I hope my specific examples below don't come off as picking on people. (No really!
Really!!)
The question in the subject header came up
twice yesterday about different stories ("Guts" and "A&P") and also came up last week. I described the events of Stephen King's
New Yorker story
Premium Harmony to
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif)
la_nausicaa and she asked what the point of that story could actually be. (That said, she liked "Guts", but then she read that one and only heard about "Premium Harmony.") She's also a school psychologist in training and said to me over email, "but it is interesting. do you have any idea how ashamed most kids are about masturbating. this totally normalizes that. it is like a public health advertisement: masturbating is normal and ok. just be careful, li'l dude," when I wondered if assigning "Guts" would just accelerate the usual gossip and rumors about a teacher's personal life that is such valuable currency to students.
And then there was the Escape Pod podcast of my novelette
The Uncanny Valley and the now-traditional
searching for and failing to find the point common to the listener forums for that site, and when a friend proofread my story forthcoming in
Phantom (yeah yeah, it's been forthcoming for a while but this time it really really is coming out next week, so I'm told) she concluded her queries and requests for changes with, "Well, that was utterly pointless."
So, you know, I'm curious about this idea of what the point of stories should be. At first I was wondering if "What's the point of that story?" is just another way of saying, "I was grossed out!" but as we've seen stories like "A&P" are called pointless, and some people who ask after the point of Gross Story #1 like Gross Story #2 just fine. I wondered if confusion was also an issue—someone who finds a story confusing may suspect that there is a point that they just happened to miss (and that it's the story's fault). But then again "A&P" isn't confusing. It isn't even all that boring. I kinda liked it when I was first assigned it, though any drama it had has long since been sucked out of me by repeated assignments.
(Aside, I was thanked last weekend at WFC for "That of Which We Speak When We Speak of the Unspeakable" because at least one person interpreted the story as the first new thing to be said about "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" in a loooong time.)
Of course, plenty of people find "A&P" boring and feel it is plotless, which also ties into the idea of confusing stories (whose plots cannot be followed) being pointless.
So sometimes a pointless story is a story that grosses out the reader, confuses the reader, or bores the reader. Each seems to be a burden. There's an expectation of enjoyment (and I presume enlightenment given the search for a "point") that is crushed somehow.
So what kind of points do stories with points have? Do people pick up a magazine or a collection and think to themselves, "Oh boy, am I gonna get a brain full of points tonight, baby!" Is a point something even sought after or only missed when it appears to be gone? Do writers sit down with a point to prove when they write a story...and don't many people object to being "preached" to? Of course, in that last case people often don't feel preached to if they already agree with the writer's point, but even that isn't universal. A libertarian acquaintance of mine told me that he can't read L. Niel Smith at all these days because the deck is so obviously stacked in favor of libertarianism that the political explorations aren't sophisticated enough for him. "I find myself arguing against my own politics!" he said, and then he described throwing a book across the room.
(That's another thing I still wonder about. I can't be bothered to dig up the link, but I did ask a few years ago if people really do that and as it turns out, people do! One day I'm going to start doing that with pizza slices I don't like. California will never be the same!)
So what do you all think? What's the point of stories? Can you think of some stories that have made good points, or that are good and pointless? Let the world know!
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chipper
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