Stories are conveyances and expressions of worldview.

The final article in Islander VI, by Alexander Adams, presents a sets of theses in synthesis. First, that the worthwhile battlefield is in the cultural (including the artistic) sphere, rather than the political. Second, that such a change relies on or at least massively benefits from creating substantial, interconnected societal efforts, building off each other. And third, that efficacy in artistic revival comes from genuine, sincere, substantial productivity which leads the way and accepts, but does not seek, patronage (a congenial message to me, given my strategy).

In all this, I will simply add a dimension to his brief comment on the necessity of sincerity: nothing kills a story faster than insincerity. A story which tries to say what it does not believe, which fawns on its hypothetical audience, will come out wrong. A story which tries to be merely a vehicle of teaching, which views the aesthetic with disdain, as a cloak to be worn, will generally come out intensely dull, intensely ugly, and uninteresting withal.

The crucial problem is that stories are conveyances and expressions of worldview. A book of explanations has a relatively neatly prescribed limit, beyond which all is implication and inference. A story, by contrast, expresses how the author understands man, man’s world, and man’s relationships with that world, including with God; it cannot do less. If it tries to do less, it diminishes significantly.

A story can avoid topics; a story can restrain itself to certain areas of worldview. But a story cannot avoid the existence of those areas. Henty’s stories do not grace theology or metaphysics with much attention at all, but the way Henty speaks of the world is a demonstration of his thoughts there, of his character’s thoughts. We know characters- and thus their authors- by their deeds, more intimately and more thoroughly than any real person could be known; their deeds necessarily convey what a real person’s deeds convey: their attitude towards and relationship with everything around them. We, instinctively aware of this in real people, find it also in characters. Thus, when narrative art attempts insincerity, it shows up far more plainly than you might expect; we see the center painted bold-and-bright, but we sense also that in the periphery the details do not match, the belief is not worked out into the life, and the assertion is given the lie by its friends. 

All art is composed of thousands of intentional details. A painting, a novel, a film, a video game, all of these are a confluence of choice, inattention (a type of choice), and restraints. The multitude of choices translates to a revelation of the artist’s actual understanding of the world; while he can train and restraint a few, rare is the artist who can manage to completely mask his real worldview, who can control every choice, particularly given that insincere people are pretending to have an interior experience while having only an exterior awareness. The performance is incomplete, and the insincerity is betrayed. Art, eventually, will out the artist.