[spellbanisher]

Originally Posted by Hitch

I disagree--that's not what I inferred from the original post, nor the follow-up to the discussion. There's a marked difference between someone picking up, say, "The Road" and trashing it because for some reason, they thought it was going to be a buddy-travel adventure, and a reader "not getting it," which was the language of the original post.

Catlady said nothing more than that which had already been said; when an author endeavors to use either a device or artifice which distracts from the substance, he risks detracting from the work, or taking the reader out of the work; to which the reply about readers "not getting it" was posted.Again, you seem to have inferred something entirely different from the original series of posts than did I. Catlady's original post said:

You simply are not getting the point TGS made or that I made. Now you are misconstruing the point that Catlady made.

Originally Posted by Catlady

The problem is that any use of a nonstandard style calls attention to itself, which distracts the reader from the substance--so an author should have a darn good reason to abandon conventional practices of punctuation.

What does she mean by "substance" except a conventional story? She's making a strict delineation between "style" and "substance" which many forms of literary fiction does not do. In other words, she's saying that an author should only use nonstandard style if it doesn't detract from a conventional story. To which TGS replied

Originally Posted by TGS

Which presupposes the "substance" is what you think it is.

There is often more to literary fiction than telling a story. If you don't get that, that's OK, but it doesn't really warrant you, or anyone else, rubbishing a piece of work because it rubs up against your expectations.

In other words, in literary fiction very often the style is the substance. Sometimes, the substance is all about "calling attention" to the style itself. Ulysses isn't about the story. It is about the way language and style affects meaning and experience. The story is simply a day in the life of Leopold Bloom. Of course one could say that Joyce's montage of styles "detracts from the substance" of the story, since it would have been much simpler to tell the story of a day in the life of Leopold Bloom with conventional prose. But the "substance" of the novel isn't the story itself.

There's nothing in either post which discusses a reader's expectations being somehow askew, or the reader misunderstanding the genre; the reply is clearly stating that the reader simply doesn't understand what the author is attempting to do in literary fiction. This line:

Um, yes there is. Again, TGS's post

Originally Posted by TGS

Which presupposes the "substance" is what you think it is.

There is often more to literary fiction than telling a story. If you don't get that, that's OK, but it doesn't really warrant you, or anyone else, rubbishing a piece of work because it rubs up against your expectations.

What do you think "presupposes the substance is what you think it is" means except that her expectations of what constitutes "substance" in a novel are contrary to what they are in literary fiction, which he expands upon in the next line

"There is often more to literary fiction than telling a story." He finishes the post by saying that a work of literary fiction doesn't warrant you "rubbishing" it because "it rubs up against your expectations."

Again, to reiterate, TGS is saying that some people, like catlady, have expectations for literary fiction that are contrary to what the genre is about.

is obviously not about someone picking up a romance novel thinking it's a thriller, or vice-versa. The very term "literary fiction" takes this out of the simplistic realm of genre confusion. The sentence pretty clearly states that the reader is simply too stupid to "get" what the author was doing in our hypothetical piece of literary fiction. And if that wasn't clear in that post, the succeeding two posts between the participants crystallize it.

No, the succeeding posts do not illustrate any such points. Now you are making stuff up. Here is what was actually said

Originally Posted by Catlady

Could you be any more condescending?

Originally Posted by TGS

Oh yes, easily.

TGS was not being condescending. He was pointing out that not all kinds of fiction adhere to Catlady's notion of a separation of style and substance. In response, she decided to attack TGS, which he deflected with sarcasm.This isn't a case of him attacking her or being condescending, this is a case of her being hypersensitive.

And I repeat: authors are free to experiment with whatever form they wish, to achieve any effect that they wish. However, there's also a cognitive-dissonance, faux-distinction between "art" and "commerce" that is all-too-frequently blurred in the writing (and painting, sculpting, etc.) world. (Personally, I blame this on the Church, dating from medieval times, but that's another discussion altogether). Your position seems to be that even if the reader plunks down their hard-earned, if they got something that they didn't expect--and didn't like it--they don't have the right to say so. Why don't they?

Again, another failure at reading comprehension. I never said a reader has no right to say they hate a work. I said it is ridiculous to pick up a work with faulty expectations and then to criticize that work for failing to meet those faulty expectations.

i.e., it is silly and immature to pick up a work of literary fiction and then complain that it has unconventional style or that it doesn't tell a conventional story.

You can complain. But your complaint is as legitimate as a man complaining that the horse he bought can't do algebra.

Of course many people simply don't like literary fiction. Many people don't see any point in literary experimentation. This has nothing to do with literary fiction being "art" and other forms of fiction being "commerce." I never once said that literary fiction is "art" and other forms of fiction are "commerce." What I said is that literary fiction attempts to do things that other forms of fiction don't.

That literary fiction doesn't follow the rules that other forms of fiction follow.

Whether or not the nature of literary fiction, its experimental and rule-breaking tendencies, render it commercially viable or unviable is irrelevant.

It has nothing to do with whether literary fiction is business or not. If literary fiction doesn't sell, then it doesn't sell. But if you change its nature it is no longer literary fiction.

Again, this is not a business or art issue. This is an issue of definition. If horror wasn't selling, I couldn't save the horror genre by telling a romance story with all the conventions of the romance genre. It wouldn't be a horror story anymore, it would be romance.

The same logic applies to literary fiction. If you change a story so that it focuses on a conventional story or "substance" and doesn't experiment with style, it's no longer a work of literary fiction. Maybe you have to do that to sell the work. But if you do, it isn't literary fiction. This isn't a good or bad thing. There is no divine mandate that authors must write literary fiction, no imperative that literary fiction must exist or be popular, no necessary reason why it must be published. It is simply a form of fiction.

The commercial standard here is simply irrelevant.

This line of arguments puts the burden on the reader, not the author; if the reader's not "up to snuff," well, then s/he should keep her mouth shut. If a piece of experimental literary fiction is incomprehensible to the reader, and she hates it, well--she's just not smart enough to understand it.

Sometimes the reader is at fault, such as when a certain poster repeatedly fails at reading comprehension even when the posts he is responding to are written in plain conventional english.

It is okay to criticize a piece of experimental literary fiction if you come into the work with the correct expectations. It is okay to say that "the author doesn't use quotation marks for some literary effect, but fails to achieve any effect."

Your example of horses and algebraic horses is not, I fear, truly representative of the issue.

Yes it is. Since people keep criticizing literary fiction for failing to tell conventional stories or for using unconventional style, clearly your example of people "not getting what they paid for" is faulty.

The artistic (and commercial) risk is the artistic (and commercial) risk--and like any venture, the audience is still entitled to say what they think. Why is that "silly and incongruous?" You don't think that idea is the height of condescension?

The audience is entitled to think and say whatever it wants. But it is silly and incongruous for criticizing a work that fails to meet faulty expectations. That isn't condescending. That's rational. As i've already stated, the commercial standard here is irrelevant.

You can say that "the market-place isn't the only legitimate standard," and you'd be right; but the reality is, it's readers who put down their own money, to buy an author's efforts. If they don't like it, the writer can console himself with the idea that the hoi polloi simply don't have the education to understand what s/he was trying to do.

This is irrelevant to the points I made or this discussion. This has nothing to do with authors insulating themselves from criticism. This has to do with ignorant and narcissistic consumers buying products based on their own faulty expectations and then complaining that it is the producer that failed them. Here is what I mean by "the commercial standard isn't the only standard."

How do you judge the quality of liquor?
Well, one way would be sales.
But what if everyone for some reason stopped liking any form of alcohol.
Would removing the alcohol from the liquor make it better liquor?
No.
Because if you remove the alcohol, it would cease to be liquor.
But the fact that people suddenly stopped liking alcoholic beverages doesn't make liquor worse than it was before.
At best you could only use the commercial standard to judge the quality of liquor itself by comparing the sales of kinds of liquor to other kinds.

Another scenario.
Suppose I'm someone who hates alcohol. I pick up Budweiser, take a sip, and say, "this Budweiser is terrible!"
"Why?
"Because it has alcohol in it! The brewer is terrible."

It is one thing to say I hate alcohol. But it would be silly to say it is bad alcohol because it has alcohol in it, which is the standard many people are applying to literary fiction.

You are viewing various aspects of literary fiction as "art," but publishing is a business.

No, I am saying that literary fiction with standards that differ from other forms of fiction. It should be based on those standards. It is as simple as that.

Any author who sells his work, either to a publishing house or as an Indy, is operating a business. And like any business, his products are open to criticism, from whoever buys them, for whatever reason. It really doesn't get any simpler than that. And if you disagree, ask every author you know whether they'd rather sell one copy of their novel, and win a Pulitzer, or a million copies of their novel, but not. (I know what the 2,000+ authors who've passed through our doors would say, pretty much down to a wo/man--even the poets.)

All irrelevant to my post.

The Jekyll and Hyde part of this is the disconnect between how an author views their "art," coupled to the capitalistic cart that puts the book on SALE to a buying public.

Again, irrelevant to the points I made.

I saw one that was purportedly a novel, but had each speaker identified like a screenplay, with the character's name followed by a colon, even though the narrative was written in the normal way. (The author told me that he couldn't be bothered to write all those dialogue tags, and that it was "too much work.") That's not "experimental fiction," it's just BAD fiction, written by people who've never even taken a high-school writing class.

Your right, that isn't experimental fiction. According to your own account, the author wasn't trying to experiment. He was just lazy. I don't see what this has to do with experimental literary fiction.

I think nowadays we readers are increasingly burdened by bad books, and it indubitably must weary us all, so that we are suspicious of even a solid talent's work, when it departs from the norm.

90 percent of everything is crap. That applies to all forms of fiction. I don't see your point here.

I can say without batting an eyelash that my view of authoring, publishing, etc., has changed dramatically over the past five years, and I think that anyone heavily involved in the Indy publishing industry has to be equally affected. I realize that my perspective of "books as products" will be unwelcome to many who write. {shrug}.

That's nice. It has nothing to do with the points I or TGS have made.

I suspect, however, that it's a view that's more widely shared by readers than many authors would like to think. I'm not interested in a fight about it; you can tell yourself that I'm a Philistine and just blow it off. ;-)

Hitch

Right, you spend a whole post misconstruing and digressing, then based on your own biases and prejudices insinuate that I'm a snob. Whatever.