When is a story is about something else?

Below the break, I propose to give you the experience of reading a book and then discuss what the book might be about. 

Why? I shall explain, again below the break. 

Intrigued? You should be!

You start the book and soon work out that it is set in the future, with plenty of technological marvels and creature comforts beyond our current capabilities. You then work out that the Earth in this imagined future is all one country, with a global government. You follow the protagonist going about his or her day, noticing various slogans about how war and conflict have been eliminated by the advent of this new world regime. 

But, as the story continues, you see that this global government seems to be rather authoritarian: there is lots of surveillance, for example, and these slogans begin to strike you as propaganda. Moreover, the regime is not just strict but also, in various little ways, rather weird: there are rules that seem tough but at least comprehensible (no criticism of the government, for instance), but others that make no sense (everyone has to cover their ears with felt caps in public, perhaps, or people are encouraged to keep small models of the planet Jupiter on their desk). Hmm, what's going on?, you think.

You read on. Next, the protagonist has a small run in with the authorities. Nothing very bad happens, but in the course of being arrested and questioned and so on, the solution to the mystery is revealed to the reader - to the reader, I say, because, to the protagonist, this is all old hat. You suddenly find out that the ultimate overloads of Earth are aliens, who run the planet with the assistance of their human quislings, telling humans all the while that the aliens are running things for the benefit of humans. Now it all makes sense! You start to speculate about why the aliens might insist on human's ears being covered ...

But there's no time to rest - the story is becoming excitingly action-packed. Our protagonist has become radicalised by this event and joins an underground band of rebels who are determined to free Earth from the aliens. You're not surprised to find that they're a motley crew of diverse and lovable misfits, but they're strong and lively characters, and you enjoy their company.

There are also lots of jokes along the way. Learning about Earth history is banned by the regime (because it is 'divisive'), so these rebels are the only ones who learn about the past, but they get it wrong in understandable and amusing ways that provide light relief but also give the reader the enjoyable experience of knowing more than the characters know (for a change).

The next bit of the story is really exciting, but I can summarise it briefly. The rebels are faced by many setbacks and defeats. There are twists and turns galore (and maybe a few spies and turncoats, on both sides). However, the rebels have developed a secret weapon that will defeat the aliens and kill their human underlings. Matters reach a climax at which it seems that all is lost, but - somehow! - from the jaws of defeat, the humans snatch victory, the aliens retreat to their planet and, in the smouldering ruins of an iconic Earth city of your choice, the rebels embrace and celebrate.

But there are still quite a few pages in your right hand - the book isn't over. What?!, you think. Well, there's time for one last twist. Shortly after their victory, we see the rebels fall out with each other, and some of the national or religious divisions of old Earth, repressed by the alien regime, re-surface, but this time in forms that the reader knows to be bizarre and 'wrong' since they are the products of what seemed, earlier in the book, to be nothing more than entertaining misunderstandings of humn history. The various human factions are taking the amazing weapon that they developed to defeat the aliens, and now aiming it at each other. 

The book ends with our protagonist seeing a scrap of propaganda left over the alien regime floating down the street. "Learning History Leads to War!" it says. Or perhaps it says something like "Without the Rules of the Regime, You Idiots Will Kill Each Other!", but less clunkingly obvious. And you, the reader, are left wondering whether perhaps the aliens were the good guys after all.

That's the end of the book. It was a rollicking read, you think. But what was it about?

There are a few potential answers to that question. Perhaps nothing. Perhaps it's just a pessimistic book about man's inhumanity to man, with sci-fi trimmings. Perhaps it was written during the Cold War and it's about how the Allies united to defeat the Axis but then immediately aimed nuclear weapons at each other. Perhaps, when you look at the dust jacket, you see that the author is from the Balkans and experienced the collapse of Yugoslavia at an impressionable age, and you wonder if that influenced it. 

Or perhaps it's a bit more spicy than that: perhaps it's about colonialism, and the way European countries would create artificial states and impose peace on them, but older divisions resurfaced after independence.

Each theory gets some support from the book - or, perhaps more accurately, there are some elements that fit much better with one theory than another. The rebels' special weapon looks like the atomic bomb and doesn't really fit with the other theories. But the authoritarian state, buttressed by propaganda, descending into civil war seems more like a Communist regime. On the other (third?) hand, the presence of aliens and the imposition of strange moral rules fits better with colonialism - and perhaps the technological advances that you spotted at the start of the book come from the aliens too. 

So there's plenty to argue about. It's a good book! It contains multitudes! How are scholars ever going to get to the 'right' answer? 

Of course, I have completely invented this book and there's no way of answering the question of what it's 'about'. I could make up names of characters, or codenames for the rebels and their weapon, all of which could point towards one or more theory, or towards an entirely different theory.

So why have I bothered with this artificial example? Well.

A few years ago, I wrote that the Disney film Encanto is a "defence of colonialism". This was a bit of a tease. While I stand by what I said, I don't really mean to say that Disney produced pro-imperialist propaganda: I was just pointing out that the film could be read in that way, if you are so inclined. 

Anyway, my piece attracted a bit of attention recently from people who know more about Colombian history than me (good for them!) and also from people who loved the film (dubious for them!). 

I think there were a couple of good points made against me:

- First, Spanish colonialism in South America did not look like Encanto. I was applying Anglo colonial concepts - for example, the Pilgrim Fathers - to a context in which they don't really belong. 

- Second, insofar as there is a historical setting for Encanto, it is the Thousand Days' War that took place in Colombia at the turn of the 20th century. The Madrigals are better understood as internally displaced people. (They're not colonising - they're gentrifying!)

As I say, both of these are good points. I think I have answers to them, but that's not my present concern. Instead, I want to think about how we might think about a debate of this kind. Hence my imaginary sci-fi story.

We might at first think that we can get somewhere by looking at the genesis of the work. I suggested that my sci-fi story might be a Cold War-era book, or have Yugoslav origins. That will certainly help us understand what the book was at least intended to be about. Animal Farm and 1984 are pretty clear examples of finding the 'about'-ness of a book by examining the circumstances of its production. Equally, looking at the creators of Encanto, I think we can confident that the film is not intended to be a defence of colonialism.

(Here I am reminded of the observation (by whom, I forget) that the most careful reader of a work of literature is the censor, who has to be alert to all possible interpretations for fear of missing a seditious one. When a Russian wrote a play or novel ostensibly about Ivan the Terrible, might it really be about Stalin? Or was the censor falling into a trap? If he says "you have written about a cruel tyrant - it must be about Stalin" then he meets the retort "why do you think that a cruel tyrant must be Stalin; I am merely writing about an historical tyrant of the kind now eliminated by kind Stalin".) 

But that's not quite the end of the matter. A story can be re-used for some other purpose. AA Milne was not writing about 21st century politics, but that doesn't mean that Winnie the Pooh cannot be used to refer to a current world leader. 

Or a book might be regarded as prescient: lots of Orwell is regarded that way, and The Handmaid's Tale is another recent example. Religious works are frequently read in that way: might the parables of the Prodigal Son or the Workers in the Vineyard be 'about' the conversion of the gentiles, late in history, to Judaic monotheism - a conversion which had not yet happened when Jesus told the stories? It's a defensible view. 

More prosaically, people frequently 'recognise' themselves, their friends or their lives when reading the works of long-dead authors. Fictional characters and situations speak to us - they inform our lives and choices - when their author could have no idea what the lives of future readers would look like. 

On the other hand, just because the author's intentions are not the limits of the 'aboutness' of a work, that does not mean that there are no limits. So for example, 1984 may about many things to do with thought, language and power, but it's not about relations between the sexes or the Hundred Years' War. I'd maintain that Encanto is at least potentially 'about' colonialism, but it's not even potentially about AI, Napoleon or ecclesiastical politics. My sci-fi story is not about the Troubles and Northern Ireland - or at least, not yet. 

All of which leaves us perhaps only a little better off than we were at the outset. I would suggest that a book can be 'about' something that its author intended but also, in a subsequent context, used or understood to be 'about' something quite different. One has to explain or justify how it is that the work is said to shine light on the idea or situation for which one contends, and that explanation or justification must stand on its own. Re-read my piece on Encanto in that light, all ye Colombian history experts, and see if makes any more sense this time. (Perhaps not.)

Anyway, the really interesting question is this: what is Zootropolis (or, for international readers, Zootopia) really about. Predators who don't eat prey? A rabbit who wants to be a cop? A shifty fox? It's so laden with  images and references that I don't know where to start.