This thread is as fertile as the back of a Surinam toad. I think we could go on bifurcating, analyzing and clarifying each other's critical categories until those categories within categories spawned an entire teratologal system of anomalies. That would be fun, if time permitted, but what has been especially fun for me on this thread is this: talking about ideas with someone who has the clarity to inspect definitions empirically, and the wisdom to avoid degrading the discussion by making the other person's supposed character or attitude the subject.
The reason I draw a distinction between the use of manipulation and reflex in morally prescriptive works and those which "exercise erudition" (without being prescriptive) is because morality is often received inductively. I am not, of course, suggesting that an erudite work of fiction is automatically free of manipulation or reflexive thought. I'm only saying that regurgitated information is not as deeply intertwined with the self-image of the author and its reflection in society as is the desire to communicate one's personal standards (cf. the reformer, Dharles Chickens, darling of newspaper critics everywhere and whom I find to be objectionably preachy).
One of the better ways to do the second thing, I think, is by way of the parable without a moral. Dystopian science fiction (when it avoids said preachiness) is an obvious example.
What you seem to be describing in Richard Patterson's books sounds like a subtler use of Nabokov's unreliable narrator -- in which case the author isn't trying to convince you of a point of view but rather expose the limitations of a narrator who is. But perhaps the technique to which you're alluding is different from that.
The idea that the novel needn't be homogenous to cohere still doesn't quite explain the modernist collage novel at its most fragmented and elliptical. One of the more obvious examples might be
The Ticket That Exploded, with its early use of Brion Gysin's cut-up technique. Does that novel read like an effectively disjunct narrative or a printout of casually organized software-driven splices?
I'd also be interested to know whether you thought
The Lime Twig (and
Hawkes' work in general) cohered or didn't structurally, since tone and style seem to carry the book where form does not.
The reason I mentioned distinguishing between commercial and non-commercial fiction is because a writer's choices can be quite different when commerciality isn't the goal.
Here's another reason the distinction needs to be made: Criticizing all writing as if it were intended to be commercial is a form of ad hominem. To do so presumes prior knowledge of the unstated intentions of the writer.
This can lead to misunderstandings when assessing the value of someone's writing, especially when a misunderstanding is predicated entirely on a diagnosis of the writer's supposed character.
Elsewhere on Mobile Read, someone once tried to take me to task for writing a metaphor that "alienated" my "audience." They didn't seem to understand when I explained that I considered myself alone to be my "audience" and felt unconcerned that a metaphor which required some familiarity with classical music could conceivably "alienate" someone else.
The confusion began when, earlier on, a different member quoted the metaphor I'd written and concluded that it showed I knew nothing about classical music.
Initially, I found his statement amusing. At that point, the thread was still fun for me.
When I explained that I'd played classical music all my life, and that music composition happened to be my major in college, his argument then became that the metaphor was snotty in its supposedly incomprehensible specialization. The idea was that a metaphor which risked obscurity had to have been written by an egotist.
The conversation was therefore degraded. It had begun to revolve around projections of my presumed attitude on the metaphor as opposed to the craft of the metaphor itself.
As an experiment, I reposted the metaphor on Facebook and asked everyone who read it to tell me whether they agreed with the two MR members who claimed it was difficult to understand.
Interestingly, no one on Facebook seemed to have a problem with it -- not one solitary person.
Of the twenty or so people who responded -- including a professor of literature, a former critic for the
Village Voice, a retired art historian, a widely published popular novelist, a Pulitzer Prizewinning poet, a sound engineer, a rock vocalist and numerous other casual correspondents -- none of them found the metaphor confusing, overly specialized or "alienating." All of them understood it intuitively.
This is why I consider a number of the discussions of writing on forums like this to be fruitless, misleading and, at their worst, venomously discouraging for the writer who might be more talented than confident. It's too easy for us to say that others should "learn to take criticism" without our acknowledging or perhaps even understanding what constructive criticism is; harder, to be sensitive to cases in which pejorative criticism might inhibit a writer at some crucial crossroad. Offering constructive criticism is not belittling someone else or telling them off.
Even professional writers can mislead and destroy other writers when their criticism becomes caustic.
I personally knew a man in his early twenties who had been the lover of a seasoned famous novelist. After they broke up, he asked the famous novelist for her honest assessment of his short story collection. Smiling, and speaking in the friendliest possible way (as she later explained), she told him that his book was worthless; that, even if he destroyed it and started all over again, his next book would likely be worthless, too; that he should therefore turn his attention to more productive endeavors.
The man agreed with her, thanked her for her candor, went home, burned all of his manuscripts, walked to the Hawthorne Bridge and stepped off the edge to his death.
This is not an apocryphal story. That man was my friend.
Never mind that surviving manuscripts suggest he was a gifted writer who at the very least ought to have been encouraged. Even if his work truly had been worthless, the damage to his life caused by one cruel assessment was unwarranted and unimaginable. To say he should have been tougher is to avoid understanding the weight which pejorative criticism can carry. Yes, I wish my friend had been tougher, but how does that wish excuse his ex-partner's actions? That famous novelist was clearly trying to hurt the man and did.
One thing I try to do in life is never to discourage anyone from creating something on their own. Even if I find the thing they've made unsatisfactory, I'm deeply aware that that thing might simply be a transition point toward something better, and that aggressively criticizing the transitional thing might impede their progress. You never know where a person's development and drive will take them.
For those reasons and others, I'm happy to have had such a friendly and open-ended discussion with you about the nature of ideas in/about fiction -- in/about fiction itself and not the people who happen to write it.