People make meanings. It’s second nature. They fill in the gaps to make sense of the world.

On the one hand, you can provide the right details to forestall people adding their own ‘wrong’ details. On the other, you can not care too much, and just let people do what they’re going to do. The political economics of it all will be there whether you intend them to be or not. As I think it’s impossible to separate art from reality, I don’t think one should try to do so.

I do worry about this kind of thing. I want people to come away from anything I write and be a step closer to being a Marxist. I wouldn’t want to leave it up to liberals and fascists to fill in the gaps in such a way that my writing becomes a manifesto for them. (Not that they won’t try. They’d happily read a Marxist animal farm and pretend the grumpy old dog Marx wasn’t even in the story or was there as some kind of warning. Liberals gonna liberal.)

This can be very subtle, though. Emphasising the way that material features influence the way that that different animals would have to organise their societies could be a Marxist way of writing. For example, a squirrel society is going to find life harder if the beaver society chews down all the trees to make dens; but some of the squirrels might benefit from this and some of the beavers might not like it. Their ways of life may be contradictory but they could live in harmony if they weren’t motivated to dominate the landscape in a capitalist kind of way.

The race thing is interesting because it reveals problematic attitudes of readers. If the first thought to a reader is that different animal species represent races, they need to ask themselves why they implicitly accept race science and the biological basis of race. So if that’s what critics are pushing you to do, I’d steer clear of their suggestions (it seems you’re already doing this).

(Strangely, when liberals use animal species, I do sometimes assume they are using them as an analogy for race and I criticise them heavily for it, like Rowling and her house elves and banker goblins or Tolkien and his dwarves and elves. I probably assume this when/because writers do little to make my think they’re trying to do something else.)

It’s probably okay to have animals represent nations or states. But if you do this, liberals will certainly interpret these as ethno-states, because liberals are, again, unfortunately, gonna liberal.

If you did want to make more of the politics of race or class or gender or sexuality, etc, there will be a way to do it. China Mieville (a Marxist) uses animals in his work. You might want to see how he does it, as a published example. I’m thinking Perdido Street Station.

Or, dare I suggest another example Orwell’s Animal Farm: A Faery Tale. The problem that reveals the curse there is, even if you put ‘faery tale’ in the bloody title, liberals are going to treat it as gospel if it could be used as a bludgeon to bash Stalin. I suppose that’s how anti-communist snitches are bound to be interpreted, though.

You wrote:

think the author wrote it that way because that’s their idea of a perfect society with no major issues…

I wouldn’t worry too much about this. The point of fiction is that it’s fictional. Not everyone understands that. That’s why interviewers often ask writers, ‘And do I get a sense that this book/film is autobiographical?’ And why writers can always reply, ‘Well I suppose it is semi-autobiographical, yes, how did you know?’

The answer is that we’re human and there’s a dialectical relationship between art and reality but they rarely/never say that. It’s better business to keep some mystique and get people to buy your book to read it and try to guess which parts were lived. I wouldn’t let this fear change your story.

People are going to put words in your mouth whatever you do. The theorists and critics get paid for it, like good little propagandists. You could get ahead of it and leave clues to lead them to put the right – at least better – words in your mouth?

You could do this by showing variety within species and show the reader that those differences aren’t, in themselves, the determining factor in well-being, as opposed to material conditions. This could turn your work into a weird and garbled political tract, but you can fix this by rewriting.

These kinds of questions might be answered by Marxist literary critics and theorists. We’re doing literary theory when we engage in these debates about what writers mean. You could read some Terry Eagleton to see the kinds of things that Marxists say about non-Marxist texts. If you agree with the criticism, you can avoid doing the thing that was criticised?

I’ll give you a quote from the conclusion to his Literary Theory: An Introduction (it’s one paragraph but I’ll split it up for ease of reading online):

There is, in fact, no need to drag politics into literary theory: as with South African sport, it has been there from the beginning. I mean by the political no more than the way we organize our social life together, and the power-relations which this involves; and what I have tried to show throughout this book is that the history of modern literary theory is part of the political and ideological history of our epoch. …

[L]iterary theory has been indisociably bound up with political beliefs and ideological values. Indeed [it] is less an object of intellectual enquiry in it’s right then a particular perspective in which to view the history of our times. Nor should this be in the least cause for surprise.

For any body of theory concerned with human meaning, value, language, feeling and experience will inevitably engage with broader, deeper beliefs about the nature of human individuals and societies, problems of power and sexuality, interpretations of past history, versions of the present and hopes for the future.

It is not a matter of regretting that this is so – of blaming literary theory for being caught up with such questions, as opposed to some ‘pure’ literary theory which might be absolved from them. Such ‘pure’ literary theory of is an academic myth: some of the theories we have examined in this book are nowhere more clearly ideological than in their attempts to ignore history and politics altogether.

(Emphasis added:)

Literary theories are not to be upbraided for being political, but for being covertly or unconsciously so – for the blindness with which they offer as a supposedly ‘technical’, ‘self-evident’, ‘scientific’ or ‘universal’ truth doctrines which with a little reflection can be seen to relate to and reinforce the particular interests of particular groups of people at particular times. The title to this section, ‘Conclusion: Political Criticism’, is not intended to mean: ‘Finally, a political alternative’; it is intended to mean: ‘The conclusion is that the literary theory we have examined is political’.

In sum:

1. Literary theorists are going to do their own politics regardless of what we do as writers. So don’t worry too much about what they’ll say.
2. If ‘literary theory’ is what people do when they make sense of literature (it might not be, but I think it is), then people are going to do something political with everything we write. The only question is, what political conclusions do we want them to make?
3. If literary theory is what people do when they make sense of literature and if we can attend to this while we’re writing, then we must also be doing literary theory when we’re writing, either on purpose or by accident. As such, I’d argue for doing political literary theory on purpose and making sure this comes through in our writing (on the understanding that something can be explicit and subtle at the same time).

Keep writing! Your work sounds interesting and it would be a real shame if you let liberal critics put you off (or me, if anything I’ve said has put you off).

Edit: grammar

I have the opposite problem— I’d really like for people not to see the very leftist themes I write. Maybe try adding a disclaimer about what it’s not about, or a foreword.

You can’t worry about how someone else interprets your work, just create, and if you see a criticism that you think is justified then you can always change things.