Very interesting, as always!

Thanks, Jerilee!

Jane Austen was a fox? She may have written about a lot of foxy ladies but can you point out two of her novels, that are, like, different from one another?

Dickens was a fox. All his novels were about the exploitation of the hapless poor by the rich and their responsible bankers. You sure could never know where he came down on anything. Why even in the Child’s History, he can scarcely go two pages without telling us which obscure British historical figures were wicked.

Hugo was a hedgehog. All his novels are attempts to get across a single underlying idea. What is it again? Let me think. The role of modern sewage systems in draining away the wealth of France? Merde. Valjean seems much less like a fox than Javert and for whom is Hugo rooting? Or can you tell? And don’t get me started on that hunchback fellow.

Are you sure you’re not confusing the categories of hedgehog and fox with the categories of writers that you like and don’t?

Anonymous, thanks for the comment. It did occur to me that all of Austen’s novels are about women trying to find a husband. However, they are not all the same woman. Northanger Abbey is very different from the others with a quite different heroine. Persuasion may seem similar to Pride and Prejudice, but it’s really not the same.

I know that a feminist message is something that modern readers tack on to her writing, but I don’t think she was really a feminist. Her novels were about how individuals navigate the social landscape, and they essentially mirrored the situation as it was. Some of her characters were lampoons of real people, and they resemble Shakespeare’s comic characters. There was no exhortation for anyone to do anything about it.

Nets, thanks for the comment.

I could very well be confusing the categories of fox and hedghog with “realism” versus “romanticism”, and this occured to me, too. However, I think they are not exactly the same, even in my idiosyncratic interpretation of them.

First of all, I don’t dislike Shakespeare. Julius Caesar is one of my favorite plays. I really do admire his writing, although not every part of it.  Secondly, while I used to marvel that anyone could read Jane Austen, I have since developed a taste for her. Her writing is informed by a deep understanding of social skills. Until I developed a few social skills of my own, I wasn’t able to appreciate it.

About Dickens: yes, he’s a very intrusive narrator who can’t hide his bourgeois English bias. His opinions pop up everywhere.  But does that have anything to do with the genius of his writing? Do we go away from a Dickens novel with the urge to become less wicked? I don’t think so. Fagin and Sykes are fascinating because they seem real. If anything, it makes us want to explore that part of ourselves more! It’s the helpless waifs in his novels, people like Oliver Twist, who pale in comparison.

I know, Dickens is supposed to be famous for fighting against child labor. But I don’t  think the strength of his writing was in its value as propaganda. The real strength of his writing was in the way he portrayed and exaggerated the idiosyncracies of individual people.

Now, about Hugo and the sewer system — isn’t that just like Heinlein who gives you a lecture on stellar navigation in the middle of a classic like Podkayne of Mars? Any good editor would simply have cut those parts out as extraneous to the story. What these writers do well is to describe heroism — and make us want to go out and be heroes, too!

Hugo does not want us to be like Javert, although he may accidentally get us to do so. He also wants us to be more like Marius and less like the students on the barricades. Heroes?

I don’t like Dickens. So his writing doesn’t work on me to get me to be less wicked. But take the Christmas Carol, for instance. It seems to have a lot of fans for some reason. Don’t they like it because its exhortation to keep Christmas all the year has appealed to them. (Doesn’t this explain what just happened to the U.S. banking system? Scrooge checked people’s credit carefully.)

One more thing. When you admire Dickens for the exagerrated idiosyncracies of his characters rather than his message which is common between The Christmas Carol, Great Expectations, and Oliver Twist, how different is that from your agent saying that the girl is good but you should get rid of the local politics and mayhem. Perhaps you’re a fox and just don’t know it!

Nets, it’s hard to keep our politics and religion separate from our literary assessment of a writer. But it should be possible, in theory.

I don’t know exactly what accounts for the broad popular appeal of A Christmas Carol, but it’s got to be more than fiscal policy. Otherwise, why wouldn’t we see Marx’s Das Kapital enacted on TV every Christmas? Whatever the appeal of the Dickens classic, it’s very similar to what makes people like Frank Capra’s “It’s a Wonderful Life.” I suspect it’s not about bank foreclosures so much as about the individual’s place in the community. People would like to think that if they were in trouble, other people they know would care enough to help them out. (Not the government.)

Anyway, dividing writers into foxes and hedgehogs isn’t directly related to the quality of their writing. Shakespeare and Dickens are both foxes, but Shakespeare is by far the better writer. I think even Dickens fans would agree.

Both Shakespeare and Dickens were actors. Dickens used to give performances and the ladies would swoon. He often played murderous villains. I think he was a character actor.

Perhaps if we used an analogy from acting, we might be able to see the difference between hedgehogs and foxes. Gary Cooper and Clint Eastwood are hedgehogs. They play the same character over and over again, no matter what movie they’re in. Lawrence Olivier was a fox. Meryl Streep is a fox. Julia Roberts and Meg Ryan are hedgehogs.

It’s not that Lawrence Olivier was a better actor than Gary Cooper. It’s that he was a different kind of actor. Meryl Streep is a universally acknowledged acting genius who can play many, many different roles. However, could she stand in for Julia Roberts?

It’s not a question of better or worse. It’s just different.

Nets, I’ll admit that it’s quite possible for a writer not to be sufficiently introspective to know exactly what kind of writer he is. I may not be objective enough about myself. It could be that this hub smacks of arrogance, and I just need to improve my writing, period.

However, when reviewing the work of others, I do have a pretty clear idea of how to find out which part is extraneous. Take Podkayne of Mars, for example. Separate out the sections that are clearly lectures (whether on interstellar navigation, high-tech reproduction or how to change a diaper in zero G.) Leave the story intact. See which one is longer. You will end up with two different types of text. Each is a worthwhile type of writing; they just don’t belong together. I think you can do the same for Hugo and sewers.

In Dickens’ case, there is less to cut out. You could argue that the social stuff is organic to his writing. I agree. Nut Dickens’ social commentary wasn’t so much a call to change the system. He described how lost an upper class person was when he was forced to live in the lower class world. It was culture clash. In the end, most of his waifs were restored to upper (or middle class) lifestyle to which they had been born. The cocknies stayed cockney.

An example of a writer who didn’t understand his own message is Milton. He wrote Paradise Lost to exp,ain the ways of God to man, but anyone who reads the poem ends up identifying with Satan.

It’s not the explicit message that determines what a piece of writing is about. It’s the overall effect of the writing.

The agent would say that the interaction between Oliver Twist and the Artful Dodger was good, he should just take out all the pesky social commentary.

Charles Dickens wasn’t a science fiction writer in the mold of George Bernard Shaw. But he did want to change the system. He was just using a literary device. The upper class person was a Mary Sue entering the lower class world. At the end of the story, he became upper class again. But the idea was to get the upper class readers to understand the lower classes with the idea that they would implement social justice. The Christmas Carol is more literal. We see Scrooge change at the end. Both are trying to get across the same message, and Dickens thinks he is a hedgehog. Unfortunately for him, you disagree.

We don’t see constant reenactments of Das Kapital on television? You could have fooled me.

About Milton, that is a classical interpretation. Contrariwise, Fish in “Surprised by Sin” argues that Milton knew exactly what he was doing and his story would not have made sense without Satan being appealling.

Nets,

I’m not familiar with “Surprised by Sin”. Can you provide a link?

Nets, about VC: what the agent told me to do would be equivalent to telling Dickens that the relationship between Oliver Twist and the Artful Dodger was great, but he should cut out Fagin and Sykes. There would be no relationship between Oliver Twist and the Artful Dodger if not for Fagin and Sykes.

http://www.amazon.com/Surprised-Sin-Reader-Paradis

Nets,

Thanks for the link. I’ll let you know what I think after I’ve read it.

Oh, so it’s Stanley Fish! I was expecting Leslie Fish.

A de-constructionist reading, I see.

By the same logic, Dickens might have made his villains more attractive than his heroes just to make us feel guilty for identifying with villains. But somehow, I doubt it.

Or maybe Sienkiewicz made Petronius seem like more of a hero than his Christians, because he wanted readers to realize they were pagan at heart and repent? If so, I don’t think it worked.

Sorry I wasn’t clear.

Milton was explaining the ways of God to man. God works in mysterious ways.

Okay…

So, how does this apply to Isaiah Berlin’s argument that Tolstoy was a fox trying to be a hedgehog?

If we go back to Isaiah Berlin’s essay on Tolstoy, we see that his use of the terms “fox” and “hedgehog” has nothing to do with either the setting of a novel or its explicitly stated theme. Tolstoy did have a “theory of everything” and he was hoping that “War and Peace” would illustrate his points about history and the individual. Berlin’s essay suggests that the theory was bogus and that the real power of  Tolstoy’s writing had nothing to do with it.

The terms “hedgehog” and “fox”, as used by Berlin, meant  “visionary” versus “clear-sighted descriptivist.” Berlin thought Tolstoy was a great writer because he could see the significant differences between and among individuals — just as Shakespeare could. What Tolstoy didn’t have, although he longed to have this, was a unifying vision.

Writers like Ayn Rand get blasted for exactly the opposite. They have a grand sweeping vision, but not a lot of psychological insight into individual people.

This dichotomy, like all dichotomies, overgeneralizes. Perhaps everyone will disagree with some of my classifications. Maybe I’m wrong about where Dickens or Jane Austen fit in. That’s because classifying all writers into two different types has its limitations. However, it can be a useful exercise, if we take into account what those limitations are.

It’s like that joke about binary that I saw posted somewhere. There are 10 kinds of people: those who like counting in binary and those who don’t!

I am on the verge of writing my first novel and I found reaidng yoru hub helpful, why? It says to me go ahead and write. thanks.

You came to the right conclusion in the end.  You just have to write.  You can’t write your novel for publication, for the market, or based on what people say or critics write.  I mean, you can if you want, lay yourself out a little formula for some genre and let ‘er rip.  But if you truly love to write, you just need to sit down and do it.

Some of your issues with literature and genre are addressed deeply and I think very truthfuly in John Gardner’s “On Moral Fiction,” and he does get into the trap that modern romantic writers can feel trapped in.

Anyway, just write.  You too Bob, just do it, man.  Write it.  Write it for you, not for anyone else.  F- the publishers, F- the critics, F- the agents.  Writing is a way of life, it’s art.  It’s not hoop jumping for some a-hole somewhere else.

Bob Ewing, Shadesbreath, thanks for your encouraging comments. They mean a lot!

I will try to look up John Gardner’s “On Moral Fiction.”

Great topic! As an undergrad I remember my favorite professor telling me I would get a lot of attention because I had an interesting, unique writing style, but I would have to be stubborn to publish because it was too unique to be boxed into a genre. So I know your struggle 🙂 Great hub, and thanks for sharing!

Very dedicated to have started writing at a young age. At least you went for your dreams instead of just talking about it as many of us do :). I like novels that cannot be compartimentalized into genres also, and many times a novel that is listed by one genre is not exactly this. It is good you remained true to yourself and provided a detailed summary of the book for those who will read it. I actually like to read books without always reading the summary first, I usually wait until twenty pages in to do that. This way I am able to get a feel for the book without prejudging the book by its cover.

Jerry G2, Sweetie Pie, thanks for your comments. Jerry, I see you actually have a writing job. That’s great!

Sweetie Pie, I like to be surprised by a book when I read it, too. I usually skip the summary. I also like to figure out for myself what the book is actually saying, regardless of what the author’s take on it is. But … not everybody feels that way.

“But if it is real, then how can it be fiction?”..

very good quote..from the classmate..

Trsmd, thanks for the comment!

Yes. That is a very good question from the student’s perspective. We often give one defintion for fiction (or some other literary term) , when instinctively we are operating based on a completely different understanding of what we mean. The new term “creative non-ficiton” has recently sprung up, perhaps in order to deal with the fuzzy line between truth and fiction.

Excellent hub with some really good analysis.

Satomko, thanks!

genre is everything. Some publishers wil tell you the only genre they want and others will not you are taking a wild guess in trying to fingure out what genre they want. There are a lot of self publishers out there and I would be careful. I am working with one of them but my novel has a long way to go. Karissa

Ladybythelake55, thanks for your comment. It’s true. A lot of established publishers swear by genre as a way of defining the market for a novel. Others will ask you bluntly what is your demographic. I would not consider a company that helps people get published a “self-publisher.” I reserve that label for those of us who publish our own works. I am considering marketing my second novel through CreateSpace. What company are you working with? What I look for is someone who will take a percentage of the take but does not expect payment from me up front. That way I know they are not just a vanity press.

For those of you who are still following this hub, here is a new book trailer that I have put together for “Vacuum County.” After you see the video, please let me know what genre it sounded as if the book belonged in, if all you knew was what is in the trailer:

http://youtu.be/n6IGO7YrRhQ