Art of Emotion VS Pornography of Emotion (Show vs Tell?)

[jireh the provider]

Now that I'm at my college semestral break, the last lesson that I had on Philippine Literature still lingers within my mind. You see, my professor taught us about the differences of writing as an "Art of Emotion" vs a "Pornography of Emotion by letting us read and analyze two stories. One of them is called Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow (translation to Tagalog: Kahapon, Ngayon, at Bukas) [this is a Seditious Drama Play], and America is in the Heart from Asian-American Author Carlos Bulosan.

Spoiler: These are scenes from the stories Rated 18

You see, our professor showed us that in terms of the writing style and the way of conveying a message, some of the scenes and chapters of America is in the Heart conveys the protagonist's struggles and difficult journey in America during the 1930s in a subtle way. One of the best examples is on chapter 20 where he described his first time having sex with a woman. There are no mentions of those private body parts. Our professor suggested to us that 'that particular scene' is written in a suggestive way.

Meanwhile, the whole plot and emotion of the seditious play (seditious plays are like drama acting used to entice the public on declaring true independence. Often in a political way from what I recall) Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow (translation: Kahapon, Ngayon, at Bukas) goes straight to the point about the Taga-bayan(representing the True Filipinos) and the character named Mother Country wanting the Spanish and the Americans to leave the Philippines for good. Every diction of the characters purely state their stand on the issue of being under the rule of another powerful country. Some of the characters of that seditious play are against the Americans and Spanish ruling over the Filipino People. Others have no problems with it. One thing that is obvious on the story is that all of the characters there are flat characters.

Looking at those lessons, it made me look back on what I learned about the "Showing vs Telling" in creative writing. The way I could compare the two pairs is that the "Pornography of Emotion" is somewhat like Telling the obvious in writing. The "Art of Emotion" and its subtle way of describing scenes and diction leaves me matching this to Showing.

Forgive me if my short examples are rusty. But I believe the difference of Show vs Tell in Writing could be something like this.

Tell:
I place the chair on the table.

Show:
Holding the wooden headrest of my chair, I lift it off the ground and slowly walk my way towards the wooden table. As I place it down, I push it forward a little pit before panting out for the fan's metallic air.

So, in short, does the "Art of Emotion vs Pornography of Emotion debate" similar to the differences of the "Show vs Tell" in creative writing. I know that I've been absent for a long. But I'm here looking for your opinions and knowledge. So I hope I could be enlightened in some way.

 

[Hakajin]

Eheh, I don't think you need to censor that; I wouldn't even call it pg-13. When it comes to sex scenes, it really depends on what you want to express. If you're going for the characters' point of view, and it's a really wonderful experience, then yeah, you do want to be more subtle and focus on the emotions more. This is what you see in a lot of idealized romances. On the other hand, if you do go into detail, it can give it a much more realistic feel. Life isn't a romance novel, and sex isn't always the best thing ever. The people involved aren't always beautiful (and if they are, they usually don't look their best during), and it can be kind of gross and/or comical. And the realism actually makes it more beautiful, because it reflects something real. To see what I'm talking about, I'd look at an indi film I once saw called "Prairie Love." Definitely an R-rating on that one, but it's a perfect example.

As for showing and not telling... Well, that, too, depends on the situation and what effect you're going for. There are a lot of situations where example 1 works better. I prefer it; the first one sounds like it's trying too hard to be poetic to me. Like, in a text where there's a lot of hardship, a sparse approach is usually better, because trying to pretty it up and make it profound cheapens it. It's also better to let the events speak for themselves, to just show the audience what happened and let that have its effect, rather than to use words to try to force an emotion. It's sort of like having a scene have no music vs. having a scene overlayed with cheesy violin music. I think the worst example I've ever seen was in a book called "The Red Violin," which was about the Holocaust. The line was "Dawn was a threadbare blanket thrown over the bed of suffering." I laughed. Anyway, this is what Hemmingway was all about. The second approach can be useful, but you want to use it sparingly; you want to do it when you want strong focus on a scene. Overuse it, and it's hard to differentiate the important stuff from everything else.

Whenever I tell someone that they should show and not tell, it usually has to do with characterization and plot points. Like, instead of telling me a character is cheerful, show me that character's cheerfulness in action. Elaborate on past events, don't just give one sentence explanations. Instead of saying "x happened, and then y happened," [paint a scene. Well, you can overdo that, too, but... In general, that's the way to go.

Of course, different people will have different opinions, but... this is what I think.

 

[Dramatic Melody]

The two conflicting pairs of ideas you present are slightly different from each other, but I think they both boil down to one thing: deciding what works best for your writing. The answer to that may not always be the same across your works, but an awareness of all of these techniques is important when you write so that you'll know which one works better for you.

While the comment "show, don't tell" makes it seem like they're opposites of each other, I believe the comment talks more about fleshing out your plot, characters, descriptions, and other elements of your story instead of just stating a fact or description and moving on from that. What this means (for me) though is knowing when to expound on plot and characters and knowing when to keep it simple and understated. Similar to what Hakajin said, overdoing the "showing" is almost as problematic as overdoing the "telling," since the flowery language of that "Show" example you put can get tiring and dragging if it's used continuously.

That, I think, is what "pornography of emotion" is getting at, since the weighty and emotional language it breeds doesn't always work for most texts. Since Kahapon, Ngayon, at Bukas, being a seditious play in reaction to the war brought about by the colonizers, calls for this heaviness in emotion, this weighty language works well for it. America is in the Heart, on the other hand, talks about the experiences of the author in America as an immigrant, and while this is also rife with emotion, the author's choice of presenting it subtly tells a lot about the protagonist and the author himself. This subtle treatment gives it a more realistic tone and feel, and being a novel about his life story, Bulosan knew that this kind of language would work best for it.

[It's also interesting that the two examples your professor gave differ in genre as well, since most dramas call for more vivid language as they are meant to be seen and heard and not read, while most stories are the opposite. This again is a result of Tolentino and Bulosan choosing what they believed was the right kind of language to convey their works, and while they contrast each other, neither of them is more "correct" than the other because of it.]

In short, it's good to know about the conflicting styles brought about by showing and telling, as well as by writing as an art of emotion and as a pornography of emotion. Many writers, critics, and theorists will prefer one over the other and believe that it is more effective and therefore more "correct" than the other, but it's not a matter of which one is better but more of which one works better for you. If your writing calls for telling rather than showing, then by all means tell. If your writing calls for overtness rather than subtlety, then by all means be overt. That also goes for their converses.

[Side-note: As someone who's also read a bit of Philippine Literature because of my course (though unfortunately I've read neither America is in the Heart nor Kahapon, Ngayon, at Bukas), I can surmise that most of what is considered "canon" in Philippine literature follows the more overt display of emotion (first thing that comes to mind is Manuel Arguilla's stories and the romantic poetry that was popular around the time of the American colonization), while a lot of what's being written today tends to point more towards the subtle display of emotion (definitely recommend the poetry of Conchitina Cruz for examples of this). I think that the shift to subtlety in more contemporary works is due to the heavier influence of foreign works to Philippine writing nowadays (brought about by more accessible foreign literature), but there are still publications that use the overt display to their advantage and profit (the popular chic-lit novels, for example). Again, that's a case of which one works better for your writing, hence the prevalence of both in Philippine literature today.]

 

[Firebrand]

Right, to continue on with Hakajin's namedrop of Hemingway, he is the epitome of tell, don't show. And yes, that does work for him and in his works, the bleak and simple prose helps to convey the banality of the situations the characters experience without all the heavy displays of emotion that would, ultimately detract from the story. To be completely honest, I've never encountered the terms mentioned here, or at least not phrased quite like that. But it is important to realize that we live in an era where literary tradition allows for both schools of thought, both showing and telling. When looking at something like this, having a background of English literary tradition helps in understanding where these concepts came from.

The novel as an art form really didn't come about until the tail end of the 17th century, and they were written in such a way where there was a lot of "telling" and not a lot of subtlety in showing. And this was done because people would read these novels for a little while, then put them down for days or weeks at a time, and then pick up right where they left off, and they'd often forget little details throughout the reading, so authors repeated themselves quite often so that people who abandoned the book don't forget anything important. Robinson Crusoe, one of the first "novels" as we would recognize, is full of exhaustive (read: dreadfully boring) detail that makes having to blow through it in two or three sittings over the weekend for a college class on Monday torture. But as time went on (so early 19th century now) novels got a bit more nuanced and adopted more subtlety and symbolism, so "showing" became far more prominent. This is especially prominent in vital Russian and French works, where things are very allegorical. But at the dawn of the 20th century, print culture had really evolved to the point where people could blend the forms or experiment in certain ones, leading to things like Hemingway's extremely blunt beige prose or the more nuanced and subtle stories of his contemporaries. Or we have something like Joyce where everything is "shown" and wrapped up in like eight layers of metaphors to boot.

I guess what I'm trying to say is it's hard to just compare these two ideas off the cuff because they didn't form in a vacuum. They're the result of hundreds of years of print culture and they will be the product of their time. I haven't come into contact with much Philippine literature myself but my understanding of it is that it is very melodramatic and soap opera-esque. In that way, having these big flowery descriptions of emotional resonance would not be out of place there, but to audiences in many other parts of the world (and the publishing market at large) such descriptions will seem either hackneyed or very dated. A flowery, over-the-top description of a love scene full of allegorical language would seem like something drawn from a courtly romance, which went out of vogue several centuries ago, or taken from the pages of something like a Harlequin romance, which is decidedly pulp fiction.

The prevailing attitude in American literary fiction today (or at least literary fiction that isn't so stupidly post-modern that it's nothing but a bunch of navel gazing and pseudo-philosophic crap) is that showing is generally better than telling when it comes to narration, but not so much in the use of metaphors or whatever, but rather in giving the audience a better understanding of what's at play in the scene. For example instead of saying, "He pulled the chair out and motioned for me to sit down," one might say, "The chair scraped across the ground as he moved it away from the table, and with a lazy flick of his wrist, he made it clear that I was to be seated." And while the lower case does more showing, like establishing the atmosphere of the scene and so on, and would be upheld as a better example of showing, sometimes simplicity is better and one does not want to be quite so verbose. Basically, it's not really that showing or telling is inherently better, but they have to be taken on a case by case basis for literally every turn of phrase. Some will be better told, some better shown.

I think the mistake you're making here is assuming there is a debate between showing and telling. But that's not really the case, nor has it ever really been. Most writers flip back and forth between showing and telling with ease, as the scene fits it. Sometimes being too flowery or metaphoric or allegorical or whatever just doesn't fit. Yes, having a story mostly told as opposed to shown is generally the mark of an amateurish writier, but the converse is also true. Sometimes when a story is excessively flowery, the writer just comes off as slightly less amateurish and more than a little show-offy.

 

[Negrek]

I think you're a little confused on the difference between showing and telling. Your examples aren't related to one another in that way. The first one states a fact: that the POV character put a chair on the table. The second sentence conveys the same essential information: the POV character put a chair on the table. It simply goes about doing this in a more involved way--it includes more about how the act was done. But "showing" isn't giving about more information than "telling," it's just about presenting the same information, but in a different way.

If you wanted those sentences to be an example of "showing" vs "telling," then you could have the first sentence be "I had a hard time putting the chair on the table." In this case, the first sentence is stating something that is not directly mentioned in the second sentence at all. The second sentence implies that putting the chair on the table is difficult for the POV character, but never actually comes right out and says it. This is the kind of situation Hakajin mentioned: the difference between stating that a character is cheerful and getting that fact across through the character's actions. The examples you use now are both "telling" with respect to the fact that the POV character is putting the chair on the table.

"Telling" isn't inherently more sparse than "showing," and "showing" isn't about the inclusion of detail, the style of diction, or how "flowery" the prose is. They are simply two different ways of conveying information: telling, direct; and showing, indirect. In that regard, yes, it sounds like the example you gave is sort of a "show, don't tell" dichotomy. If I'm reading you correctly (I haven't read either book myself, so I'm just going by what you say in your intro post), then America is in the Heart does more "showing" in that it implies the sex act rather than describing it directly, whereas Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow has more of a "telling" style and simply states what it wants readers to take away. So, yes, a show/tell distinction. But a similar distinction does not exist between the example sentences you provide. Likewise, the chair example Firebrand used isn't a show/tell distinction either. Verbosity and level of detail is not what distinguishes one from the other.

In any case, as other people have said, neither is inherently better than the other; they simply have different purposes. But I don't think you were asking for a value judgment about the techniques anyway.