The following text is a brief except, reproduced by permission from The Fiction Editor, The Novel, and the Novelist, by Thomas McCormack, copyright © 1988, 2006. To view the entire document online in a PDF reader, click the link to the right. To download the file, follow the instructions under the link.

Excerpt, p. 1-5 of 21:

Earlier I said that the concept of ‘theme’ was malignantly balled up. Part of the support for this doleful conclusion came from the examination of nineteen of the leading college textbooks that announced themselves as introductions to literature and its writing, and that talked about theme. I’ll quote from several of them in this Note. There have been texts—and new ones arise each year—that avoid the term ‘theme’ entirely, but the ones I inspected comprised, statistically, the huge majority of the instructionals assigned to undergraduates in America in the last generation.

Let’s start calmly: Each appearance of the word ‘theme’ in a literature appreciation textbook should be marked with that yellow crime-scene tape. Samples of the way ‘theme’ is taught should be sent to Atlanta so the Centers for Disease Control can get on it. We should all write to our congressmen; if we can mount a legislative campaign against smoking, surely we do as much for ‘theme’? (Late in the twentieth century the French volunteered their help, but they succeeded only in introducing a second virus.)

The way ‘theme’ is currently taught is actively harmful.

I seriously pursue this crusade here, albeit in condensed, almost outline, form, because I believe that what’s being done in classrooms stunts, and even kills, the ability and appetite of many of the best students. This deprives our globe of much talent that would otherwise find itself in writing, teaching, reading . . . and editing.

Their teaching of ‘theme’ is harmful because of what it leads to, and what it leads away from.

In the student’s mood and attitude, it leads to confusion, discouragement, and alienation.

In his knowledge it leads to error about what authors are trying to do, and about what is cherishable in fiction generally, and stories and novels individually.

It leads the student away from enjoyment, sanguine expectation, and trust in literature. It actually reduces the possibility of his focusing where the reward is.

It does this by forcibly thrusting on the student a concept that is fuzzy, arbitrary, trivializing, irrelevant, distracting, and ultimately deadening.

It’s important to realize that this enforcement is executed by a figure who has immense authoritative ascendancy over the students. The student (initially) respects, trusts and obeys him. The more dedicated the student already is to reading, the more devoted he is to the idea of studying under the great professor, the man who sees, and knows, and who will convey the keys to appreciating great writers and great books. Because the professor is both lofty and wrong, the result is either sore disillusionment and withdrawal, or a kind of lobotomy, the disconnection of sensibility, replacing it with a soulless response and printout acquired from an insensate microchip.

To understand why this happens, we should first get down the definition of ‘theme’ that is generally taught. (We could begin by comparing the contradictions among texts—“The theme is the moral”; “The theme is never the moral”; “The theme is the subject”; “The theme is never the subject”—but each author would, justifiably, claim he should not be held responsible for what other authors say. Still, the point that there are disputes is worth mentioning for students’ benefit, because the young mind confronting any textbook tends to accept it as factual, like a primer in history or mathematics. I’ll content myself in a moment with noting the contradictions within texts.)

At first hearing, the notion sounds benign. The ‘theme’ of a work is said to be (Perrine:) * [footnote to go at bottom of page: *See source references at the end of this Note.] “its controlling idea or its central insight”; (Hall:) “a central insight into human experience”; (Pickering:) “the central idea or statement about life that unifies and controls the work”; (Trimmer:) “the central and unifying idea about human experience”; (Gordon:) “the main idea, the abstract statement of what the work means, its significance . . . central meaning”; (Kane:) “the central meaning.”

Its benignity begins to fade a bit as the student starts to realize he’s having trouble grasping the thing. He’s not sure what ‘meaning’ means here; or ‘idea’; or ‘significance’. . .

So the authors go on, aiming to clarify things, and the dominant tack is to emphasize that the student arrives at the theme by generalizing, producing a general statement about the human condition as implied by the total story. (Perrine:) “It is the unifying generalization about life stated or implied by the story”; (Hall:) “the implicit generality the story supports . . . we express the theme by a sentence or two of generalization”; (Pickering:) “[Sometimes] theme is tied to a revelation of character and takes the form of a statement about that character and what the fate of that character may imply about people or life in general”; (Gordon:) “The statement of what a story means should be a general one, applying not only to the story, but also showing its relation to life”; (Brooks:) “not only an evaluation of the particular experience related in the story, but a generalized evaluation. Always the end of a successful story leaves us with an attitude to take toward life in general.”

The student seldom realizes it, but by this point he has already been deflected away from delight and understanding. But, innocent and eager, he presses on with his assignment: to derive a generalization about “life in general” from the particulars of the story.

Quite naturally, his first efforts tend to be in the form of a ‘moral’.

No, no, he’s told; you’re confused; a theme is not a moral; that’s not the kind of generalization about life we meant. (Pickering:) “To identify the theme [as] ‘crime doesn’t pay’ is to confuse theme with moral”; (Kane:) “Theme should not be confused with moral, a simple tag which can be abstracted as the ‘point’ of a narrative.”

The student’s eyes begin to blink; evidently there’s a difference between the ‘purpose’ and the ‘point’ of a narrative.