Fellas, let's clear something up.
It's a serious pet peeve of mine, and we're gonna talk about it, because I have the power to do that here.
Novels are fiction. They're not true. However, that doesn't mean they aren't real. Novels have a message. They are usually meant to effect change, or thought, or emotion, or all three. If you choose not to read them that way, if you choose to read them as entertainment and take from them no greater purpose, if you choose to view the world the same way after reading them, that's your choice. I'm not arguing about that right now.
However, a lot of people don't like to read them that way. They like to view them as fiction with a message, as a medium to communicate social views.
Here's the problem. The world is one large, amorphous shade of gray. There is right and wrong and good and evil and rationality and emotion and acceptance and prejudice. But none of these things exists in a vacuum, or in fact can exist in a vacuum. They only make sense within a strange, overlapping set of contexts that are constantly manipulated and infinitely malleable.
When people are viewing novels, however, specifically intended messages of novels, they disregard this entirely. They view messages as prejudiced or unprejudiced, valid or invalid, one extreme or the other.
It does not benefit anyone, writer or reader, to view them this way. If you intend to apply a message (or even acknowledge that the message was meant to be applied) to a real world full of conditions and uncertainties, it makes zero sense to view them through a lens without those uncertainties. If they're to have any meaning at all in a wider context, they need to be afforded themselves the privilege of that same context.
Oversimplifying the message of a book -- makeup is bad, the world is going to hell, Jesus is Lord -- without regard to the contexts, emotions, and conditions within that book is just as bad as oversimplifying a person you meet on the street. You are doing the book and its message a severe injustice by regarding a real affirmation in a fictional world without the weight of a real affirmation in a real world.
This is the way it is.
You cannot convince me that messages within fictional contexts have any less weight, any less validity, or indeed any less complexity than other messages. If you view it as a silly moral of an untrue story, it can never have profound weight.
If a character has a flawed worldview, and is observing phenomena within that world, it is absurd to assume their views are unflawed. If an author has a political leaning, and is commenting on the politics or worlds real or fictional, it is absurd to assume their views are unbiased. This is a world of few simplicities, and it is important to remember that novels exist in that world. The set of contexts should not narrow under the umbrella of fiction, but rather widen to include the fictional contexts as well as the real ones.
So the next time you affirm that a book is saying that the government is prejudiced without considering the context of the world and the author and the characters and your own reading, you yourself are practicing prejudice. You are disregarding the possible effects and lasting resonances of fiction, and robbing it of a world of possible value.
