Extollager
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- Aug 21, 2010
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There may be two different things getting mixed up in some of the comments.
In message #125 above, I didn't state, but should have stated, that I envisage a spectrum. At one end belongs the story that may be enjoyed as pure entertainment providing pleasure, but depending on a very casual reading. This kind of story has its place. At the other end of the spectrum is the story that may require a great deal of sustained attention, may offer rewards to readers who are better-informed about history, art, etc. than readers who are not. This kind of story also has its place. A reader who can read and enjoy this kind of story at all is likely to value it highly. He or she may try to interest others in it, urge them to acquire knowledge and develop reading skills that could enable them to read it because the rewards are known to be great.
I think some of this kind of encouragement may be counterproductive because it is liable to evoke false charges of snobbery or whatever. On the other hand, this kind of encouragement may be just what some less well-read person needs. In my own case, I had at least two English professors who knew a lot I didn't, who enjoyed a lot that I hadn't enjoyed, and I wanted to become more like them. One of them was quite a popular teacher and one of them was, so far as I'm aware, not popular. But I was on a sort of quest, still am, and I revere both of them as I remember them. I would have hated it if they had seemed to be ashamed or apologetic because they were enormously better read than I and had academic credentials I never attained. They were inspirations to me. They loved reading. They were sort of fathers and brothers and friends and mentors to me. If you have been to college and have never had teachers like these, that's a pity. But then in any time and place they are probably exceptional -- especially now when politics is so horribly messed up with literary study.
OK, so there is a spectrum of fiction writing, or a spectrum of possible reading. Some works of fiction may belong not at one or the other end of the spectrum but somewhere in between, and this model not being an infallible touchstone, good readers may differ somewhat in where they would place a given story on the spectrum. I don't suppose that all of the stories of any legitimate genre always cluster at one end or the other. For example, Henry James's The Turn of the Screw is a ghost story and so is some ghost story from Weird Tales. The James story belongs pretty far towards the literature end of the spectrum while the pulp yarn probably belongs towards the subliterary end. (But if I wanted a story to read aloud to some youngsters on Hallowe'en, that WT yarn might be a good choice if it wasn't simply bad.)
The other thing that's involved in the current discussion of imaginative writing is the matter of goodness and badness. I don't think that literary goodness and badness are simply matters of taste/subjectivity. Meaning no offense, but it seems to me that some of you guys are very quick to say something is just a matter of subjective preference.
But badness and goodness in reading can be more objective than that. A bad piece of writing may start as a bad idea and/or be badly written. The most uncontroversial criterion of badness will be that a piece of writing is bad when the author doesn't know how to write. He doesn't know, or worse doesn't care, what words mean; for example, he says decimate when he means utterly destroy. He has no sense of how words and phrases sound together. He persistently falls into unintended bathos. He relies on crude and offensive ethnic stereotypes to provide the power to make the engine of his writing turn over, relying in readers to despise what he despises. He may be a lackey of those in power; if they are plastering the streets with billboards of square-jawed heroes who pose next to enormous tractors, he will write about heroes with tractors. He relies on the reader to indulge in fatuous, consolatory daydreams that his writing hardly has the power even to evoke. He will never use ten words when 120 words are possible. His work constantly suggests inattention to his job, ignorance of his subject, and neglect of, or even contempt for, his readers.
And he may be writing for pulp magazines or for prestige book publishers. His work is bad. It is bad in itself, and to develop a taste for it is for one's taste to be stunted or to become corrupted. Good criticism will expose the badness of this work, though without cruelty towards the author and his fans. And that might offend the author and his possibly influential friends and the custodians of fashion. But that's what good criticism of bad work will do with bad books, unless it simply ignores them
Good criticism may also take note of good but unfashionable writing and try to mold people's taste so that they will receive it and enjoy it if possible.
The spectrum I have attempted to describe assumes that the story to be discussed seems to be reasonably good. "The Speckled Band" is towards the subliterary end, but is good for what it is. A lot of science fiction probably belongs towards that end, just as probably a lot of more realistic fiction does. If a story is truly bad as just described, it's hardly worthwhile trying to assess its place on the spectrum. Why would you even finish reading it?
I'm guided much by the comments of people whose judgment I have confidence, happily too much to have read things that seem to aspire to literature but are bad. I've read a fair amount of bad subliterature because I read fanzines, old magazines, etc. and because sometimes I just felt the itch to read a new genre story that I persisted with pretty lousy writing. As for bad writing with literary aspirations, benefit of the oft-derided "canon" is that books that seem to be grossly failed efforts at literature haven't generally been regarded as canonical. Quite a bit of drama survives from the Elizabethan-Jacobean period that just about nobody except literary historians ever reads; I suppose that some of this is just bad. But most of us, self included, never hear about it.
