From those I know in theater, there is a description of acting that refers to laying everything out in plain view: "on the nose," meaning that there is nothing in the acting that is below the surface, everything available for view without having to dig. Acting that is "on the nose" is trite, banal, and a curse. It doesn't work because it insults the audience, assuming we have to be shown everything.

The problem with overly didactic fiction is similar. Even small children shy away from didactic fiction, because it assumes there is nothing that the audience should infer.

I suppose that says something about me as a teacher, that I want my students' essays to be "on the nose," or as close to obvious as possible. I like my fiction one way, but my student work another way.

If a book that deals outright with gay love is ideological, then every book dealing with straight love is ideological. I'm no Harry Potter expert, but the artistic problem of representing a gay character would be that the books simply aren't all that concerned with romance or love or sexual desire.

But let's not pretend that all books aren't ideological. An ideology is a worldview, and great books present a coherent view of the world. Fitzgerald's criticism of American materialism; Faulkner's defense of tradition over modernity; Knowles's vision of war as a problem of the individual human heart; the tragic awareness that social life is full of deadly double binds; all such themes are ideological.

It's too easy to view the norm as free of ideology. Great literature delights and instructs. (And those writers, like Wilde or Baldwin, who oppose the didactic are among the most preachy. Christ, *Dorian Gray* is worse than a Puritan jeremiad. Craft and instruction go hand in hand. They aren't in opposition.)

"It makes a great difference whether the poet seeks the particular for the universal or beholds the universal in the particular. From the first procedure originates allegory, where the particular is considered only as an illustration, asd as example of the universal. The latter, however, is properly the nature of poetry: it expresses something particular without thinking of the universal or pointing to it. Whoever grasps this particular in a living way will simultaneously receive the universal, too, without even becoming aware of it--or realize it only later."

--Goethe