The Importance of Literature.

[Jemmy Bloocher]

When we read books, we imply they are important. If any book can be important, we could decide that some books are essentially and functionally far more important than others — in a given set of active domains (in the instance here sci-fi, or perhaps more pertinently fantasy).

But by what means would we decide this?

[dANdeLION]

Individually. Realistically, nobody can guess how a book will alter them. We here like to rant against some authors who aren't as 'good' as the authors that had the biggest impact on us, but I bet if I went on those 'lesser' author's fan sites, I'd see the same devotion to them that I see here (and feel) to SRD. But, given that no two of us is exactly the same, I still feel that we all know what the top works are in fantasy and sci-fi based on the overall popularity of said works. Tolkein's LOTR, Rowling's Harry Potter, and Asimov's Robot series are currently popular in Hollywood, as was Herbert's Dune and Howard's Conan was a generation ago.

[Jemmy Bloocher]

Hence, importance by accessibility. I agree. Some of the greatest works of literature are read by a small audience, but their relevance is somewhat diminished by their accessibility.
Or maybe, as some people would argue, all great works will have a wide(r) audience because of their innate power. I am not too sure. If this is the case it becomes harder to differentiate between the popularity of 'greatness' and the popularity of the 'inane'. I wonder where on this spectrum the works you so rightly mention, dAN come.

[dANdeLION]

My comment did not, nor did I wish it to, have any reference to "accessibility". Now that you have brought it up, though; what do you mean by it? Accessible, as in copies are easily found, or as in it's an easy book to read/get in to?

[Myste]

Some of the greatest works of literature are read by a small audience, but their relevance is somewhat diminished by their accessibility.

Do you mean that a book's relevance can be diminished by a lack of accesibility? I.e., that an unreadable book (e.g. Finnegan's Wake), however critically acclaimed, loses cultural relevance because it is inaccesible to people who aren't monomaniacal expatriate Irishmen?

Or do you mean that book loses its cultural/literary relevance as soon as it becomes accessible to too many people? I.e., that a book's value is lowered every time another member of the hoi polloi reads it?

I consider myself a book snob, but I don't think I'd go that far.....maybe I'm just confused.

[FizbansTalking_Hat]

Some of the comments made already are interesting but could you be more speciifc, sorry if I'm being stupid about it, but what exactly is the issue on hand, maybe I missed it due to my lack of intelligence but please rephrase what the point of this thread is... are we discussing what the majority of people consider good reads to be, and is this based on how many books are sold, or its popularity, or its relavance to society and the time its put out in,......please explain more, sorry if I'm being dumb about it.

[Variol Farseer]

Some of the greatest works of literature are read by a small audience, but their relevance is somewhat diminished by their accessibility.

Do you mean that a book's relevance can be diminished by a lack of accesibility? I.e., that an unreadable book (e.g. Finnegan's Wake), however critically acclaimed, loses cultural relevance because it is inaccesible to people who aren't monomaniacal expatriate Irishmen?

I'd like to vote for that point of view, if I could do so in good conscience. Unfortunately, Joyce stands as the great shameful prototype of that utterly opaque literary genre, the Unreadable but Terribly Significant 20th Century Puzzle Novel. Not that Ulysses is unreadable, though Finnegans Wake is effectively so for most people. But thousands of mediocre writers, seeking a cheap entree to the World of the Creative Artist™, have seized upon Joyce's discovery that you can write a novel which is essentially about its own stylistic tics. These illegitimate heirs of his have inundated the world in pseudo-literary crud, just as Tolkien's legion of cheap imitators have flooded us with bad fantasy.

The trouble is that the mock-Joycean method works, at least for its own chosen purposes. Up to a certain point, you gain more critical attention and respect by being wilfully obscure than by telling an honest story. This is largely because it's easier to write academic papers about obscure texts. For one thing, if you write a learned paper about a popular book, you have to work very hard to prevent your colleagues in academe from considering you a bit of a thickie. I mean, everybody understands The Godfather; for Pete's sake, what's to be academic about? Whereas those writers who are so tediously precious that you can't see past their prose style to find out what the story is about — Gertrude Stein may be their patron saint, for all I know or care — are easy to do academic work on. Nobody understands them, so one interpretation is as good as another; and by bringing your own carefully honed arsenal of critical weapons to the task, you can make the corpse of the book conform to whatever interpretation you decided upon in advance. I am reminded of a well-known author — I forget his name, alas — who quit working on his Ph.D. in American Literature because his professors insisted that he do a Freudian interpretation of Theodore Dreiser, and he wanted to write about what he actually read in Dreiser's stories.

I'm also reminded of a poacher's story from Michener's Centennial. A poacher turned aerial tour guide is taking a big-game hunter from Boston up in an aeroplane to shoot a bald eagle. He matches speed with the bird, and the hunter blasts it with a shotgun at point-blank range. Says the poacher:

'So when the dude does fire he practically disintegrates the eagle. We spent the better part of an hour pickin' up the various bits and pieces, and when we hauled them in to Gundeweisser, the taxidermist, he looks at the pile and says, "How do you want this job made up? As a duck or a eagle? I can play it either way."'

If a work of fiction is so inaccessible and so gnomic that you need telepathy to understand it, your critical taxidermist doesn't have to know whether it's a duck or an eagle. He decides in advance which way to play it, and reconstructs the fragments according to plan. The story of Finnegans Wake hasn't had much cultural influence, but as an example of how to gain a ripping critical reputation by modelling the Emperor's new clothes, it has reshaped the whole landscape of literary fiction.

[Myste]

Variol, that was awesome. I have to go away and think now.

[danlo]

Very good Variol F! This probably explains why Pynchon is so popular in those "posh" circles. I feel Jemmy's intial postulation is a bit too openended and, as dAN indicates, our responses run the danger of being too subjective.

But Jemmy has asked us to concentrate on Fantasy and Sci-Fi in particular and while dAN has a serious point about Hollywood's influence I question it's overall clout. Reading is declining at a serious rate in the US but thanks to some ventures like The Potter movies and LOTRs the Fantasy genre is enjoying a renewed vitality. Is it the same for Sci-Fi? Will I, Robot, which from what the previews indicate and from what I've heard has nothing to do with the book(s), inspire a bunch of new Assimov readers? Did the Dune movie and the P. K. Dick movies (Blade Runner, Screamers, Total Recall, Imposter, Minority Report & Paycheck) actually increase those author's readership?

And, of course, there's individual tastes too and how far a reader wants to go or bothers to go to find out what's really out there. The sales figures indicate, to a large degree, that many readers don't even bother to go past Wal-Mart or the local newstand. There not going to find Zindell or Donaldson there, for example. They're going to have to be content with LOTRs, Potter, King, Brooks and Jordan. At least they are reading but they have no means to establish importance beyond a certian level. So now were's establishing, aside from the paid critics, a marked minority of readers in the Fantasy/Sci-Fi domain who actually take the time to go the library, seek out new or relatively unknown authors at bookstores or learn about them by word of mouth or on the Web.

Is this, now, the populace the ominous task of "ascribing importance" falls to? Is this elitist? And am I being presumptuous by saying "beyond a certain level"? Pehaps Fiz is right that the question should be rephrased. Even within our newly established "minority" there can be distinct disagreements. There are, for instance, those in the Martin community that don't like, or get, the Covenant books. To me (the elitist ) the Martin books are rousing adventures filled with intrigue and stark personal conflict but the Covenant books have more social and environmental revelance and delve mercilessly into psychological and emotional issues that (should) stir the entire collective human conscience.

Yes, to me, there is a certian level of writting "quality" in Sci-Fi and Fantasy that, probably, seperates 20% of the stuff out there from the rest. But your top 20 list may not jive with mine...I may feel that The Neverness, Covenant, Dune, LOTRs, Uplift, Ice and Fire, Gap and Hyperion books are the best written books in the entire literary world. You might slap back at me with Mazatlan, Ringworld, Earthsea, Foundation, New Sun, May, Scott etc...then how do we decide? Pistols at dawn? Perhaps all we can do at this point is enjoy, promote and share what we like best about all these different works. Isn't that what were doing here, anyway?

Besides there are so many different types of Sci-Fi, for example, that at certian points it becomes futile to make any type of cross-comparision...

[Brinn]

A-1 post Farseer. An instant classic.

The first book that jumped to my mind while reading the initial topic was "Ulysses" as well.

It seems to me that there is a subculture of academic elites who value innaccesability in a yarn and wear this as a badge of honor. They are arrogant toward or ignore "popular" works not because of any objective or inherent inferiority but because of mass acceptance alone, somehow implying that accessability disqualifies any work from being considered "serious".

IMHO, literature is in the mind of the reader just as the appreciation of any art is subjective.

[Myste]

I agree with Brinn.

[danlo]

If you want to go totally insane on the whole thing look at how the critics criticize the academicians who assay to ascribe "importance" in their analyses of the Sci-Fi genre. As per this one example I don't think I've ever read anything that I disagree with more (maybe two sentences make sense when the reviewer says it is up to the reader's repitiore and connection to modern cultural symbols) and find a completely ridiculous highbrow exercise in the ruination of paper-to say nothing the the poor trees killed this wanker's books!www.depauw.edu/sfs/review_essays/fek83.htm (sorry I couldn't delete what I first wrote here )

[[Syl]]

The Protocols of Science Fiction

I was thinking there was a more appropriate thread for this article, but I couldn't find it. Anyway, it's fairly relevant.

[FizbansTalking_Hat]

Anyone remember the Simpsons episode where Moe has the bar redone and when Lenny, Carl and Homer walk into the bar they see that there are videos of eyeballs and stools thrown on the ceiling, and Moe describes the art as, "Weird for the Sake of Weird"

This is what comes to mind when I think of authors like Joyce. I mean, I am a fan of Ulysses and yet as a fan I feel that there are certain aspects of the book that are just obscure for the sake of obscure, but to question some "purists" that are in love with these style novels, its like you've stabbed them in teh chest. "How dare you question this great literary piece of work.... you cannot possible fathom the work as a whole, if anything it must be appreciated simply b/c it is weird and so harsh to get into...etc..."

You get my point. When you think of a work like Joyce, do you know what is most often said of it... It is the one book that all great literary readers like to have on their shelf, but never read. It's a nice thing to say you have Ulysses on the shelf, but to try and get into the book, to know about it, to read it, well its 600+ pages and its only 1 single day inteh life of a jewish irishman. You tell me if that isnt weird for the sake of weird.

I don't know what makes a good book truly good. Is it a large fan base, being a best seller for more than 60 weeks on the NYTIMES, or is it a book that is just so weird and so difficult to get into, you can't really tell if its genius or stupidity...

[Myste]

What I miss are the days when literary criticism was interesting. I don't mean the academic stuff, I mean the stuff by people like Edmund Wilson and Virginia Woolf's Common Reader and Dorothy Parker. I mean criticism that was as much a book review as an exploration of meaning and theme: when it was still OK to make value judgments as a part of critical discourse.

I also miss the days when Story was more important than Language, and I'm afraid I do have to blame the modernists for the death of literary narrative. Now "literary" has become as much a genre as "mystery" or "scifi"; for the most part, it's distinguished by affectation and a lack of readability. No wonder the literary novel is on the decline, and genre fiction is so popular at the supermarket. People want to read books that engage them. It's really that simple. If literary fiction could find its way into a space that actually meets the needs of readers without raising nonsense to an art form (did anybody else read the WSJ article about the verbless novel?), then it could pull itself out of this nose dive and start selling again.

And while I'm on my soapbox, dammit, let me just say that I'm an English major; I have a graduate degree; I enjoy literary fiction. But I am sick to death of twee little linguistic games and navel-gazing grammarless maundering. Give me meat! I want STORY! Hence, I read genre fiction, and find that some of the most interesting writers and storytellers in English don't need to play mind games to ask the real questions of literature: What is "real"? "Who are we?" "What does it all mean?"

[Brinn]

Nice post Myste!

[Myste]

Thanks

[FizbansTalking_Hat]

One reason I think that the Literary genre is fading is that it has this stigma of being very old and crusty. Maybe it has to do with the fact that a lot of classics of literature are taught in junior high and high school and as a result of that, people associate this style reading with school and a lot people just rather not think of those times. Maybe the way they're taught in school turns people off. I mean, the reason I have such great passion for literature is that I had brilliant English Lit professors growing up, but not everyone is as lucky as I was back in school.

I mean, I love Dumas, Twain, Dickens, Tolstoy, Mellville, Verne, Bronte, Hawthorne, Steinbeck, Shakespeare..and other great classic writers...etc. but a lot of people are turned off on thise authors b/c they are introduced to their work in a very improper manner.

So maybe the way people are shown great works affects whether or not they cna come back to them again. If your teacher is awful and presents Hemingway in a very boring manner, chances are you're not going to come back to that when someon reccomends it to you. "Oh, you want me to read For Whom the Bell Tolls, but The Pearl was so crappy, don't think I want to give that a chance...."

Those are just some thoughts, don't know what you wnat to make of that. Cheers.

[Myste]

If your teacher is awful and presents Hemingway in a very boring manner, chances are you're not going to come back to that when someon reccomends it to you. "Oh, you want me to read For Whom the Bell Tolls, but The Pearl was so crappy, don't think I want to give that a chance...."

I think that's a really good point--Ihad at least 3 different teachers and/or profs who assigned "Hard Times" because it was one of Dickens' shorter novels--the problem is, it's also one of his not-so-great novels. I wouldn't read Dickens for years! Then I went through the OMG-I-was-an-English-major-and-I-never-read-
Dickens phase, and devoured Oliver Twist and David Copperfield in a week. Presentation is crucial.

There's also the fact that when you're in school, you have to read all these books that were written a hundred years ago, or more--they're great, and wonderful, and everyone should read them, but if you're instilled with the belief that great books are all a hundred years old and reflect almost nothing of the kind of life you live, you might not be inclined to stick with it. Why not get kids reading contemporary literary fiction in school? Dave Eggers, Michael Chabon, Molly Gloss? Stuff they can relate to?

[Edinburghemma]

I wanted to quote the whole post by Myste, but won't. Great post, and I agree wholeheartedly. The story is the flesh of literature, the language is the bones, both are vital, but the story is what gives the work life.