Clancy and Heinlein are good examples of major authors who write series of books that profess the authors’ own political beliefs. Are there major authors who have their heroes espouse - and continue to espouse - beliefs which are antithetical to their own?
I’ll exclude the romance genre for obvious reasons.
Books only?
P.S:interestingly, both Clancy and Heinlein are conservatives. Maybe it’s more of a trope in some Conservative circles to use fiction as quasi propaganda.
Let’s keep it to books for the moment.
Let’s keep gratuitous political slams out of this thread okay? I used Clancy and Heinlein because they’re well known, not because they lean one way.
Umm, no, that would be wrong. See Peter Hamilton as a counter example.
I don’t know that this is exactly true, because I don’t know the EXACT nature of his political beliefs, but I have read that Eric Flint is a hardcore socialist, yet his 1632 novels don’t seem to espouse socialist ideals, at least not in an overt way.
Understood, but sooner or later, you will have to talk about the actual politics of the authors, whatever they are.
Well, except for union guys being the heroes and that whole destroy-the-aristocracy thing…
Any believer in representative government and free market capitalism would be all for destroying the monarchies as well. Yes, the union guys being heroes does play into his beliefs somewhat, but he doesn’t seem to be turning 17th C Europe into a welfare state in the books.
According to the world renowned source of literary criticism Cracked.com, Machiavelli was kidding when he wrote The Prince.
I hate it when people take my sarcasm literally too.
Ever read the last usually added pages to The Prince? There are some letters Machiavelli sent to his friends, one of them describing Mac’s encounter with one horrendous looking woman, and the sex that ensued. It’s hilarious and kind of takes him down from his pedestal.
I am not sure I get your point. A consensus of author and protagonist is just one option and not the most often used one at the theatre or in, well, what is often called “high literature”. The narrative stance of an author can be affirmative towards his main or any other protagonist (or antagonist), but it can also be critical, adverse, euphemistic, ironical, sarcastic or neutral.
Molière and other playwriters of comedies have often used protagonists that show outrageous mind sets and behaviour; the beliefs of the character Michael Kohlhaas in the drama of the same name are politically in accordance with Kleist’s but his behaviour reveals a critical distance towards the consequences of the protagonist’s obsessive rightfulness. The Marquis de Posa in Schiller’s Don Carlos is the author’s mouthpiece – and yet, he fails miserably.
Thomas Mann is certainly at odds in Doctor Faustus with the protagonist as well as the narrator; old father Briest in Fontane’s Effi Briest speaks for the author, but he isn’t more than a marginal figure – and his passivity shows a self-deprecating stance of the author.
Dostoyevsky and other Russian authors also showed very complex stances towards their protagonists – just think about The Brothers Karamazov, especially Book 5: “The Grand Inquisitor”.
If you want examples of a full-blown adversial stance, there are plenty too.
Heinrich Mann’s Der Untertan (The Loyal Subject or Man of Straw) is a condemnation of the Kaiserreich. His protagonist, Diederich Hessling, is a creep.
Günter Grass’ story *1934 *is an inner monologue of a SS-henchman, who tells us his point of view of the murder of the jewish author Erich Mühsam in Oranienburg.
Brecht’s Der aufhaltsame Aufstieg des Arturo Ui (The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui) is a parable about Hitler’s way to power set in the milieu of criminals. Not surprisingly, Ui is not Brecht’s political mouthpiece.
A ton of works that deal with oppressive regimes and are told from the perspective of one of its proponents are anything but propaganda material.
Vladimir Nabokov has Humbert Humbert express things that he definitely did not agree with.
Norman Spinrad’s novella “Journals of the Plague Years” was written from the point of view of a deeply religious Christian fundamentalist (he thought that AIDS was a judgment from God). The character is portrayed quite sympathetically, even though Spinrad is just the opposite politically.
I know Eric Flint and wouldn’t categorize him as socialist. He just doesn’t like bullshit – from anyone. (In one case, he was highly critical of the union he once worked for, for instance.)
Well, almost ANY great author has to make his villains plausible. To do that, he has to understand the villain’s way of thinking, and present that thinking in an attractive way. Otherwise, you’re left with straw men.
To use just one famous example, John Milton was a devout Christian Puritan, but he wrote Satan’s lines so well that many readers come away thinking Satan was the hero of “Paradise Lost.”
Exactly what political views of Heinlein are being espoused where? For any character you can find, I can find an opposite one.
Since you mention Spinrad, RealityChuck, The Iron Dream is another example, and a creepy one. The German Federal Department for Media Harmful to Young Persons (yes, it does exist) was so confused by the author’s intent that they indexed it for promoting Nazism.
What about Arthur Conan Doyle, who turned to spirituality in his later years, and his character Sherlock Holmes?
Frankly, we’ll find far more books, plays and lets not get started with films that show differences in the mindset between the artist and his characters.
George Orwell was a socialist, but his two best known books are devastating portraits of socialism gone horribly wrong.
(Of course he, unlike many of his readers, knew the difference between socialism in general and Stalinism in particular.)
But all the works you cite are single volumes or take a variety of viewpoints across their works. Or both.
Conan Doyle is a good one, though, with Sherlock Holmes.
I suspect that nearly all writers for Hollywood are writing fiction antithetical to their own beliefs, in at least one way or another.
Say that you’re a fairly liberal, hippy type and you’ve been hired to write a horror movie. The general rule for a horror film is that sex is BAD and EVIL. Any character who has sex, must die. Thus, even though your own ideas of sexuality is that everyone’s free to do what they want outside of wedlock and even if they’re still in high school, you have to kill all of these sexual teens off.
Let’s then say that you’re hired to write an action film. The rule for an action film is that the bad guy gets blasted away at the end of the film. Your personal beliefs are probably that capital punishment is an inhumane and monstrous affair, yet here you are forced to write in the noble hero blowing the brains out of the villain at the end of the film.
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