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Animal Farm poll - Input Junkie

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May 1st, 2014
11:56 pm

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Animal Farm poll


Any thoughts about what, if anything, Animal Farm proves about fiction with a very high proportion of message?

This poll has also been posted to my livejournal.

This entry was posted at http://nancylebov.dreamwidth.org/1047240.html. Comments are welcome here or there. comment count unavailable comments so far on that entry.

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From:ritaxis
Date:May 2nd, 2014 04:16 am (UTC)
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People will put up with a lot more messaging if they can hook it up to their anti-communist preconceptions.
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From:nancylebov
Date:May 2nd, 2014 04:42 am (UTC)
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And more generally, people will put up with a lot more messaging if they can hook it up to whatever preconceptions they've got.

I didn't realize how anti-capitalist the book was until I saw people claim it was only anti-communist, but not only is the ending a portrayal of a communist revolution getting co-opted by capitalism, but it starts with Farmer Jones as property-owner/slave-holder/member of capitalist economy.
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From:ritaxis
Date:May 2nd, 2014 05:00 am (UTC)
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You might be more interested in the general case, but I'm really interested in the specific case. I mean that people in general no matter what their politics put up with a lot higher ratio of messaging to plot and other components of their literature when it is anti-communist messaging than when it is other kinds of messaging: that material that has a socialist message in it is much more likely to get panned for being messagey than material that has an anti-communist message.
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From:acelightning
Date:May 2nd, 2014 04:49 am (UTC)
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It depends a great deal on the skill of the author, but in general, the more message there is, the less enjoyable the story is to read. (Which is a somewhat weird observation by someone who once found The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged enjoyable.) I'm reminded of some mid-20th-century reviewer who said that the author of the book being reviewed had "sold his birthright for a pot of message". (The reviewer might have been Dorothy Parker, or Theodore Sturgeon; it was a long time ago.)
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