[Hitch]

Originally Posted by spellbanisher

This is a jekyl and hyde post. The second half is a legitimate and pertinent critique of the effect of ommitting quotation marks in experimental fiction. The first half is a trite harangue that completely misses the point of the poster it was addressed to.

<snip because it's being repeated later>

To paraphrase, you shouldn't judge a work if you falsely expect something to be what it is not.

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.

If you pick up a romance novel expecting it to be a thriller, the work doesn't warrant your judgement based on your faulty expectations.

Just as i wouldn't call a physics dissertation a bad work because it doesn't tell a rip-roaring story.

Again, you seem to have inferred something entirely different from the original series of posts than did I. Catlady's original post said:

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.

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. 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:

There is often more to literary fiction than telling a story.

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.

A thing should be judged on the basis of what it is. Many people pick up literary fiction expecting a conventional story with conventional language and grammar. Then they rubbish the work based on those expectations and criteria. There is often more to literary fiction than telling a story.

To repeat TGS's points, literary fiction often experiments with form to see what effect that has on meaning and experience. As we see on this thread, to many posters think a work is ipso facto "pretentious" if it doesn't focus exclusively on the story, as if conventional format was handed down by god as the perfect means of expression for all meaning and experience.

To add a point of my own, literary fiction also tries to get us to think about how and why we use language and grammar. The fact that we are here discussing the effects of ommitting quotation marks means that those works have succeeded, even if you don't like them. In other words, literary fiction doesn't have to likeable to be effective. Indeed, it is often most effective when it is not likeable. The market-place standard is not the only legitimate standard.

If you don't like literary fiction that's fine. But there is a difference between saying something like "i don't like horses" and saying "that is a defective horse because it doesn't do algebra." The former is a personal preference, which are always valid, although not always legal or moral. The latter is a silly, incongruous judgement, which is what many do with literary fiction.

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?

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. In plain English, isn't that what's being said? And, as she's too stupid to understand it, she's not entitled to "rubbish it," even though she bought the product. If a work is commercially unsuccessful, and gets trashed by the readers, they weren't entitled to comment on it in the first place. Isn't that the distilled version? One may discount any criticism that "doesn't get" the device deployed by the author--if the critic didn't like it, they didn't get it, and thus, the critique may be devalued, branded as illegitimate, and utterly ignored.

Your example of horses and algebraic horses is not, I fear, truly representative of the issue. If a consumer buys a movie-theater ticket, to see a dramatic, literary movie she has heard about, and instead, is treated to a 90 minute stage-play of mimes in facemasks acting out the parts--no matter how cleverly--she's entitled to say that she thought it was pretentious and silly and worse, boring. It doesn't matter if it's the same drama for which she purchased a ticket, simply told in a different form. That's no different than any author trying a convention outside the norm. 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 "Jekyll and Hyde" part of this discussion isn't mine--it's that of our hypothetical author. If a writer wants to experiment with form, to see how it affects substance, certainly, that's his prerogative; but that doesn't mean that those who read it don't have the right to dislike it; to think otherwise truly would be pretentious rubbish. 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.

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

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.

Back OT: literary devices can be deployed as the writer sees fit; but I've seen a ton of books on Amazon, patently self-published (you can tell by the egregiously bad formatting even before you get to the body) in which dialogue is indistinguishable from narrative. I've seen novels with stage-directions in them, between narrative paragraphs. I've seen books mixing past/present tense, (in the same sentence--not flashbacks) and the like. 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. 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.

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}. 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