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Point, counterpoint. I do feel like I’ve seen this argument before. Endlessly.
I generally enjoy the books Lev Grossman praises more than the books Matt Cheney praises, but I think that on balance Cheney is more right than not. Grossman is getting at something real, but the way he’s couching his argument is rife with what Cheney calls “armies of straw people marching through an alternate literary history.” Among other things, Grossman palms a whole bunch of cards, first telling us that “the Modernists” were a group of writers including E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald—none of whom are really known for their wild, plot-free typographic experimentalism—and then suddenly turning around to reveal that, no, actually, the Modernists were really Pound, Joyce, and Eliot, who set out in their remote mountain fastness to “break plot.” Which evidently they managed to do, putting “the novel” into a “100-year carbonite nap” from which it is finally awakening (never mind the math), because there are a bunch of new mainstream writers who don’t disdain genre elements and fun storylines, hooray.
I want to see the bookstore shelves in this alternate world, the one in which The Waste Land and Ulysses had this titanic influence on what got published, filling the catalogs of Doubleday and Harper & Row with brilliantly hermetic stream-of-consciousness narratives and irregular verse. More to the point, I sometimes think that people lap this storyline up because so many people’s school experience contains at least one instance of being looked down upon because they didn’t care for one or more of the sacred mutant outcroppings of High Modernism, and they concluded from this that Literature is all about impenetrable stuff that they don’t like. That damn Hemingway with his crazy free verse.
As far as “plot” goes, as I get older I more and more suspect that “plot” is really being used, in the many incarnations of this argument, as a placeholder for a whole cloud of qualities found (or not found) in certain narratives, some of which actually constitute “plot” and many of which do not. What first led me to suspect this is the fact that many of the sternest exponents of “I want novels to have plots, dammit” are also demonstrably fans of, for instance, quite a few Robert A. Heinlein novels whose plots can barely be detected even by advanced scientific equipment. (Not just later Heinlein, either; go back and look at Beyond This Horizon). As it happens, I like some of those books, too, and what I learn from them, and from thousands of other books, is that what matters isn’t the presence of a carefully-engineered, structurally sound “plot.” What matters is whether a book entrances us into reading it or forces us to decode it—and “plot” is just one of several methods of getting us into the reading trance. It’s a good method. It’s not the only one.
Teresa has observed that “plot is a literary convention; story is a force of nature.” But that’s only a sidebar to what I’m saying, because “story” isn’t the only way a book can entrance us, either. Sometimes it’s just the voice. A sensibility. The promise of knowledge we urgently want. Sometimes it’s the way a book flatters us, and sometimes it’s because it hurts us, but in just the right way. (Seductions don’t all work by a single means; why should we expect books to?) My point is this: We don’t read plots. We read books. Some of them captivate us; many don’t. Plot is one way to captivate us, but there are far too many uninteresting books with perfectly-formed plots, and fascinating books with defective or stunted plots, to support an argument that Plot is the magic juice that makes good books good.
I said that Grossman is getting at something real. Cheney is right when he says:
Lev Grossman sez: “Old hierarchies of taste are collapsing. Genres are hybridizing.” This is called The History of the Novel. Those two statements could have been made at any time during the last 300 years at least.Quite right. And yet, it’s worth talking about the specifics; what’s actually happening between particular readers and particular books. Imagine: Conversations about actual books! Instead of grudge matches about somebody else’s imagined (or even real) snobbery! We could even try believing one another when we talk about why we find certain things cool. Instead of making up narratives about straw men. It’s a crazy idea, but it might be worth a try.
UPDATE: Evil Monkey weighs in.
This sort of thing is one of the reasons I didn't go for an English major. While analysis of structure can be fun and all, there comes a point at which I want to say, "if you enjoy it, it doesn't matter why, dammit."
You can enjoy a novel for plot, that's fine. You can enjoy a novel for sentence structure, sure. You can enjoy a novel that breaks all the literary conventions in a new and fascinating way, and yes, I have a friend like that. I don't give him reading suggestions.
Sooner or later I'd like to see people stop trying to analyze this and just go off and read something.
Lev Grossman says: "suspense and humor and pacing are shedding their stigmas"
And why is that? Because their use in the supermarket potboiler serves to reinforce a morally shitty view of the world.
That seems like a tendentious reading of Grossman, John A.
I mean, the moral and the amoral alike both use metaphors. And zeugma. Sheesh.
Possibly so, Patrick, though I wasn't so much reading Grossman as suggesting an alternative cause for the effect he describes.
I mostly see the books my family members and my co-workers have around, and with some exceptions, they leave me feeling somewhat unclean after I read them. (Thus my habit of mostly reading the last thirty pages or so to see how they end up.)
Examples will only get me in trouble with family members and co-workers, some of whom read Making Light. Yes, I'm chicken.
I guess I'll swim against the tide a little on this one. I'm not saying that Grossman is beyond criticism, but people aren't taking into consideration the very influential tradition of criticism, hostile to mere plot or story, which Grossman is self-consciously arguing against. (Doesn't James Wood remark somewhere about the "essentially juvenile" satisfactions of plot?)
B. Durbin, #1: Sooner or later I'd like to see people stop trying to analyze this and just go off and read something.
I dislike the false dichotomy between analysis and enjoyment of a book. I can analyze a piece without enjoying it, and enjoy a piece without analyzing it; however, I find that having better analytical tools at my disposal makes it easier for me to enjoy most of the things I read, and to articulate why I didn't like something. At which point I can better figure out how to avoid that disliked element in the future. Plus, I get to have fun with the analysis itself, even of works I didn't enjoy; it nets to more fun for me all around.
Which is not to say everyone needs to run off and get a college degree in literature to enjoy reading. But I see that pernicious meme of "Unlike people who study literature, I actually read and enjoy books" crop up often enough that it begins to irk me even by implication as much as the fast food jokes do.
#5: James Enge: Influential on who? Why do grown-up human beings have to care what James Wood thinks?
Really, as Abi Sutherland just now pointed out to me in IM, there are real reasons people pre-emptively flinch over certain kinds of snobbery. Goodness knows I have my own reasons. The point of my last paragraph is, please, God, can we have conversations about how we read books without endlessly worrying that someone is going to walk in with the Cricket Bat Of Cultural Authority and tell us UR DOIN IT WRONG.
I am not interested in telling anybody that their reading tastes are wrong. I am extremely interested in how and why people read, and the purposes to which they put their reading.
#6, Fade Manley: I'm with you. I don't think academic literary types should pass wholesale judgment on why people read popular novels, and I don't think non-academics should claim that people who "analyze" books aren't also enjoying them. Both are sloppy attempts at pretending to an omniscience that no one actually has.
Fade@6: That's a natural reaction to reading something, really enjoying something, and being told it is crap for literary reasons.
PNH @ #7 - When you talk about how and why people read, do you mean people in specific (I read in bed or on the subway), people in general (The average American reads X books per year, The average Robert Jordan fan buys X other 'genre' books, etc.)
Or both? Regardless, they're nifty things to think about.
Steve Burnap @8: I'm not sure what you mean by "natural reaction." I mean, it's obnoxious when someone comes in and tells a group of friends playing Guitar Hero, "You're not really in a band! You're just playing with toys! That's stupid! You shouldn't be having fun!" So...irritation at that? Sure. But I don't see a lot of people automatically going, "Yeah, well, playing a real guitar sucks, and clearly you aren't enjoying it the way we're enjoying our game!" There's room for people to enjoy all sorts of things, and I'm tired of getting snide remarks for daring to enjoy literary analysis just because someone once had a bad experience with an English teacher telling them that their Sweet Valley High books weren't real literature*.
If by "natural reaction" you mean "people are irked by being told what to enjoy," sure, I agree with you. Of course people are upset when they're having fun and someone shows up to tell them it's not real fun and they're inferior for liking that kind of fun.
If you mean "Therefore they're going to tell anyone who enjoys things differently that they're wrong instead and this is a perfectly valid response," I'm going to disagree. It's an error of the exact same type as what set them off in the first place. The useful response to "You shouldn't enjoy that in that way!" is not "Well, you shouldn't enjoy it in your way!"
* I am not going to try to define Real Literature. And I did read Sweet Valley High books, and I didn't enjoy them, and I consider it very useful to be able to articulate both why I didn't and why my little sister did. It helps when figuring out what books to recommend to her.
Patrick Nielsen Hayden @ #7: I'm not saying that anyone has to care what Wood in particular thinks, but he does exist, he writes a lot of stuff that some people take seriously (or the New Yorker and Harvard wouldn't be paying him) and he's part of the tradition Grossman is arguing against. Essentially, I think Wood et al. are wronger than Grossman.
As Patrick found out when we started talking about this on IM, there is a lot of anger and a lot of insecurity around this topic.
It's basic primate dominance games, of course: a certain proportion of academics have used their mastery of a (very useful) toolkit as a form of bludgeon. Then a bunch of people who have been bludgeoned have decided that All Academics Are Thugs, and the future of talking about books is being told that you're interrogating the text from the wrong perspective forever.
(I see Fade Manley and Steve Burnap are now displaying the characteristic flinches of the two sides of this classic interaction.)
Can we declare a truce here?
I'll accept that people with academic degrees in English are (a) having fun with literature and (b) advancing the state of human knowledge, if no one in this thread tells me I'm wrong and stupid for liking what I like, or thinking about this stuff without the official toolkit.
If not, we're switching this whole damn' thread to Latin till everyone respects mah authoriteh.
I'm with Fade Manley at 6 about the false dichotomy between enjoyment and analysis. I'd like tentatively to suggest another false dichotomy: between the various perceptual, passionate and rational activities, including analysis, which make up reading, and 'enjoyment'. I don't think the second exists separately. Enjoying - taking pleasure in - reading is undertaking those various activities in a certain way: enthusiastically, with focus, joyfully.
Of course, people enjoy reading different things, which engage those perceptual, passionate and rational activities in different ways and to different degrees. There's no simple hierarchy of value such that engaging analytic faculties is better than engaging emotions, for instance.
But some things - maybe the books John A at 2 gestured at - engage and cultivate only ugly passions: gleeful identification with heedless power and violence, for instance. 'I enjoy it' isn't a defence of reading those kinds of book, because the enjoyment is corrupt, and analysis can tell us why.
(Disclosure: I've just reread C.S. Lewis's An Experiment in Criticism; can you tell?)
What about the New Wave? Doesn't the WSFA Constitution require someone to complain about the New Wave at some point in this kind of discussion? (Not me, though; I think the New Wave was awesome.)
I find this interesting, being an example of the same arguments happening at the same time in different cultural spheres.
A week ago, a literary manifesto was published in one of the main Swedish newspapers. A group of young authors declared the teens "the decade of the plot," wanting to erase all experimentation other than that with storytelling and plot from their writing, and calling for other authors to join them in their endeavour to save the plot.
Another group of young authors immediately answered with a counter manifesto, promising to continue playing around with words and form and typography.
The Swedish blogosphere broke out in arms (for which, read debate), and it feels as if we'll be talking about this for a while.
Gosh, KarinH, sounds like All Fandom Plunged Into War to me!
[sixteen paragraphs of self-deprecating commentary snipped per comment 12]
It's hard, sometimes, to figure out in the abstract what I love about books. So let me list a few and see what they have in common. My off-the-top-of-my-head list of really good books would include things like:
The Secret History, by Donna Tartt
China Mountain Zhang, by Maureen McHugh
The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. Le Guin
A Civil Contract, by Georgette Heyer
These are the books I can go back to at any time, for any purpose from comfort to enjoyment. Sometimes I want to read a single scene, or even just a line or two. Sometimes I reread them three or four times in a row.
They're not the "best" books in my collection by any standard that I could possibly name. But they're the ones I almost wish I hadn't yet read, so I could have the pleasure of reading them for the first time again*.
No, better: I wish almost wish I hadn't yet read them, so that I could fall in love with the characters for the first time again. All of those books have characters that I have come to love. I read them the way I visit friends.
For me, I guess, plot and writing are ways of defining and exercising characters.
Your mileage will certainly vary. I'd like to hear how.
(Interesting to note, on reread, that all of the books that spring to mind have female authors.)
-----
* This category also includes Firefly
At this point, I really wish Teresa would drop in a humongous post about the changes in the publishing industry that led to the sorts of supermarket racks we have today. She made a remark on that in passing once, and I've since wanted to read more about it.
John Arkansawyer @19, I can do that, but Patrick does it better.
Teresa @ 20: Either way, I'd sure like to read it.
By the way, isn't the usage "Oh Lev Grossman No"?
I'm reminded here of a TV series by the British composer, Howard Goodall, in which he described how new classical music lost its mass audience, while popular music became the target of mass adulation. (I'm pretty sure it was Twentieth Century Greats.)
If I recall right, he started with Cole Porter, also covered Bernard Hermann (whose music for Psycho was right there with the current hot modern classical style, but was for a movie and so didn't count), and finished with the Beatles, who were lifting stuff from all over.
What the heck, go read about it on the guy's webpage, here
Announcement:
Let us banish the idea that it's possible to enjoy a book for the wrong reason.
Let us also banish the worry that we will be accused of enjoying books for the wrong reasons.
Let us believe each other when we say we liked a particular book, even if it was Black Body by H. C. Turk.
Do that, and I can guarantee we'll have some interesting conversations.
Signed,
The Management
(delurking, yet again)
This topic strikes near to my heart. I spent a good portion of my late adolesence and early twenties laboring under the belief that I could perch upon an endowed chair uttering gnomic profundities on the directions of literature or the impossibility of narrative truth...
Naturally, I failed (for a variety of reasons) but life has turned out to be fine regardless. Nevertheless, I still care a lot about literature and criticism.
Earlier in the thread, Patrick (Mr. Nielsen Hayden? I don't know the etiquette, and do apologize) asks "Why do grown-up human beings have to care what James Wood thinks?" Well, that's a reasonable question. I believe that I'm a grown-up human being so I'll have a stab at it.
There is a difference between a Reviewer and a Critic. A reviewer tells you (in their worthy or unworthy opinion) whether or not a book is worth reading. A critic, if they are engaged in the art and craft of criticism, gives you an opportunity to consider or reconsider a book through their analytic lens. James Wood is a prime example of a pure aesthete in his application of criticism - for him the ideal novel is one in which nothing happens, but the process of it not happening is honest, immaculate, and above all else true.
Now I don't agree with this view, but I respect that James Wood is a sincere intelligent critic, and I appreciate that he can give me an alternative perspective on a work. Literature is a slippery notion, but I think that Gene Wolfe gave a working definition that I can wholeheartedly endorse and proclaim:
"My definition of good literature is that which can be read by an educated reader, and reread with increased pleasure."
The critical task is to read and re-read, to see and re-see, and to (hopefully) offer new readings to readers.
(relurking, but shall return.)
I'm reminded of Twain's comment about Wagner, which was that his music is better than it sounds.
Possibly not unrelated: THE FUTURE OF READING: A New Assignment: Pick Books You Like
TNH @ #23 - Not more than two hours ago, by the oddest of coincedenks, Melody was reading me your review of Black Body, and I had decided I really should go read it, just to bask in its' awesome badness...
Patrick: All your Cricket Bat of Authoriteh is ours. Bend over, naawteh boi...
Creepy coincidence time. I was just reading Teresa's Mountain-Dew-expelling Amazon review of Black Body to Oleander an hour and a half ago. Whafuh?
The Grossman piece is very very odd. It's a bit like reading something written in the early 1970s. Knowing he comes out of Comp lit helps explain some of the oddness, but he's very much misusing terms--and I've verified that via Abram's Literary Terms, and the usual undergraduate lit handbooks.
He's just plain wrong.
But the oddest thing of all is that he talks about plot, and story, and he refers to Forster--who is the person who crystallized the distinctions between plot and story in terms of twentieth century literary theory, and criticism of the novel.
But Grossman doesn't seem to be aware of that.
Most particularly though, Grossman doesn't seem to understand the associations of Modernism, and seems almost to see it as something divorced from what came before, and from everything that came after, and it just isn't. There's a continuous connection.
There is nothing new under the sun, and of the making of books there is no end.
I spend an inordinate amount of time on Absolute Write's forums. They're pretty nifty.
Over and over in genre discussions people attempt to define and categorize "literary fiction," and "literature," as separate from "fiction" and "genre fiction."
As someone who thinks a lot of medieval lit qualifies as urban fantasy, this makes me pull my hair and gnash my teeth.
The endless qualitative distinctions between Austen (or any other canon author) as literature and Stephen King as "trash," or "genre fiction" and hence inferior to "literature" get a little thin too. They do very much seem to be tied to a difference between wanting to read to find out what happens, and reading for an external reason. Austen or Faulkner are "good" for us; King not so much.
Is the idea that if it isn't "hard," and "difficult," that if we have narrative lust reading a book then the book is "bad" part of our puritan heritage? Is it even uniquely American? I do note that German and French book reviews even in terms of SF and F seem to be very very different that American ones.
Lisa Spangenberg @ 31... a lot of medieval lit qualifies as urban fantasy
But is it fantasy when they believe this is the way Nature truly functions?
But is it fantasy when they believe this is the way Nature truly functions?
Dude, the Medievalies may not have known a lot about nuclear physics, but they weren't stupid. No way anyone would believe some of the stuff in various chansons, gestes, lays, and metrical romances was or could be literally true. It was fantasy, they knew it was fantasy, and they were having a good time with it.
Lisa Spangenberg @ 31..."Is the idea that if it isn't "hard," and "difficult," that if we have narrative lust reading a book then the book is "bad" part of our puritan heritage?"
I think that you're on to something here, although I'd like to alter and amplify it slightly. There seems to be a definite feeling...not just about novels but about learning in general that it must have UTILITY. Somehow, reading for pleasure (to some) has the whiff of decadence. Reading must be an *improving* act, something that will better us.
This is the sentiment behind statements like "I can't imagine why you'd learn any other language but Spanish...what will Latin do for your resume?"
James @ 33... I don't remember calling them stupid, but I stand corrected anyway.
The literature academics I know read everything, including scifi. Yeah, they call it that, and surely that proves something doesn't it?
As for Fitzgerald though ... This Side of Paradise, which catapaulted him to fame and fortune is experimental in terms of fiction for the year 1920. It is cut-up, without conventional chapters or breaks. It quotes in full the popular songs of the day, as well as mention other popular culture practices and products. This was the first fiction to do so, whereas now these have become signatures of either careful historical research or lessons from Bill Gibson, or product placement to offset production costs. Nor is there any real plot or conclusion.
Fitzgerald's next novel, The Beautiful and the Damned, did the same except at much greater length and with less brio or successful artistic effect (this is my opinion, of course, and mine alone).
His least popular novels, Tender is the Night and The Great Gatsby, his straight ahead realist novels were failures, commercially, unlike his previous two. For the record I really love these two Fitzgerald novels, admire This Side of Paradise, and care not at all for The Beautiful and the Damned.
In the end Fitzgerald made most of his fortune from his short fiction, not his novels.
What a strange time 1920 was, I kept thinking this mid-summer, while working out to This Side of Paradise on cd. I hadn't read the novel in many years. This is the first time I really understood it -- got it, so to speak. But then I'd not spent time at Princeton myself when I read the novel the two times before. (My mind kept flipping the script, or in deconstructionist terms, 'decentering' the Princeton of This Side of Paradise, as First Lady Michelle Obama's unhappiness at Princeton kept intruding my reactions to the text I was listening to so carefully.)
By the way the Wiki plot summary of This Side of Paradise is wrong in most of the details.
Love, C.
Serge @#32
But is it fantasy when they believe this is the way Nature truly functions?
A lot of times they knew they were making up stuff just because they could--they didn't, for instance, actually believe that all the things said of fairies were true--for one thing, the Church had decided opinions about it and took measures to make their feelings about "fabulae" very clear.
I rather doubt that Chaucer's readers and hearers thought that kissing an ugly old hag would restore her to youth and fecudity.
But it was totally cool story.
Lisa L Spamgenberg @ 37... Good point. I ask because I remember something that a buddy in Québec once said about the origins of fantasy tales up there. He pointed out that the tales of the 19th Century could not be considered as belonging to the genre of fantasy because people truly believed that, for example, the defiance certain religious interdictions was how one could become a werewolf, and that thus those stories belonged to the realm of folk tales. Anyway.
Argh. My aopologies for misspelling your name, Lisa. How embarassing.
He pointed out that the tales of the 19th Century could not be considered as belonging to the genre of fantasy because people truly believed that, for example, the defiance certain religious interdictions was how one could become a werewolf, and that thus those stories belonged to the realm of folk tales.
I am not convinced that your friend was as conversant with 19th c. society or 19th c. literature as perhaps he needed to be to make that argument.
Lisa L. Spangenberg @ 30:
There is nothing new under the sun, and of the making of books there is no end.
What a beautiful thought! Could we have it in Latin please? I'm sure I would find it much more profound, and certainly Improved, if rendered in a language I can't really read.
James @ 40... As he is a professor of Literature, and especially about French-language literature, I give him the credit that he knows what he's talking about. Me, I'm like Sgt Schultz. I know nothing, nothing.
Serge @#39 Hah! I can't spell my name, or anything else, correctly at least half the time. I bless PNH's note about spelling of things every time I screw my courage to the sticking point and post, because even though I proof and write outside the comment window, I'm afraid I'll make an error and annoy PNH.
Actually, I spell everything perfectly but the Internet introduces errors . . . yeah, that's it.
Serge@#38 wrote:
I ask because I remember something that a buddy in Québec once said about the origins of fantasy tales up there. He pointed out that the tales of the 19th Century could not be considered as belonging to the genre of fantasy because people truly believed that, for example, the defiance certain religious interdictions was how one could become a werewolf, and that thus those stories belonged to the realm of folk tales.
I say Feh. The first widely circulated and written version of a werewolf tale was Mare de France's Bisclavret, from the twelfth century. She very much wrote for an erudite and educated aristocratic audience, and the tale is very clearly identified wrt genre as a Breton Lay--which by definition is a fantasy that includes love, magic, and usually, the otherworld.
I note that even earlier Old Irish lists of the genres of tales include two that are specifically about fantastic trips to the otherworld--echtras, and imramms. The lists of tales make it very clear that these really are genres in just the way we use genres to categorize story types today. And these too were also very much created for a learned audience, pre and post Christianity.
So I'm sticking to fantasy as a medieval genre.
And to the governing belief that it's ok to enjoy what we read.
@#41 Ralph Giles
Lisa L. Spangenberg @ 30:
There is nothing new under the sun, and of the making of books there is no end.
What a beautiful thought! Could we have it in Latin please? I'm sure I would find it much more profound, and certainly Improved, if rendered in a language I can't really read.
You're gonna laugh, now.
Ecclesiastes 1:9
The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.
http://www.latinvulgate.com/verse.aspx?t=0&b=23
Ecclesiastes 12:12
And further, by these, my son, be admonished: of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh.
http://www.latinvulgate.com/verse.aspx?t=0&b=23&c=12
Keep in mind that the Vulgate numbers and breaks verses a bit differently.
I note in passing that the "Overmuch study maketh men mad" in Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy was much inspired by the second verse.
http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/article/show/56
Let's also banish the idea that only "classic" or "literary" books are worth analyzing (cf. the article linked at #26). I hear this sometimes from would-be preservers of our beleaguered culture who've discovered academic studies of pop culture, and recoiled--Susan Jacoby in The Age of American Unreason, for instance.
Great novels stand up to more analysis, and more varied analysis, than others. (A month or two ago I came across a blogger who mused that maybe "the artist's task consists primarily in maximizing the number of possible interesting interpretations of their work." That's not a perfect standard to use for determining the quality of a novel, but there is no perfect standard. This one is as good as many others.)
But not-so-literary books--all the way down to the potboilers and novelizations--are also worth analyzing. Fred Clark's exegesis on the Left Behind series should, all by itself, refute anyone who argues otherwise.
Lisa L Spangenberg @ 43... the governing belief that it's ok to enjoy what we read
I couldn't agree more. In fact, that's why I don't believe anymore that one should finish a story once one has started even if the act of reading is as pleasant as watching Karl Rove & Dick Cheney fighting each other and dressed like Mexican wrestlers.
B. Durbin @1:
While analysis of structure can be fun and all, there comes a point at which I want to say, "if you enjoy it, it doesn't matter why, dammit."Of course it matters why you like it. It's a really interesting question that has no wrong answers.
I've read more published litcrit than anyone here except Patrick and Scraps. I promise you, the good stuff is interesting, and has a detectable resemblance to normal readers talking to their friends about why they like what they do.
Weird fact about academic lit types: They like the stuff they study. They don't spend their professional careers concentrating on Samuel Richardson, Edward Gibbon, minor Elizabethan playwrights, James Merrill, William Faulkner, the later Greek poets, Nathaniel Hawthorne, James Joyce, ME metrical romances, Anne Bradstreet, or John Cowper Powys because they think it's somehow good for them, or morally uplifting, or any of that rot. They like it. They feel affinity for it. They think there are interesting things to say about it.
Not all of them are good at explaining why.
Sooner or later I'd like to see people stop trying to analyze this and just go off and read something.For some of us, thinking about why we liked it is a natural part of digesting and assimilating the book. We can't stop doing it. It's not in our nature.
John A Arkansawyer @2:
Lev Grossman says: "suspense and humor and pacing are shedding their stigmas"Maybe he's got stigmas confused with stamens and pistils?
And why is that? Because their use in the supermarket potboiler serves to reinforce a morally shitty view of the world.What? How?
Suspense and pacing are basic narrative tools. Humor, like story, is a force of nature. An author who can reliably manage all three deserves to sell a lot of books.
John Arkansawyer again @4:I mostly see the books my family members and my co-workers have around, and with some exceptions, they leave me feeling somewhat unclean after I read them. (Thus my habit of mostly reading the last thirty pages or so to see how they end up.)
I know that feeling, but I just stop reading. Checking out the last thirty pages is how I assess their notions of causation and consequence.
Examples will only get me in trouble with family members and co-workers, some of whom read Making Light. Yes, I'm chicken.I can't do anything about their judgement, but we can enforce manners; and figuring out the tropes/mechanisms/tone that makes you have that reaction to some writers would be very interesting indeed.
James Enge @5:
I'm not saying that Grossman is beyond criticism, but people aren't taking into consideration the very influential tradition of criticism, hostile to mere plot or story, which Grossman is self-consciously arguing against. (Doesn't James Wood remark somewhere about the "essentially juvenile" satisfactions of plot?)Oh, well, James Wood. He's an alien.
Okay, I'm being unfair. When James Wood talks about what makes literature good, he's actually telling us what he enjoys. Some critics agree with him, because they enjoy the same things. Some critics (and many readers) think he's a frackin' alien -- I'm sorry, I can't help it, he just is! -- and wouldn't dream of reading a book on his recommendation.
He and I probably have some overlapping tastes. I'm not sure we could discuss them. (Maybe if we were both drunk? Not sure.) I nevertheless believe he's telling the truth about what he enjoys.
Other than that, What Patrick Said (see #7).
Fade Manley @6: Agreed, on all points.
Patrick @7: And if he's that hot, why isn't he at Yale?
Steve Burnap @8:
That's a natural reaction to reading something, really enjoying something, and being told it is crap for literary reasons.When were you ever told that by someone whose opinions you valued? It would be a poorer world if I couldn't dismiss James Wood, or Harold Bloom when I disagree with him. Learn how to do the same. It's useful, and will make you a happier reader.
Jim Macdonald is a secondhand participant in this thread via my chat window:
Jim: Here's dialogue you're never going to see:He had me there. I have heard that one, often.Reader: This book sucks!TNH: Here's one I've never heard:
Writer: But I worked so hard!
Reader: Oh, in that case I like it.Reader: This book sucks!Jim:
Writer: But James Wood and Harold Bloom said it was good!
Reader: Oh, in that case I like it.Reader: This book sucks!
Prominent Literary Guy: This is an important work of modern literature!
Reader: Modern literature sucks.
Also:
Jim: Someday I'd like to show you a movie: The Car. It is incredibly bad, but it's also wonderfully good, all at the same time.Sometimes I have hours-long hard-fought arguments with Jim about litcrit. Other times, I just sit back and applaud.Or, I think it is, only the film makers were reaching beyond their level of budget and talent for it.
The plot: Satan comes to earth in the form of a modified Cadillac. Many people die.
TNH: One wonders how the author came up with that one.
Why is it bad?
Jim: Because it's cheesy, and it doesn't have a resolution, or any motivation, and wow is it non-slick.
On the other hand, it's got a lot of "how did they do that?" moments in it (all pre-CGI), and it has a guy playing "Dawn" from Peer Gynt on a bass horn, just because they had a guy who could play "Dawn" from Peer Gynt on a bass horn. And the music behind the titles is Dies Irae played on automobile horns. And it opens with a quote from Jack Kerouac. And it's pretty much a morality tale about loving automobiles too much, and people not enough.
TNH: Cool stuff is cool stuff.
Jim: Oh, and there's a porno film, one of the hard-core triple-Xers from the 'seventies, paused for one of the actors to do a really cool magic trick. (Swallowing razor blades: a classic.)
The filmmakers ruined it, by cutting away for a reaction shot in the middle. The effect requires that it be done completely fairly, in one continuous take. But I could see that it was a dynamite version, and this guy was really good.
They hadn't done Moovvveee Maaagggiiiicccc, it was the real thing. The filmmakers walked on it by making it look like a cheap, no-skill cheat.
But I saw the guy doing it, and knew what he was doing, and was impressed.
Josh Jasper @9: Patrick's gone out to pick up some groceries, but I'll bet he was primarily asking how we all read as individuals, with the possibility of eventually working up to more general statements, if the initial lab results warrant it.
Fade Manley @10 (Addressing Steve Burnap):
There's room for people to enjoy all sorts of things, and I'm tired of getting snide remarks for daring to enjoy literary analysis just because someone once had a bad experience with an English teacher telling them that their Sweet Valley High books weren't real literature*.Thus demonstrating that their English teacher had a defective understanding of literature. It's that horrible old faux-genteel Twoo Art thing about "literature" being refined and uplifting and dull, and exerting an improving moral influence on readers (even if they loathe it and are bored out of their minds); whereas popular fiction is a shallow, debased, and corrupting influence, no matter how it's written or what it's about.
That whole mindset is basically literature as social control, and nobody likes it. If you want a book package to be the kiss of death, contrive to have it suggest that reading this book will be good for you.
If by "natural reaction" you mean "people are irked by being told what to enjoy," sure, I agree with you. Of course people are upset when they're having fun and someone shows up to tell them it's not real fun and they're inferior for liking that kind of fun.Which is why you and Patrick and I and assorted others here get irritated when people dismiss our enjoyment of literary analysis.
I don't know whether they're aware that they're doing it.
James Enge @11 (addressing Patrick):
I'm not saying that anyone has to care what Wood in particular thinks, but he does exist, he writes a lot of stuff that some people take seriously (or the New Yorker and Harvard wouldn't be paying him) and he's part of the tradition Grossman is arguing against.So? All it means is that a small number of writers you've never heard of, but who've probably gone to the right schools, and whose tastes resemble his, are likelier to receive certain prestigious grants, which they'll use to write novels and short stories you wouldn't want to read anyway. Many of those books will sell in quantities inadequate to support a single mass-market edition.
Yeah, the ruling class pays its nieces and nephews to write dull books, and hires its aunts and uncles to talk about how good they are. How come you can ignore that when they do it with painting and sculpture, but it bothers you when they do it with literature? And why are you giving them the priceless gifts of your time, your attention, and your sense of satisfaction with yourself?
The only really satisfactory response is to read books you find good, and refuse to let yourself feel belittled on account of doing it.
Abi @12:
As Patrick found out when we started talking about this on IM, there is a lot of anger and a lot of insecurity around this topic.Not to invalidate the anger and insecurity, but at bottom it makes exactly as much sense as people acting like you're a class enemy because you have Greek and Latin. English lit studies and classical languages have both been misused in the cause of unacknowledged class warfare.
Children of privilege went to schools that taught Latin and Greek. When public education was provided to the children of the poor, it was decided that they wouldn't be taught classics. English lit studies were invented to fill the slot that left open. That's when the canon became the canon. Before that, books were just books. It's also where second-rate lit studies picked up their emotional load of gentility, improvement, and resentment.
It's not surprising that they leave so many students feeling like they haven't understood what they've read, or haven't understood it in the right ways, or haven't liked it for the right reasons. If you'd been confident that you'd really understood it, you'd have realized that you were just reading books and stories, and that they had only such magical powers as books and stories normally possess.
It's basic primate dominance games, of course: a certain proportion of academics have used their mastery of a (very useful) toolkit as a form of bludgeon. Then a bunch of people who have been bludgeoned have decided that All Academics Are Thugs, and the future of talking about books is being told that you're interrogating the text from the wrong perspective forever.I've hypothesized that some of the raw nastiness of academic lit studies is an inadvertent product of scaling problems.
When there weren't many universities, it was reasonable to expect that all academics would write and do research as well as teach. When you establish land grant colleges and state university systems, you have a lot more academics who are obliged to publish, and they aren't all going to come up with something new to say about Andrew Marvell. Competitive hermeticism is a natural outgrowth of this system.
Can we declare a truce here?I have not the slightest objection to that. And by the way, there is no official toolkit, and the canon is constantly being reformulated. Acting like it came down off the mountain written on stone tablets is mere convention.I'll accept that people with academic degrees in English are (a) having fun with literature and (b) advancing the state of human knowledge, if no one in this thread tells me I'm wrong and stupid for liking what I like, or thinking about this stuff without the official toolkit.
If not, we're switching this whole damn' thread to Latin till everyone respects mah authoriteh.Entirely appropriate, and pleasingly symmetrical besides. I'm in.
James D. Macdonald #33: There's a novel (part of which is dedicated to an ancestor of mine) based on the presumption that the protagonist actually believes that mediaeval romances, chansons &c are true.
abi @12,
That was something of a reflective flinching on my part, and I am more than happy to back down from potential implied hostility.
Besides, I've only just reached chapter 3 of Wheelock's (again), and if this thread goes all Latin, I'm going to be reduced to discussing poets giving roses to girls and announcing that their great country is strong.
#24, dlbowman76 -- Yes, "Nielsen Hayden" is our last name.
I actually do understand reviewing and criticism, and the shades and nuances thereof. I've read a reasonable amount of the stuff. I even know who James Wood is. What I was really asking is, do we really have to wander around apologizing for enjoying plot, just because James Wood and a few dozen other arch-aesthetes sniff at it? It's like being careful not to sing pop songs in the shower because some guy in the local alt-weekly is a music snob. That guy from the alt-weekly isn't lurking outside your bathroom door, and James Wood isn't in this comment thread.
I find it unremarkable that a few people hold an extreme, aestheticized view of literature--odds are, a few people always will. I find it quite remarkable that we should grant this small coterie such power to define the terms of discourse, to the extent that we inevitably have to argue with them before we can get down to just plain talking about what we like about stuff we've read. Even though they're not in the room. I want to say to so many of my friends, particularly in the SF world, "CALM DOWN, THOSE PEOPLE AREN'T HERE, THEY CAN'T HURT YOU ANY MORE."
I do like your observation in #34 that there's a "definite feeling," in some critical quarters, that literature has to have utility, and that logically following from that, it should be to some extent work. I'm reminded of Terry Eagleton's claim that the "English Studies" syllabus was devised in the later nineteenth century, as a way of properly socializing and normalizing the new waves of tradesmen now ascending into the middle class, since obviously you wouldn't want to waste the trivium and the quadrivium on arrivistes but you had to do something to ensure their outlook was In Line. If indeed modern English Studies academia originated as a system of social control, much is explained. But it doesn't mean that when Gore Vidal or Joanna Russ or Marvin Mudrick or Edmund Wilson dive deeply into how a book works, where it succeeds and where it fails, how it fits into its time, and what can be teased out of it with a close reading, that they're doing it out of a desire to kill anyone's simple enjoyment, or because they disdain the pleasures of reading unanalytically, or because they think that literature needs to have Purpose and Utility. The best critics, and those are some good critics, do it because they take enormous pleasure in it, a pleasure that's just as real as my pleasure in re-reading Starman Jones.
#36, Constance: You're right that Fitzgerald was more of an experimentalist than my hasty generalization acknowledged. Then again, so was Heinlein. And some of Joyce's best work consists of short stories that are formally conventional. One of the problems with potted histories like Grossman's is that they simplify that sort of thing, reducing complicated writers and historical eras to sports teams all wearing the same jerseys.
(Incidentally, I'm not ignoring abi's #18, I'm thinking about it. That's actually the kind of stuff I want to talk about.)
And, Fragano, that's why it's funny. Because *nobody* believes that stuff. I thought it was the most boring book in the world in high school--then I read the same stuff the hero did, and all of a sudden it was a kneeslapper.
Send not to know
For whom the earth moves
(Did it move
For thee too
In Spanish boxcars with machine guns
Tearing apart
Large fish?)
Decrypting codes of
Behavior
I saw
Maleness
And Dorthy liked
it.
A phrasing that might help, and amuses me at the instant: if you're looking at a group of people with what strikes you as a really odd, distorted, or fun-destroying idea of books, tell yourself "Their kink is okay, it's just not my kink." Their kink is okay, and they can go off and have their fun, and you can have yours.
The books themselves will still be there in the morning.
Kinks are a good analogy.
I was composing a post about John Gardner and profluence and what-makes-writing-appealing that might have been useful, but EditPad Lite locked up and ate it and now maybe I'll content myself with being a kind of data point.
First, I must, as they say, situate myself. I'm a white male literature Ph.D. of A Certain Age who used to teach. I'm a compulsive reader who also reads professionally (for Locus), so my actual reading habits are not representative of any significant demographic. In any case, here are some of the writers I read for pleasure when I'm not reviewing: M.C. Beaton, Bernard Cornwell, Lindsey Davis, C.S. Forester, Dick Francis, George MacDonald Fraser, Carl Hiasssen, Reginald Hill, Stewart Kaminsky, Patrick O'Brian, Robert B. Parker, Martin Cruz Smith. All these have something that pleases a reader who trained particularly hard on Old and Middle English and Renaissance drama and poetry and who taught considerable chunks of the modern (and modernist) canon, along with popular literature and SF. And some of them I would happily teach in, say, a freshman lit-for-writing course, should I ever have the chance again.
My recreational reading no longer includes the kinds of books that get reviews in the serious literary press--possible candidates, presumably, for inclusion in some future canon of school texts. I find them uninteresting and often tediously badly written (for example, Cormac McCarthy, for my money a chronic over-writer). If someone were to produce a novel of middle-aged angst or pathological family dynamics as sharply written as Gorky Park or Master and Commander or Flash for Freedom, maybe I'd reconsider.
In grad school and in the classroom, I really enjoyed dealing with Eliot and Pound and Joyce and many of the more challenging modernists-as-conventionally-conceived, along with the merely-moderns such as Shaw and Faulkner and Katherine Anne Porter and Flannery O'Connor. Many of my students did not enjoy this material as much as I did, partly because it can be hard to read, partly because some of it can be pretty bleak. But they found Shakespeare tough going, too, and even something as direct as Frost's "The Span of Life."
I'm not sure there's a point in here, except that I tend to connect questions about "quality" to further questions about for whom and what and when.
TNH: Would competitive hermetics be a natural result of competitive hermeneutics, or the other way around?
If you don't mind, here's something I've been wondering about an actual book:
About ten years ago I was reading the Penguin Sagas of Icelanders and enjoying it not just for the stories but for the style in which they were told. What struck me was the way they would say, matter of fact, what they thought motivated a character's actions. This violates what I think is a modern rule of good storytelling, "show, don't tell", but it worked. Maybe because they tell, then show. Maybe because the rough and fractious society of the sagas is the kind of place where you'd be talking about and thinking a lot about the motivations of powerful people. Whatever it was it made a powerful impression on me.
I just started reading the Tales of the Heike and I'm getting the same kind of feeling. The culture is different. People score points by composing poems packed with punning references to ancient literature. (Which is beyond ancient for me; I am thankful for footnotes.) But there is an undercurrent of ruthlessness and wariness; people intently observing each other and trying to take each other's measure.
I don't think I've seen Teresa's review of Black Body; and I can't actually recall if I introduced her to it or not. I know I read it independently (and yes, I finished that train wreck). T, do you remember?
The debate reminds me of the old story about the fellow who's seeing a psychiatrist, and the psychiatrist says to him "You're crazy!" and the patient says he'd like to get a second opinion. "Okay, you're stupid, too!" Agreeing with T's point on "wrong reasons", and saying that I'm much more likely to learn something if I try to figure out why a person likes something than if I just say the person is wrong. This assumes that I'm happier learning than not, which is mostly true.
I am giddy with excitement over this post. This is one of my favorite topics!
I started liking genre, then was convinced by school to like literature, then went back to genre. I still read litfic, but as a genre, it isn't as fun for me these days.
I think one aspect, touched on above, is that 'good literature' must not be escapist. An immersive read, that Patrick describes as being 'plot' is precisely what puts some people off of a genre book. 'Immersive' becomes 'fun' and that becomes 'escapist'. If you read a difficult work, it prevents you from being carried away. You must chip away at each sentence, you must labor to understand what the author is doing. I'm not being sarcastic, some people consider that act of labor stimulating and that is what distinguishes a worthy work of art from what they might call 'fluff.'
I have no problem with that. I am not into SM or BD, but since I went to San Francisco State University, I had the luxury of getting a minor in human sexuality. I learned a lot about tops and bottoms in power relationships.
My personal opinion is that in so-called 'literary fiction' the author is the top. You, the reader, are the author's bitch. You will submit, you will struggle through what he is doing, and you will enjoy it. You exist to serve and service the author. There is nothing wrong with this relationship. It is consensual, and some folks really like it. It is especially appealing to creative writing students, because we aspire to be the top to a whole pool of readers.
With genre fiction, the author is the bottom. The reader is the top. The author exists to serve and service the reader. The author must make the prose good enough to keep the reader coming back for more, and if the author doesn't, the understanding is that reader will throw the book across the room. The author is the reader's bitch, there to serve. Take a look at how fiesty genre fans get when their authors aren't writing books fast enough.
This does not happen to Jonathan Franzen. He making our struggling-to-understand asses come correct with his leatherclad, horsewhipping prose. But an fantasy writer? Where's my product, bitch. I read your blog! Stop having a life and tell me what happens next!
I originally wanted to be a writer because I wanted to get laid. I didn't know this at the time, but I hoped, yearned, ached for legions of smart women and men to admire my prose, to prize out the meaning, and to take me to bed. I wanted adoration, and literature was to be my vehicle.
After I got older, I realized I still really want to write. In fact, I want people to like what I write because I want them to have fun. Somewhere I stopped making writing be about me, and started making it be about the reader. I found this attitude in the SF community, and it was this philosophical turnaround that led me back to science fiction. I liked the attitude that SF writers had, I liked it more than the attitude that litfic writers had.
That was why I switched sides. That, and now that I'm a grown man, I don't worry so much what that woman in the cafe thinks about the cover of the book I am reading. I am free to read space ship stuff.
A true tragedy: Jonathan Lethem, first published by Patrick Nielsen Hayden, a brilliant genre writer. He went the other way. At first, it looked like a good move. He wrote a great crime book called 'Motherless Brooklyn'. Wonderful stuff, and it made him a legit writer in the minds of the litfic folks.
He just had a short story in the New Yorker. I was so excited to read it. The protagonist was a middle class person with a midlife crisis and a big headache. That's right, Jonathan Lethem is now writing about headaches that come in midlife. If I had the time, I would buy one of those archives of the New Yorker and do a spreadsheet on every story in the past 30 years that had a middle aged protagonist with a terrible headache. It is a stand-in for 'something is wrong with my life but I don't know what...nobody can see it because it is in my head.'
I liked 'Gun, With Occaisional Music' so much more.
I am sorry for the length of this post, but I just love this topic.
Sean Sakamoto@59: "With genre fiction, the author is the bottom. The reader is the top. The author exists to serve and service the reader."
Christ Jesus.
Sean Sakamoto @59
Ah. You've essentially just made that long-standing thing about reading novels contributing to moral depravity--and being especially corrupting for women, who lacked sufficient intellectual rigor to differentiate between fantasy and reality.
In addition, there's the long-standing critical discussions about the so-called masculinization of novels as a mark of both integrity and mental rigor, as opposed to "feminine" novels having less integrity, literary merit, or moral fiber. With your suggestion that "literary" writers are tops and "genre" writers are bottoms, you're buying into what's essentially at least a two-hundred-year-old reason to be dismissive of the merits of any fiction that can remotely be classed as genre.
Because if the experience of reading is enjoyable, or course, it must be morally bad. And also, might reveal the reader as weak-minded and female-ish.
Sorry if it's too over the top, I'm just trying to make the point that I think genre readers have more empahsis on their audience, and litfic writers are more interested in their audience doing the heavy lifting.
Sean, have you read any Gene Wolfe lately?
Sean @62 - it's not over the top, as such, but you're perhaps buying into some very old and weird thinking about the nature of reading and writing.
Sean Sakamoto, #59: Okay, that's another entry in this thread that I'm going to need to think over for a while.
Small correction: I wasn't the first editor to publish Jonathan Lethem; that would be Michael Kandel at Harcourt, who published Gun, with Occasional Music in hardcover. I merely have the distinction of having beaten Del Rey in a brief battle to reprint the book in softcover (Harcourt being one of the few remaining hardcover fiction houses of the day with no attached mass-market paperback line). That said, I actually like Lethem's recent work a lot. The Fortress of Solitude is one of my favorite mainstream novels of the last twenty years, and I also quite enjoyed his lightweight-but-biting dark-romantic-rock-and-roll-comedy You Don't Love Me Yet. I guess I missed that New Yorker story--I'm so used to skipping the fiction in the magazine that I'd probably miss a story by Teresa if one appeared there.
I disagree.
First of all, I don't think it is immoral to be a top or a bottom. Secondly, I don't think one is less intellectually rigorous, and third, I don't necessarily agree with people who define fun as being escapist, nor do I think that escapism is necessarily wrong.
I was trying to describe what I see, not advocating one side or the other. As a matter of personal taste, I prefer genre fiction. It is more fun to read, and I like fun. I see nothing immoral about the experience.
Mac, #61 -- But Sean wasn't being dismissive of genre fiction, quite the opposite. Also, obviously "top" =/= "male" and "bottom" =/= "female." (For that matter, "bottom" =/= "not in charge", which lends an extra resonance to Sean's whimsical metaphor.)
Sean Sakamoto @59
I started liking genre, then was convinced by school to like literature, then went back to genre. I still read litfic, but as a genre, it isn't as fun for me these days.
You show me a novel in the canon, and I'll show you a genre. Our brains work in terms of motifs and themes and tropes. Pretty much all of the canon novels we read now, say for a novel Ph.D. qualifying exam, were initially decried as genre fic and populist. The authors, by the way, even then were just as much telling lies for money as the scops behind Beowulf and the current genre fic authors, low list, mid list, and best seller, and yeah, category romance is in there too.
I'm not a fan lit fic per se. If a novel is such that a press will only publish less than five thousand copies, it's likely lit fic, and as far as I can see, that means M.F.A. and publish or perish. God knows I don't want to read any more of 'em if I'm not being paid up front.
Sean @66 - I'm not accusing you of thinking one or the other is immoral, at all. As it happens, neither do I.
But the idea of one type of writing as being dominant, active, in-control, and performing upon versus another type of writing as being submissive, passive, and doing-as-told, is very much an argument about masculinization vs feminization of literature (this certainly isn't mine, btw, I refer you to the rather famous mid-90s essay by Beth Newman, "The Heart of Midlothian and the Masculinization of Fiction")in terms of a greater theory of fiction.
That's what I find problematic.
Sean Sakamoto @59: With genre fiction, the author is the bottom. The reader is the top. The author exists to serve and service the reader.
Isaac Asimov said that he got into writing SF because there wasn't enough of the stuff he liked to read out there. So perhaps the secret to Asimov's productivity is that he was servicing his own kink.
It's interesting that the top/bottom metaphor is being used here...as for who's in charge, look at who's doing all the work.
PNH, Sean, I'm clearly expressing myself badly -- how do we talk about writing in terms of
A = You're my bitch
vs.
B = I'm your bitch
without talking about masculinizing or feminizing?
I seem to have made a leap in terms of this discussion, though, that's left me out on a limb. So I'll gently bow right back out with a tip of my metaphorical hat.
Sean. SKZB. 59-60. Three points.
Gene Wolfe is on record as saying "I am the reader's slave."
On the other hand, I've been telling students for years that fiction is about what you can do to the reader ... as long as they get off on it, of course.
#69, you misunderstand me. I think your previous reading is coloring your view of what I am saying.
I believe that both types of writing can be intellectually rigorous. I am describing the reader's relationship to the writer, not to the prose itself.
I believe that in so-called 'literary fiction`, the reader enters a submissive relationship with the author. A (make me work, make me struggle, make me earn understanding), whereas a genre author works from the assumption that the onus is on him or her to create something that will be less work for the reader, more immersive, more compelling and captivating.
The actual prose is neither top nor bottom, it's an authorial stance. The prose might be difficult, obtuse, wonderful, turgid, dense, light, feathery, butch, femme, or woody with buttery finish and a fruity nose.
As for these terms, 'literary' and 'genre', I am agree with anyone who says all litfic is a genre. One distinguishing feature of the litfic genre is the idea the the reader will be engaging in a certain kind of effort to meet the author more than halfway. Some folks really like doing this kidn of work. I have enjoyed it myself.
I have no objection to the d/s metaphor; I'm all for d/s metaphors. More d/s metaphors, say I. I just want to snap my crop at the notion that genre writers, as a class, write what they think readers want. I have no doubt that there are writers who think in those terms, but for the most part what readers do is go hunt out and find writers who appeal them; while the writers are busy writing stories they wish someone else had written because they want to read them. Genre writers do not, as a rule, willingly place themselves in the fur-lined handcuffs of trying to guess what readers like (other than, insofar as possible, "good").
(P.S. Didn't anyone get my Hemmingway free verse? Or was it just not funny? *sniff* *lip quiver*)
Steve, I got it! I even Laughed Out Loud. It's a fast-moving thread--I've barely managed to keep up.
Mac, no, you do have a point -- don't bow out of the conversation. I think this is one of those cases where certain metaphors both deepen our understanding and cloud our vision, which means that in short order we're all stepping on rakes and walking underneath falling anvils.
@76
You may be right. I can't speak for all writers in either genre. But I do speak from the experience of having been in both kinds of workshops. I have a degree in creative writing, and I have been in some SF writing groups and workshops.
It really did seem to me that the fundamental difference betweent the two was a regard and attitude toward the reader. Also, as a student of both litfic and genre fic, I have observed a different attitude among the fans that seemed to support my views on this. I don't claim to be describing an absolute law here, but I my ideas do come from my experience in both spheres.
@#75 Sean Sakamoto
I believe that in so-called 'literary fiction`, the reader enters a submissive relationship with the author. A (make me work, make me struggle, make me earn understanding), whereas a genre author works from the assumption that the onus is on him or her to create something that will be less work for the reader, more immersive, more compelling and captivating.
Do you think Dickens was writing for the critics? Or Twain? Both were roundly condemned for their lack of style, and absence of philosophic value. Dickens' books were described as "consumables" by the leading literary critic. You might also think about the fact that the Brontes, like Tiptree, were deemed to be, clearly, "masculine" because of their masculine, dominant style.
Referring to an author as someone's bitch is very much using gendered language--I note Neil Gaiman's carefully chosen "George R. R. Martin is not your bitch" reference wrt to "who's on top."
LitFIc is mostly a category used by publishing marketing folk and tenure-seeking M.F.A.s It's mostly used to mean "books we can't sell except to the M.F.A.'s own students." It's not a genre outside of publishing and book selling. It's not even in the huge giant list of LOC headings for genre.
I think there's an either/or conflict happening, as well -- that is, either you're the reader's bitch, or the reader is just along for your private ride -- that's perhaps not entirely helpful.
But then, it occurs to me that we're operating without a solid definition of what Sean means when he says "lit fic" and that might, in addition, be helpful.
Joyce's Ulysses perhaps rides me hard and puts me away wet, to extend this metaphor, but that doesn't mean I think of him as a more "literary" writer than I think of Khaled Hosseini or even John Irving or even Stephen King.
If I step on a rake, I think that makes me the top. Hopefully the rake likes it.
I laughed at the Hemmingway free verse thing too!
I'm just too busy making sure my metaphor doesn't make me its bitch.
Mac, I welcome your posts. You helped me refine what I was saying. The last thing I want to do is come across as a guy who thinks fun books are girlish and therefore bad. I do not, not, not think that.
texanne, I will go find some Gene Wolf, thanks for the suggestion.
(raises hand)
Sean is a good guy, and very smart, and a professional writer. Do not be alarmed.
Also, Mac, Lisa, I get what you're saying.
"many of the sternest exponents of “I want novels to have plots, dammit” are also demonstrably fans of, for instance, quite a few Robert A. Heinlein novels whose plots can barely be detected"
OK, but, I really don't like Heinlein in large part because of lack of plot. I like Terry Pratchett and not Douglas Adams because of plot. I like later Pratchett more than earlier for several reasons, but largely, again, plot. Some people really do want books to have plots.
My own experience with writing in "genre" style vs. "literary" style--working on the definitions as they seem to be used above, rather than my usual reading of them--is almost precisely the opposite of the top/bottom divide as described. When I'm writing "literary" fiction, it's with a great deal of consciousness for what the reader might be expecting, and what style I'm emulating, and how I can meet the expectations of that very specific style. Whereas when writing "genre" fiction, I'm generally ambling along having a cheery old time writing whatever the hell I feel like, and hoping that there'll be a few people out there who also want to read that sort of thing. The "literary" reader is the demanding one I need to put a lot of thought into meeting the demands of; the "genre" reader is the one where I figure we'll hook up if we have similar interests, and if not, well, I'm still having fun, aren't I?
@#81 TomB
If I step on a rake, I think that makes me the top. Hopefully the rake likes it.
That rather depends on whether the rake is Byron, Rochester or Anne Lister.
PS: Hemingway. Wolfe. (*Crack!*)
Sean, I completely get that you don't think genre = girlish = bad/weak-minded/etc. I also get that you love and appreciate genre fiction. I made a leap, after, and forgot to leave an adequate trail for folks to follow.
My response was to your characterization of "literary" (whatever that means) vs. "genre" in terms of dom/sub language.
There's been ongoing critical discussion about the centuries-old dismissal of reading! novels! as Bad For Moral Character, and I found your metaphor absolutely fascinating in terms of that discussion. I also found it deeply interesting in terms of the use of gendered language around writing/reading.
That's what I was responding to -- so please accept my apologies if I sounded as if I was making value judgments regarding your personal theories around writing. That certainly wasn't my intention.
"I think one aspect, touched on above, is that 'good literature' must not be escapist."
This notion is made pretty explicit in some of the standard English texts that students get assigned in later high school or early college. I wonder how many folks it puts off literature.
When I was going to school, for instance, we had as one of our required anthologies Laurence Perrine's Story and Structure. As I recall, it had a preface that posited a strict dichotomy between "escape literature" and "interpretive literature", with the former not being worthy of the latter. Science fiction was explicitly thrown into the "escape literature" bucket, in toto.
I was annoyed by this when I read it, and knew there was something wrong with it, but I couldn't really articulate exactly what was wrong with it, and couldn't help wondering whether my objection to it simply showed that I wasn't an adequately perceptive reader.
I have to wonder how many students have gone through similar experience with this and other books like it. (Story and Structure is still coming out in new editions, the latest published in 2008, though it's being carried on by new editors by this point. I don't know whether they've kept the preface more or less the same, or modified it, buf if you google for "escape" and "interpretive" literature you'll see all kinds of assignments online related to distinguishing them.)
Lisa,
I had Gaiman's post in mind when I wrote my post. If it helps to clarify my main point, please let's use the word 'bottom' instead of 'bitch'. My main point, as evidenced in that Gaiman post, is that genre fans want their writers to work for them, whereas litfic fans want to work for their writers.
As for defining terms, well, I will try.
I think that in his day, Dickens was what we would now call a genre writer. He worked very hard to make a compelling, gripping, and wonderfully nuanced world for his writer. He very much had his writer in mind. The critics smelled this, and they said it was bad, precisely because of this.
Now, many years later, Dickens is more difficult to read. The language is dated, the references are dated. I LOVE Dickens. But, as a reader, I have to do more work to read his books. I have to become more of a bottom than a top. This is not Dicken's fault. The blame in this instance lies with the passage of time.
With Dickens, as with all good literary fiction, the work is worth the payoff. Here's a tautology (If it is worth the payoff, then the book is good. A book is good if it is worth the payoff.)
Some folks set out to write a difficult book from the start. These tend to be litfic types. Jonathan Franzen wrote a great essay in the New Yorker about 'difficult fiction' and, unless I read it wrong, he seemed to be rethinking his position on whether or not a writer should strive to make his prose difficult. It was a wonderfully introspective response the the whole Oprah drama a while back.
A friend of a friend of mine from back in school that I used to know before she moved away once observed that for her, topping was never a matter of "me boss, you bitch." It's about the interesting new ways you can get them to squirm, and the really pretty noises they make, and what tiny amounts of input it takes to get them to scare themselves into a state of pink and hyperventilating apprehension.
I think about that whenever I read Melville.
MacAllister,
Thanks for the apology, but it is not at all necessary. I knew I was venturing onto dangerous territory by using loaded terms, but I wanted to make my point with a bang. I did not know that I was using the same imagery as centuries of anti-literature Puritans.
I think I disagree with those folks on two points, that a type of writing can be immoral based on esthetics, and that if an esthetic is somehow feminine, it is therefore bad.
teresa, thanks for vouching for me. Everyone has been very respectful.
If I saw someone whom I may have thought was claiming that novels are girlish and wrong, I could not have rebutted with the same degree of diplomacy that I have encountered here.
Melville and making pretty noises. Nice. I know exactly what you mean.
Louis Ferdinand Celine was a literary French writer, misanthropist, curmudgeon, and all around creep whose fiction can top me every time I dare venture into it. Journey to the End of Night is an exquisite pain.
Now, many years later, Dickens is more difficult to read. The language is dated, the references are dated.
Difficulty in reading for those reasons is different from the writing being difficult to read from the beginning. Those are books I would describe as litfic. It doesn't necessarily make any of them bad, but I'm less likely to read them. (I read Austen.)
Ah! But there's this really cool thing, here!
We sexualize our description of the reading/writing experience (at least some of us do) because it is, at heart, an intimate transaction, regardless of all else.
To some degree, that leads to gendered language when we're trying to construct metaphors, describe experiences, and otherwise communicate the nature of a highly intimate experience.
In terms of classic Puritan arguments about the moral depravity lurking between the covers of novels, it might has well have been an indictment of the depravity lurking beneath the covers of a shared bed -- and the nature of all evils embodied by and unique to the feminine, either way.
But here we are, again, needing to define and describe the terminology and inherent meaning behind the metaphors themselves before we can go anywhere at all with the discussion itself.
And Lisa wonders why I think litcrit is so cool. *g*
In all this talk about analyzing, there is one factor missing... the author.
There's a lot about what an author is trying to accomplish, or whether or not the author wrote a fun read. What I would like to hear is how people go about analyzing the authors themselves.
I'm not talking about a public discussion of so-and-so's particular neuroses or the childhood trauma that affected so-and-so's later writing. That, for the most part, would be horribly disrespectful (except for the few authors who specifically encourage it), especially for living writers.
What I'm wondering is how people allow discoveries about writers to affect their perceptions of that author's works.
For example, there are two authors whose books I initially loved. In each case, a few hints lead me to investigate their positions on gender relations. What I discovered caused me to never pick up their works again, despite the fact that the stories had not changed.
On the flip side, learning about several other authors as people has made me reread and enjoy work that hadn't interested me before, or made me want to pick up books I might not have considered before meeting/learning of that particular author.
I find that once I understand (at least the basics of) an author, that person's books don't need as much analysis. They can be understood at more of an intuative level (of course, I could just be foolin' myself there). Which is good, because I'm terrible at analysis. I'm the opposite of Dr. Letson above, wholly unschooled beyond the high school/college liberal arts minimums in serious literature. When asked recently to test read a book, I found doing the feedback to be as hard as any college paper ever was. I loved the book, but actually analyzing why, and putting that into words, was very difficult (as well as one of the more interesting and unique bits of fun I've had in years).
It's funny... Sean's top/bottom comments have actually underscored my belief in trying to understand the authors more so than their individual works... I can think of several authors that I love to read who have described themselves as being very commercial... they ARE my bitches, writing what I want to read. For a few others, they are in charge of what they write and when, and I am THEIR willing bitch if it will help persuade them to focus on what I want.
In both cases, knowing which role they like is a definite part of their appeal.
It's GOOD to live in a genre with choices! :-)
I am exquisitely uncomfortable with the use of "literary fiction" for a number of reasons.
1. It really is used a very great deal to refer to the M.F.A. books that tenure track academics send to university presses within the presses themselves. It is not well meant. It means "we'll do a small run, and hope that we can sell all of them in under five years." I say this as a former employer/reader at three university presses, and after wading through stacks of lit fic as a member of tenure and hiring committees.
2. I see some posters here using literary fiction to, I think, describe prose style. That makes me wince a bit.
3. I keep thinking of Barthes and things like S/Z, where he talks about jouissance / orgasm (with a nod at Lacan), and books he wants to fuck, and those he wants to fuck him. It's better in French, really, but he wants to make love to text--and as far as I can tell, pretty much does.
I always had the feeling that the notion of Literature was missing the point, but it didn't crystallize until I learned (and made sense in retrospect) that Shakespeare was his time's equivalent of a hack. At which point I realized that Literature wasn't so much about what a book was, but instead was at best a collection of useful analysis tools and at worst a gang sign.
@#97 edward oleander
There's a lot about what an author is trying to accomplish, or whether or not the author wrote a fun read. What I would like to hear is how people go about analyzing the authors themselves.
I'll try to respond, not so much because of indulging in the "Intentional Fallacy," but in terms of how my reading changed (the way I read changed), so for me, the books changed.
In the vicissitudes of grad school life, a lot of my books, especially genre fiction, had to be in storage. After years of close reading, when I got my SF and F out of storage, there were a lot of books I hadn't read for about twenty years. Books I very much loved.
Two authors, in particular, I couldn't stand to read. Both were authors I had attempted to ocate everything they'd written. Both were authors I'd published essays and presented papers about. Not just for the prose, but for the underlying assumptions about the world. My changes in perception changed the books for me, and yes, at the level of story.
So back to the Lev Grossman essay, and PNH's observation that still has me laughing, "That damn Hemingway with his crazy free verse" -- we're still having trouble with definitions, then, and what we mean by literary vs genre, and what Grossman means by modernism. It's the can't-define-it "but I know it when I see it" problem.
So how do we sort writers who've been in the literary canon for decades, like LeGuin? Or genre writers who write tricksy and complex books (thinking of Lindholm/SKZ's co-written The Gypsy here, frex) and are still unabashedly creating a book that's commercial, as well as creating art as best they can be true to the term?
When a trojan virus takes over Lisa Spangenburg's computer, and it floods the internet with meretricious emails promising to share an ill-gotten fortune, the email sender will be "Lisa Spamgenburg."
Fragano @48 -- you mean Don Quixote, right? Just checking.
I had to skip ahead at around #50, sorry. . . . On review, I don't think I could keep up with the kink/top/bottom metaphor . . . rewind a bit?
But I had to say:
I am an academic, and most of the academics I know read everything, and enjoy it too.
I am an English teacher, and most of us know better than to tell anyone to stop liking things. We have a harder time refraining from trying to convince people they should like certain great (. . . really, try it! Would you like it at the beach? Would you like it with a peach?) old books.
There are, of course, some English teachers who are literary snobs and bullies, and they are ruining our collective reputation, dash it all.
There are critics and critics . . . serious criticism can be found in magazines, newspapers, blogs, fanzines, etc., and another, very different kind of criticism can be found in academic journals, which is seldom about "my" enjoyment (though it might be about "the reader's" experience) and is instead focused, narrow, incremental, little readings that involve a lot of research.
I think it is all valuable (speaking of the two kinds of criticism . . . not to defend any individual article). For its different purposes.
The Lev Grossman thing reminds me of the kind of broad context-setting statement one gives while teaching a lit-survey class so the students have some basic frame of reference before they read.
No, actually it reminds me of the horrendously oversimplified and shallow distortion of your already over-generalized broad contextualization that you sometimes get back from the C student who doesn't really want to be taking this class, but who feels that regurgitating your points back to you in cartoon form will cause you to give an A instead of recoil in horrified recognition of your own teacherly sins (particularly, sloth and vanity).
I'm enjoying the tools and snacks brought to the table here -- thought-provoking, to say the least.
Teresa asked:
When were you ever told that by someone whose opinions you valued?
A few times. I'm still wary of a particular acquaintance who scorned my enjoyment of Book 4 of Harry Potter, and said with great certainty that it wasn't just her opinion, Goblet of Fire was objectively bad.
Why do "grown-ups" care what some New Yorker critic says? Why do we "let" authority figures (English teachers, critics, more experienced friends, influential bloggers) reduce the joy we take from literature, or make us feel inferior for not having read (or not having enjoyed) certain works? Well, that's a why don't you just of the bootstraps variety. To follow your recommendations -- have fun and don't be bothered by what the authorities think -- you have to have self-confidence, and be able to articulate your own aesthetics and dismiss others' without fear of consequence.
We aren't born with those abilities. I have them, a little, now. Reading wasn't enough. I got them by editing others' work, reading slush, and writing positive and negative reviews of published work to help others decide whether to read it. I didn't really develop as a reader until I had the power to influence others' reading.
I know enough now that I can use newspaper/magazine critics' reviews as tools, instead of feeling like they're Telling Me How It Is. But at heart my sympathies are with that kid who doesn't even know she's allowed to scoff (privately) at her curriculum.
On the analysis front, I found Michael Lopp's "Art is 'the documentation of a thousand interesting decisions'" useful in helping me frame my own writing, and in helping me understand what I love about cerebral and subtle moments in art.
Further observation: my taste in books is rather like my taste in music. My current playlist randomly jumps from TMBG's Birdhouse in your Soul to Strauss's Ein Heldenleben to Slipknot's Gematria to Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor to Franck's Le Chasseur Maudit to Pollyanna Frank's Dykes and the Holy War (which I suppose can be classed as Israeli folk music). And there are similar arguments in that realm, none of which bother me one whit. There are useful tools for analysis of music, and there are music snobs.
Skipping ahead in my reading of comments to say, re: TNH @ 23--your Amazon review of Black Body was so intriguing, I had to order the book.
Used. For $0.01 plus $3.99 shipping and handling.
I look forward to its awesome badness! Or at the very least, having some interesting things to say the next time someone asks what I've been reading lately...
p.s. all credit to edward oleander @ 27 for the "awesome badness" line.
PNH @ # 50 - I actually do understand reviewing and criticism, and the shades and nuances thereof. I've read a reasonable amount of the stuff. I even know who James Wood is. What I was really asking is, do we really have to wander around apologizing for enjoying plot, just because James Wood and a few dozen other arch-aesthetes sniff at it? It's like being careful not to sing pop songs in the shower because some guy in the local alt-weekly is a music snob. That guy from the alt-weekly isn't lurking outside your bathroom door, and James Wood isn't in this comment thread.
I find it unremarkable that a few people hold an extreme, aestheticized view of literature--odds are, a few people always will. I find it quite remarkable that we should grant this small coterie such power to define the terms of discourse, to the extent that we inevitably have to argue with them before we can get down to just plain talking about what we like about stuff we've read. Even though they're not in the room. I want to say to so many of my friends, particularly in the SF world, "CALM DOWN, THOSE PEOPLE AREN'T HERE, THEY CAN'T HURT YOU ANY MORE."
How does that fit in with the various genre-unfriendly gatekeepers at major media outlets, who let "literature" past, but keep genre fiction from getting mentioned? From my perspective, it's not just the select group of academics that are the only issue people have, it's that the academics are a symptom of a wider lack of respect for genre fiction.
In regards to "utility", expecting literature to have utility to be worth talking about is like expecting painting to have utility to be worth talking about.
Which is (IMO) why a lot of modern art gets dissed, because it's very serious commentary on elements that are important to painters, who think about this shit all the time, whereas Thomas Kinkade gets stores in shopping malls. Certainly people like his art, but there's not much introspection in terms of who the artist is, his relation to the history of art, and so on.
If you think about art history and art theory, Kinkade is pretty boring. Likewise, if you think about writing as an art, and study it, Stephanie Meyers isn't going to hide much in her books to interest you.
I'm not sure, though, if we require the technical competency from our most popular writers as we do our most popular painters. Kinkade is technically brilliant, and I don't think Meyers is. I've always gotten the sense that some authors get away with clumsiness in story arc, poorly crafted dialog, and other crap that other authors don't because they threw in some formulaic pouty vampires who hit the teenage angst button at just the right angle. "Entrancing" is what you call it, yes?
What I didn't like about English class was a sense that I had to pretend to like what the teacher liked in order to get a good grade.
That's one reason I broke away from all that and majored in math. Not that I was really ready to major in math, but, as one person's reaction to my decision put it ,"it's so safe.."
Am I going off on too much of a tangent here, straying away from relevance?
Just saying I enjoy reading more when it's not for school. Writing too, sometimes.
rm @102 re: teachers and book recommendations
Your post gave me one of those light bulb moments where all of a sudden you see a situation from both sides at once. I suspect that the real problem with literature teachers isn't a few who bully their students into accepting their tastes as "better."
From the student's point of view that's sort of built into the whole situation. After all, you're getting recommendations from someone who by definition ought to know these things better than you do. If you don't like the books they recommend, it can be easy to assume that either their expertise isn't worth much or you're just not very good at reading.
When the student says they didn't like the book and the teacher gives that slightly disappointed "Oh, well..." I'm sure the teacher feels bad that their recommendation didn't give the pleasure they had hoped, but it's awfully easy for the student to read that as "Oh, well...I thought you were smarter than that."
Josh Jasper @107: How does that fit in with the various genre-unfriendly gatekeepers at major media outlets, who let "literature" past, but keep genre fiction from getting mentioned?
Like for instance...?
Chris, it's really helpful to be reminded of that dynamic. I'll try to avoid sending that unintentional message.
And I just remembered to say, The Car is awesome. Period.
(But periods are followed by other sentences.) In my memory -- no telling if it's in the movie -- they kill the demonic car by collapsing a cliff on it . . . ?
And as it dies, it takes the form of several mythological monsters . . . ?
And if my memory is at all accurate, couldn't some analytical terms like mythology, archetype, allusion, and so on be, like, not only helpful but pleasurable to discuss . . . ?
(Favorite IMDB discussion post: "How did they come up with the title?")
Would you like them on the beach?
Would you like them with a peach?
Can you apply them to The Car?
Try them, try them, here they are!
Some more general thoughts:
I think part of the problem is that people (even academics) mean so many different things when they talk about analysis and interpretation, even within the ivory tower.
There's analysis of form and structure, which I think can be the closest to being a normative measure of "worth." How does the author achieve the effects they do (or fail to achieve them?) How do the letters on the page add up to a whole?
Relatedly there's interrogation of meaning. What does the story tell us? How are we supposed to feel about the characters? What are the ideas and themes investigated? What values are implicit in the work?
And then there's the construction of interpretations. What sort of intellectual playground does this work give us? How does the work respond when we poke it and prod it with different tool sets? How many different ways can we cut it up and paste the pieces back together and come up with something interesting?
I guess my point is just to recognize that when Wesley (@45 he presents an argument for type #3) analyzes a book, he's not necessarily doing the same thing you are. And that's going to end up with different results with different works. I love Wodehouse's novels dearly, but they are so immaculately put together that constructing an interesting literary interpretation of them seems rather like grabbing a paint brush and setting out to improve on the Mona Lisa. They simply don't reward that sort of analysis.
And of course none of this says that revealing and playing with flaws can't be just as rewarding. I recently watched the first few episodes of HBO's True Blood and spent an enjoyable evening trying to quantify why the series so completely failed to engage my interest and sympathy or suspend my disbelief.
A friend of mine went to a major science-and-tech university -- I'm embarrassed by being temporarily unable to remember which -- where the faculty had only one lit teacher.
When my friend took a course from him, this guy announced that he was going to hit them with the very best there was, and if they couldn't appreciate it, they just plain couldn't appreciate literature. And then, he had them read The Song of Roland.
I found this fairly stunning. In my list of sure-fire works for inexperienced readers, which is set in 10 pt. type with narrow leading, The Song of Roland makes its appearance a couple of fathoms down. I asked my friend how much context the teacher gave them for the poem, and whether they'd looked at other works from that period -- Cantar de Mio Cid, say, or Huon de Bordeaux. They'd had none of that, he said; no language, history, cultural background, context, nothing -- just the bare poem itself.
I've wondered about it ever since. Was the guy incompetent? A monomaniac? Had he lost all his non-Roland syllabus notes at the last minute? Did he forget to have the bookstore order the titles he'd intended to teach, forcing him to make do with three cartons of Song of Roland their distributor had shipped them by mistake? Was he trying to hide some kind of progressive amnesia, and had to fall back on his long-ago dissertation topic? Was he tormenting the students for his own amusement?
I'll never know, of course. But I believe that was the last literature course my friend ever took.
Going to sleep now, which means responses to some stuff will have to wait, but I do want to note, also, that "academia" =/= "intellectualism." A large number of the critics I like are entirely free of academic affiliations, and the ones I read who do have Chairs of this or that, tend to be somewhat off the usual reservations.
Crooked Timber just did a whole online seminar about a fascinating-sounding critic and political thinker named George Scialabba. Who has a chair at Harvard--right behind the desk at which he conducts his day job as a building manager. Literary and political criticism aren't the property of academia.
Teresa Nielsen Hayden at #23writes:
> Let us believe each other when we say we liked a particular book, even if it was Black Body by H. C. Turk.
Now you've gone and made me look it up! Sounds steamy.
And given that I enjoyed _A Feast Unknown_, I'd best not complain about that.
Sean @ #59:
"I originally wanted to be a writer because I wanted to get laid. I didn't know this at the time, but I hoped, yearned, ached for legions of smart women and men to admire my prose, to prize out the meaning, and to take me to bed. I wanted adoration, and literature was to be my vehicle."
I'm going to reveal the Terrible Secret about the Writing/Getting Laid connection:
A long, long time ago, I had a friend I'd see several times a year at conventions. We'd gotten into the practice of flirting with each other, and, after several years of this, we ended up going beyond flirting and wound up in bed together.
So there we were, side by side, having a pleasant post-coital conversation, and I happened to mention that I'd just sold my first professional piece of fiction.
And there was this sudden intake of breath from beside me, and I looked over, and the lady in question was staring at me with eyes wide and an absolutely aghast expression on her face.
"Oh my god," she said faintly. "Oh my god. I'd forgotten you've been trying to write fiction. Oh my god. And the one thing I've always promised myself is that, no matter how many guys I went to bed with, I'd never go to bed with a writer!"
And that, boys and girls, is the Terrible Secret: Writing actually makes you less likely to get laid.
You may now return to your litfic/genre discussion.
Xopher @ 17 - Oh, yes, almost exactly so. With healthy population of fandom saying "we don't want to talk about structure, we just want to read/write/talk about books," (and, naturally, yet another part of the population pointing and laughing).
Bruce,
Funny story!
I learned that being a writer made me less likely to get laid, but I didn't have the good fortune of having it explained. It was a long, painful lesson.
rm @ 102... There are, of course, some English teachers who are literary snobs and bullies
Mine (in 1970) introduced me to Mad Magazine, Doctor Strange, and to the Silver Surfer.
The links make me think of fat felines from Palestine.
Sean Sakamoto, #91: Now, many years later, Dickens is more difficult to read.
Reading Dickens gets easier with practice. I currently find his prose as transparent as any modern author's.
I googled for "escape" and "interpretive literature" as suggested above, and almost all of what came up looked like the kind of "sample essays" plagiarized by high school students. I'm guessing the concept isn't seen as useful by anyone in the world beyond the English teachers who use that textbook.
I also found a lecture by a professor at Western Kentucky University from which we may learn that posting direct, unedited transcriptions of your extemporaneous lectures is a bad idea:
Oscar Wilde said that fiction is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you’ll be when you can’t help it and that really sums up the way I feel about fiction because I always have my students read things that I enjoy reading too because when I enjoy reading it then I feel I’ve got much more impetus to talk to you all about it so we’re gonna be reading in fiction a lot of Southern writers because that’s a genre that I really, really enjoy so but before we even get into talking about who we’re going to read I want you to know a little bit about fiction itself.
Avram @ 110 - Talk show hosts. The editorial departments of major newspapers let F/SF slip through on occasion, as long as no one actually say nice and insightful things about it (slight exaggeration, but you get my point). Lev Grossman himself has to argue with Time Magazine to get his reviews and commentary on F/SF books in. Even PW keeps the numbers of Q&A, signature reviews, etc. of genre authors down.
I'm not going to say that it's an organized conspiracy, or that it's a 100% exclusion effort, but there is pushback against inclusion of F/SF on a regular basis, no matter how "literary".
I declare myself a lover of print on pages. Just about any kind. I've published on George Herbert and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. So there's that, for what it's worth.
I also read Grossman's novel recently. (Anyone else?) I find his critique of modern literature interesting, to say the least, in light of my feelings about his novel.
Anyone else here read it yet? I'm intrigued to know how you felt the novel lined up with this article.
Sean, #59: Interesting analysis! I do flinch a bit at some of your phrasing, but that's specifically because of the Gaiman post on the topic of the author not being the reader's bitch (which I suspect is the thing fueling a lot of the disagreement with you overall). But that doesn't mean there's not a lot of truth in what you say; for example, a writer who abandons a very popular series for several years and then releases a new book which is completely unrelated to it... well, that book is liable to flop because it's not what the writer's fans wanted.
I'm beyond amused by your admission that you went into writing because you wanted to get laid -- don't most guys mess around with garage bands for that? :-) Also, personally, you're more likely to catch my attention in the cafe if you're reading something with a spaceship on the cover than if you're reading something Terribly Serious And Self-Consciously Meaningful.
Side note: I also sometimes pick my public reading with an eye to the possible observer. For example, my on-the-plane book is much more likely to be hard SF or space opera than fantasy, even though I enjoy both, because reading fantasy is seen as stereotypically female and I like messing with people's expectations.
Lisa, #79: "Lit-fic" may not be an officially recognized genre yet, but IMO it should be. This is partly because (again IMO) it is no longer a negatively-defined space, as in "genre fiction has this, that, and the other, and WE don't"; there are some very well-defined tics and tropes which are common to the lit-fic genre. There was a longish discussion of that issue here a few years back, of which I don't recall the title of the thread.
edward, #97: I have never had to abandon an author I loved because of something I found out about them personally, but there are a couple of people whose books I used to like that I am no longer comfortable with having in my library for that reason. I'm not sure what I would do if I came across something really personally heinous about one of my top favorite authors, but I suspect my reaction might be along the lines of, "Well, the books are good, I'll just look for them used now."
Bruce 117: Writing actually makes you less likely to get laid.
I believe I should be immune to this effect. Probabilities can't be less than zero, after all. However, to be on the safe side I will go home and delete all my half-finished stories, and burn all hard copies in the back yard. One must have priorities.
This discussion has been going on a long time.
Yes, novels; -- for I will not adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom so common with novel-writers, of degrading by their contemptuous censure the very performances, to the number of which they are themselves adding -- joining with their greatest enemies in bestowing the harshest epithets on such works, and scarcely ever permitting them to be read by their own heroine, who, if she accidentally take up a novel, is sure to turn over its insipid pages with disgust. Alas! if the heroine of one novel be not patronized by the heroine of another, from whom can she expect protection and regard? I cannot approve of it. Let us leave it to the Reviewers to abuse such effusions of fancy at their leisure, and over every new novel to talk in threadbare strains of the trash with which the press now groans. Let us not desert one another; we are an injured body. Although our productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literary corporation in the world, no species of composition has been so much decried. From pride, ignorance, or fashion, our foes are almost as many as our readers. And while the abilities of the nine-hundredth abridger of the History of England, or of the man who collects and publishes in a volume some dozen lines of Milton, Pope, and Prior, with a paper from the Spectator, and a chapter from Sterne, are eulogized by a thousand pens, -- there seems almost a general wish of decrying the capacity and undervaluing the labour of the novelist, and of slighting the performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them. "I am no novel-reader -- I seldom look into novels -- Do not imagine that I often read novels -- It is really very well for a novel." -- Such is the common cant. -- "And what are you reading, Miss ----------?" "Oh! it is only a novel!" replies the young lady; while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. -- "It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda;" or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language. Now, had the same young lady been engaged with a volume of the Spectator, instead of such a work, how proudly would she have produced the book, and told its name; though the chances must be against her being occupied by any part of that voluminous publication, of which either the matter or manner would not disgust a young person of taste: the substance of its papers so often consisting in the statement of improbable circumstances, unnatural characters, and topics of conversation which no longer concern anyone living; and their language, too, frequently so coarse as to give no very favourable idea of the age that could endure it.
From Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen, written 1798ish, published posthumously in 1818. Of course then the discussion was simply fiction/anti-fiction, not literature/genre, but it's the same idea.
Serge @121
rm @ 102... There are, of course, some English teachers who are literary snobs and bullies
Mine (in 1970) introduced me to Mad Magazine, Doctor Strange, and to the Silver Surfer.
My 5th grade English teacher, around 1967, loaned me a copy of The Hobbit. I found Andre Norton on the library shelves the same year, sealing my fate as a reader of sff.
It was my aunt, the elementary school principal, who introduced me to Mad Magazine.
But in those days I remember being annoyed by the fact that the public library didn't find Nancy Drew worthy enough to carry, and so I only got to read them occasionally when someone gave me one or I borrowed one from a friend. The idea that one could buy books whenever one wished required that one have funds.
OtterB @ 131... If I remember correctly, nobody ever recommended any book to me because I already was making frequent trips to the school's library. As for Mad magazine, I clearly remember when my teacher told our class about it, specifically the parody where a woman stabs her husband and he bleeds to death all over the sink, but have no fear because Josephine the Plumber was here to tell the woman about the cleansing power of Comet.
The current sense of "genre" as "formulaic and convention-bound and thus predictable" is generally not applied to "literary" works that are clearly so constructed, which does not prevent SF or mystery readers from recognizing the reigning formulas and conventions of "literary" or "serious" fiction. Some of the mystification is rooted in the sense that literary fiction connects more strongly to reality--either via representational realism ("This is the way divorce/bereavement/abuse/addiction-and-recovery really feel"); or claims that complex and important and probably morally improving Issues are being addressed; or both. So: Art Is Really True and Art Is Good For You, which are the Defenses of Poesy back on which puritans always fall, since Art Feels Good is deeply suspect. Or, to take a slightly different tack, these folk distrust dulce but understand and can defend utile. I also suspect that the association of difficulty or opacity with Art is in part the result of believing that anything really improving and important shouldn't come too easy. After all, you gotta suffer if you gonna sing the blues.
TNH @114: When I was still in the trenches, I often thought that the snobbery and self-absorption (along with narrow reading habits) of some lit teachers made it even tougher for the rest of us. (I can't recall a time when literature wasn't a hard sell to the general student population.)
What makes this debate so compelling, and enduring?
1) We have all invested a great deal of time reading books. We want to make sure we have read the best ones -- the ones that will enrich our lives and spirits.
2) We are all secretly concerned that literature is a failing enterprise anyway, and we hope that by restoring the qualities it had during the 19th century, what Ursula LeGuin called "The Century of the Book," it might once again reclaim it's place as the main focus of cultural energy.
3) We are all nerds who love categorizing and recategorizing the books in our heads just for the sake of it, dammit!
4) Somewhere at the intersection of the taxonomizing of literary tribes, wondering how books work, and evaluating what effects literature has on our minds -- there is a set of instructions, or the shape of a posture towards life, that is profoundly liberating and joyful, and if we just keep talking about it enough, we might find out what it is.
Deep thanks to Patrick for this post -- I was almost convinved by Grossman, but I couldn't shake the feeling that somewhere in his article, I'd been had.
And finally, I direct all perplexed readers to "The Superstitous Ethics of the Reader" by Borges. It's three pages on style v. substance that'll change the way you think about this question forever.
“There are two kinds of music – good and bad.” attributed to Richard Strauss and Duke Ellington, among others.
abi @12
I can't find a citation for the line I recall of Timoty Leary's that, "The only reasonable political position is down on all fours."
from my .sig file:
There's also been some speculation about the Pre-Joycean Fellowship. The best explanation I can make is that we exist to poke fun at the excesses of modern literature while simultaneously mining it for everything of value. Does that help? I didn't think so.
-- Steven Brust
Teresa @23
Especially at #23, that ought to have been "The Mgt."
And yes, Shakespeare was a hack pandering both to the pit and to whoever might be of use to his career. I mean, does Macbeth suck up to the new king, or what? And as soon as he had an "income", he went back to Avon and never wrote another line.
& John Mark Ockerbloom @90
"I think one aspect, touched on above, is that 'good literature' must not be escapist."
So Shakespeare's comedies are right out, then!
Teresa @47
Does that make Tom Jones hysterical realism?
Oh, please, don't go to Latin. Google Translate doesn't do Latin.
Sean Sakamoto @59
Then the notorious popularity of the pomo inversion, which makes the critic the most important participant, among critics, is due to putting the critics on Top?
[Found in moderation queue and edited by JDM to add (presumed) URL of broken/missing link. --JDM)
N.B. Writing poetry gets you laid, not prose.
Roger Ebert told the joke of a Hollywood starlet so dumb, she slept with the writer.
@135: Play the guitar. Write poetry. Join a gym. Get a wing-man.
Me, I think it's all pheromones. Everything else is a delusion and/or a hobby.
(And while writing poetry doesn't necessarily lead to getting laid, might it not work the other way round?)
TomB@57: About ten years ago I was reading the Penguin Sagas of Icelanders and enjoying it not just for the stories but for the style in which they were told. What struck me was the way they would say, matter of fact, what they thought motivated a character's actions. This violates what I think is a modern rule of good storytelling, "show, don't tell", but it worked.
POV in the sagas is a weird thing, in that it's mostly all exterior. When a character's thoughts or motivations are given, they're reported not from inside the character's head, but more or less as a conclusion drawn from community observation of what the character is saying or doing. It's neither third-person-objective in the modern sense, nor omniscient in the 19th-century sense, but something a little bit like both and a lot like neither. (Somebody I read once -- I forget who -- gave it as his, or maybe her, opinion that the POV character in the typical Icelandic saga was the community as a whole.)
Edward Oleander@97: One of the good things about being primarily a medievalist is that all of the authors one studies are safely dead, and a lot of them are anonymous.
Chris W.@113: I love Wodehouse's novels dearly, but they are so immaculately put together that constructing an interesting literary interpretation of them seems rather like grabbing a paint brush and setting out to improve on the Mona Lisa. They simply don't reward that sort of analysis.
You've put your finger on what I suspect is an unavoidable problem with literary criticism: without meaning to, it gives pride of place to those texts which are productive of analysis. There's a lot more that can be said about something complex, knotty, and variously flawed than can be said about something clear and simple and damn-near perfect. "Wow. You have got to read this!" is an honest response, and one most if not all writers would give their eyeteeth to produce in their readers, but it never got anybody tenure.
(But it helps, I think, to remind oneself that hidden inside every piece of literary criticism, no matter how labored or abstruse, is another voice saying, "This nifty bit of writing -- let me show you it!")
I never managed to get much in the way of lengthy prose finished until I got married, so perhaps I could say that getting laid got me to be a writer. It's as good a working theory as any.
Sean Sakamoto: I still take issue with (if I understand correctly) the notion that a or the distinction between what we call genre fiction and what many call contemporary literature lies in the attitude of the writer toward the reader: in the former case it being one of service to, where in case of the latter this relationship is reversed.
There are several problems with your formulation. For one, it requires knowing what is going on in the head of the writer. This is a problem because many writers won't talk about what is going on in their heads, and the rest lie about it (often very sincerely, no doubt).
Next, it requires knowing what is going on in the head of the reader. Same problem, although perhaps less acute. To be sure, there are readers who will loudly and passionately berate a writer who is not producing what the reader wants, or is not producing it fast enough. But exactly because such readers are so loud that they drown out the rest, we cannot know how ubiquitous they are. Moreover, we cannot know to what degree writers actually pay attention to them (see above). I know for certain many genre writers have a visceral "fuck off" reaction to being told such things. No doubt others react more submissively, but have you reason to believe the latter are in any way the standard for genre writers?
To be sure, there is work-for-hire, and there is ghost writing, and there are media novelizations, but I think those can safely be excluded.
Finally, assuming you're right, and there is this massive layer of genre writers who set in to work with the idea of submitting to the desires of the reader, I'd like to know how they go about it. Do they take a poll? Take direction from their editors (who are, presumably, taking direction from marketing, who takes direction from the jobbers, who take direction from the chain managers)? What's the mechanism here?
I really think that writers (a generally cantankerous bunch, and that's one of the few generalizations I'll dare) tend, over-all, to aim their writing at their own tastes. At least, the good ones do, no matter what part of the bookstore the book ends up in.
My taste in many things is abominably bourgeois, but I do remember seeing Fanny and Alexander shortly after it first was shown and coming out of it with a sense that there was an awful lot more to it than could be grasped by simply watching it. (OTOH, having seen the 180 min. cut of Andrei Rublev, my wife and I had the same reaction: "What was that?")
I have tended to avoid litfic in any of it's various guises since high school and college classes seemed to say that "literature = depressing" and I do not care to get depressed any more than reading the newspaper will do to me.
TomB #57:
About ten years ago I was reading the Penguin Sagas of Icelanders...
Illiterate and uncultured that I am, I had no idea that the ancient Icelanders even knew about penguins, much less write sagas about them!
Illiterate and uncultured that I am, I don't seem to understand modern English tenses, either.
John Houghton @ 144... "See Ensign Oates' frank adult death struggle with the spine-chilling giant electric penguin!"
@Debra Doyle #139: Community POV seems like a good description. I was thinking "consensus POV" which is essentially the same thing. It doesn't presume omniscience, but it is allowed to make reasonable assumptions and draw conclusions.
... what I suspect is an unavoidable problem with literary criticism: without meaning to, it gives pride of place to those texts which are productive of analysis. There's a lot more that can be said about something complex, knotty, and variously flawed than can be said about something clear and simple and damn-near perfect.
But clear and simple doesn't necessarily mean shallow or empty. Texts which are easily productive of analysis are like places with especially fertile soil. Cities rise up on them. Texts that are harder to crack may yet contain gems of great value.
@ 141 SKZB,
I understand you don't like my theory. I'm OK with that. It is flawed, not provable, and certainly not uniformly applicable. BUT, it is based on my experience with writers, in writers groups, and in the behavior I've witnessed within certain communities of readers. In other words, it might not be a bulletproof concept, but I didn't pull it out of my ass either.
In the creative writing circles, the main point was "How to I express myself," and in genre writing circles, the main point was, "how do I keep the reader's interest."
I suspect, but I may be wrong, but I reckon that when you write a story, you give a lot of thought to how the story might keep the reader's interest. For example, Jim Macdonald gives this advice about writing, "If you're bored writing it, the reader will be bored reading it."
I've never heard such advice in a litfic writing workshop. If the reader was bored, he wasn't trying hard enough. That said, I'm certainly no authority on either type of author. As I said, this is based solely on my experience, but I do think it's a viewpoint worth discussion, if only because when I made this discovery it changed my entire outlook on writing.
Sean, I don't know enough to have a strong opinion about whether your theory holds water or not, but I have another term for writers who assume that if the reader is bored, they just aren't trying hard enough.
I call them "bad writers."
So I kinda hope you're wrong (even though everything about your theory rings pretty true to me) because that would effectively write off dismiss a whole class of writers.
I'm comfortable with making readers work pretty hard, and with challenging them to think and puzzle and deduce. But the payoff has to be there; they have to end by saying "Yeah! I was right!" or "Shit! I had that all wrong!" or even "Waitaminnit...let me read that again." Note: "What?! I did all that work for THAT?!?!?" is NOT acceptable, and any writer who thinks it is is just a bad writer. If there's a whole genre (and I'm in the "litfic is a genre" camp) that values the expression of the writer's feelings (eyeroll) over the reader's enjoyment, then there's a whole genre of bad writing.
But then, I'm an extrovert and a manipulative control freak. I like to make people do things because they want to do them. I suppose I'll now be jumped all over by the introverts, so let me defend for a moment by pointing out that I see nothing wrong with writing to express your feelings; I just see no point in publishing the result. If writing isn't an act of communication, it is private and should stay that way. Besides, publishing it uses up resources that could be used by work that's actually worth reading that rewards the reader's efforts as described above.
"Sooner or later I'd like to see people stop trying to analyze this and just go off and read something."
This is very specifically directed at article writers who do an OMG-People-Read-Things-For-This-Reason piece every so often, and I apologize for the sloppy writing that allowed people to think it was directed at literary analysis in general.
And the unconsciously ambiguous nature of my writing is the OTHER reason I didn't go for an English degree.
Tangentially related: Vampire endorsement turns Brontë into bestseller | Books | guardian.co.uk
Reinforcing the need to judge a book from its cover.
I loved the review at the end:
"I was really disappointed when reading this book, it's made to believe to be one of the greatest love stories ever told and I found only five pages out of the whole book about there love and the rest filled with bitterness and pain and other peoples stories"
Well, I certainly agree that it is worth discussing; otherwise, I wouldn't be discussing it. The issue is not that I don't like it, the issue is that I think it's wrong. With this latest clarification you made, perhaps instead wrong, I ought to say that it is a valid observation from a seriously flawed perspective.
Let me explain.
I cannot speak for the litfic community (if there is any such thing). But it would seem to me that to create any artifact intended for others with no concern or care for whether others get anything from it is not to be a top, it is to simply be a bad artificer. Are the works of what we've been calling the litfic community intended for others, or merely for the personal satisfaction of the author? If the latter, why on earth would I care why, how, or if they do it?
If your point is that genre writers care if readers enjoy their stuff, then, sure, I agree. And if "litfic" writers (or should I say litfic "writers"?) don't care, then that is a valid difference and one worth mentioning.
The reason I consider the top/bottom analogy to be wrong-headed is that, indeed, there is such a thing letting the reader control and determine what and how one writes. To me, a work is good insofar as it reaches, moves, delights, influences, and especially ephiphanizes as many people as possible over as wide a spectrum of humanity, across time and culture, as possible. With that definition of "good" in mind, the goal is to make it good. If a writer were bottoming to the reader (and, without doubt, some do), his goal would be to make it pleasing. Do you see the difference?
Perhaps I just hang out with the wrong crowds of literary and genre writers, and got my MFA at the wrong place and have run workshops at the wrong writing centers and have been published by the wrong editors and have edited the wrong magazines and have read too widely the wrong writers and their literary biographies but I too am deeply suspicious of Sean's formulations.
I'm also deeply suspicious of the claim that "literary fiction" means books that can only sell a couple thousand copies to the MFA crowd and whatnot. Grossman points to Nam Le's book selling 16,000 copies in the past year and a half of so, in two formats. What he doesn't mention is that ~14,500 were in hardcover, which ain't bad (and which doesn't include sales to libraries, which Worldcat tells me Le has done well with, with 1207 library systems having at least one copy of his book).
I know plenty of genre writers that would looooove to sell 14,500 hardcovers of a single title in a year and a half (plus a couple thousand to libraries, and through independent bookstores etc etc etc.) According to Bookscan, which I am abusing here in the final minutes of my working day, a number of the more prominent genre writers--Hugo and Nebula nominees and winners--haven't managed that trick with their 2008 hardcover releases. (Though of course genre fiction often gets the mmpb release as well.)
There is far too much in this thread for me to absorb at one sitting. Although I was highly amused at Sean's use of bondage terminology.
My mind is still pre-occupied with a statement John A. Arkansawyer made at the top of the thread: what, pray tell, are "immoral books"? As far as I can recall there have been only two books that made me want to take a shower afterwards: de Sade's Philosophy in the Bedroom* (which made me want to spend a week scrubbing off) and Anne Rice's Interview with a Vampire (which I found so disturbing three quarters of the way through -- mainly because of Claudia -- that I put it down). One of these was popular fiction, the other, um, not.
*Read for a college course called "Evil and Decadence in Literature."
Nick, we have had different experiences. Maybe you went to all the right places and met the right folks and I went to all the wrong places, wrong this and wrong that. That works for me.
skzb, you wrote "To me, a work is good insofar as it reaches, moves, delights, influences, and especially ephiphanizes as many people as possible over as wide a spectrum of humanity, across time and culture, as possible. "
When Oprah put Franzen's Corrections on her reading list, he objected. He said that his work was too complex for her readership and suggested that they wouldn't get it. This kicked off a huge controversy. Some folks said he was being a snob. Some folks said he was just being honest. Oprah herself was very angry. They've reconciled since, but it was a fun controversy, and it was a mainstream version of the lit vs. genre discussion that I enjoyed very much.
There are a lot of litfic folks who would not agree at all with your definition of 'good' writing. I was one of them, back when I was in school. We turned our noses up at any 'bestseller.' We were suspicious of anything that became too popular, too mainstream. It was pandering, it was selling out, it was bland, escapist, pablum, etc.
Good fiction required labor on the part of the reader. That's my central tenet. My choice of diction got in the way, perhaps the truth is more nuanced. I am not saying that litfic writers don't think at all of their writers and genre only think of their writers. It is a matter of degree.
I think that in litfic, the empasis is on the writer doing more of the 'work' to understand what the author is getting at. The onus is on the reader. If a reader doesn't understand the work, then the reader is embarrased and fakes it.
In genre, the onus is on the writer. If the work is not accessible, or not at the very least a fun read, then the writer has failed. A work of litfic can not be a fun read, and be considered very succesful.
I guess I am trying to say that a work of genre could be fun, and only fun, to be considered a success. Litfic can get away with being boring, difficult, and not fun at all, and still be considered a success by its readers, because they don't demand that their reading be fun.
Franzen describes both these models much better than I could. I see a suprising similarity in your words and his, although he would put you in what he calls his 'contract model' vs. Flaubert's Satus model, in which most people will NOT enjoy the work, precisely because it is literary!
I quote:
'It turns out that I subscribe to two wildly different models of how fiction relates to its audience. In one model, which was championed by Flaubert, the best novels are great works of art, the people who manage to write them deserve extraordinary credit, and if the average reader rejects the work it's because the average reader is a philistine; the value of any novel, even a mediocre one, exists independent of how many people are able to appreciate it. We can call this the Status model. It invites a discourse of genius and art-historical importance.
In the opposing model, a novel represents a compact between the writer and the reader, with the writer providing words out of which the reader creates a pleasurable experience. Writing thus entails a balancing of self-expression and communication within a group, whether the group consists of "Finnegans Wake" enthusiasts or fans of Barbara Cartland. Every writer is first a member of a community of readers, and the deepest purpose of reading and writing fiction is to sustain a sense of connectedness, to resist existential loneliness; and so a novel deserves a reader's attention only as long as the author sustains the reader's trust. This is the Contract model. The discourse here is one of pleasure and connection. My mother would have liked it.'
pat greene, #154: what, pray tell, are "immoral books"?
I take it to mean a book whose philosophical outlook, core argument, or basic assumptions about ethics are morally twisted.
As an example, here's a book that made me cringe for just those reasons.
Here is a link to that Franzen essay, which I really enjoyed.
(Even the name sounds like a top!)
And, just for fun, here is a link to a great essay/ brutal takedown of academic literary criticism by a Yale Grad student.
I am sitting in a windowless conference room. The walls are lined with sets of leather-bound books with gold-lettered spines. ‘The ode must traverse the problem of solipsism,’ a young man is saying. He pauses for a long time. Underneath the table, one leg is twisted around the other. A stretch of gaunt white ankle shows between trouser and sock. ‘In order to approach participating in.’ He pauses again, his body knotted like a balloon creature made by a children’s entertainer. Finally, in one rush: ‘The unity which is no longer accessible.’ My fellow students utter a long soft gasp, as if at a particularly beautiful firework.
‘Brilliant,’ says the professor. ‘Very finely put. But I didn’t quite understand it. Could you repeat it?’ I write the sentence down in my notebook, like everyone else in the seminar. The ode must traverse the problem of solipsism before it can approach participating in the unity which is no longer accessible. When I have pieced it together, I realise he is talking nonsense. I am struck by the thought that literary criticism – at least as it is practised here – is a hoax.
Letter from Yale
Sean: Put that way, I don't think we have a disagreement. Alas. :-)
It should be added that, to me, a good book ought not to *require* labor on the part of the reader; but it ought to *reward* labor on the part of the reader.
The ode must traverse the problem of solipsism before it can approach participating in the unity which is no longer accessible.
It is not much consolation that society will pick up the bits, leaving us at eight modern where punishment, rather than interdiction, is paramount.
I know which one makes more sense to me.
skzb,
I just want to say that our discussion has been really fun for me. I appreciate you making me work to clarify my point of view, and I also enjoy your style. I hope we meet some day. If you ever find yourself in rural Japan, drop me a line. I know some good soba restaurants.
what, pray tell, are "immoral books"?
Chaucer!
Rabelais!
Balzac!
(This answer courtesy of the River City book club, which also has its suspicions about Shakespeare and all them other highfalutin' Greeks.)
Sean Sakamoto, 157: I wonder if the writer of that Letter from Yale has any scientific training? I can't tell if she understands that "inertial" is not a mere linguistic overextension of "inert," but a genuinely different concept.
Which makes me a bit wary of the rest of what she's saying.
Ah, the things we non-English majors choke on...
Russell @ 135: And while writing poetry doesn't necessarily lead to getting laid, might it not work the other way round?
IMX it was the other way around—not getting laid led to poetry. I can't write it any more.
People
Let's not, please, confuse critical theory, particularly as espoused by the likes of Ruth Yeazell (the Yale prof above in Sean's excerpt) and literary criticism. One is a lovely, fascinating theoretical and philosophical exercise, the other is practical application with an eye to understanding a text and our reactions to a text.
And 15K hardcovers of literary fiction by a tier one university faculty member will sell to students in five years. Easy. That's why more and more schools are telling faculty you can't require your book as a text; you must make it optional or demonstrate to the textbook committee that it really is the best choice.
Nick, we have had different experiences. Maybe you went to all the right places and met the right folks and I went to all the wrong places, wrong this and wrong that. That works for me.
Perhaps. Though I would recommend a couple of things to consider:
1. there are plenty of blowhards in MFA classes and creative writing workshops. School is sort of the place where one can get one's hare-brained theories out of one's system. But the same is so of Clarion and other workshops in the SF/F field -- there's plenty of blogging about this or that silly idea that some emerging skiffy writer has. (Often, they take the form of ill-considered "movements.") These silly ideas aren't necessarily representative of the silly ideas working writers have.
2. I'd contend that SF/F requires enormous amounts of work on the part of the reader. The ability to sit through lengthy infodumps on means of propulsion, the neologisms, the immense casts of characters and endless 800-page volumes that take place over the course of generations, the many references to earlier literature, outright didacticism on everything from statecraft to sexual politics, and the topic of science in general require significant synoptic facilities and patience from readers. Many many readers simply slam shut a book when the first page contains many crazy terms and weird names--for these readers complex or unusual sentences about the everyday is LESS work than trying to read SF/F. This may be one reason why many adult SF/F readers come to the hobby as children while relatively few people start reading SF/F as adults--one needs years of experience to read the contemporary material in the field.
I also don't think Franzen/Oprah is a good example of lit v genre, when one considers that OBC selections included work by Toni Morrison, Edwidge Dandicat, Andre Dubus III, and Barbara Kingslover. Franzen's arguments were both more nuanced and more self-serving (to maximize air time on a variety of media outlets) than all that.
There's a good rejoinder to Franzen in Harper's, though sadly the entire article hasn't been pirated:
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2005/10/0080775
And 15K hardcovers of literary fiction by a tier one university faculty member will sell to students in five years.
The Boat came out one year ago. Literary fiction does have an audience outside of classrooms. It really really is true, and that audience is as authentic and legitimate and often as large as any other audience out there.
Again, my quibble with this discussion is that we're all talking about different things when we say "literary fiction."
The Boat? The KiteRunner? Satanic Verses? No one has actually made any attempt towards a definition - so it's a meaningless term. It means whatever the speaker at the moment intends to signify, regardless of how eccentric that assignment of meaning might otherwise be.
I read that rebuttal. The author contends that institutions are NOT forcing a certain canon on readers, contrary to what Franzen claims. It seems like much of what Franzen argues, and that I argue, and who rebutts us, depends on what school and crowd one went to and hung out with.
I still like his Status model vs. Contract model, and I do think it applies to the dynamic of pleasure vs. work as a way that some folks seem to evaluate the merit of writing and the place of literature. I don't personally use this method to value a work of writing, but I think that's what is behind a lot of litfic snobbery.
Mags @130: I just read and enjoyed Northanger Abbey last year and cracked up over the following dialogue between Isabella and Catherine, which comes shortly after (and ironically contrasts) the high-minded defense of novels you quote:
Isabella: "...But, my dearest Catherine, what have you been doing with yourself all this morning? -- Have you gone on with Udolpho?"
Catherine: "Yes, I have been reading it ever since I woke; and I am got to the black veil."
I: "Are you, indeed? How delightful! Oh! I would not tell you what is behind the black veil for the world! Are not you wild to know?"
C: "Oh! Yes, quite; what can it be? -- But do not tell me -- I would not be told upon any account. I know it must be a skeleton, I am sure it is Laurentina's skeleton. Oh! I am delighted with the book! I should like to spend my whole life in reading it. I assure you, if it had not been to meet you, I would not have come away from it for all the world."
I: "Dear creature! how much I am obliged to you; and when you have finished Udolpho, we will read the Italian together; and I have made out a list of ten or twelve more of the same kind for you."
C: "Have you, indeed! How glad I am! -- What are they all?"
I: "I will read you their names directly; here they are, in my pocket-book. Castle of Wolfenbach, Clermont, Mysterious Warnings, Necromancer of the Black Forest, Midnight Bell, Orphan of the Rhine, and Horrid Mysteries. Those will last us some time."
C: "Yes, pretty well; but are they all horrid, are you sure they are all horrid?"
I: "Yes, quite sure; for a particular friend of mine, a Miss Andrews, a sweet girl, one of the sweetest creatures in the world, has read every one of them...."
C. Wingate @142: Did you know Ingmar Bergman's preferred version of Fanny and Alexander was 312 minutes long? (It was broadcast in this form on Swedish television, I believe over several nights.) If you've only seen the theatrical version (188 minutes), your "sense that there was an awful lot more to it than could be grasped by simply watching it" was on target; obviously there was more that needed to be watched!
Nick M @166: I'll accept the proposition that much SF requires familiarity with the tradition in order to get the whole experience, but wouldn't the kind of book described in section 2 be better described as "bad SF"? At least the infodumps, clumsy names and neologisms, and (presumably) badly managed matters of scale? Handling those elements in a way that makes them features rather than bugs is part of the craft of SF. Or, come to think of it, of serious historical fiction.
At least the infodumps, clumsy names and neologisms, and (presumably) badly managed matters of scale?
Who said anything about "clumsy" names or "badly managed" matters of scale? Not I! No fair moving the goalposts.
What I am saying is that what Audience A (SF readers) see as features Audience B (non-SF readers) may see as bugs, even if Audience A is absolutely sure that the neologisms and the physics of the spaceship engines and all that stuff is the bee's knees and done well and properly. Sort of like musicals: there are people who simply dislike all musicals because they cannot get behind characters breaking into song. It doesn't matter whether fans of musicals say that, say, The Music Man is the Best Musical Evar and that with all the bands and music teachers it's okay that everyone starts singing, those who dislike musicals will dislike even The Music Man.
I do think it applies to the dynamic of pleasure vs. work as a way that some folks seem to evaluate the merit of writing and the place of literature.
Could you name some of these people and point to their statements where they've said such things?
Sean, #155: In genre, the onus is on the writer. If the work is not accessible, or not at the very least a fun read, then the writer has failed. A work of litfic can not be a fun read, and be considered very successful.
Okay, now here I'm going to disagree with you somewhat. I don't mind having to work at reading a piece of genre fiction if it seems to be heading in a direction which will make the work worth it. Some of the best SF I've ever read has been stories that made me think, stretched my brain -- I'm thinking of things like "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" here. I wouldn't call that a fun read; it's a strong and disturbing story, and it doesn't provide any pat answers for the reader.
My point is that I like both kinds of story -- but I like both of them within the area of genre fic, because its tropes speak to me more than those of lit-fic do. Sometimes I'm only in the mood to read fluff, and sometimes I want more substance, and I can find both of those in my genre of choice.
BTW, if I can't understand the work, I consider it the fault of the writer, because the writer is the professional; it's his or her job to communicate with the reader. I can follow quantum physics if it's put into layman's terms, so I have a lot of trouble considering myself too stupid to understand a work of fiction.
Nick, #172: In #166, you talked about "the immense casts of characters and endless 800-page volumes that take place over the course of generations*" and said, "many readers simply slam shut a book when the first page contains many crazy terms and weird names." I don't think it's unreasonable for Russell to have paraphrased that as "clumsy names and badly managed matters of scale." If that reading is completely off from what you were trying to say, could you elucidate?
* I do feel obliged to point out here that this phenomenon is also common in the romance/historical genre, so it's not entirely true that only SF readers can handle that sort of thing.
I know I'm coming into the discussion late. I like the idea of making the reader work versus making the author work, but in looking at the posts discussing it I think there might be some misunderstandings of what it means.
Making the author do the work doesn't mean that there is no work for the reader. Rather, the author has worked to encapsulate the work in such a way that the reader is willing to work with it. (Oops, overload on the "work" term, which is what I think is the issue in the first place. Let me try again.) The author has worked to encapsulate the story/poetry/ideas/whatever in such a way that the reader is willing to engage with it in a thoughtful manner.
Making the reader do the work, on the other hand, means that the reader has to chip away at the surface abstruseness before finding (or not) what's buried beneath it.
Does that sound about right, or am I completely missing the point?
I do think it applies to the dynamic of pleasure vs. work as a way that some folks seem to evaluate the merit of writing and the place of literature.
Could you name some of these people and point to their statements where they've said such things?
In the essay that Patrick linked to at the start of this post, ' The Modernists introduced us to the idea that reading could be work, and not common labor but the work of an intellectual elite, a highly trained coterie of professional aesthetic interpreters. The motto of Ezra Pound's "Little Review," which published the first chapters of Joyce's "Ulysses," was "Making no compromise with the public taste." Imagine what it felt like the first time somebody opened up "The Waste Land" and saw that it came with footnotes. Amateur hour was over.
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I don't agree with all of what Grossman says in that essay. The one thing I do agree with is that in this strange and undefinable land of 'literary' fiction, there is a significant readership that values difficulty over pleasure in a text. I don't even think it is wrong, it is a matter of taste. What is wrong is to look down on someone who has different taste.
I think this dichotomy extends beyond fiction. I play the shakuhachi. It is an extremely difficult instrument to play. Within the tiny shakuhachi community, you will find people who value the pieces that are technically more difficult to play over the easy, crowd pleasing folk music.
In popular culture, you have classical music snobs who sneer at rock and roll. I remember when the classically trained prog rock virtuosos looked down on the 'three cord' punk rockers.
There is something about difficulty vs. pleasure in the assignment of artistic merit that happens. I don't know if this is about acquired taste, the reward of effort, snobbery, puritanism, or some unholy combination of all the above. But it exists, and in the genre vs. litfic arena the smell of it is very strong.
Lee, I don't think I was saying anything all that obscure. "Weird" for example means "odd" and "extraordinary", not "clumsy." "Endless" doesn't necessarily mean "badly managed"—of course no book series or even mode of writing is actually endless, but it's easy enough to think of readers who didn't live to see the end of this or that series of books, or who fell away from a series because it became a slog or because life got in the way.
"SF/F requires enormous amounts of work on the part of the reader" is pretty straightforward. It does. It may not seem that way to people who have spent decades doing the work but the same is so of many of the people who enjoy (post)modernist fiction. They find their reading difficult but not too difficult. From the outside it may seem willfully obscure, but so too are stories about made-up kingdoms or the genetic differences between Neanderthals and modern humans etc etc.
A personal example:
My mother was a college professor with a Ph.D in German literature. She and her colleagues read all kinds of complicated literary stuff to stay current.
In her spare time, my mom and her friends loved to read mysteries. They called the mysteries, 'junk.' For example, 'This weekend I'm just going to read junky mysteries.' They also called these mysteries, 'trashy' and 'guilty pleasures'.
Why was it junk? Why did they feel guilty about reading mysteries? They valued the hard stuff, the epic poems with references that took footnotes to explain, but they seemed to enjoy the trashy junk too, but that was somehow not OK.
The motto of Ezra Pound's "Little Review," which published the first chapters of Joyce's "Ulysses," was "Making no compromise with the public taste."
Nothing in that Grossman quote shows that there is a pleasure v. work dichotomy when it comes to the assignment of artistic merit. It shows only that the Little Review has a different publishing program than, say, The Saturday Evening Post. (So too does Tor, which publishes mostly SF/F and thus which caters to less than 10% of the fiction market. Why does Tor ignore the voice of the people! The people who don't want SF/F but only more popular genres!)
The mere publishing of "difficult" work is not a demonstration that the work was considered good because it was difficult, or that difficulty is valorized over pleasure.
So again Seam, please name some people "who value difficulty over pleasure" in a text and show me where they have made statements to that effect. Seems to me to be pretty clear that people who enjoy "difficult" texts find pleasure in the difficulty-- they just dare take pleasures in things you might not.
And the pleasure of difficulty is not unique to readers of (post)modernist fiction. Readers of SF/F, also enjoy difficulty, though the sites of difficulty within those works vary. "The Cold Equations" is a difficult text -- go find some third graders to read it to and then report back to me how pleasurable they found it -- but for an audience who enjoys being confronted with the idea of an amoral uncaring narrative universe, it is pleasurable. Same too with people who enjoy spending significant amounts of mental energy on reading eleven volumes of this or that fantasy series, or who enjoy being overwhelmed by descriptions of the vastness of space or the infinity of time, etc etc.
In her spare time, my mom and her friends loved to read mysteries. They called the mysteries, 'junk.' For example, 'This weekend I'm just going to read junky mysteries.' They also called these mysteries, 'trashy' and 'guilty pleasures'.
Why was it junk? Why did they feel guilty about reading mysteries? They valued the hard stuff, the epic poems with references that took footnotes to explain, but they seemed to enjoy the trashy junk too, but that was somehow not OK.
Again, this is NOT an example of your claim that some people valorize difficulty over pleasure.
One can enjoy formal dining at a top restaurant because it activates and challenges their palettes and also enjoy Kraft Dinner because it does not. One can enjoy epic poems because they are awesome and timeless and mysteries because they are not awesome and not timeless.
Your mother just had more than one axis when it came to pleasure.
Nick, #178: the genetic differences between Neanderthals and modern humans
I'm going to take a bit of a tangent here, on the assumption that you're referring to Robert J. Sawyer's Neanderthal trilogy, which I have read. Now, I happen to think Sawyer does a very good job of handling the infodumps, but that could just be because I'm already loosely familiar with the areas of both genetics and sociology, and could therefore follow where he was tweaking things.
But what I want to say in particular is that when I got to the end of the first book, my most immediate reaction was to say, "Holy shit, that man can WRITE!" The text just... flowed, there's no other word to describe it. There were no clunky phrasings or choppy paragraphs to bounce me out of the story, and (at the other extreme) the words didn't stand up and holler, "Hey, look at me, ain't I something?" ; the writing didn't get in the way, as I have had it do in many books from far better-known authors. This doesn't have anything to do with the subjects he was writing about -- it was purely an issue of style. And that sense of the prose being the vehicle rather than the driver is one of the things I almost never get from lit-fic.
Lee: and some people can read, say, Ben Marcus or Nam Le, and have that same experience. They can do it with Eliot or Joyce too. They are not lying, they are not just saying so to look good back on the college qudrangle, they're not showing off -- or not showing off anymore than some con-going enthusiast who bellows about his or her favorites all the time -- or anything like that. They just like what they like. They don't see words as something that could "get in the way" because the words are the way in some books.
Further, many people can enjoy books where words don't get in the way and books where the words are the way and where the whole point is to holler "Ain't I something." There's no privileged position, no essence of what a novel or story is (or should be) be that precedes its existence.
Incidentally, I too have some background knowledge (I took a bunch of physical anthropology classes in college, and was the only non-major in the my school called "400-level" courses) and found Sawyer's first book in that series incredibly clunky, to the point where I laughed out loud several times at his attempts to squeeze in this or that bit of the science, and to the point where I didn't bother with the other books in the series. (There was also one of the more ridiculous descriptions of a rape scene and its immediate psychic aftermath I've ever read on pp. 62-65 -- I didn't laugh out loud, but I did roll my eyes and put the book down for a week.)
Rob T. @170: I am working my way through the Horrid Novels. My favorite so far is The Midnight Bell, which has the most hilariously convoluted plot and...
Lauretta and her guide followed him with their eyes in silent wonder for some moments, when a sudden blow from an unseen hand levelled her companion with the earth, and, from the firmness with which he had held her arm, he in his fall drew her upon him. Astonishment closed her lips; and in an instant, a man muffled up in a cloak lifted her from the ground, and whispering in her ear "Be silent," he took her arm under his, and led her swiftly along... (from Chapter XIII)
Ninjas! Could it get any better?
I'm on my third read of The Mysteries of Udolpho and enjoying it more than the previous two readings. I find skipping the poetry helps, and also speeds things along considerably.
I'm frantically preparing for Burning Man, so apologies in advance if I've missed something important or this turns into a post-and-run, but I want to throw a couple of dogs on the fire.
I don't really believe in Sean's dichotomy, and here's why. When I write (music, not fiction, but I don't think that matters), I'm not trying to be the listener's bitch or make him* mine. I'm trying to do good work. I don't understand what it would even mean to write for or against the listener; what listener? For every listener who would prefer X, there's one who would prefer not-X. The only way I know to work is to play what I want to hear. If someone doesn't like it, I don't conclude that they're a philistine or that I failed; I conclude that the listener and the song are not a good match.
What does make me think that I've failed is listening to something I did a while back and realizing that it's shitty. This is quite painful, and a powerful (if, alas, not all-powerful) incentive against laziness and self-indulgence. Trying to do something to please "the listener" that didn't please me would, in effect, be to deliberately make something shitty. Being only human, I might do that for hard cash up front, but as a speculative effort to please people who would almost certainly rather get their shitty-to-my-ears music from people who are enthusiastic about it? No way.
I may be overgeneralizing from my own case, but I think most writers write what they want to read, and the rest is rationalization. If any authors want to admit that they often write something not to their taste because they think the public will like/hate it, I'll stand at least somewhat corrected.
"Difficulty vs. pleasure" seems so wrong to me that I think I must be misunderstanding it. Doing something difficult well--including reading a difficult but rewarding novel--is pleasure (although, of course, not the only kind).
Literary fiction is arguably a marketing category, but I'll believe that it's a genre in the sense that SF is when I see a definition of it that's both accurate and genuinely analogous to a well-accepted definition of SF. (Yes, I know there aren't any definitions of SF that are truly well-accepted. Work with me here.)
*A case where using the male pronoun to represent the general human is less sexist rather than more? Um, I hope so!
The thing in this so far that's rung truest and most useful for me is in Patrick's #50: I find it quite remarkable that we should grant this small coterie such power to define the terms of discourse, to the extent that we inevitably have to argue with them before we can get down to just plain talking about what we like about stuff we've read. Even though they're not in the room. I want to say to so many of my friends, particularly in the SF world, "CALM DOWN, THOSE PEOPLE AREN'T HERE, THEY CAN'T HURT YOU ANY MORE."
This has been the dominant theme in my own life lately: letting go. It's not a matter of saying, in every case, "Oh, that doesn't matter anyway." It may matter a lot. But my time and mood matter too, and the question "What am I accomplishing by reengaging with this, and getting angry or miserable over it?" needs to be asked a lot. Early and often. Sometimes there's a reason, and ones like "I have information here that will bring some encouragement to people I care about" are worth taking seriously. But a lot of the time, at least for me, the answer turns out to be something like "Well, it's what people-like-me do and if I pull out of pointless, unproductive, rehashing arguments I won't see some of the other participants at all." At that point it's worth counter-reasoning something like "Then maybe you should learn to live with seeing them less, or use e-mail more, or something that doesn't keep you stirred up and depressed so much."
The other thing that I really wanted to flag agreement on was Nick Mamatas' #183: They are not lying, they are not just saying so to look good back on the college qudrangle, they're not showing off -- or not showing off anymore than some con-going enthusiast who bellows about his or her favorites all the time -- or anything like that. They just like what they like.
For work and personal reasons, I happen to be reading a fair amount lately in places where there's a lot of left-wing jargon in use, and in particular the language of studies of oppression, privilege, resistance, social change, and so on. I find a lot of the language unpleasantly grating at best - not the content, the style. But I find that there are people with information and perspectives I really, really want to hear from who really do communicate comfortably and fluidly in it, and so it's worth the work to me to think through what they're saying and deal with it. It might not be worth it to someone else, and in fact part of my current work project will be interpreting key ideas in the language of a different subculture, in hopes of making them useful for that audience.
But that's a digression. :) My point here, and I do have one, is that for any viewpoint at all, and particularly for ones stereotyped as anti-fun, anti-enjoyment, and the like, there are people for whom that style, subject, etc., are in fact fun, enjoyable, comfortable, the whole deal. Sometimes we can find the connections to say "Hey, I understand the satisfaction you get out of that, it's very much like what I get out of this other", and that's cool. But "your kink is okay" is cool, too, and we seldom have need to get quite so worked up over the fact that people get different pleasures out of different stuff.
Disengage! Disengage! Always dilute for Reading-Listening-Panels-Fanfic-Dissertations! OK!
Nick, #181: That's not really a response to Sean's question. He's already acknowledged that his mother and her friends enjoyed both the academic reading and the mystery novels; the question was why they considered the latter something to be ashamed of reading. That's what "guilty pleasure" means -- something you know you shouldn't be doing, but you do it anyhow because you like it.
WRT our conversation, we seem to be talking past each other somehow, and I don't know what to do about that.
About guilt and reading--
I think that a lot of people who call science fiction or fantasy or murder mysteries or romance novels or *whatever* their "guilty pleasures" do it not because they actually feel guilty, but because they think they should feel guilty.
They are aware that the way they are perceived by others makes their affection for sf/f/mm/rn/or whatever seem a bit...out of place. So they claim to feel "guilty" about reading them, just to make their persona appear to make sense. I know a lot of people who eat dessert with great pleasure and no guilty, but who still say that dessert is a guilty pleasure because they know they are perceived as being fitness freaks. So it may be like that.
It may also be quiet defiance.
I have an academic type job. When colleagues find me reading sf/f/mm/rn/or whatever I am inclined to make quiet remarks about my "low tastes" as a way of precluding smart ass remarks from them, but also as ironic praise of the very thing I'm reading, particularly as contrasted with what I "should" be reading.
"Yep, you caught me reading Louise Penny instead of Grun Von Prinsterer. Ah well. We've always known I have low tastes."
Sean @ #157
I am a veteran of the Yale English department, and that article took me straight back to my dark days of befuddlement and confusion under the tutelage of the corrosive, joyless sophistry that passes for a literary education at Yale. And to the moments of inspiration that are, perhaps, brighter in contrast.
Three things saved me from hating books forever, and I hope Yale never abandons them.
1) English 125. It's a survey of major English poets and the syllabus hasn't changed too much since the curriculum was set by T.S. Eliot in the 1920s. Hearing the first 45 lines of Paradise Lost read aloud in class was a conversion experience for me. And so was having to memorize the first 20 or so lines of the Canterbury Tales. Depsite their best efforts to destory the joy of reading, Yale's English Professors are still powerless in the face of the actual poetry. I hope they never stop making this class and its syllabus a requirement. Getting an English degree is still worth it for the forced exposure to difficult books--they change you, their power is unassailable, immune to the periodic waves of nonsense that lap at every society.
2) Science Fiction & Science Fact. This was a science class I took because it was easy. You had to read Sci-Fi novels and then write a paper or two about the scientific concepts in them. On the syllabus was "Foundation" by Isaac Asimov. And, after I read it, my life was never the same. That class gave me a deeper, more honest love of books than anything I encountered in the English department. Somehow, Asimov struck me as a continuation of reading Milton in a way that all the criticism I had to read just wasn't.
3) The Elizabethan Club. A private club on campus grounds where graduate students can mix with undergrads and professors to have unpretentious, interested discussions of whatever, and tea every day from 4-6. There's also a kick-ass rare book vault that's open one day of the week. I learned more about the realities of academic life (which I subsequently avoided as a profession), and about the world of ideas than I ever did in class. Yale used to be filled with literary societies, which were all bought by the university and turned into office buildings for faculty. I can only hope this one stays open as long as the University does. Yes, only a small number of selected students get to enjoy it, but otherwise it would be swamped. Yale needs more clubs like this.
One of the most interesting discussions here in a long time. Sean's at #59 especially good food for thought.
Back in 1987 at the bookstore in which I was working, Ambient was on the shelves and we just got in The 27th City, Franzen's first novel (google for plot description, if you for some strange reason can't recall). The store buyer introduced us when he dropped by the store to sign copies and we prepared to shake hands. At the moment she said "Jack's a science fiction writer too" Franzen pulled away his hand before I could shake it. Instinctual, I suspect.
Afterward, having landed in science fiction, I found myself being told more than once that what I wrote wasn't really science fiction, and my writing in the field potentially stole readers away from the Real Stuff. (Not many readers, but that didn't seem to be the point.) At Readercon in 1994 one of the PKD judges made a point of coming over to me to explain that he had voted against me, implying that those literary proclivities had proved troubling, and saying he'd like to tell me all the reasons why. I said I'd love to hear them but had to go wait in the lobby for the limo, and walked away.
A few months later that same year, the late Charles Brown told me, "well, anything you write is going to be science fiction, even if it's not science fiction."
I think ever since that point, as per Sean's theory, I've been a power bottom.
Nick, #181: That's not really a response to Sean's question. He's already acknowledged that his mother and her friends enjoyed both the academic reading and the mystery novels; the question was why they considered the latter something to be ashamed of reading.
I was the one who asked a question of Sean, or rather made a request. I requested that he provide an example of someone who privileged difficulty over pleasure, of someone who points to something that is hard or difficult and declares that because it is difficult and offers no pleasure that it is good.
The reason I asked for an example, and the reason I looked closely at his attempts is because Grossman has sparked a number of conversations across the blogosphere and a number of people have made declarations that there are writers/critics/readers etc. who are just jerks and willfully obscure and purposefully make/champion/consume things difficult because they think difficult=good AND pleasure=bad.
And myself and a number of other people have asked for the names of some of these writers/critics/readers are and...no surprises here...not one person has managed to come up with a name that makes sense. They've listed writers whose works they didn't like, they've listed critics who have pooh-poohed (some) science fiction, they've waved their arms and have said "most every critic" or people who read "hard" stuff, but nobody has shown that any of these people are opposed to pleasure.
They just find pleasure in other things. #185 has it exactly right.
Also, I don't believe we are talking past one another at all. You think Sawyer can write well. I don't think he can. I can certainly appreciate writers who make sure that words/writing doesn't "get in the way" (as you put it) of the story; I don't think Sawyer is a good example of that at all. (A writer who is: Robert Charles Wilson. Another: Greg Bear.)
I also don't think that "the prose being the vehicle rather than the driver" is the definition of good writing (it's "a" definition), and driving in a prose vehicle isn't always the reading experience I want to have.
Good writing can involve prose being the vehicle, it can involve prose being the driver, it can involve prose being the obstacle that must be overcome, it can involve prose being the scenery that zips by almost too fast to recognize, it can involve prose being the flaming heap on the side of the road that we slowly drive past in order to linger upon. Bad writing can also involve all those things.
Good writing is a lot of things. The people who prefer (either always or sometimes) drivers, obstacles, scenery, and flaming heaps--and people who do not like (or do not always like) prose as vehicles--are not putting on airs or pretending to do so for tenure or social status or doing it because the nerd is the victim of the world and they are the great oppressor, or anything like that.
Nick @191:
I requested that he provide an example of someone who privileged difficulty over pleasure
OK, I'll bite.
Of course, there’s always the possibility, of course, that you genuinely feel Zoe’s Tale is one of the best novels published last year. If that’s what you believe—if you actually think Zoe’s Tale is the best the novel can aspire to—then you really, really, really, really, really need to broaden your aesthetic horizons. You need to read more widely, to look at a greater selection of writers and modes of writing; to stretch yourself; to venture out of your comfort zone. Not just for the health of this award, and SF; but for the sanity of your soul. Because if you can actually read the excellent The Quiet War and then read the pleasant but mediocre Zoe’s Tale, and not see that the former is a much much better novel than the latter, there must be something wrong with you.
Adam Roberts thinks that one should read The Quiet War rather than "pleasant" Zoe's Tale for the sanity of your soul. He makes no claim about the enjoyability of his alternative suggestion; it is simply prescribed, like medicine.
(Personally, I have enjoyed some books that have made me work for my pleasures; I'm a big fan of Italo Calvino's slimmer and less coherent works, and I've got more than one Nicholson Baker on my shelves. But I don't like the feeling I'm being looked down on any more than any sentient being does.)
Constance @36 said: His least popular novels, Tender is the Night and The Great Gatsby, his straight ahead realist novels were failures, commercially, unlike his previous two.
And yet, Gatsby is the one all American high school students are forced at grade-point to read, analyze, and write endless reports about, to the point that I -- a confirmed lifelong book-horse* -- was so fed up by it and bored with it that I managed completely to miss any of the gory description surrounding the car crash. I knew there'd BEEN a car crash, because who was involved, who died, etc, was on all the quizzes ... but a friend of mine who actually liked Gatsby, way back when, asked me recently if I thought it was too gory for kids, and we had a really odd conversation in which I started wondering what else I'd missed. Clearly, I was skimming it at light-speed for factoids so I could do my homework, put it down, and go on to some book I LIKED.
John Mark Ockerbloom @90 said: "I think one aspect, touched on above, is that 'good literature' must not be escapist." // This notion is made pretty explicit in some of the standard English texts that students get assigned in later high school or early college. I wonder how many folks it puts off literature.
Me, for one, for years. Two brief anecdotes, to the point:
A -- I understand there are very many people who get as excited and pleased by reading Austen, Bronte, etc, as I do from Ursula Vernon and Lois McMaster Bujold. However, I've never managed to PROPERLY READ† any of Those Authors, despite having 'read' many of them for class over the years. Pride and Prejudice only made sense to me properly when I saw Gurinder Chadha's relatively recent Bollywoodization of it, "Bride and Prejudice". For one thing, it made all the suitors and sisters look DIFFERENT ENOUGH that I could keep them separate, which is emphatically not true in any BBCization of it I've ever sat through (or, for that matter, Zefirelli's "Romeo & Juliet," which a teacher showed us in high school in an attempt to be Hip And Interesting).
A 1/2 -- Another teacher in high school said (I paraphrase), "Hey, guys, this'll be fun: we're going to read science fiction this semester!" And then she assigned The Disposessed. Which sounds interesting to me when described by my friends, but which I utterly bounce off of in explosive boredom when trying to READ it. The same thing applies to The Left Hand of Darkness, and almost anything by Vernor Vinge: the metadiscussion of the work fascinates me, but I can't read the work.
B -- The first 'literary' book I read and really enjoyed was Zadie Smith's White Teeth.
Teresa Nielsen Hayden @47 said: Patrick's gone out to pick up some groceries, but I'll bet he was primarily asking how we all read as individuals, with the possibility of eventually working up to more general statements, if the initial lab results warrant it.
One of my major objections to the class of books that get shelved under 'Fiction' rather than in any of the subsets I prefer to shop in, is that the authors are often really, really sloppy with their worldbuilding. They think that just because they're using a contemporary American setting -- with, say, a heroine who is having a Life Crisis and therefore needs to do [plot thing] to get her head on straight -- they don't have to describe anything, set a scene, or even give me any reason to CARE ABOUT this person they're having life happen to. Therefore, I don't care, and I quit reading. I want my authors to work at least hard enough to intrigue me within the first, oh, eight or nine pages at the most. Margaret Atwood and (unrelatedly) the kinds of people that become Oprah's Book Club books ** rarely manage it.
Sean Sakamoto @91 said: With Dickens, as with all good literary fiction, the work is worth the payoff. Here's a tautology (If it is worth the payoff, then the book is good. A book is good if it is worth the payoff.) // Some folks set out to write a difficult book from the start. These tend to be litfic types. Jonathan Franzen wrote a great essay in the New Yorker about 'difficult fiction' and, unless I read it wrong, he seemed to be rethinking his position on whether or not a writer should strive to make his prose difficult. It was a wonderfully introspective response the the whole Oprah drama a while back.
A deliberately-made-difficult book that nonetheless sucked me in like an Electrolux and dragged me through it paragraph by paragraph until suddenly I was reading its bizarre argot as easily as Pratchett got me reading Nac Mac Feegle dialect: The Book of Dave, by Will Self (amazon link). Dickens, however, I have a really hard time with. Imagining reading and loving Dickens fluently, to me, is akin to trying to imagine the (very alien) minds that could listen to Cicero deliver his speeches in public and be rabble-roused to war by them, despite having to wait fifteen minutes or more for the verbs.
MacAllister @96 said: Ah! But there's this really cool thing, here! We sexualize our description of the reading/writing experience (at least some of us do) because it is, at heart, an intimate transaction, regardless of all else.
Another datapoint: I have a friend who will never again read anything produced by Anne McCaffrey ... because the first Pern book he read, unwarned, was Moreta: Dragonlady of Pern, and the way it ends so abruptly hit him in the face in a way it DIDN'T me, because I'd read all the previous, and knew that (avoiding spoilers, just in case) the ending of that book is (a) fated and (b) the settled history of the other books. He, however, had been expecting this to be the start of a whole cycle involving those characters, and to have them suddenly yanked away from him and the book end the way it did was, well. Insert your sexual metaphor here. But he felt it was a mean, rude, awful, inappropriate, and above all DECEITFUL cheat, and he'll never date THAT hosebeast again, EVER.
Sumana Harihareswara @103 said: I'm still wary of a particular acquaintance who scorned my enjoyment of Book 4 of Harry Potter, and said with great certainty that it wasn't just her opinion, Goblet of Fire was objectively bad.
I'm reading this and feeling acutely uncomfortable in a 'wow, I may have made an ass of myself' sort of way ... because some time ago I spent a good hour attempting to show my younger sister how not only objectively bad but morally poisonous the whole Twilight series is. Um. And yes, she enjoys reading them, and enjoys basking in the (cough, gag) 'romantic' themes the same way that I find some 80s songs irresistibly nostalgic: I remember crying uncontrollably to them in my preadolescent years. However, my sister is in her twenties, and actively seeking a life partner, and I desperately do NOT want her to use the same criteria to choose same that Bella finds so useful? So, um. Thinking about this now.
--
* A book-horse, according to my mother's coinage, is like a clothes-horse, only for books. I go through them at a staggering pace and continually need new ones, to the point that I utterly outstrip current fashion and ordinary retail supply, and must go searching through the racks at thrift stores and such for leftover unique 'vintage' items of yore. I have BEEN going through them like that since shortly after I learned to read whole sentences, at the age of three.
† Reading 'properly,' to me, means actually being pulled in and excited, wanting to know what happens next. It often, for me, involves being able to slip into a character as a hand to a glove, being someone else, zooming or sauntering through events. Sometimes it's not immersive that way, but it always involves the words pulling my eyes/mind along inexorably. The text takes away all my will to stop reading, when all goes well. Speaking of d/s relationships. :->
** In re Oprah's Book Clubn, is it just me, or is Sheri S. Tepper's Gibbon's Decline and Fall precisely the right sort of book, except that it has sentient dinosaur-descendants in it?
In re Oprah's Book Clubn, is it just me, or is Sheri S. Tepper's Gibbon's Decline and Fall precisely the right sort of book, except that it has sentient dinosaur-descendants in it?
Most any Tepper would do, if they weren't all science fiction. I mean, can you picture the furor over The Gate to Women's Country, or The Family Tree?
Grass might be a bit much, I guess.
Avram@70 on Asimov servicing his own kink.
This explains both his output (what else but a compulsive activity could've produced so much) and the occasional whiff of unexplainable creepiness I get from his books, that stale odor of old cigars and uncirculated air, of being not unwelcome as a reader, but not totally necessary either.
"For me, writing is just thinking out loud," Asimov once said.
JackWomack @190 on being a power bottom.
First, wow. Second, I am eyeing the copy of "Going, Going, Gone" on the shelf over my head somewhat suspicioulsy now.
Sean @59 on tops and bottoms
I will never quite think about reading in the same way. A new piece of mental furniture added, thank you.
But I have to ask, what about those bottoms, power bottoms especially (thank you Mr. Womack, for giving me permission to use that term here on Making Light) who are secretly in control of the relationship, getting all the satisfaction they want, all the protection, and all the while leading their partner to new places. I think, if Gene Wolfe, for example is any kind of bottom, he is that kind. I can't believe I just typed that. I mean, this is a guy whose major work is about a torturer with some serious kinks to work out, right? All the masks and hidden sexual violence of Severian. It all makes sense now ...
abi #192:
Swing and miss. Even the quote you provide declares The Quiet War to be "excellent" and a "better novel" while Scalzi's title is "pleasant but mediocre." Further, Roberts makes NO claim as to TQW's difficulty—and McAuley is not a difficult writer—nor does Roberts claim that TQW is good because it is difficult and denies the reader pleasure.
But your miss is more or less identical to the other misses I've seen yesterday and today. The mere claim that Book A is good and Book B isn't as good is insufficient. As far as why so many people see "Death to pleasure! Read the hard, obscure, incomprehensible stuff because it is hard!" in comment and claims that contain none of those imperatives, I can only suggest a reread of PNH's comment #50.
One thing that is puzzling me a bit about this discussion is that a lot of people seem to be writing as if fiction were divided into literary and genre - genre, therefore, just being whatever does not have the virtues and/or faults of literary writing. But this is not so; there is a vast amount of 'mainstream' fiction that is not literary by any ordinary criterion.
I'm wondering why this escapes notice. One reason may be that genre people were often forced to read literary fiction at school, and literary people quite often read genre fiction for relaxation, so they register on one another's radar in a way that the great mass of popular fiction doesn't. But reflecting on some of Nick Mamatas' comments, I think it may also be the case that SF/F just has more in common with literary fiction than the mass of popular fiction has with either - both present a kind of challenge; with both it often makes sense to ask 'What is the big idea of this work?'.
And what about the idea of being a versatile reader?
Sorry, couldn't resist. But seriously, it does provide a compelling metaphor for what goes on when I choose to pick up Henry James v. P.D. James, say.
PNH @ #7 I am not interested in telling anybody that their reading tastes are wrong. I am extremely interested in how and why people read, and the purposes to which they put their reading.
First, I read to be entertained. I want to enjoy the trip that starts with the first sentence and have a good trip and an enjoyable time all the way to the last period. I like a strong narrative, interesting characters, and engrossing plot. Lacking a plot, some goal no matter how simple will do. Morals and/or messages are welcome -- as long as they are not preachy or try to hit me over the head with their improving ways. They are also optional. I have read plenty of good books that lack both moral and message. Again, it's all about me being entertained -- and I have ecclectic tastes.
Second, I read to learn. (This is mostly for my non-fiction selections, although it can apply to my fiction, too. Alt-History is the best example of this.) Writing style is important. I may be very interested in the subject, but if the author bores me, the book goes away.
Third, I read to share. My friends and siblings and I swap books out all the time. We like to talk about them, too. Or not. The best part of making a new friend is the ability to borrow from their personal libraries and finding a gem I never knew about before. In some cases, I discover a new author that I must collect.
Fourth, I read to find enduring tales and "new friends, soon to be old". I'm currently going through my personal library (I do this about every 5 years) because I'm out of shelf space. The stories that don't stand up to multiple readings get culled. With these stories, the journey is as important to me as the destination.
Fifth, I read to suit my mood. Some people crave certain foods. I crave certain stories. There is something to be said for a Popcorn Novel at the end of a long, aggravating day where all I do is solve other people's problems. Ditto for Bubblegum, Fluff and Pure Escapism. I've heard some people call these "guilty pleasures." I call them essential. Some days, I just have to buckle a swash or go crazy. Other days, I feel a driving need to improve my mind with Something Autodidactish.
In re the urges by 'literary' writers to continually shout, "But it's not Science Fiction!", I'm forced to share two illuminating exemplar books.
Margaret Atwood has repeatedly stated in public that she Does Not Write that sf stuff, she writes real good literature. However, Oryx and Crake is a far-future dystopic novel about (among other things) humans raised to grow transplant organs, transgenic animals, and cloning. However, it can't possibly be sf, because she says it isn't (partly, in her view, because it isn't about "things that haven't been invented yet," apparently to her a key part of sf).
On the other hand, Tom Hyman's novel Jupiter's Daughter rewards reading in parallel with Nancy Kress's Beggars in Spain books. Despite the former supposedly being a 'thriller' and not 'sf', they're basically about the same thing: a mysteeerious process is created that can modify one's embryos/future children to create a superhuman race that does not need to sleep and is intellectually brilliant.
The major difference between the books is that Kress makes such a child the protagonist and looks at what happens to society, long-term, when there are enough modified children out there to form a sizeable minority. Hyman instead looks at the spy-vs-spy infighting about who gets to own/control the process, and the book ends before any of the children grow to maturity.
A minor difference (but amusing to me) is that Hyman's science is laughably bad, of the 'actuate the verteron field' sort, only he uses real-world science words to do his Treknobabble. At one point he has a nanny surreptitiously save snippets of an engineered child's cut hair to ship to someone interested in reverse-engineering the process ... instead of, oh, I don't know, surreptitiously taking a cheek swab while the kid's asleep?!? Sigh.
abi @ #12
I'll accept that people with academic degrees in English are (a) having fun with literature and (b) advancing the state of human knowledge, if no one in this thread tells me I'm wrong and stupid for liking what I like, or thinking about this stuff without the official toolkit.
I'm one of those with and English degree, but I never got beyond the bachelor's level. Abi is so right about the dominance games. It's even more apparent on the inside where the dedicated ones live.
In the end, the "you're ruining it* for me!" factor trumped everything else I wanted from my academic education. I'll never tell anyone what they're reading is trash, or stupid or not acceptable. Nor will I demand they explain why they like it -- or not. For me, it's enough that they read.
---
* "It" being my enjoyment of reading.
Lee @ 174: BTW, if I can't understand the work, I consider it the fault of the writer, because the writer is the professional; it's his or her job to communicate with the reader. I can follow quantum physics if it's put into layman's terms, so I have a lot of trouble considering myself too stupid to understand a work of fiction.
This is like saying "if I can't make it down the ski slope, it's the resort's fault. I played varsity soccer, so I know I'm a good athlete."
It took me three tries to read Gravity's Rainbow; the last time it was a thrilling page-turner. I wasn't any smarter, I'd just gained some appropriate skills somewhere along the way. That doesn't make me a better reader than anyone else--my wife is less likely than I am to read "difficult" books, but when we read the same book I can pretty much guarantee that she'll be able to discuss it more insightfully and cogently than I will--but it means that I'm a better reader than I once was.
Nick @196:
I beg to differ.
None of the adjectives he uses about The Quiet War are about the reader's pleasure. It's "good", "excellent" and "a better novel" than the "mediocre" and "pleasant but mediocre" Zoe's Tale. But "good" and its synonyms, in this context, is not clearly the same as "something you'll enjoy reading".
The reasons I am urged to read it are to "broaden my aesthetic horizons", "stretch myself" and "venture out of my comfort zone" for the "sanity of my soul".
There's a word for that, and it isn't "enjoyable". It's "worthy".
Now, from what I hear, that's selling the book short. But it's still reading as medicine, and it's patronizing and unappealing.
In the play Wit, the dying English professor says that the reason she studies and writes about John Donne is because he's difficult.
She's right. He is.
The play then goes on to expose the ways in which her intellectualization of her world has left her dehumanized. We are meant to find the visit from her former student who reads her the children's tale "The Runaway Bunny" a consoling return to humanity for her--particularly since she declines with a whimper when her student offers to read her some Donne instead.
And okay, in the world of the play, I can take that.
But as someone who also specializes in Donne and other 17th century metaphysical writers, I can say that those of us who choose them don't, on the whole, choose them because they're difficult. And we certainly don't choose them because they are overly intellectual and unemotional. We choose them because they leave us breathless, ecstatic, enraptured. And one of the tools they use in order to produce that effect is their difficulty.
They aren't good *because* they are difficult. They're good. They are also difficult. They work at the height of their intellectual and emotional powers and they demand the same from their readers.
OK, I'm picking up the vague impression that Jonathan Franzen, whatever fine qualities he may have, is a fucking asshole. In the Oprah situation, any non-asshole would simply have smiled quietly to himself; after all, any non-asshole would reason, how does it hurt ME if they read the book and fail to grasp its concepts? But Franzen appears to believe that his writing will be rendered unclean by being read outside the ivory towers of Akademe. And refusing a handshake SOLELY because someone is a science fiction writer goes in barely-resist-pushing-him-in-front-of-a-bus territory as far as I'm concerned.
Also he disses his own mother by using the fact that she would have liked Contract-model fiction to diss IT (if that sounds circular, think of how the word 'gay' is used by teenagers today).
So: does anyone know of any cases where he's been courteous to anyone, at any time?
By the way, Adam Roberts is an asshole too, and I'm not just saying that because I'm a Scalzi fan.
Elliott 193: forced at grade-point
That's brilliant. I'm stealing it, just so you know. I'll say where I got it.
Perhaps a part of the problem is that the sort of books taught at school are taught by teachers who don't much care for them. We complain about Dickens, but he was the Joss Whedon or J. Michael Straczynski of his day, writing enormously popular serial works. So wht do they come over so badly in school?
Shakespeare isn't easy, but I think I picked up on my teacher's enthusiasm. But, crikey, there was so much we had to read so as to pass exams which didn't get the same boost. And, in other ways, I think the teachers I had were not very good.
Of course, we suffered from being a bit too old for the home video revolution. We got one viewing of a 16mm print of Julius Caesar (Marlon Brando as Mark Anthony) but it wasn't exam syllabus for my year, and so the film didn't really feed into the teaching for me. I suppose I could have picked up something from Olivier's version of Henry V: now you even get Doctor Who filming at the Globe Theatre.
Heck, since there has been the BBC Shakespeare, and I have movie versions of Hamlet, Richard III. Henry V, Twelfth Night (which was the play I remember reading through in class), Much Ado About Nothing, and Love's Labours Lost (the musical version). And nobody told me that Will was very likely to have been a Catholic sympathiser at least, was involved in an attempted rebellion, and lived in a London where Africans, slave and free, were valued professional entertainers. Nor, for that matter, that he had a high-profile role in the entry of King James to London.
And the big Shakerspeare for me was Macbeth: it was in my O-level exam. I was told about the allusion to Banquo's heirs and the Stewarts, and hence King James, but not a word about Henry Garnet and equivocation.
(People say exams have become easier. With the internet, these things are dead easy to discover.)
Of course, it might just be my sensitive fannish mind, but I can't help feeling short-changed by the lit teachers. And a bit grumpy about the holes in what I remember of English language teaching. But I have a .pdf of the first edition of Fowler's Modern English Usage, and I kind of like the way the old-fashioned beggar approaches the problems of using the language. I can write bad sonnets, pun atrociously, and write 50,000 words for NaNoWriMo. Maybe some of it is down to my teachers, but how many of their pupils have managed that?
I mean, I've met people in "professional" jobs who don't know what a sonnet is, and it's hardly an obscure verse form.
But if the English teachers were any good, would there be the same mystique about "literary" fiction? Would Dickens and Austen and Hardy be on a special sort of pedestal, instead of being competent and memorable? Would Six Charlies in Search of an Author work for a modern audience?
All these questions and more will be answered next week, same time, same channel.
abi @ 203... Some time ago, I finished an SF novel I had very much enjoyed. When asked if it was good, I responded:
"Well, I liked it."
abi @203:
Beg all you like, you're still inaccurate. You are torturing the text to make it say what you wish it to say. Roberts is NOT saying to read TQW to broaden your horizons, etc. He gives TQW as an example of a good book after explaining that it is a good idea to broaden one's horizons by reading widely and outside one one's comfort zone, not that the act of reading TQW will make you a better reader with a saner soul.
I refer again to Comment #50. The people you are arguing with are not here. Indeed, they are no anywhere so far as I can tell.
I knew that Abi likes to bind text, but she tortures it too?
I really, really don't like cantaloupe--as in, I find its smell and flavor nasty. My wife (at first) found it very strange, since she loves cantaloupe. But no amount of "give it a chance" or "most people love it" or "you don't know what you're missing" or even "it's good for you--full of vitamin whatever" can ever overcome my primal experience. Now, artistic taste is not rooted in the snake-brain (which is where I take my smell-based disgust of cantaloupe originates), but its base components can be buried pretty deep in the psyche. And I have had people push at me artistic cantaloupe--works and traditions that I just don't care for and (at my age and level of experience) know I never will. Free jazz. Experimental theatre. Soap operas. "Tintern Abbey." Slasher movies. Much mainstream, highbrow fiction. If I were an inexperienced 20-year-old, it might make sense to tell me that I should try Wordsworth or Sun Ra or Cormac McCarthy, since I would not yet have collapsed the wave functions of my personality and aesthetic universe. But most adult personalities (with the exception of the constitutionally neophilic) really do know what they like. And if it's cantaloupe, I say to hell with it. Or, if I'm with my wife, "Here, hon, take my portion."
Dave Bell @206: When I'm emperor, teachers not hopelessly in love with their subjects will be made into administrators. Wait, that already happens. OK, all teachers, etc. My wife is refusing to consider retirement because she can't give up re-reading and talking about Austen (who, by the way, completely deserves that pedestal), Homer, Ovid, and Shakespeare and the rest of her heroes. I'd say that it takes a special anti-talent to make Shakespeare unappealing--though maybe crappy teaching technique will suffice. And the wealth of recorded performances you note ought to compensate for even that.
Nick 208: I read that quoted passage pretty much the way abi did. When someone uses only one enjoyment-word ('pleasant'), he's discounting enjoyment as a criterion. Assuming Adam Roberts isn't an entirely incompetent writer, his sneering use of the word 'pleasant' to diss Zoe's Tale indicates that he looks down on people who think enjoyability should be a criterion.
If he didn't mean that, he said it wrong.
I once told my seventh-grade teacher that she should give this book I'd just reported on a try, because it was really good.
She replied, "I only read things that make me a better person. How is reading that book going to make me a better person?"
(She meant reading Scripture, of course.) I didn't have the resources to answer her back then, but I could have said "Because anything you read makes you a better person." Too abstract for her, I expect. But actually I think that's an appallingly narrow criterion for choosing one's reading, unless one thinks oneself so deeply in need of improvement that all one's free time should be taken up with the more, shall we say, medicinal sort of texts.
For the same reason, I think Adam Roberts is being narrowminded and snobbish (in this case; I know nothing more about him and probably shouldn't have called him an asshole above), and recommending "improving" books over "enjoyable" ones.
I think what's at issue here is the definition of the term 'good book'. Adam Roberts thinks it means a book that improves the reader; I think it means a book that engages the reader and leads to an enjoyable experience. And that means the value of 'good' is reader-dependent; while Everybody Poops is a "good book" for my five-year-old nephew (oh wait, he's six now, wow), Dhalgren would not be. I, on the other hand, enjoyed my first reading of Dhalgren (the most challenging book my teenage self had attempted to that point) so much that I read it again two weeks later—and enjoyed it even more. Subsequent rereadings have revealed more and more underlying textures and hidden meanings (some of which I have confirmed were not intended by Delany).
I think the attempt to establish universal and fixed criteria for what constitutes a "good book" is fundamentally wrong-headed.
In my idiolect, "pleasant" is a very mild compliment, akin to "satisfactory." Calling a book "pleasant" is damning with faint praise, not saying there's something wrong with pleasure. Calling a book "pleasant but mediocre" is doing this even more clearly.
I can't see any way that "excellent" and "better" are not "enjoyment words" here. Who would think to say "it was excellent, and I also enjoyed it?" It's the opposite case--grudging admiration--that requires explanation.
He's being kind of a dick, but a "wake up, sheeple!" dick rather than an "eat your broccoli" dick.
Russell Letson @ 210... If I were an inexperienced 20-year-old, it might make sense to tell me that I should try Wordsworth or Sun Ra or Cormac McCarthy
I'm going to have to give the latter a try, especially after the con I attended this weekend, where I chatted with a writer who said he's been called the Cormac McCarthy of HellBoy stories.
TNH #114: my list of sure-fire works for inexperienced readers, which is set in 10 pt. type with narrow leading...
Am the only one who really wants to see this list?
Please? Pretty please with sugar on top?
Elliott Mason @193: However, my sister is in her twenties, and actively seeking a life partner, and I desperately do NOT want her to use the same criteria to choose same that Bella finds so useful?
What makes you think that she will?
David Brin has written that medieval-setting fantasy novels are morally bad because they depict feudal monarchies, and therefor must also be endorsing anti-democratic politics. It's obvious to most fantasy readers of my acquaintance that Brin's argument is nonsense, yet somehow it's not obvious to most SF and fantasy fans of my acquaintance that the same argument applied to Stephanie Meyer's vampire romance novels is also nonsense.
Re Dave Bell at 206: I was at state schools in Britain 20+ years ago, and with regard to the teaching of English back then I'm unable to work out what the hell the teachers were trying to do. English lessons seemed to consist of either reading through a book as a class (one pupil at a time reading aloud to everyone else, with discussions after each passage—it took us a month to get through Animal Farm), or, when we were younger, doing endless comprehension exercises. (Comprehension exercises... whenever I see an edition of a novel that's aimed at the book-group market and see the list of suggested discussion topics in the back pages, I have a depressing flashback). Mixed in with all this was creative writing with inadequate feedback and very little formal grammar taught except when a teacher had a particular bee in his or her bonnet about some aspect of usage. This was all before the National Curriculum.
There was very little encouragement to go off and read serious literature on one's own for pleasure. As a mechanism for putting you off reading for pleasure it couldn't be bettered. Good job I stumbled on SF in my late teens (it's not much of an exaggeration to say I read only the fiction I absolutely had to before then).
Xopher @ 211 & 212:
No, if you read it the way abi did, you also read it wrong, for the same reasons abi did.
See; we can play this game all day long. Roberts thinks TQW is a good book. He says it in that paragraph, and he says it elsewhere in that post. He thinks it's a better book than Zoe's Tale.
And he says that "good readers" are likely to see what he means.
That's it. When you say "Adam Roberts thinks it means a book that improves the reader" you are MANUFACTURING something that does not exist in what Roberts said.
What I'm getting out of all this: 'YMMV.'
Which it does. There are books I read in and for school, that I wouldn't want to read again even at grade-point (thanks for that one!), and others that I would, because they improve on re-reading. (I think I'm going to track down the 'Horrid Novels', just for fun.)
I suspect that with reading for school, it's wrapped up a lot with the teacher, the class, and the teaching - my English-lit teacher was very good with Shakespeared, and could get her mind around me reading in 'sight and sound' terms.
Tim, while I see your point, I think he's contrasting 'excellent' with 'pleasant'. If he'd said "Give it a try; with a little effort you'll enjoy it too" I wouldn't be saying any of this. Instead (going beyond the part abi quoted now) he says
...the very heart’s-blood of literature is to draw people out of their comfort zone; to challenge and stimulate them, to wake and shake them; to present them with the new, and the unnerving, and the mind-blowing.He spends the rest of his blogpost going on about how we should vote for books (and other works) that are good (by his criteria) so that people outside the genre and its fandom will see that SF is really brilliant. Never, at any point in the blogpost, does he talk about enjoying anything other than the things he disses. He's more concerned with the reputation of the genre outside itself than with anything approaching enjoyment. (He does mention that METAtropolis is his own personal vision of hell; get the feeling Scalzi is his bête noir?)
I think he should endow his own awards, and have them juried for literary merit by people who are not fans in any sense. Maybe he can get Jonathan Asshole Franzen to chair the committee. In other words, he wants the Hugos to be something other than what they are: an award that says "for people who like this sort of thing [i.e. science fiction fans], this is the sort of thing they like." That's all the Hugos mean. (Well, that and a sales bump.) If you're a science fiction fan, a Hugo means you're likely to enjoy the book, if you're like most other fans (at least the ones who join WorldCon, which is another conversation entirely).
And a "wake up sheeple" jerk is jerk enough.
Nick: Could you dial back your tone a bit, please? You're coming across as quite a bit more hostile than I think is justified anything anyone has said. If you're offended by what I've said, please say so. Just getting nastier doesn't win any arguments.
My statement that I read it the same way abi did was intended to point out that her reading was not idiosyncratic to her. That's all.
Now: read the paragraph I quote from Adam's essay in my last post, and tell me that's not trying to improve readers. If you think it isn't, I think we fundamentally disagree on the meaning of the word 'improve'.
Yes, he says TQW is a good book. From the rest of his essay, it's clear that enjoyability is not one of the criteria he uses to define that term.
sb "...justified by anything..."
P J Evans: Yup, that's it. Part of the problem is that a lot of us aren't reliably good about talking about your pleasures, what triggers them and how they feel to us. It doesn't help that there are enough people who bolster their own sense of self by trampling on expressions of pleasure to breed a lot of defensive reactions, either.
#193
[ And yet, Gatsby is the one all American high school students are forced at grade-point to read, analyze, and write endless reports about, to the point that I -- a confirmed lifelong book-horse* -- was so fed up by it and bored with it that I managed completely to miss any of the gory description surrounding the car crash. ]
High School students are still on the opening act of their lives. Why would or should (most) h.s. students penetrate the gravity, the sadness, the nostalgia, the peculiar historical qualities of what it is to be a member of the United States who is an outsider due to poverty, class or citizenship? Or rather, all of these elements and more, all together in one novel?
It's like the assignments in h.s. for Silas Marner and Ethan Frome -- wotinhell are They thinking? There are countless wonderful novels to assign h.s. students that aren't about the failures and sadnesses of middle-aged people and their miseries.
I have a 12-year-old friend, whose favorite novel while she was 11, was The Kiterunner. That book, though classified an adult novel, spoke so loudly to her due to the age of the primary protagonists, because of the setting so far from what she knew -- just everything about this adult novel -- that she re-read it 5 times!
Why do we torture our children with fiction that they aren't really for yet? I adore Silas Marner, but I didn't read it until I was in my late 20's.
Love, C.
There is, I think, a quite widespread use of 'pleasure', to mean not just 'everything pleasant', but something more restricted, the precise nature of which I find it hard to define. There are some things we do 'for pleasure' - i.e. because we find them pleasant, and for no other reason - and there are other things we do for other reasons, e.g. because we find them challenging, or because we learn from them, etc. - which we may indeed enjoy, but aren't just doing them 'for pleasure'; the enjoyment is consequent on something else.
So when Roberts et al. are accused of 'privileging difficulty over pleasure' I take it the point is not that they think we shouldn't enjoy what we read; it's that they think that mere enjoyability by itself isn't a good reason for reading something. There seems to be some truth in this accusation.
(That said, 'difficulty' isn't a good word for the thing they privilege - the aren't so absurd as to think that the fact that something is difficult by itself gives us reason to read it. And I agree that 'pleasant but mediocre' doesn't mean that pleasantness is a demerit - rather, it means pleasantness is its only merit, and not a great one - but that still implies he's privileging something else over pleasure.)
Nick, @208. I read the quoted passage the same way that abi and Xopher did.
And, this probably won't count with you since I cannot quote them, I had teachers who placed difficulty or "suitability for analysis" above pleasure in reading. Not just what we had to read for class, but what we should read personally. Perhaps they meant that pleasure was simply a lesser consideration than difficulty, rather than it should not matter at all, but then they were not clear.
Nick,
I am fundamentally unconvinced that Adam Roberts's prime criterion for "a good novel" is that the reader will enjoy reading it. The context in which he uses "good" and "excellent" lead me to believe that he is using the terms in a more technical sense, as in "well-constructed".
Throughout the essay, he places value on works that are "challenging", "unnerving", and "outside the comfort zone". When he compares the Hugo shortlist to the Clarke shortlist, he praises even the "failed" candidate for "trying to do something a little new with the form of the novel". "It’s an experiment in voice and tone, and ambitious in its way." This is in contrast to the "pleasant" and "cozy" Hugo candidates he criticizes.
Really, very little of the essay is about enjoyment. That's not to say that he doesn't enjoy reading these challenging, envelope-pushing books—I am sure he does. But that's not why he's recommending them to fandom.
Now, you can wave your MFA in my face and tell me to stfu because I'm just an amateur Reader Of Stuff and you have a Degree, but that's kind of what we're trying to get away from, isn't it? Or was I wasting my bandwidth in comment 12?
Xopher @220, I'm not sure improvement is the issue. Enjoyment is the issue. Do you think Roberts doesn't enjoy reading the material he prefers, that he forces himself through it like a beginning exerciser doing his morning routine, even if he didn't bother to actually use the word "enjoy" in that particular blog post?
Avram, it doesn't seem at all implausible that as Andrew's #225 suggests, Roberts gets a variety of satisfactions from his fiction reading, none of which may particularly be well described as "pleasure". Or at least that the pleasures he cultivates and welcomes are all removed from the kinds of pleasures a bunch of us are talking about here.
I don't know that it's true in his case, but I know folks with a deep appreciation for good craft in various ways for whom "pleasure" is never really the point, at least.
Nick: Could you dial back your tone a bit, please?
You first. Nothing I've written here is more hostile than, "his sneering use of the word 'pleasant' to diss Zoe's Tale indicates that he looks down on people who think enjoyability should be a criterion." Your entire increasingly silly misreading of Roberts's post simply tells me that you have exactly the baggage already discussed in comment #50. It's really not worth talking about enjoyment with someone who can look at the Roberts's enthusiastic use of the terms "stimulate" "mind-blowing" "the new" and "wake and shake" and come away with "enjoyability is not one of the criteria" Roberts uses to determine which books he believes to be good.
I don't know whether you really have reading comprehension difficulties (I suspect not, given your sentences), have a penchant for arguing yourself into a corner and trying to bluster your way out, or if you really just have so much comment #50 style baggage that you assume the worst of Roberts's comments and fill in the blanks with even more dire claims he's never made, but in the end it doesn't matter. Your remarks are limned with hostility toward Roberts (you already called him and asshole and then caught yourself -- funny that I never mistakenly typed a-s-s-h-o-l-e in the twenty years I've been online) and show a simple inability for whatever reason to understand Roberts's very simple claim:
The books on the Hugo shortlist are mediocre, which is bad because I think the Hugos are supposed to be about the best books. I like books that wow me and do something new. The Hugo books don't, except for one, but that one didn't really work for me either. I hope Hugo voters put books that wowed me on the shortlist next year because the Hugos have a high public profile. Here are some suggestions.
Is Roberts hostile? Sure, it's a polemic. Is he being a bit imperious? Of course, but no more imperious than, say, you Xopher. Is it a fair reading to say that Roberts doesn't like enjoyable books or doesn't find books enjoyable or that he holds enjoyability distinct from quality? No. Not at all. Not in the slightest. That interpretation tells me much more about the interpreter than it does the text.
Now, I don't care much for Roberts's actual claims: of course popularity contests are going to be popularity contests. I don't care about the Hugos, though I did enjoy receiving my little rocketpin. I think some of the books he champions in his posts and certainly the movies he champions are just as mediocre as the books he decries. But he is absolutely not saying "enjoyment bad/difficulty the only good." This is transparently so because the books Roberts champions are no more difficult than the ones he labels mediocre.
So again, can anyone actually attach a name and a quote to anyone ever who has said "enjoyment bad/difficulty the only good"? And if not, will anyone out there actually stop claiming that there are legions of teachers and critics and snooty bloggers and Japanese instrumentalists and MFA students who do just that?
Nick Mamatas: You're not going to like my answer either, because again I can't link to it, but I have gotten exactly that attitude from my mother. She is not SF hostile--she has read and enjoyed some and is open to my suggestions for more that she might enjoy--but she is openly puzzled when I tell her that I read a lot of things simply because I enjoy them. She wants to be learning something*/be exposed to new ideas/have her mind stretched by what she reads. That's fine; I like that, too--but not all the time. But she is puzzled at best, disdainful at worst of reading simply for enjoyment.
*not necessarily facts; something about how people are works for her, too
Now, you can wave your MFA in my face and tell me to stfu because I'm just an amateur Reader Of Stuff and you have a Degree, but that's kind of what we're trying to get away from, isn't it? Or was I wasting my bandwidth in comment 12?
It's always very funny when someone manufactures some insult, attributes it to someone else, and then gets sore at being insulted by the person who didn't say or do anything.
Roberts is clearly talking about enjoyment. What does Roberts enjoy? He enjoys books that challenge, stimulate, offer something new, unnerve, and blow his mind. He refers to these books as good, excellent, and brilliant and enthusiastically encourages others to read them.
The defensiveness in this thread is hysterical, and in more ways than one. Because Roberts didn't stand and up and swear, "By the sacred Gernsback and the holy Campbell I do swear that I will only enjoy the books that Fandom Assembled does and only for Fandom-Approved reasons, and I will be sure to pre-emptively denounce The Intellectual and The Literary and the Schoolteacher and the Beret-Wearing Homosexual In the Back of the Cafe who is their Servant if on such an occasion that I like something else for reasons that are my own, so help me ghod in heaven" he's a schoolmarm telling people to take their medicine. And that medicine? The Batman movie, as opposed to the Hellboy movie. Uh, okay.
Wow, Nick, I read the first paragraph of yours at 220, the first couple of lines of the second, glanced through the rest, and concluded without reading further that no productive conversation can take place between us, at least on this topic, and probably on most others. I'll look through your posting history to see if I'm wrong on that last point, but our conversation in this thread is over.
Avram, I didn't mean he doesn't enjoy it. I meant that isn't the reason he gives for anyone wanting to read it.
Bruce: Yeah, that. Avram, what Bruce says here.
She wants to be learning something*/be exposed to new ideas/have her mind stretched by what she reads.
My mother is the same way. (She calls her mystery reading "idiot reading".) However, that isn't the same as saying that the only good books are difficult books that require work and that enjoyment is bad. So it's not that I dislike your answer because it's not linkable, but because it doesn't actually match my request.
So again, the name and some evidence of anyone, anywhere, you thinks that the best way to determine the quality of a book is how "difficult" it is and how much "work" it involves, who dislikes pleasure.
It's a trick question, of course, because the organism always seeks pleasure. Your mother takes pleasure in learning something new about people (or talking squid, or the French Revolution) and thus that is what she seeks out. She's not torturing herself for the sake of social status or to impress you or for occult reasons.
My friend Brian chews tobacco. Why? He likes it. Why don't I chew tobacco? I don't like it. it doesn't taste to me the way it tastes to him, or at least what he likes in his mouth is not what I like in my mouth. My failure to find pleasure in dip does not make me anti-pleasure and pro-eating gross things that aren't enjoyable like dip is.
Nick, we acknowledge your expertise, but you're edging further and further into "jerk."
YA author John Green recently made the point in his blog that reviewers often concentrate on the likeability of a book as if the only thing a book can do is be likeable.
I'm in no way a fan of reading-as-broccoli and reading-as-medicine, but since I read Beloved in ninth grade I've been hitting up against books I found challenging, frustrating, infuriating, and wonderful if I refused to let myself be deterred. Rabelais in French, Murakami in Japanese, James Joyce, Greer Gilman, Kelly Link. It's not broccoli; it's pleasure, though it's the pleasure of hiking up a mountain or wrestling with packages in Linux. Often it's something I wouldn't do if I didn't have to, and yet, when I have to I'm glad I did it. Every so often--not as often as I should, perhaps, but the "shoulds" of reading are problems in themselves--I do try to tackle something far from my expertise and enjoyment, just to discover what’s there that I don’t know yet.
I’m 27. I’m not too old to discover that I do, in fact, like eggplant (when it’s broiled in miso).
A few months ago I picked up the Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories. I pretty much hate it, or at least, it’s way too much of exactly the same thing: the alcoholics, the desperate relationships, the flat-on-purpose prose. I don’t, in fact, think that it improved me, except in allowing me to cross that particular style of short fiction off the list of things I should try just in case they’re actually really neat. Maybe all it’s given me is this experience of confronting my own frustration with the stories. That was kind of… worth it. And just as reading for pleasure should never be dismissed as mere escapism, I wouldn’t want that experience dismissed as broccoli. Or “worthy.”
no productive conversation can take place between us, at least on this topic, and probably on most others
Given that our last conversation involved you accusing me of hating someone and then claiming that my hatred was obvious to all—which you had to sorta kinda back down on finally after I objected—I suspected as much all morning. My purpose in debunking your misreading of Roberts's post was to benefit third parties who might be reading this thread.
Mary Aileen @ 231... my mother (...) is openly puzzled when I tell her that I read a lot of things simply because I enjoy them
...while I come from a family that is perplexed by the idea of getting any pleasure from any reading.
Re: Margaret Atwood, I read a review of her latest by Ursula K LeGuin in the Guardian on Saturday, in which LeGuin regrets that since The Year of the Flood isn't SF, she must review it as a 'realistic novel':
To my mind, The Handmaid's Tale, Oryx and Crake and now The Year of the Flood all exemplify one of the things science fiction does, which is to extrapolate imaginatively from current trends and events to a near-future that's half prediction, half satire. But Margaret Atwood doesn't want any of her books to be called science fiction. [..] Who can blame her? I feel obliged to respect her wish, although it forces me, too, into a false position. I could talk about her new book more freely, more truly, if I could talk about it as what it is, using the lively vocabulary of modern science-fiction criticism, giving it the praise it deserves as a work of unusual cautionary imagination and satirical invention. As it is, I must restrict myself to the vocabulary and expectations suitable to a realistic novel, even if forced by those limitations into a less favourable stance.
Duck and Cover!
Meanwhile, yeah, I wonder if there is a problem with some books taught at h.s. level needing a more mature mindset. Which doesn't mean you should limit it to a YA classification. Possibly literary education needs more awareness of the psychological changes that take place--they are trying to teach teenagers, and their perception of the human condition changes, a lot.
OK, I remember one of the earlier books I was faced with was The Silver Sword. And the play She Stoops to Conquer. Steve with a Book @217 describes something close to what I remember.
Maybe it's lucky that the BBC broadcast a radio version of the Foundation Trilogy, and I came across Babel-17 in the school library. It may have been the only item of SF there.
Nick @234:
It's always very funny when someone manufactures some insult, attributes it to someone else, and then gets sore at being insulted by the person who didn't say or do anything.Allow me to add to my earlier remark that you are also embarrassing yourself. To be blunt, you have badly misread your context and the people you're dealing with. They may not have your en pointe facility with litcritspeak, but they're not stupid.
They're also good at keeping track of conversations. For instance, Abi and Xopher are both accomplished moderators, in their different styles, and they normally have no problem conducting civil and enlightening conversations, no matter how diverse the views are under discussion.
We don't argue to win. We argue to find out interesting things. I would have assumed you'd prefer the latter.
for Emily H. @ #236
"The only people opposed to escape are the jailors"
-Tolkien
re 232: Nick, I'm certainly not going to rise up to defend the Hugos, if for no other reason than I haven't read any of the nominees this year. And I am certainly capable of my own acts of snobbery for and against the genre. However, I would join those who are reading Roberts's treatise as being pretty prescriptive. For example, when he lists several things he thought should be looked for on next year's short list, he says of them, "They’re not all of them completely perfect; but they all of them, in various ways, push the envelope, try new stuff, shake you up." He says a lot of other things through the piece about what a great book ought to be like, and they add up to a lit prof's theory of good-book-itude. And if he doesn't say "prefer this over something 'pleasant'", I am tempted to infer that he thinks that one's taste should be developed to prefer the envelope-pushers over the merely 'pleasant'.
Funny, Nick, I read back those earlier posts (as I said I would) and saw them as a misunderstanding, amicably resolved. My poor reading comprehension again, no doubt. I came back here to say that you've been quite reasonable and amiable in the past, and that I was unwilling to discard you entirely.
I haven't changed my mind.
NelC: Ooo, burrrrrnnnnn. And well-deserved, though Atwood has (I'm told) backed off from her "No! No! My work is not SF! LA LA LA" stance to some extent.
That is a great quote from LeGuin.
I really like Atwood's novels (except for Oryx and Crake, which I couldn't get through).
But I'm so sorry she came out with her Year of the Flood at the same time as The Year Before the Flood came out.
But maybe it's ok? She's Science Fiction, and according to amazon, The Year Before the Flood is "21st Century History."
Love, C.
Atwood:
IM IN UR GENRE, STEALIN UR TROPES
I IZ TOO JENTEEL 4 SKIFFY
Science Fiction:
ROFLMAO
U NOT SIT SO FUNNY IF U STOP HIDIN ROKKIT SHIP
Nick Mamatas @196
The mere claim that Book A is good and Book B isn't as good is insufficient. As far as why so many people see "Death to pleasure! Read the hard, obscure, incomprehensible stuff because it is hard!" in comment and claims that contain none of those imperatives, I can only suggest a reread of PNH's comment #50.
I don't think it's about "Death to Pleasure" or PNH's @ #50 modern English Studies academia originated as a system of social control either.
I think it has to do with: 1) assumptions about work 2) assumptions about what it means to be "A Responsible Adult."
I helped a friend move a few years ago. When we packed up her library, she handed me Heinline's Stranger in a Strange Land to keep. She reminisced that the first time she read it, she and her husband had dissected the book so they could both read it at the same time -- not being able to afford two of them since they were both in college. The book she handed me was the one she bought for herself after their divorce. I knew she enjoyed science fiction, but her library was full of reference books (she was an architect and taught at the university where I work), histories and "literary works". I asked her why she had stopped actively reading SF -- as opposed to accepting occasional loaners from me.
Her response was a vague description of it being something she did when she was a kid, but life since then hadn't allowrd for it. I started quoting 1 Corinthians 13:11. When I was a child, I talked like a child.., She paraphrased the ending to "...When I became a woman, I put childish ways behind me. Then told me that was exactly right. Reading for simple enjoyment was kin to a child's playing. There was no value in it.
At work, I find myself mentoring college students. Getting the concept of "work should be fun and not just work" is difficult because all their lives they've been told "Being an adult means getting a job, paying your bills, saving for the future, getting married and having kids." Enjoyment is nowhere on that list*. Finding a job that they enjoy is a distant last to finding one that pays well, has good benefits, and won't take them too/will get them as far from home as possible.
Children have fun. Adults have obligations^.
So. Pleasure for pleasure's sake is by its very nature guilty. It produces nothing. It saves nothing. It prepares us for nothing. It only takes time and resources away from productive, responsible actions.
Reading for education or self-improvement or reading because it's work has far more value. For a given definition of value.
------
* Every so often I will quote The Princess Bride at work. More and more, I get blank looks, so I wind up pitching the movie (it being my first exposure to the tale). My latest intern thought it sounded good, funny, etc., but didn't actually do anything about it until the book was assigned for reading and in-class discussion. Once she had read the book she was all about renting the movie.
^ I shocked a teenaged niece** by admitting that I read YA, YA SF and YA fantasy. I was a grown up. I wasn't supposed to do that. She didn't buy my answer that I don't see the need to deprive myself of good fiction just because it was written for kids.
** I'm the "weird, but fun" aunt.
@248: I knew there was a reason I've been putting off growing up for so long. Maybe I'll skip it altogether. Mere oblivion and uninterrupted childhood, here I come.
Victoria, I've always suspected there was a class agenda in the idea that adults have no right to indulge themselves in unproductive entertainment, or to hope for fufilling work. I know you didn't discuss the "fulfilling work" half of that, but in my experience those two memes travel as a pair.
What's funny is that there's no matching condemnation for indulging yourself in stupid, mindless entertainment when you come home exhausted after work. It's still unproductive; you just don't enjoy it the way you enjoyed those childish things you supposedly put away.
(I keep that set of suspicions filed next to the idea that it's necessary for executives to have lots of vacations and perks because their working lives are so stressful, and the one about how financial traders have to be given huge bonuses because otherwise they'll quit their jobs.)
All our lives contain hard-to-solve problems, and it's appropriate for us to spend a reasonable amount of time and energy doing what we can about them. But why should we get told that it's our duty to spend all the rest of our spare brain power on questions which we already know are intractable? That isn't "being realistic." It's self-inflicted dullness.
Andrew M @225, CS Lewis, in his autobiography, drew a distinction between joy and (I think it was) pleasure that might be relevant here. Joy, for Lewis, was tied in with longing, wanting, and striving, in a way that mere pleasure wasn't. We haven't been drawing that distinction in this conversation -- I've seen pleasure and enjoyment used as synonyms -- but maybe we oughta, or something like it.
However, to get back to the original topic of this thread, that distinction, once drawn, is a different distinction from the one between genre and "literary" fiction, or between plot and plotlessness. One person's secondary-world fantasy comfort read is another person's incomprehensible massive series filled with unpronouncable names and bizarre unrealistic goings-on.
It also occurs to me that Sean Sakamoto's original top/bottom distinction is inside-out. It's not that literary authors are tops, and literary readers bottoms. It's that (among SF/F genre fans, and maybe others) "literary" is a label readers attach to books that make them feel like bottoms. This is why Dickens is considered literary today, when he was the JK Rowling of his time. Sean seems to be saying something similar further along in the thread.
Where I part from you, Sean, is where you say that more difficult works are written by authors who don't care as much about the reader, or where you say less difficult works are more compelling. You seem to believe that difficulty in a book arises from some kind of personality flaw in the author -- self-centeredness, or hostility towards the reader. I think that difficult books indicate that an author has faith that the reader will overcome the difficulty. Gene Wolfe's books, for example, are often like puzzles that the reader has to assemble, and you can't design a puzzle without giving some thought to the person who's going to be putting it together.
As far as compelling goes, I find that a certain minimal level of difficulty is necessary to keep me engaged with a work of long prose. Otherwise, I get bored.
Sean's description of easy genre works as more "immersive" also reminds me of some recent arguments in role-playing gaming, which I'd follow up on, but I don't actually remember the details of those arguments all that well, and besides, this thread has already eaten an hour or so of my day.
TNH #250: What's funny is that there's no matching condemnation for indulging yourself in stupid, mindless entertainment when you come home exhausted after work.
And that's the thing about "junk" reading. It's not stupid and mindless, it's just mind in a lower gear than what's happening at work.
Some people just have a higher level of mind-in-gear when having fun. They read mysteries and SF and sea stories, instead of vegging out or doing SuperMario.
And as to obligation, well! I've always had an obligation to enjoy myself. There are no guilty pleasures, just guilty hairshirts.
Victoria: I similarly shocked one of the 6th-grade girls in my son's after-school care when I saw her reading Coraline and commented "Oh, that's a great book!" I got a cautious eye and a "Interesting..." I seem to get that latter comment a lot.
Joann @252, don't diss Super Mario; it's pretty challenging. Tougher than a lot of SF I've read.
This whole conversation is land-mined full of dubious assumptions about what is or isn't difficult.
And if not, will anyone out there actually stop claiming that there are legions of teachers and critics and snooty bloggers and Japanese instrumentalists and MFA students who do just that?
Nick, I did just that. I did not give names because the individuals aren't around anymore, and they're not famous so it's not like you could contact them anyway. But I clearly talked about my experience with my teachers (high school teachers whose names I remember and one one college teacher whose name I have mercifully forgotten -- he made me read Faulkner's Absolom! Absolom! and I have never forgiven him) and you ignored what I said completely because it did not fit with your preconceived notions.
Now maybe because these people aren't famous they do not count, but let me assure you that high school teachers have the potential for having great impact - for good or ill -- in shaping reading habits. Especially as these teachers were charismatic and engaging individuals that I, personally, would have walked over coals for.
I was lucky in that I found what we were "supposed" to enjoy not too onerous -- I have always loved Eugene O'Neill, e.g. and went on to read all of his works on my own. And Steinbeck. (Faulkner was a different story, and I remember feeling guilty that I detested As I Lay Dying -- and unable to admit for years that I found Pearl S. Buck's The Good Earth boring beyond belief.)
Nick: Have you discussed with Roberts what he means in that passage? Or can you point to anywhere that he discusses what he meant? Or point to other statements of his that would support your reading? Because without further evidence it's just dueling interpretations: yours vs abi's/Xopher's/mine.
For the record, I agree that 'pleasant' as used there seems to indicate mild praise and not 'pleasure' in the sense that we're discussing it. But that's a red herring. The rest of the passage does indicate that Roberts prefers challenging works and believes that others should, too.
Nick,
I almost went into internet warrior mode, scouring google books for citations, searching for quotes...heart pounding, fingers tapping...and I realized, I was going what I call internet crazy.
That's what I like about Making Light. I don't come to this blog to do battle. When you said you'd seen this claim that some people like difficult writing all over the internet, and in every place nobody can provide a source, I realized...you came to this discussion loaded for bear.
That's fine. I understand your situation. People are making claims, and you want us to prove those claims. The thing is, I didn't realize I'd waded into a cybewar.
I was baffled at first by the "maybe I went to the wrong schools, got the wrong MFA, etc." remark, but now I get it. You have a horse in this race. This matters to you. I respect your passion over this issue. I do suggest that you try to be nice to us here, we are not your opponents in an internet war. I will engage with you, but if you're nicer about your approach it will make an open discussion easier. I was put off by your attitude and it didn't make me want to discuss this idea.
My first issue was that in some corners, the author challenges the reader, and in others the reader is more of a primary concern. This was my top/bottom thing. I think we had fun with it, it might contain some elements of truth, who knows?
As for the other...a problem with pleasure in reading, vs. work being meritorious solely for its difficulty. Let me first say this: I'm not calling anyone a jerk, even if they like hard work only because it is hard.
Secondly, I'm not in this to win, or lose. I enjoy sharing ideas based on my experience. I can't always defend them like a thesis. If capitulation is what you're looking for, I happily produce my lack of documentation as a fatal flaw in my argument.
If you want to discuss the idea, I would be delighted to, because there's a lot to it, I think. The question, to me, is the work vs. pleasure and work as pleasure and no work as pleasure relationship.
I was once one of these people who liked difficult works only because they were difficult. I play the shakuhachi. It is an extremely difficult instrument to learn. I will never, ever be any good at it. I chose this instrument to play precisely because it is so difficult. I enjoy surrendering to the challenge, to practice something for the sole reason of the practice with no expectation of results. I like the pure, blunt, brutal difficulty of it.
For reading, not so much. But there was a time when I did like difficult books just because they were difficult. If you need evidence that this thinking exists...take me! I liked John Zorn because he was difficult. I didn' t know much, I was a poseur.
Now, my fellow travelers who liked those difficult things may very well have liked them based on other merits. I certainly hope so, and I am not criticizing them based on their tastes. But me, and some of my friends, we were faking it. We thought it was good for us because it was hard to access. There was also an "emperor has no clothes" thing going on as well. None of us wanted to stand up and admit we didn't understand what we were reading.
This happens all the time. Why do we call a chocolate brownie decadent but not carrot juice? There is something to this idea that pleasure can mean escapism and for some people, that is wrong. Something that demands constant attention, like the shakuhachi, or a difficult work of fiction, has a focusing effect on the mind. For some people, the very work is the reward. It's exercise.
When people lift weights, the very difficulty of the weight lifting is the entire point and purpose of the exercise. Why can't the same happen for some people regarding literature? Why do some people like puzzles like sudoku? I hate puzzles like sudoku, precisely because they are hard, and at the end, I just have numbers in a box. Yet I practice a bamboo flute that my teacher assures me I'll never do well, unless I practice for 25 more years, and I find it incredibly fulfilling.
Stoicism, buddist non-attachment, puritanism, the argument against pleasure in many forms exists everywhere. The problem comes when people assign a value judgement on another's experience. Or attach shame to an activity that does no harm.
Xopher @ 220: Never, at any point in the blogpost, does he talk about enjoying anything other than the things he disses.
To me, it's so self-evident that "challenging," "stimulating," "mind-blowing," and even "unnerving," "wake and shake," and "outside your comfort zone" are describing forms of enjoyment that I'm at a loss for ways to explain it.
It's true that he privileges some forms of enjoyment over others, and that he thinks you're a better person if you enjoy literature his way, which is pretty lame. There's a nugget of truth there; obviously, if two things are equally pleasurable, you should choose the one that improves you over the one that doesn't. What he's missing is that being challenged all the time palls just like anything else, and that it's perfectly possible for people to get their dose of challenge and mind-blownitude from other sources than their reading.
jerk
I forgot about your reasonable objection to using a synonym for something as nice as a "penis" as a derogative. Sorry about that. I can't resist pointing out, though, that the same argument applies to masturbation (and the sphincter, for that matter).
One thing about guilty pleasures-- I walked out of Pirates of the Caribbean feeling delighted, and also somewhat--not guilty, but certainly discomfited. Because here was a movie that seemed almost to be made just for me. It was all, "Oh, you like pretty men and period costumes and pirates and having adventures and saying witty things? Okay, here you go." And that has more in common with pandering, or pornography, than with art. Not that there's anything wrong with pornography.
The beauty of love, and of art, is in what happens when there's friction between one person and another, when you have to stretch yourself a bit to see things form the other point of view, or when they show you something you would never have seen by yourself. I'm always a little suspicious of the books I enjoy that seem, on closer reflection, to just be echoing my own biases.
Teresa @ 247: Oh, HOWL. Oh, Gasp. Oh, OOK OOK SLOBBER DROOL!
Excuse me. Must recover.
*wipes eyes, clears throat*
Now then...
I have a question for those familiar with That Stuff Some People Call Contemporary Literature (henceforth, TSSPCCL. Or not).
My question concerns experiments in form and voice. Personally, I love playing games with form and voice (within, of course, my limits). But to me, doing something unexpected with form or voice (or structure, or...) must always serve the story, not be an end in itself.
The impression I have (from comments about it) is that in much of TSSPCCL (god, that's ugly) the experiments become the end in themselves. Is that true? If so, that would seem to me to be a weakness in those works.
When people lift weights, the very difficulty of the weight lifting is the entire point and purpose of the exercise.
I always thought the main point was to get chicks and/or dudes. Have I been doing it wrong?
Tim, I think there's a fundamental disagreement of viewpoint between us on this. I think it's obvious that being "outside your comfort zone" is uncomfortable—by definition. And being uncomfortable means you're not enjoying it. Otherwise people would wear hairshirts and sleep on cold concrete floors for enjoyment.
I'm not denying that there's value in being drawn outside your comfort zone, mind you. I'm just saying a) it doesn't have to be the only purpose for choosing your entertainment (I'm at a loss for another word that doesn't sound as prejudiced toward my point of view as that one), and b) if you're uncomfortable, that's not enjoyment, and if you're enjoying something you're not uncomfortable (at a basic level, I mean; obviously some people enjoy—in some sense—being tied up and whipped, and that's not exactly comfortable).
And similarly with the other terms, with some exceptions. 'Stimulating', for example, while I don't think it's necessarily an enjoyment word, doesn't directly contradict the idea of enjoyment.
That's why I think we have a fundamental difference here. I absolutely don't get the same thing out of the paragraph you're quoting as you do, and only with effort can I see how you read it that way. Thank you for not just saying I'm wrong, wrong, wrong because my POV does not match yours. It's appreciated.
And my substitution of 'jerk' for 'dick' was not intended as criticism in any way, or objection to using the term. I actually just plain misremembered what you said and didn't go back to check. Sorry. But btw I don't think of 'jerk' as being a reference to masturbation, and I think if it were, it wouldn't appear quite so freely in 40s movies. In fact the picture in my head is of someone suddenly yanking on a leash around someone else's neck, pulling the second person off balance. The person holding the leash is the jerk, see?
As for 'asshole'—well, that one's pretty ingrained. A character of mine named Addison Wesley Worthington (a stuck-up style queen of the most odious kind) was given the old line about "how come you homosexuals have to take a perfectly good word like 'gay' and ruin it so my grandmother can't say it any more?" He responded something like this (quoting from memory):
You know, I do sympathize, I do. I feel exactly the same way about the word 'asshole', which is a perfectly good word for a perfectly nice, perfectly fun part of the anatomy, which has been completely ruined by its by-now-indelible association with people like you.One may suppose a dismissive gesture of a manicured hand, a turn on the heel, and a nose-held-high exit.
The impression I have (from comments about it) is that in much of TSSPCCL (god, that's ugly) the experiments become the end in themselves. Is that true?
The vast majority of books that fit your acronym aren't experimental at all.
I'm not aware of any well-regarded experimental fiction that I would describe that way. But I also don't think "serve the story" and "end in itself" are the only two options (or, if you like, I'll include, for example, "expose, and explore alternatives to, a hidden assumption of supposedly-transparent storytelling" under "end in itself," but then disagree that it's necessarily a weakness).
But I don't consider myself an expert on contemporary literature by any means.
Oh, and I agree with Evan. I don't enjoy lifting weights at all. I lift them because it makes me stronger (that is, it improves me). If I could get the same effect by folding laundry for hours on end (a task I loathe), I would prefer to do so.
The goal is not enjoyment of the process. The process is the unpleasant necessity to get the real goal of future enjoyment in another context.
Pat Greene @255: Long after I'd left school, I read Absolom! Absolom! purely for the fun of it, and enjoyed it a great deal. I beg you, think it possible that others might do so as well.
The well-thought-of book which I personally loathe is Bernard Malamud's The Natural. Finishing it left me depressed and literally nauseated. I've known other people who didn't like it, but I've never heard of it having that repulsive an effect on anyone else
Steve @260: The trouble with experiments in form and voice for their own sake, unconnected with a story, is that they're missing all those technical things story does, like giving location and pace to the work, giving you some idea of who's talking, et cetera.
What I know is that James Joyce and Laurence Sterne tied their experiments to stories, and I can follow and make sense of them even when they're outre. I can't follow Gertrude Stein's non-narrative experiments nearly as readily, even though hers are generally less ambitious.
I've always had the impression (based on zero evidence) that the insult "jerk" was from soda-jerk, implying someone generally unfit to get a "real job."
Xopher @ 262: I think it's obvious that being "outside your comfort zone" is uncomfortable—by definition.
I don't quite agree with this. I think it's a buzzterm meaning something more like "where your habits fail to be optimal."
And being uncomfortable means you're not enjoying it. Otherwise people would wear hairshirts and sleep on cold concrete floors for enjoyment.
Substitute: ride roller coasters, jump out of airplanes, climb mountains, run marathons, drink too much, go snow camping, go to Burning Man (must... stop... posting...), etc., etc. People subject themselves to discomfort for pleasure all the time.
I mean; obviously some people enjoy—in some sense—being tied up and whipped, and that's not exactly comfortable).
"In some sense" is doing way too much work here. They enjoy it, is all.
But btw I don't think of 'jerk' as being a reference to masturbation
Somewhere I got the impression that it's short for "jerkoff." Bogus folk etymology, perhaps.
You know, I do sympathize, I do. I feel exactly the same way about the word 'asshole', which is a perfectly good word for a perfectly nice, perfectly fun part of the anatomy, which has been completely ruined by its by-now-indelible association with people like you.
Love it.
Constance, #224: It's like the assignments in h.s. for Silas Marner and Ethan Frome -- wotinhell are They thinking?
They're thinking "George Eliot's good, right? What did George Eliot do that's shorter than Middlemarch?"
Andrew M., #225: And I agree that 'pleasant but mediocre' doesn't mean that pleasantness is a demerit - rather, it means pleasantness is its only merit, and not a great one - but that still implies he's privileging something else over pleasure.
I'm not so sure. I think it's more that "pleasant" is not as good as "great," or "wonderful," that a "great" book is capable of delivering more pleasure than a "pleasant" one, and that a book that isn't really trying to do whatever the hell it's doing is unlikely to give that extra hit of pleasure.
(I'm pretty much in sympathy with Roberts on the Hugos. I'm withholding judgement on The Graveyard Book and Anathem but, while Doctorow and Stross have written award-worthy books, they weren't these books. Zoe's Tale is the worst book I have read in the past year--yes, I do mean in the "How much pleasure did this give me?" sense--and even managed to appall me when it answered the question "Does my heroine have the right to ask these aliens to sacrifice themselves for her benefit?" with "Like, whatever." Twice, if you count the natives whose homeworld Zoe's parents have invaded, who simply vanish away in the face of her awesomeness.
Don't get me started on the comics shortlist, although I'll grant you Girl Genius is good.)
Nick Mamatas, #230: So again, can anyone actually attach a name and a quote to anyone ever who has said "enjoyment bad/difficulty the only good"?
Maybe the problem is that many people have had to take this attitude from people who loomed large in their own lives--teachers, professors, parents, mentors--but who aren't important enough, in the grand scheme of things, to come with documentable quotes.
I had a drawing instructor in college tell me comics weren't art. Now, it's true that the comics I draw hover around the "pleasant but mediocre" end of the scale, and at the time I was even worse; but less accomplished art is still art and being told otherwise bothered me more than it should have.
It's the kind of pain in the neck that's hard to document. On the plus side, it may say something about this attitude that hardly anyone of any significance holds it.
Xopher @262: And being uncomfortable means you're not enjoying it.
I don't think this is true.
I had to deal with Silas Marner - I didn't get The Great Gatsby or Ethan Frome (or, for that matter, Hamlet) in HS. (I could have read Ethan Frome, if I had wanted, because my parents had a copy. I don't remember seeing any F Scott Fitzgerald on the shelves, although there might have been some.) I remember tackling Madame Bovary and War and Peace, and getting Finnegan's Wake from the library, too.
They're thinking "George Eliot's good, right? What did George Eliot do that's shorter than Middlemarch?"
I like Silas Marner, and was not particularly happy with either Middlemarch or The Mill on the Floss. I think that they were thinking: "This is an enjoyable, well-told story, accessible, with a simple plot, a moral point, and not too long". In short, the sort of book that a lot of people genuinely like.
I think that one of the ways of approaching some of this is that fen typically give a book extra points for extraliterary challenge -- literature of ideas, if you will -- of the sort which is usally referred to as senawunda. A lot of people also (or in some cases, instead) get equally pleased by intraliterary challenge --experiments in form and the like. The obvious extreme instance of this is Finnegan's Wake.
There have always been counterpoints (such as Trollope -- the author of what Henry James called "loose baggy monsters") who manage to become literary if they last long enough. And up until about 1900 nothing written in English really measured up, offficially -- it's only then that they were admitted to academe, under the shadow of their elder classical siblings.
One of my teachers (Hugh Kenner) suggested (orally; I don't know if he ever published this point) that our model of the Canon was largely shaped by what was public domain when the first modern copyright acts came into play -- basically, what was available in Everyman's Library at the time. What we call "literary" is pretty much an accident of a whole lot of factors.
I have reasonably catholic litarary tastes, and read a lot of light SF as well as having a couple of degrees in English and a taste for "classics". From where I sit much of the problem with many modern "literary" fiction is not that it's literary but the fact that it's inferior to many other exemplars. (I don't usually find people dissing Anthony Powell when they take aim at modern lit. They do aim at Joyce, but it's easy to see why people find Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake hard going; and he's hardly "contemporary" any more.) And what is the problem with much light reading is that although it repeats familiar tropes, sometimes with technical skill, it frequently brings nothing new to the party.
It's entirely possible that what people will be pointing at a century from now as late Hegemonic American Classics will include, say, Stephenson, Le Guin, and maybe Stephen King. We lack a lot of perspective.
Xopher: On the other hand, sometimes good and bad features are rolled together inextricably. Sweating isn't fun, but getting things done that make one sweaty may well be, for instance. I think that reading a difficult book can be like climbing a steep slope to see a view you'd never have if you stayed down below, or for that matter learning how to live with someone you love who brings to the relationship a set of habits and needs that isn't 100% compatible with how you've lived on your own. In these kinds of experiences, payoffs and costs are all rolled together in a complex cycle.
Sean @257: Why do we call a chocolate brownie decadent but not carrot juice?
Because carrot juice has a higher ratio of dietary nutrients to calories? There may well be people who subjectively enjoy carrot juice as much as (or even more than) they enjoy chocolate brownies, but unfortunately for this specific metaphor, nutritional value is far more objectively measureable than "reading value" is-- depending on who you ask, "reading value" may mean "amenable to multiple levels of analysis", "reinforcing proper moral values", "offering insight into the human condition", "introducing new intellectual concepts" or what-all, as already rehashed in this thread.
But I wonder if the "outside the comfort menu" might be a useful edible analogy-- some people prefer to eat the same thing over and over again (as per "An Engineer's Guide to Cats"); others enjoy the experience of trying new foods, where the novelty itself is part of the enjoyment. I guess the question is whether "stepping outside the comfort zone" means "stepping outside the known comfort zone to possibly expand its boundaries", or "knowing that you've stepped beyond possible boundary expansion to the point of actual discomfort."
Avram, #216: It's obvious to most fantasy readers of my acquaintance that Brin's argument is nonsense, yet somehow it's not obvious to most SF and fantasy fans of my acquaintance that the same argument applied to Stephanie Meyer's vampire romance novels is also nonsense.
That would doubtless be as odd as you think, were it not that the troublesome memes in Twilight are heavily reinforced by a lot of contemporary culture, from fairy tales to romances to stories you hear on the evening news. As a culture, we spend significant amounts of time grooming young women to view skanky and emotionally-abusive behavior as romantic and admirable. In a world where Sting can be appalled by the number of people who consider "Every Breath You Take" to be a love song, worrying about the effects of too much Twilight worship on a young woman's love life isn't out of band. There are plenty of real live men who behave very much like Edward.
Dave, #240: I wonder if there is a problem with some books taught at h.s. level needing a more mature mindset.
Dingdingding! This is something I've been saying for the last 15 years or so. It takes a certain amount of life experience to really get anything out of a lot of canon lit-fic, and teenagers by and large simply have not yet had the time to acquire that experience. I suspect that if we spent less time teaching young people to hate reading, many more of them would eventually come to some of those books as adults, and find out for themselves why they are considered so outstanding.
Sean, #257: Tangentially, you have reminded me that I have had the "this is really hard, but that's part of what makes it good" response to something; it just wasn't a book. It was when my college choir did the Geographical Fugue. Most of the other people in the choir hated it, but I fell instantly and completely in love with it. It challenged me in ways that no other choral piece ever had; it pushed the envelope of my personal experience. And yet somehow, this didn't stop me from continuing to derive great enjoyment and fulfillment from singing simpler pieces.
Side thought: It's not so much that Nick and I are talking past each other, it's that he appears to be talking past everyone else in the thread as well, and doing so in ways that remind me of some very unpleasant... characters... from past online interactions.
Re Xopher @262 and subsequent discussion on comfort zone. I concur with those who disagree with Xopher's position that if you're uncomfortable, that's not enjoyment, and if you're enjoying something you're not uncomfortable
Physical challenges that others have mentioned such as camping, long runs or bike rides, etc., are enjoyable in some ways and not in others. Perhaps it's that we have "comfort zones" of different sizes and shapes and permeability. One person's nice comfy niche is another's boring rut.
Thanks, Lee. I am looking forward to viewing that link when I get home from work today.
I have had plenty of experiences whose difficulty was their most meritorious aspect, now that I think of it. I have also found that I had to let go and allow myself to have fun.
I knew a shrink who saw a big part of her job as teaching her clients to re-examine fun and start having it again. I think Americans have a hard time with the concept of fun sometimes. It is seen as childish, or unproductive. I have had that line from the bible 'when I became a man I put away childish things' quoted to me as a reason why I shouldn't play video games any more.
Actually, I did have to quit video games because they were killing my life. That's part of all this for me too. We now have an addiction for everything. When is something bad just because it is fun, or bad because it is too much fun and causes compulsion or addictive behavior?
And...how does this apply to books? Or doesn't it? I find this stuff very interesting.
Lee @274, both monarchism (or at least anti-democratic strong-leaderism) and a debased form of feudalism are also heavily supported by our culture, in addition to superstition and magical thinking (another couple of things Brin fears are encouraged by fantasy). Have you noticed how much attention American society gives to the Chief Executive, and how much disdain it gives Congress?
Sean: For what it's worth, as one more data point, my counselor says that one of her biggest thing is encouraging clients to take seriously the idea that they're dealing with real matters of real consequence and to give ourselves time for rest and reflection, and for things that we truly enjoy to build us up again.
pat greene @255 and others have, I think, touched on why it's so difficult to dismiss the bullying of critics who are not here and can't hurt us; their opinions echo those of people whose instructions we value and who we were reluctant to disappoint.
For me, it was a high school English teacher who was otherwise quite wonderful as a mentor in nurturing enthusiasm for literature, but who was also convinced that science fiction was all rayguns and BEMs and therefore without real value. I knew better even at the time, but it's hard to shake that disapproval, and hard not to react to it when it comes up in another context. (Actually, come to think of it, I grew up surrounded by English teachers, including having one as a parent, and that there was a clear bright line between SFF and "good books" was a background assumption. If I've managed to quit being embarassed about reading something with a dragon or a spaceship on the cover, it's only because I've been disengaged from that environment for a long time now.)
When those are the opinions of people you trust, or want to trust, it's very hard to shake that iota of doubt that maybe they're fundamentally true, even when they're being spouted by complete jerks. And it takes a very long time to be able to trust your own view of the world. I'm sure my pursuit of writing fiction was set back considerably by the several well-meaning educators who told me I might be pretty good if only I could quit writing stuff with monsters in it; it took years to stop feeling like when I sat down to work on a genre story that I was wasting time I ought to be devoting to creating something "good." (And, of course, the truth was that the stories I wrote when I was in school were pretty much crap, but the monsters weren't half bad.)
Terms the definitions of which I apparently don't share with at least some of the commenters in this thread: 'comfort zone', 'comfortable', 'uncomfortable', 'enjoy', and probably several others.
For now, I'm finding this gap impossible to leap. Perhaps that's because I'm pretty tired right now. But I think most of the examples are about things you enjoy despite discomfort, not because of it. But I'm probably wrong even about that. Maybe some people really enjoy sleeping in tents and cooking over campfires for their own sake, rather than because of what else it does for them or to enjoy being in wilder places.
Not me, though. Last time I slept in a tent it proved life-threatening (asthmatic pneumonia is one of those No Fun things that doesn't "improve" you either, except by teaching you Not To Sleep In Tents), and generally I find the discomfort of camping is not sufficiently mitigated by the enjoyment of being in a wild place.
See, though, when my friends are going to go camping, I say "Have fun," and wish them a good time. Years ago someone was telling me I should go camping though (not a friend), and really giving me the whole spiel about how if I don't like camping I must be lazy (I am not), wimpy (I am not), or weak (well, my lungs are). That's not for not GOING camping, that's for not LIKING it. He basically implied that I was Not A Real Man for not liking it.
Here's my point (thank you for your patience): maybe I don't fully grasp what people are capable of enjoying (rock climbers. I totally don't get rock climbers), or even everything people mean when they say they enjoy something. But if you tell me I'm wrong or stupid or...any of that stuff if I don't enjoy what you enjoy, you're no better than the guy who said I was Not a Real Man because I don't like camping.
Now, my main point of disagreement with Nick was different. I was saying that Adam wassiz wasn't saying he enjoyed the books he was recommending. I may have been wrong about that. But you know what? I'm pretty much the target audience for that piece, unless he was just apostrophizing the eligible Hugo voters to amuse his fellow literati, which I still consider possible. If he was saying that the books he's recommending are enjoyable (and Tim says it seems to him that he was, and Tim is a sensible person), he said it really, really badly, because he failed to make that come across to me, to abi, and I daresay to many others.
Given that it was a polemic, that's HIS failure, to get his point across; HIS failure, that he offended me (and, I conjecture, many others) enough that his point didn't really sink in. I was too annoyed to listen. He came across as sneering at books I really liked. Then I get told, here, that characterizing his polemic as "sneering" is hostile (never mind the third party/person in the conversation distinction).
I bet Adam would dismiss me, as Nick dismissed me and abi, as having "misread" him. Well, tough shit Adam; if you want to talk to people in our world (and you said you did), you need to play by our rules. And our rules say that the responsibility for transmission of information lies with the sender. You fucked up.
Xopher, here's an example of something I've done that was pleasurable because it was outside my comfort zone:
Xtreme Skyflyer: Experience the breathtaking thrill of hang gliding and skydiving. You'll be hoisted 153 feet above ground, and dive at speeds up to 60 miles per hour while free-falling 17 stories toward the Earth skimming just six feet above the ground.
The pleasure comes from your reptile brain screaming OH MY GOD I'M GOING TO DIE while your superego (mostly) knows better. Obviously, lots of people wouldn't enjoy it, and anyone who thinks that's any kind of failure is being very silly. But for me, it was awesome, and not improving in any way I can figure.
I don't think there's a direct literary equivalent, but if you hear me saying "whoa, that was messed up" in a reverent tone after reading a book, I'm praising it for squicking me in a good way.
And yes, I enjoy camping for its own sake (though not as much as some). That guy, though? A dick.
Xopher: First off, agreed about the problem with Roberts' presentation.
Now, about discomfort. I think it's not that many of us actually get off on being uncomfortable. But the fact of different experience can be a pleasure of its own, with the discomfort subsumed into that. I don't like lumpy ground, but I really miss being able to sleep out of doors, with so much of the world around me, and like that. Discomfort looms large or small in the experience as a whole for a lot of reasons.
Tim: Yeah, I pretty much take the tag 'Xtreme' as meaning "Christopher, this is not for you. Don't even watch other people doing this." I guess I think 'Xtreme (thing)' means "(thing) PLUS YOU MIGHT DIE!!!!!!" I believe that you like that, because I'm willing to take your word, but...non grokeo.
Bruce: I think I do get that part. It's like eating spicy food for me; I don't actually enjoy the burn itself, but it's part of a whole flavor experience that's impossible to have without the burn. There's maybe a little macho pride ("Look what hot food I can eat!") mixed in there, but I even like spicy things when I'm alone.
Both (and others): I have learned things in this thread today (in just the past few minutes, in fact). Thank you for that.
I'm a little surprised that no one has yet mentioned the (ISTM) obvious genre connection with discomfort and pleasure: horror.
Being frightened and tense is not comfortable, and yet fiction (in an array of media) designed to produce those effects remains among the most popular entertainment around. As a fan of (some) horror, I can attest that there is also something pleasurable about those sensations, cultivated under the right set of circumstances. But damned if I can say exactly what, or why (though Tim's admiring "that was messed up" hints at some part of it).
It's not a pleasure everyone shares, and I have no judgment whatsoever to pass on those who don't. But it's very real, and widespread enough that even mediocre attempts to service it have been known to achieve success in finding their audience. (And, as Thomas Ligotti suggests in "The Consolations of Horror," at least some of the value of horror is connecting - in spirit if in nothing else - with other human beings who share your kink.)
Mutual pleasure, Xopher - your question goaded me into trying to articulate something I've fumbled with in the past. (A productive discomfort!)
Teresa, I understand that it is possible for people to enjoy Absolom! Absolom. After all, I really liked Nabokov's Pale Fire, which many people who were in my class *loathed.*
And I am being unfair to the book. If I am honest with myself, a lot of my loathing comes from personal circumstances. My family was from the South (my sister and brother still live in Mississippi), and I had come to loathe Faulkner probably on principle. (I had moved to Florida at age 8, so viewed myself as Not a Southerner, which I felt was a good thing, at least when I was 20 and going to school in Massachusetts.) Although it took place in the 19th century and my family was nothing like the Sutpens or Compsons, there was something about the book that resonated, and not in a good way.
I sat on the bus from MIT (where I was taking the lit course for which I was reading it -- yes, MIT, sort of a long story there) to Wellesley ripping the paperback copy of the book into small strips while repeating over and over "I don't hate the South! I don't hate it!" I don't hate it!* (It turned out later I had pneumonia, and was running a fever.)
So it's not completely the book's fault. Although, I have read three novels and two short stories by William Faulkner, (As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury being the other two novels) and hated the novels and liked the short fiction.
I should probably give it another try -- it's been over a quarter of a century. I'm a lot older and if not wiser at least not so touchy about things.
All of which is a roundabout way of bringing in another factor of why books are enjoyable to me and how or why I read what I do: how they resonate with life experiences.
It's a tricky thing; I want whatever I read to touch on humanity -- even stories of rockets and time travel. (I tend much more to be a mystery reader than a SF/F reader.) But things that are too close to painful experiences can simply be too hard to read.
I realize this is a lot more mundane than the litcrit discussion above: I majored in history. And I did not get nearly enough sleep last night, so am rather punchy.
*End of the book -- last line spoken by a major character who is the child of a typically Faulknerian Southern family
I thought Pale Fire was absolutely hilarious. I couldn't stop laughing.
Xopher:
And along with the people who tell you you have to like what they like, are the people who tell you you just haven't had the *proper* example of... medieval Gregorian chant, or experimental free-verse, or single-malt Scotch* and if you had you would enjoy it.
Dan:
I don't read horror. But horror in film is an interesting case for me, because there is outside the comfort zone, scary and enjoyable (for me) -- Psycho, The Blair Witch Project. Then there is outside the comfort zone, gory, and (to me) nauseating**: Friday the 13th and sequels, the Saw franchise.
*I hate Scotch. Single malt or blend.
**I know a lot of people like these movies.
Xopher @287: Me, too.
It was a pleasant follow up to Lolita, which I found a fascinating read but made me feel vaguely queasy.
pat 288: Or that you just haven't met the right girl (or boy) yet.
You don't like Gregorian chant? Oh, man. :-)
pat: Just so. Me, I don't enjoy slasher movies or the stuff that usually gets called "torture porn," and yet I like an awful lot of things that share some of the same elements: the films Se7en and Event Horizon and Hellraiser, and particularly creepy TV show eps like Buffy's "Hush" or Torchwood's "Countrycide." And I'm not sure I could quite explain what exactly I think the difference is, or whether I think it's of degree or kind. Certainly all those things have some discomforting or at least unsettling effect on me, and some I find pleasurable and some I don't, and there's no clear bright line separating one from the other.
if you want to talk to people in our world (and you said you did), you need to play by our rules. And our rules say that the responsibility for transmission of information lies with the sender. You fucked up.
Now THAT is what I call a top.
I was lucky with reading in school--I didn't like everything, but I didn't get anything I loathed or couldn't handle, and a reading assignment was always preferable to any other kind regardless. I went through a phase where I believed (and stated in class) that "poetry is bullshit", but that wasn't because some teacher messed me up, it was because I was fifteen and had my head even further up my butt than it is now.
But I do understand, at a visceral level, how a teacher can mess you up. In seventh grade (when, for complicated reasons, I was only ten), a teacher asked me if I had really written the story I'd turned in. I had, and she accepted my response, but for some reason I was traumatized out of all proportion to the incident. For several semesters I just stopped doing writing assignments. Eventually I did resort to plagiarism; fortunately, even though I didn't get caught, it quickly became even more mortifying than writing, and I was able to write again. But throughout my school career I was never able to make myself start writing a paper, even a term paper, before the night before it was due, and to this day I can't write a thank-you note or a post to Making Light without a bit of that experience creeping back. This may or may not be why my writing tends to be overly stiff and formal.
I expect she meant well; the story was a narration of the last thoughts of a man falling into a blast furnace (how's that for depressing litfic!), and she may have been worried about my mental health.
More on-topic: the admiring "messed up" is usually a response to encountering a type of thinking so new to me that it seems almost alien. J.G. Ballard's Crash is a rare famous example (usually if it's famous, I'm prepared for it and the response is less intense). Horror alone doesn't trigger it, but some horror authors that did are Robert Aickman, William Hope Hodgson, and Philip Jose Farmer (in Image of the Beast and A Feast Unknown). The ultimate example is Felix Gotschalk's Growing Up In Tier 3000, which, whatever else you can say about it, is certainly as messed up as anyone could wish.
I love both Absalom, Absalom! and Pale Fire (which I agree is hilarious).
pat greene @ 288: And along with the people who tell you you have to like what they like, are the people who tell you you just haven't had the *proper* example of... medieval Gregorian chant, or experimental free-verse, or single-malt Scotch* and if you had you would enjoy it.
I try really hard not to be like that because I know it's annoying as hell, but it's worked for me enough times (beer, fish, rock & roll) that I tend to believe in it. So: Machaut's Messe de Notre Dame.
(just kidding, and it's not exactly chant anyway)
Tim @ 294: I agree. If you haven't tried Machaut's Messe de Notre Dame, you don't know if you like single malt scotch.
Pat Greene@288: Of course, some of those people are right -- I thought I didn't like Scotch, until someone at ConJosé let me taste the stuff that they were drinking.
@286 and passim earlier: can we start spelling "Absalom" correctly?
Tim, I suppose I should listen to the chant you mention. I have heard some chant, and I just wasn't engaged. I didn't hate it, though, not like Scotch.
skzb -- I'm glad I was done with my drink or you would have owed me a new keyboard.
Xopher -- the right boy or girl -- or several. Depending upon the crowd you run with.
I think it boils down to "evangelists in most fields tend to be annoying as hell."
David Goldfarb, mea culpa. I'm the person who originally misspelled Absalom.
As for Scotch... My husband loves Scotch. We have or have had in our house: Glenfidditch, Glenlivet, another one which starts with Glen (from a bottler in Glasgow - it's in another room and I'm too lazy to go look it up), Oban, and a couple others. And at same bottler I tried a number of different ones. My favorite? The rum. (We also have Appleton Rum, Havana Club Rum, Bacardi...) (We could probably open a bar if we wanted to -- and we don't really drink very much. People give my husband Scotch for his birthday.)
skzb: I agree. If you haven't tried Machaut's Messe de Notre Dame, you don't know if you like single malt scotch.
Does that also go for those of us who haven't tried the Machaut, but have already decided we like single malt scotch? If I try it, and discover I do not like it, will I have an epiphany along the lines of "I guess when I thought I loved Glenmorangie and Lagavulin I was just totally mistaken; I don't like single malt scotch after all"?
[tongue partly in cheek and partly lodged in Total Befuddlement, which for the purpose of this metaphor is the gap between the left bottom crown and the gum line.]
Xopher: maybe I don't fully grasp what people are capable of enjoying (rock climbers. I totally don't get rock climbers), or even everything people mean when they say they enjoy something.
You just gave me a light bulb moment. Rock climbing as parallel to literary criticism.
I enjoy several things about climbing (fwiw, all indoor/gym climbing; never done actual rocks yet even though they're Right Over There *points*). On one level, I enjoy feeling competent and strong and bad-ass like I do when I get to the top of the route. Experiencing one's own competence, I'm convinced, is a huge part of the positive feedback loop that leads to enjoying a certain skill or craft. In climbing, that enjoyment is heightened (ha! I pun) by knowing that I am not very strong and also deeply, physically, involuntarily acrophobic--but I finished that dang route anyway, go me! So that's one enjoyment of climbing for me.
The other is, I get an experience I wouldn't have had if I hadn't acquired this skill-set. A particularly tricky move to get from one set of holds to the next can be fun. A technically challenging route is fun like puzzles are fun. Getting to experience my body via a whole different set of movements and efforts than the everyday, that's fun too. Which loops back around into experiencing my body as capable of new things as one flavor of the "enjoying one's one competence" thing.
Both kinds of enjoyment are present in literary criticism for me. I enjoy having a toolbox filled with stuff I picked up both from academic literature study and from genre-focused peer-critique writing workshops. I enjoy the very ability to use those tools. And those tools allow me to enjoy fiction on a level that would be inaccessible to me if I didn't have them. Heck, those tools make enjoyable even fiction I didn't enjoy on its own merits, because of the pleasure to be found in being able to precisely say to my friends why I didn't like it, and they'll tell me why they did, pointing out interesting things I may have missed along the way, and eventually the whole thing morphs into a completely different but equally fascinating conversation...
Of course, lit-crit could be said to be like paragliding or painting miniatures on these merits too. It's just that you mentioned being baffled by rock climbers, which got me thinking about why I liked climbing, which led to "Aha! Two major enjoyments to be found in acquiring and employing specialized skill-sets. Hurrah!"
Sean: [quoting stuff about "you will play by OUR rules"] Now THAT is what I call a top.
I have to disagree, insofar as it's my understanding that it is actually the bottom who sets the rules and is in fact in complete control of the situation. I may be wrong, as it's not my scene, but people whose scene it is have impressed this point on me. (Or, I suppose, impressed a point upon me which I have misrepresented. This is always possible.) It's actually been bothering me throughout the BDSM subthread--someone way way way upthread pointed out that "bottom" doesn't necessarily equal "not the one in control of the situation," but that mistaken (as I understand it) equivalence still seems to be dominating the use of the metaphor here.
The other thing that's bothered me is the constant appearance of the "I'm his bitch," "they're my bitch" rhetoric. As Mac pointed out, it's a gendered phrase; I hear it as gendered in that particularly nasty way of female insult words being used to demean men. And the term "his bitch" I hear as very specifically connoting the (male) victim of repeated prison rape. So hearing the phrase used over and over again in a seemingly approving way, even as metaphor, is discomfiting.
(Neil Gaiman's "George R. R. Martin is not your bitch" blog post didn't bother me in the same way, in part because "NOT your bitch" can be read not just as opposing the label for a particular person, but opposing the whole institute which employs the label; and in part because of the delight/shock/scandal/squee of watching someone very mild mannered and easy-going suddenly let someone have it with both barrels of an extremely eloquent shotgun.)
And now I bow my head shamefully at, through ignorance of both Gregorian Chant and Names of Single Malt Scotch I Haven't Had Yet, totally missing skzb's keyboard-damaging funny.
It must be bedtime.
Nick Mamatas @ 181: "Your mother just had more than one axis when it came to pleasure."
No, YOUR mama has more than one axis--oh wait. ahem. sorry. Where was I?
"Again, this is NOT an example of your claim that some people valorize difficulty over pleasure."
Well it is, actually. You asked for an example where someone valued literature as work over literature as pleasure. His mama is so fa, ahem, reads both difficult lit and easy lit. One she has a job studying and one she refers to as "junk" reading.
difficult(status) > pleasure(status)
What more do you want?
Basically, your current argument seems to be "You can't actually find someone who will only read works carved into his/her own living flesh, so therefore no one is claiming the difficult literature is better than easy-to-read literature." Watch your goal posts there; I think they might be getting away from you.
Something worth keeping in mind is that nearly everyone* reads both challenging, mind-blowing works of genius AND with-blanket-and-cup-of-tea comfort books. (Sometimes even in the same genre!) So it's not about People Who Prefer Difficult Literature versus People Who Like Easy Material. It's about what kind of challenges people like, and what kind of comforts they crave; and then also about what kind of challenges are lauded, and what kind of comforts are denigrated.
*Apart from the aliens.
So now that the thread has most entirely moved on, I wanted to go off and read the entire Roberts post before commenting. First thought was that it was actually extremely unclear about what he values, other than "these specific books are good, valuable, these other specific books are juvenile" which could lead one to infer either meaning from it.
Here is why I think abi correctly interpreted Roberts as implying "difficult > good" and Nick misinterpreted him: Roberts states specifically and emphatically that the only book on the Hugo list that he felt deserved to be there is one he didn't care for much - Anathem "which isn’t so much mediocre as enormous and deranged and so boring it goes through boring into some strange condition on the far side." (His earlier review is pretty harsh on it too, though funny, complete with a new vocabulary to make fun of oversized SFF.) His comments about Little Brother and Graveyard Book seem to indicate that he enjoyed them quite a bit, but he didn't think they're good enough to be on the list - only the one he thought was challenging and difficult but boring deserves to be there. So I think there are concrete reasons in the text for believing Abi called it correctly.
Mind you, I agree with some parts of what he says. I'd like to read a lot more interesting and mind-blowing fiction, and I plan to look up some of the titles he lists. However, his scale of values does seem to show that he values challenging and experimental above fun to read.
Oh yeah, one more thing re Nick's theses:
Is it wise to even try to defend the ground that there exists nobody, but nobody, "who value difficulty over pleasure"? When a single counter-example would suffice?
This is the Internet, the new universe of public discourse: you can without much difficulty find somebody who sincerely and emphatically believes any bat-shit crazy thesis, as for example that Nazi aliens live on the world inside the hollow earth, or that Time is a Cube. It's not my fight, but if I were picking a side here, I'd say the windmills have a considerable strategic advantage.
Clifton Royston @ 304... any bat-shit crazy thesis, as for example that Nazi aliens live on the world inside the hollow earth
That sounds like the premise of one of Mike Mignola's stories.
heresiarch @302: Something worth keeping in mind is that nearly everyone* reads both challenging, mind-blowing works of genius AND with-blanket-and-cup-of-tea comfort books.
My blanket-and-cup-of-tea comfort books are Gravity's Rainbow and The Book of the Long Sun. Not because I'm so sooper smart, but because I've reread them so many times, in the pursuit of understanding them, that they're as familiar and comfortable to me as an old baseball glove. (Mostly. Ensign Morituri's Story is still a big WTF.) I guess my point is that, as Dostoevsky put it, man is the animal who can get used to anything. I think Housekeeping is likely to get on that short list too, and for the same reason. Holy crap is that a strange book.
Somewhere back around post #50 (there were giants in the earth in those days), Patrick posted about skipping the fiction in The New Yorker. This made me think back on all the stories I've read in that magazine in the last couple of years, and, well, I couldn't. Not that I haven't read them - I read everything in the New Yorker, having that affliction, which Myles naGopaleen identified, that drives men to read the labels on jam jars - but I remember next to nothing about any of them. There was that one about the guy who inherited a house, that was tedious. And the one about the girl who was a babysitter somewhere in the Midwest.
But I do remember Rivka Galchen's "The Region of Unlikeness." Which was very striking to me because here was an actual, honest to God science fiction story in The New Yorker. I don't think I've ever seen that before (and no, "The Kugelmass Episode" doesn't count).
Compulsive early-music nitpick: Machaut didn't write Gregorian chant. OTOH, it's true that the Messe de Nostre Dame is a reason to be glad I'm human.
The only New Yorker stories I remember are one about ten years ago by Edwidge Danticat, which I remember because it was good (she is always worthwhile), but especially because it was good in ways that aren't easily stereotyped as a New Yorker story, and one very recently that was mentioned on Making Light, the one about the changeling who dies in the hospital, and his uncomprehending fairy parents. Because it was just like what I'd read in SFF contexts. Surely that author would acknowledge the story was Genre.
I see yer Messe de Nostre Dame an' raise Le Chant des Templiers.
TexAnne @ 307: I did say "not exactly chant anyway." A spoonful of sugar and all that.
I regret mentioning that I did not like Gregorian chant. I have listened to all three videos (in their entirety) and feel...
...totally unmoved, and annoyed at at myself for spending 20 minutes when three -- one for each video -- would have sufficed.
I do not like chant. There are a few medieval *songs* I like -- I adore Gaudete -- but they strike me as a different animal. And even though the Messe de Nostre Dame seems to me, not being a musicologist, as closer to song than chant, it still did nothing for me.
I do not like it here or there, I do not like it anywhere. I do not like it, Sam-I-Am.
I even find parodies of chant somewhat annoying. I am very fond of the *concept* of the Benzedrine Monks of Santa Domonica (their cover of "Smells like Teen Spirit" had me falling over for about fifteen seconds) but only for a minute or so. It gets old *fast*.
Pat Greene - I do not like it, Sam-I-Am.
Wait, I remember how that story ended!
Sean 292: Now THAT is what I call a top.
Why, thank you for recog...I mean, damn right, slave! On your knees when you talk to me!
Nicole 299: I like your rock climbing analogy, but by the time I've absorbed it enough to comment in detail the moment will have passed...food for thought, though, and highly enlightening about the motives behind both litcrit and rock climbing.
...it's my understanding that it is actually the bottom who sets the rules and is in fact in complete control of the situation.
It's a little more complex than that. I think I may be the one you refer to later; I said "look who's doing all the work." Hmm. Terminology: I'm going to use the terms 'dom' and 'sub', because 'top' and 'bottom' have different meanings in the "vanilla"* gay community, and the roles do NOT map 100%.
The sub must never feel like he's† in control, since not being in control is what makes it erotic for him; at the same time, he must never be in serious fear for his life or safety (well, at least anyone I'd want to play with doesn't want that; if you're looking for Mr. Goodbar I'm not your guy). The dom sets the rules, but with an eye toward exciting the sub. The sub controls nothing: he obeys, or disobeys and is punished (or sometimes obeys and is punished anyway). But the sub has an absolute veto over the entire scene in the form of his safeword; not over any element, but over the entire situation. He can end the entire thing but not shape it.
Meanwhile, the dom is watching the sub, noting when his limits are being approached, keeping him in the zone just short of saying his safeword. That's why I say the dom is doing the work, even if the sub is picking up marbles with his lips and putting them in a bowl. The sub is just experiencing; the dom is leading, but beneath the surface is a whole complex interplay of nonverbal communication.
That's how I play. YMMV is a gross understatement here; I'd say YMWCVAL. Some people play without safewords, which I'm not quite confident enough to do, even in the limited ways I've experienced this scene. And I'm not the most experienced at it, not by a long shot; what I've given here is my understanding and my perspective.
Clifton 303: Nice point about Anathem. That didn't occur to me, but it's absolutely true.
____ 304: ...or that Time is a Cube.
Not really on topic, but in some of my fiction there were some...well, sort of mathematicians...who proved that time cannot have a dimensionality less than 1.618, and may have a dimensionality in excess of 2. This is nonsense, of course, but if I published it some crazed bozo would decide it was The Truth and start telling it to other people. It's not dramatically crazier than believing that Elizabeth II is a lizard from outer space, and people really believe that one.
____
*Anyone who thinks this term is in any way belittling has not tasted my vanilla buttercream chocolates. Vanilla can be a flavor too, even one that stands up to bittersweet chocolate.
†Of course both subs and doms can be female, though I've sometimes seen the spellings subbe and domme used for women. I'm going to say 'he' throughout because that's how *I* play.
Xopher @ 314... dom is doing the work
Dom de Luise?
Heresiarch @302: Something worth keeping in mind is that nearly everyone* reads both challenging, mind-blowing works of genius AND with-blanket-and-cup-of-tea comfort books.
Actually, not me. I don't read for comfort. I read for challenge, for novelty, to be entertained, and to understand what the heck my friends are going on about, but not that metaphorical blanket-and-tea thing.
Josh -- Oh, damn. You're right. Should not use that particular Suess reference here. *Goes off muttering "One fish two fish red fish blue fish..."*
The difference between me and the narrator of "Green Eggs and Ham," however, is that I've actually tried the things I say I don't like.
Russell Letson @ #249
I knew there was a reason I've been putting off growing up for so long.
Clifton Royston @ #253
I got a cautious eye and a "Interesting..." I seem to get that latter comment a lot.
Clifton, I think you, Russell and I all have the Peter Pan Syndrome. Kids of a certain age don't get it. Certain kinds of readers, do, no matter the age. I think we should start a Peter Pan Reading Group or a Peter Pan's Reading List. My most recent YA read was "Bloodhound" by Tamora Pierce.
Recommendations?
Victoria: My last YA read was earlier this year, a recommendation from Jo Walton, The Bones of Faerie. It was good, but IMHO not remarkable; the core ideas were really interesting* and the writing was fairly good, but I felt it was slight; the ideas deserved more done with them.
* E.g. the setting as an aftermath of an apocalyptic war between Earth and Faerie, with both sides using their most powerful weapons. ** A conceptual hybrid between The Chrysalids and The Last Hot Time?
** This shouldn't spoil anything, it's revealed very early on in the book.
I just finished Philip Reeve's YA novel Larklight. Amusing. It'll make an interesting movie.
P.S. to Serge and Xopher: both my bat-shit crazy examples are for real. The former is derived from Richard Shaver's beliefs about the "Deros", which still has followers elaborating on it; the latter is TimeCube. Surprised you've never heard of it; it has a certain degree of Internet fame.
Xopher @ 316
Nicole @ 299
Dan Simmons also uses rock climbing as an analogy for challenging reading. Here he is talking about Henry James:
"As readers, we’re like climbers used to practice rocks who are suddenly confronted with a 3,000-foot sheer face to climb or descend. The cry goes out for pitons, carabiners, jumars, and rope . . . lots and lots of rope. Oh, yes, and please send us a good climbing partner – someone who can show us the route."
The quote is from his amazing essay series on writing posted on his Web site: (http://www.dansimmons.com/writing_welll/archive/2006_03.htm)
Xopher @ 316 on vanilla v. not vanilla
I think Sean's likening of reader/writer to top/bottom works for all the various definitions of top and bottom, "vanilla" and otherwise. Being a versatile reader means that at different times you get to try out all the roles, and see the complex, changing power distribution between tops and bottoms (which your post helped flesh out even further) as a really neat way of imagining what's going on when you pick up a book, or sit down to write one. Applied to just about any kind of sex we've seen alluded to or described here, the metaphor yields new things.
pat 317: If abi had had to carry through on her threat to make the whole thread Latin, we could still use that book. Aren't you glad?
Clifton 321: Wow. I thought you were exaggerating, or at least making shit up. Wow. Loonies.
Evan 322: Are you...flirting? :-) Let's get together and apply some metaphors!
pat greene, 312: I wasn't trying to convince you. I was pedantically correcting the idea that Machault wrote Gregorian chant, when in fact he wrote polyphony. Here endeth the early-music neep.
Constance @ 36: [This Side of Paradise] is cut-up, without conventional chapters or breaks. It quotes in full the popular songs of the day, as well as mention other popular culture practices and products. This was the first fiction to do so, whereas now these have become signatures of either careful historical research or lessons from Bill Gibson, or product placement to offset production costs. Nor is there any real plot or conclusion.
This Side of Paradise seemed to have a defined plot: Amory Blaine was a narcissistic Princeton alum whose experiences, romantic then martial, couldn't be reconciled with the -ism-movements of the previous century. His being rejected by the Zelda stand-in caused him to realize his own narcissism had its own denying himself a cake by keeping it quality to it, and reconciled Humanity's narcissism with funding everything from a cap on ownership.
But Amory wasn't able to gain any traction because his capitalist-foils were, as we might say today, not reality-based. As a carry-over from the -ism-movement in question. And as far as I know, Fitzgerald was right. I think if you can stick $5M -10M in the bank and earn enough to fly first class every day for the rest of your life from the interest, you categorically have "enough," and you can "keep score" from the taxes above that you pay. And if you instead feel the need to let Bernie Madoff grow your $5M without a solid understanding what he's doing, I'm not really sure of your basis for my sympathy if you discover your $5M gone.
Clifton Royston @ 321... Oh, I'm not surprised that those examples are beliefs held by some people. After all, this is the Reality where (if I remember correctly) John Birch's followers believe that public transportation is a government conspiracy to control our movements.
Xopher @ 323
Well, I never turn down any chance to be intellectually promiscuous! :-)
Sorry, TexAnne, I got defensive there. I shouldn't have.
Xopher -- But of course there has to be Latin Dr. Seuss! That's so wonderful. Along with Winnie Ille Pu.
counter counterpoint. Well. Sorta. Feel free to pick it apart some more.
#250 ::: Teresa Nielsen Hayden
I've always suspected there was a class agenda in the idea that adults have no right to indulge themselves in unproductive entertainment, or to hope for fufilling work. I know you didn't discuss the "fulfilling work" half of that, but in my experience those two memes travel as a pair.
I brushed past it and deliberately didn't address it. I am well aware the attitude exists that work shouldn't be fun. Otherwise, they wouldn't call it "work." I don't know if it's a class agenda, a moral agenda or a socio-political* agenda. I do know that I tried the "fulfilling work" gambit. All the reponses, in the end, were reduced to, "But I have bills! The sooner I get my loans paid off, the sooner I can do what I want. I can't wait around until I find something I like!"
It's not just college kids, either. I have a sister who is stuck in a job she hates, but can't leave it because she can't find a higher paying one to go to. Taking a cut in pay or settling for a lateral tranfer into another job is not an option. I think that ties into your suspicions about executives with perks and financial traders with big bonuses. Money is a metric everyone understands. Happiness and fulfillment are too subjective.
TNH
What's funny is that there's no matching condemnation for indulging yourself in stupid, mindless entertainment when you come home exhausted after work. It's still unproductive; you just don't enjoy it the way you enjoyed those childish things you supposedly put away.
In my experience, "mindless entertainment after a long, hard day" often includes those childish things we are supposed to put aside. I don't know if it's a lack of condemnation or the presence of an unspoken but widely acknowledged prerequisite that functions like an excuse. "I have no mind left, therefore simple, uncomplicated things that make me happy are finally okay." We are asked to justify our desires a lot. Ditto with explaining.
TNH
(I keep that set of suspicions filed next to the idea that it's necessary for executives to have lots of vacations and perks because their working lives are so stressful, and the one about how financial traders have to be given huge bonuses because otherwise they'll quit their jobs.)
I file these next to Office Politics and/or greed. If a top earner goes to his/her boss and says, "I'm unhappy with work and just sent out a bunch of resumes. So if you get calls, that's what it's about," the boss will usually try to keep that person around--situation allowing. If they can't improve the working conditions, they can improve the take home pay. That way, when the over worked employee finally does get some time, he/she can buy more happiness or a much desired status symbol. Then there are those that see the financial bribe in action and start working the system.
TNH
All our lives contain hard-to-solve problems, and it's appropriate for us to spend a reasonable amount of time and energy doing what we can about them. But why should we get told that it's our duty to spend all the rest of our spare brain power on questions which we already know are intractable? That isn't "being realistic." It's self-inflicted dullness.
The more anecdotes and arguments I read in this thread, the more I am inclined to write "Readers in the Hands of an Unselfish Meme" a la Jonathan Edwards^. My premise is that only selfish readers read for pleasure. Unselfish readers aspire to education, self-improvement and the redemptive act of working hard.
---
* It's a weird bit of EOE social legislation. I'm unhappy in my work, so you have to be unhappy in yours, too. You can't have fulfillment and a good wage with bennies. Pick one.
^ Lev Grossman's article and Nick Mamatas' defense of it both strike me as puritanical in the etymologic sense of the word rather the cultural one we've developed. They espouse the shining light on the hill attitude.
#271 ::: James:
My own sense about Ulysses and particularly Finnegan's Wake, is that they are books about language, about sound -- about music. They are really meant to be read the way Joyce composed them -- aloud. And hopefully not in isolation, but with others.
Some of the most enjoyable times of my life were spent with a room of people, taking turns, reading these books out loud, with other music maybe also going on, drinking and eating, and conversation and telling our own stories.
This is how Joyce wrote them.
Love, C.
#325 ::: Mike Leung
I don't read that as a plot or a conclusion.
Amory has a long discussion with a capitalist as he makes his broke way back to his cradle of discussion and debate, Princeton, the very bastion of legacy privilege in this country. This is just one of many long discussions that fill the book, about anything from fast girls to the value of Princeton's eating clubs, the deep, eternal significance of Amory & his friends' existence in the world, to the value of the artist.
However, one can see clearly why this slight, bright, MODERN novel so knocked the critics' and his generation's sox off; it was genuinely new. Like they saw themselves. It was the hippest thing ever, and they were IT.
This is very like what happened in our own time with Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City in contemporary fiction, and around the same time in SF/F, Bill Gibson's Neuromancer. It would be difficult to find anyone who knew better than Bruce Sterling just how significant he was in the world at that time (Bill is too well-mannered to ever talk that way about himself), or McInerney in his dimension of the world. Really. My little ole ears heard both of them describing and explaining this to little ole me.
Surely this was much as it was with Fitzgerald when This Side of Paradise broke out of the pack and into new ground. You hear Amory and his friends speak this truth to the power throughout the novel.
Love, C.
Victoria @318: I maintain an inner ten-year-old, but he's the one who at that age started reading through his aunts' collections of popular novels of the 1940s and 50s: Thomas B. Costain, Frank Yerby, Ellery Queen, Samuel Shellabarger. . . . I never went back to kids' books, other than the Heinlein and Winston titles in the public library. And I did recently enjoy Little Brother, though I spent half the book wanting to smack the narrator.
I still have an office full of model WWI aircraft and toy robots and rayguns, though.
Sean Sakamoto @ 59: "My personal opinion is that in so-called 'literary fiction' the author is the top. You, the reader, are the author's bitch. You will submit, you will struggle through what he is doing, and you will enjoy it....
With genre fiction, the author is the bottom. The reader is the top. The author exists to serve and service the reader...."
It strikes me that writing within literary conventions is hard, just like writing a sonnet or a villanelle is hard: you have to take your own ideas and force them into a foreign mold. It's much easier to put your ideas onto paper in the words and the patterns that feel most natural, heedless of expectation or convention. Conversely, reading the former is much easier than reading the latter. Structure, like the three paragraph essay format, is the reader's friend.
It's very easy for this contrast to become morally loaded. Work versus pleasure isn't right--I think there are two dichotomies being conflated there. The first is work versus play. (Both work and play can be pleasurable.) Because it serves no purpose play tends to be viewed as worthless, whereas work--pleasurable or not--is morally worthy. That's part of the moral load.
The second dichotomy is challenge versus reward. A natural but fallacious assumption is that greater levels of reward are reaped at higher levels of difficulty: doing an Olympic triathlon makes somone happier than doing a sprint triathlon. But while challenge can be measured objectively, reward is entirely subjective. As challenge increases the feeling of reward will increase, peak, and then decline as the challenge moves beyond the person's ability to overcome it. Everyone will find their peak reward at a different level of challenge--even people with identical skill levels. One rock climber derives her greatest pleasure from falling her way up a 5.12b hold by hold, and another climber of identical ability prefers strolling up a new 5.10 every day.
In general, I think that genre tends toward the lower levels of challenge. Genre conventions work like built-in reading guides, allowing readers to follow along with less effort. Litfic tends towards the higher levels of challenge, forcing the reader to learn an entirely new way of reading every time. Neither is better, or more inherently rewarding. It just depends on what kinds and levels of challenges you find most rewarding.
Because of these tendencies, litfic and genre are prone to very different fail states. A genre book that succeeds uses the familiar conventions as a sugar coating to get its payload of ideas to the reader; failed genre doesn't have anything to deliver. It's sugar all the way through. (I think this is what Emily H. was getting at @ 259.) A successful litfic book gets at an idea beyond the scope of genre, that can't be reached without building new conventions from scratch; whereas a failed litfic book is impenetrable--the reader, bereft of familiar guides, can't get a hold on it at all.
(There is a second failure mode for litfic, which is that it has nothing to communicate and the lack of conventions is a sort of litfic-as-genre un-convention. This is the product of people who read litfic and said "I want to write like that," not realizing that the whole point of the earlier work was to write something new.)
Bob Rossney @ 306: "My blanket-and-cup-of-tea comfort books are Gravity's Rainbow and The Book of the Long Sun. Not because I'm so sooper smart, but because I've reread them so many times, in the pursuit of understanding them, that they're as familiar and comfortable to me as an old baseball glove."
There's plenty of room in my philosophy for that.
Avram @ 316: "Actually, not me. I don't read for comfort."
You haven't ever thought to yourself, "Boy, that was hard. I think I'll go relax with a book"?
Constance @ 332: I don't read that as a plot or a conclusion.
Amory has a long discussion with a capitalist as he makes his broke way back to his cradle of discussion and debate, Princeton, the very bastion of legacy privilege in this country. This is just one of many long discussions that fill the book, about anything from fast girls to the value of Princeton's eating clubs, the deep, eternal significance of Amory & his friends' existence in the world, to the value of the artist.
Amory treated Princeton as an opportunity to develop a pretense with which to socialize, and as far as he devoted his time to its practice rather than reasoning it through, I don't think it can be said he debated much of anything at all.
This Side of Paradise seems to provide all the events that constitute a plot on even the Robert McKee scale:
It's act followed by tiny act, etc. Raiders of the Lost Ark is also act followed by act followed by act, etc, but I've yet to hear anyone argue it had no plot.
Inner 10-year-olds should note that this past year has been probably one of the best ever for YA science fiction and fantasy (as Hugo voters recognized by putting The Graveyard Book and Little Brother on their shortlist)--
Tender Morsels by Margo Lanagan is far from a comfort read, a brutal fairy tale with intense, evocative prose. Lanagan's collections of short stories have the same dense prose and deep themes.
The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness is science fiction that tackles religious fundamentalism, colonialism, misogyny, and the ties between violence and our conception of masculinity, set on a world where the men are constantly bombarded with one another's thoughts and the women are all dead. Warning: there is a dog. You know what happens to dogs in YA books.
Graceling is what I recommend to people who recoil at their daughters and sisters and nieces reading Twilight, a suspenseful high fantasy about a young woman whose grace--her special talent--is killing people. Features a non-stupid romance with actual human beings.
Heresiarch @335: You haven't ever thought to yourself, "Boy, that was hard. I think I'll go relax with a book"?
Well, if I'm physically wiped out, I might choose to physically relax by reading, but I'll generally still want my book to be something engaging and exciting.
But to do something mentally difficult, and then comfort myself with an unchallenging book? No, I don't think so. Not recently, anyway.
What Bob said, in 306, about a book that's "as familiar and comfortable [...] as an old baseball glove"? I don't seek that out. I crave novelty. When I reread, it's because I suspect there's something I missed the first time around. Or sometimes to refresh my memory for a sequel, if it's been a long time. There are very few books that I've read more than twice as an adult.
Heresiarch @ 334: Genre and form (in the sense of sonnet, quatrain, etc.) are not quite the same thing--there are, for example, genres of sonnets. And poetic forms (generally describably using the languages of linguistics and rhetoric) can serve readers as well as writers. (To shift artistic realms, ever participate in a swing-tune jam? The 32-bar song form keeps it from collapsing into a noisefest.) And genre (a mixed-element term that includes rhetorical/linguistic form as well as matters of content and arrangement of content) offers a range of effects denied to the one-off work: satire, and parody, for starters, plus irony, inversion, and all manner of variations on a form or convention-set. You can't play with satisfaction or frustration or redirection of audience expectations without having expectations in the first place. No genre, no Shaw. Or Shakespeare, for that matter. Or early Woody Allen. Or Randy Newman.
I find the metaphors of sugar-coating and payload telling: they assume a content+form model of the work of art, and this model often indicates an aesthetic that privileges content--which in turn often implies that the value of a work resides in the content (see fruit and chaff, which is a medieval version of the puritan aesthetic).
-ble. Describable. I'm not wearing my computer bifocals.
Avram @ 338: "What Bob said, in 306, about a book that's "as familiar and comfortable [...] as an old baseball glove"? I don't seek that out."
My apologies for my poor wording--"with-blanket-and-cup-of-tea" has led you off in the wrong direction altogether. My point wasn't about rereading or tea-sipping, but about mental exertion. There is reading that exhausts, and there is reading that relaxes. I'm saying that people generally like both--or maybe they prefer TV for their relaxing, but (nearly) everyone likes both kinds of entertainment.
Russell Letson @ 339: "Genre and form (in the sense of sonnet, quatrain, etc.) are not quite the same thing--there are, for example, genres of sonnets."
While genre is not the same thing as poetic form,
I'm not making a rigorous comparison. I'm merely trying to illustrate that prescribed forms make communication easier--like it's easier to read properly formatted essays than stream-of-consciousness ramblings--even as they limit the range of expression. Do you disagree with that point?
"(To shift artistic realms, ever participate in a swing-tune jam? The 32-bar song form keeps it from collapsing into a noisefest.)"
I think that's an excellent metaphor for genre--a set of artistic touchstones to keep the collaborators in time with each other.
"And genre (a mixed-element term that includes rhetorical/linguistic form as well as matters of content and arrangement of content) offers a range of effects denied to the one-off work: satire, and parody, for starters, plus irony, inversion, and all manner of variations on a form or convention-set."
You're making an awfully thorough defense of the uses of genre, but I'm not attacking genre.
"I find the metaphors of sugar-coating and payload telling: they assume a content+form model of the work of art, and this model often indicates an aesthetic that privileges content--which in turn often implies that the value of a work resides in the content (see fruit and chaff, which is a medieval version of the puritan aesthetic)."
Here we may have an honest disagreement. I do think there is a distinction between form and content. Otherwise there would be no translations from one language to another, nor from one medium to another. This isn't the same thing as saying that only content matters, however--content without form is gibberish. The crucial things is to have both. To rephrase what I was saying above, genre fails when it has form but no content; litfic when it has content but no form.
(returning to thread, and gazing upon it in awe and wonder)
This board is astonishing...what a collection of erudition, opinion, and ideas gathers here. No wonder I lurk. My Latin is rusty at best, and my Middle English wanders no further that a smidgen of Chaucer. Nevertheless, in again I wish to wade!
I think that over the course of this conversation, we've seen several arguments, all revolving around the idea of the utility of literature - what's it for? Is it to improve us? That's a seductive notion, because reading involves work, and work should yield reward (so this line of thinking goes)
From that line of thought, there is a direct path to the notion of reading as a morally active act - by committing your time, your effort to the task of reading, what do you add to yourself, how do you become a better person, a better member of the community, of society? This is not a new argument.
Personally, and contra Avram, I'm enough of a hedonist that I will read and reread certain works for the sheer pleasure of reading them, and not necessarily for the challenge and stimulation. Although admittedly, some of my most dog-eared volumes include "White Noise", "Midnight's Children", "The Book of the New Sun" (in four *very* dog-eared paperbacks) and "Wolf Solent".
Perhaps the deeper question is *why do we read* when it is not necessary to our personal or professional survival? I have a colleague who told me once, with a note of pride, that he had not read a single book since university. When he asked me what the heck he was supposed to do on a trans-Atlantic flight, I told him a bit tersely "Sorry, but you're f***ed."
So what to make of us who read for ourselves? Are we hedonists? I'll be the first to admit that the books that I read and buy will not clothe my children or put food on my table. So is reading for personal benefit inherently selfish? I can't answer that, for I don't know.
If it is, then hang fire, I'm a selfish person, and by God I'll read what I damn well please.
If it is, then hang fire, I'm a selfish person, and by God I'll read what I damn well please.
That's sort of the way I've come to feel, too, at least since I've gotten well into middle-age, therefore I don't hide the true crime books when I come back from the library. (Now *there's* a disreputable nonfiction genre for you if ever there was one, and the wheat to chaff ratio sometimes falls on the low side.)
dlbowman76 @ 342: Perhaps the deeper question is *why do we read* when it is not necessary to our personal or professional survival?
Well, when black ink-marks on layers of cellulose can reach into your chest and show you your own beating heart, how many things are better *than* reading?
Re: Mike Leung @ 344: That's a powerful statement...but it could also be argued to be inherently selfish. I know I'm banging on this "utility" drum relentlessly, but hear me out. Being deeply emotionally touched is *valuable*, I certainly wouldn't argue that. But does it do good? Does it improve me as a person? You're right that reading does have a deep personal benefit and makes us feel good, but someone of a less sympathetic bent might say - so does alcohol.
ldbowman76, in my opinion every bit of reading that moves you makes you a better person—if you let it. Comedy opens the heart to joy, which makes almost anyone a better person. Tragedy opens the heart to sorrow, which strengthens compassion. Speculation about how the world might have been different (if, say, magic worked) or how it might change (with, say, cheap space travel) expand the ability to think about why things are the way they are, and how they might change: this is politicizing, which I think is on balance a good thing.
In short, everything you read makes you a better person, or can if you let it. That's not just good for you, but for the people around you.
Even if you read a piece of total fluff with no edifying lesson or mental-stimulation value, taking time for a harmless pleasure is, I feel, likely to make you less cranky (that's a generic 'you'; I'm not saying you're cranky). If I have no joy in my life, I'm likely to take it out on others. Misery isn't good for anyone, or for society as a whole.
One character in a Mary Renault novel (ha! I do remember after all: The Mask of Apollo), an actor, said that each time he left the stage he hoped he'd made one man in the audience less inclined to beat his children.
So I say Enjoy! and share your joy with others. Else wallow in your misery, and woe to you if you share THAT.
I'm delighted by Xopher's response, this is a positive assertion of the merits of reading for its own sake. It's also a Point of View (capitals deliberate). The opposite case could be made. Mind you, I'm firmly in the camp that reading is in and of itself a positive good, and I'll take an even more elementary position, Reading opens the self. Reading *anything* is solipsistic - but not bad! - and makes us engage with ourselves.
To take some pop examples: Carl Hiaasen makes us consider our relationship with our environment, James Ellroy and Henning Mankell are deeply engaged with morality and the idea of good and evil. Philip K. Dick takes us all the way back to square one and demands to know - What is a human? What does it mean to be human? Are we human? Are you human?
So, Xopher, I agree wholeheartedly, but also hope to engage with you (and anyone else) on the idea of "utility" (God, that again???) If we accept that reading and literature enriches us individually, how does that benefit us as a community, as a society, as a world?
yrs,
David
It's amazingly difficult to talk about the whole idea of voluntary avocational reading without the use of language which, deliberately or not, imposes rank and hierarchy upon it. We speak of "higher levels" of difficulty, and "greater" challenges; and -- in our still-puritanical society -- even words like "pleasure" and "relaxation" have a faint negative cast to them, especially when set beside words like "instruction" or "insight" or "self-improvement."
I'm willing to accept that somebody else may find enjoyable something that I do not. After all, most of the people who tried to convince me, during my school days, that organized team sports were fun, certainly appeared themselves to enjoy them. But I'm no more fond than the next person of being told, or even feeling like I'm being told, that my enjoyment of those things that I do like is in some fashion inferior to the enjoyment experienced by people who like something else.
Debra Doyle: Can we escape from those frames? Or is that structure of understanding *any* avocational activity ineluctable? Admittedly, my upbringing (Stolid, American, Catholic) imposes it's own set of frames, but my current existence (Flexible, European - expat, militant Agnostic †) Has shattered my previous "knowns" or false consciousness if you will, and given me a wider ability to understand and interact with...well everything.
The notion of fun is very slippery...so slippery in fact, that I'm not sure that fun, as a concrete concept can be defined other than people have it and everyone knows what it is, but for every single person, it's utterly different.
† - def.: I Not only don't I know what I believe, but frankly am not sure that anyone else does either.
If we accept that reading and literature enriches us individually, how does that benefit us as a community, as a society, as a world?
Because, David, community, society, and world are composed of individuals. The man who does not beat his wife is a man who is not going to jail. The wife is not going to the hospital. Social resources are not being expended on keeping the vulnerable safe and the guilty punished. There is a great deal of utility in entertainment of all sorts as stress-relievers.
And they act as social lubricants. Reading gives us the structures through which we share ideas and even values. It allows the making of connections. Book clubs, for example (I've just joined one), can be a boon to people who otherwise might be isolated.
Social utility? For all its legion of problems, The Da Vinci Code led to a great many classes and seminars for laypeople on theology. And not just in fundamentalist churches: my Episcopalian rector led such a group, in which he urged people interested in the book's themes to read Eco's The Name of the Rose. People were given an opportunity to explore what they believed, and why, and why what they believed was important.
Harry Potter and Frodo give us hooks on which to hang our discussions of heroism and sacrifice, and the nature of good and evil. And more than that -- they give us ways to transmit those ideas to the next generation. There is a reason fundamentalists fight so hard to ban books from school libraries.
Those messages can be good or ill: several commenters have alluded to ways in which Stephanie Meyers' Twilight series impart unhealthy ideas about male-female relationships to teenage girls. (I would not know, having never read any of them.) But there is still utility in having the conversation.
When we as a society read -- and have our children read -- literature or nonfiction from other lands, the world becomes that much smaller. And, hopefully, we learn to be *less* solipsistic and nationalistic in our outlook.
We enrich ourselves, and help build bridges one to another, when we read and talk about what we read.
Heresiarch @341: There is reading that exhausts, and there is reading that relaxes. I'm saying that people generally like both--or maybe they prefer TV for their relaxing, but (nearly) everyone likes both kinds of entertainment.
Yeah, when it comes to TV and movies, I'll watch something I've seen several times before. (Most often while doing something else at the same time.) And listening to music, sure. But reading hundreds of pages of prose is enough work, and takes enough time, that I reserve it for things that make my brain-gears spin faster, not slower.
I've been following this thread faithfully, but mulling much more than posting.
It occurs to me that I got a bit derailed with Sean's choice of metaphor in ways that were both useful and misleading, all at once.
In very real ways, we seem to be talking about individual squick and squee buttons -- but for whatever weird persona
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