Let Theme Happen Through Consequence

In the last chapter of Lu Xun’s The True Story of Ah Q, the hero, a laborer who sleeps in the village temple of Weichuang and turns every humiliation into a private victory, is arrested over a robbery in which, by his own account, he had no part. He cannot write, so he is told to sign a confession with a circle. In George Kin Leung’s translation, first printed in 1926, Ah Q “used all the effort of his entire life to draw the circle,” and just as the line is about to close it swerves outward, “creating a figure the shape of a melon seed.” Ashamed, he consoles himself behind the barred door: “My sons and grandsons will be able to draw round circles.” He falls asleep.

The story has shown this move before. Beaten earlier by the villagers, Ah Q thinks, “I will consider that I have been beaten by my sons,” and walks off satisfied that the victory was his. Lu Xun doesn’t stop to call this habit a disease. He builds the plot on it. The same reflex that cushioned every small humiliation now cushions a man on his way to a firing squad: he decides that being paraded and put to death is part of the “allotted destiny” of people “born between heaven and earth,” and what shames him is that he lacked the nerve to sing a few lines of drama. The crowd cheers “Bravo!” Weichuang concludes that being shot is “proof of his badness.” The city is merely disappointed that he sang no line from a drama: “They had followed him all in vain.”

No one in the last chapter states the theme, a consoling fantasy that serves a crowd and an authority better than it serves the man. It is assembled from what happens and what it costs. Ah Q’s consolation is serious because it gets expensive.

George Eliot, writing in 1866 to Frederic Harrison, said that aesthetic teaching is the highest of all teaching because it deals with life in its highest complexity, but that if it lapses anywhere “from the picture to the diagram,” it becomes the most offensive of all teaching. Her complaint is with bad teaching; she is a moralist who thinks the picture teaches better. Flannery O’Connor, in “Writing Short Stories” (collected in Mystery and Manners), put it more severely: when you can state the theme of a story and separate it from the story itself, she says, “you can be sure the story is not a very good one.” Fiction that hosts long arguments shows the limits of that strict reading. Ideas can be stated at length, provided someone holds them and then pays for them.

So the maxim is about cost, and says little about how much the writer may say aloud. A value shows it matters when it costs something, and a belief is tested when acting on it produces a result the believer did not intend. A reader who sees a person choose, and sees what follows, tends to draw the connection unprompted, and the same value meeting different pressures in different scenes is what readers recognize as theme. A conclusion assembled that way is harder to dismiss as the author’s opinion. A statement of theme can only report the pattern, and it usually reports it earlier and more simply than the work earned.

Theme turns into a lecture in characters who speak it in complete sentences, a narrator who pauses to explain what the events mean, a poem whose last line translates the poem. Some forms announce their theme legitimately, though: the fable with its moral, the essay with its thesis, the satire (Practice 19), the sermon. A character may state the theme naturally when the speech belongs to her, serves what she wants, and is then tested. And a reader who wants the point stated is not wrong; clarity matters (Practice 95), and a theme enacted so obliquely that no one finds it has effectively been buried. The craft question is whether the statement carries the meaning or merely labels it.

Practice. Find one place in your draft where a theme is stated: a character’s speech, a narrator’s reflection, the “what this taught me” paragraph, the closing couplet. Delete it. In its place put a choice that costs someone something, followed by a consequence the reader can see, with no comment. Read the new passage to one reader, ask what they take from it, and compare their answer with the sentence you deleted. In nonfiction, replace the declared lesson with the instance that demonstrates it. Keep the whole to thirty minutes.