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From: wfi@rti-sel.UUCP (William Ingogly)
Newsgroups: net.sf-lovers
Subject: Re: Criticism
Message-ID: <234@rti-sel.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 6-Jun-85 18:04:51 EDT
Article-I.D.: rti-sel.234
Posted: Thu Jun  6 18:04:51 1985
Date-Received: Mon, 10-Jun-85 06:39:37 EDT
References: <228@rti-sel.UUCP> <5897@duke.UUCP>
Reply-To: wfi@rti-sel.UUCP (William Ingogly)
Distribution: net
Organization: Research Triangle Institute, NC
Lines: 164
Summary: 

In article <5897@duke.UUCP> crm@duke.UUCP (Charlie Martin) writes:

>The point that I think has been offered is that SF writing is
>terrifically derivative and (somehow) less ``good'' than mainstream
>writing.  Just to warn everyone ahead of time, I don't feel that this
>is really true: Sturgeon's Law applies to everything, mainstream or
>not.  ...

I completely agree; one of my responses in this exchange made exactly
this point (though I mistakenly attributed Sturgeon's Law to Arthur
Clarke). I have never made the point described here; if you think I
have, I've either failed to communicate correctly or you've misread
me.

>Have you ever read (or tried to read) a story in which you were never
>able to become engrossed in the story?  Where you were always conscious
>that you were ... reading ... a ... book?  Then I believe you were
>reading something that I call sterile.
>
>Now, note that two different people would believe different things
>sterile.  I find it hard not to be conscious of ...reading ... the ...
>book... (I promise I won't do it again) when I have read Moby Dick.

As you point out, this is the problem I have (or had) with Lord of Light. 
I found some of his techniques intruding on my enjoyment of the story.
Do you find Nabokov's fiction sterile, by the way? He was a *very*
self-conscious writer who deliberately played games with the authorial
presence (in one of his novels, for example, a character goes insane
when he discovers he's a character in a book; and in Lolita, Humbert
Humbert mentions a play or book called 'My Cue' by Vivian Darkbloom.
Try rearranging the letters in Vivian Darkbloom's name ...). Nabokov
and Melville are two of my favorite authors, so perhaps we're dealing
with a difference in personal taste here. More than one literary
critic has knocked Nabokov for playing these games with his readers'
heads, so you're not alone if you dislike him. But does that make him a
bad writer? 

>I find it impossible to read Moby Dick for pleasure.  I very much doubt
>that _Finnegan's_Wake_ is read by *anyone* for pleasure -- or if it is,
>it is only because years of study have made the reader so familiar with
>the language involved (which means learning how to handle puns across
>several european languages which are written in the form of euphonic
>Scotch telegrams) that this language barrier is no longer a problem.  I
>believe that _Finnegan's_Wake_ is sterile.

I totally agree. I also would call it self-indulgent. The few people I
know who have made a study of Finnegan's Wake claim to get great
enjoyment from tackling the task, however, so I suspect that this is
another case where a certain amount of personal taste is involved.
Perhaps it's like the guy who likes to beat himself over the head with
the baseball bat because it feels so good when he stops. :-)

>Bill has mentioned several times the various writers who are involved
>in meta-fiction: Calvino has been prominent.  I don't feel that
>meta-fiction is *inherantly* sterile: _Cosmicomics_ is an example of a
>break with conventional ficiton which I don't think is sterile at all.
>However, writing meta-fiction, writing fiction in which conventions are
>challenged, is a risky business: it's hard for the reader to co-operate
>in understanding the dream.  Calvino sems to manage; for me John Barth
>does not.

Again, I agree; Calvino is a blast, and Barth is a bore. For me, of
course. I'm sure both of us have known people who greatly enjoyed
Giles Goat-Boy, or Chimera, or one of Barth's other books. Gunter
Grass is another writer who's an acquired taste, I think.

>                                                   ... But the idea
>originally proposed was that we who prefer to read SF should get our
>minds out of the ghetto and find out what *real* fiction is like.

We both know SF readers who read nothing but SF; I have one of them in
my family. From postings to this group over the past two years, my
feeling is that there are readers in this group who hold the mistaken
opinion that SF is the only place where most interesting/valid/worthwhile 
things are being done today in fiction. I certainly did *not* say
that SF in general is not real fiction, or put down the entire SF
genre. If you think I did, I suggest you reread my posting. Yes, I've
made extreme statements (the use of the word ghetto was extreme). The
intention was to get people's attentions and spark some exchanges on
this topic, and it seems to have worked. I care a great deal about SF,
but I care a great deal about a lot of fiction written outside the genre
as well.

>However, my experience with what has been propounded as ``literary'' is
>that, for me at least, the ``literary'' fiction is nearly completely
>sterile.  The few ideas that are proposed are puerile or dull, the
>characters are often people who I wouldn't want to talk to in person,
>and the situations are usually intolerably banal.  I can't make the
>dream vivid: the author's style, choice of words, non-standard sentence
>structure or simple lack of identification with his own characters have
>made it impossible for me.

Try replacing "literary fiction" in this paragraph with "SF." Bad
fiction is bad fiction, no matter what the genre. And all of us
(myself included) have to admit that fiction fulfills different needs
for different people. We all have our own ways of approaching a story,
and I suspect we all get something different from a story. What I've
reacted strongly to in this group and others in the past are what I've
felt were absolutist statements that pigeonholed whole genres of
fiction, types of music, or groups of people unfairly.
 
>The usual response to this has been an essentially elitist one: ``if you
>were a literary sophisticate, you wouldn't find it so.''  Well, maybe
>so: but my experience with English Lit people has been that becoming a
>``literary sophisticate'' really means ``learn the code words and
>accepted interpretations.  Learn to fit in.''   Perhaps those of us that
>believe that there is more good writing in SF than in mainstream are
>simply near-illiterates, as the more strenuous pro-literary voices seem
>to have claimed.

Then you've had one or more bad experiences with 'English Lit' people
that you shouldn't generalize from. I've known several people, 
undergraduates and graduate students alike, who were rabid SF fans 
in first-rate English Lit departments (University of Virginia and 
University of Iowa at Iowa City, for example). I think this is an 
unfair generalization. And defending the claim that there's more good
writing in SF by accusing myself and others of character assassination
isn't a fair argument in my book. 

Certainly, graduate or undergraduate programs in English encourage
their students to conform in more or less subtle ways; this is more a
problem with academia in general than with literary criticism or
the formal study of English (or other) literature. What makes you
think students in these programs are all too short-sided to see that
these problems exist? And 'code words' and 'accepted interpretations'
exist in all disciplines, including computer science. Every field has
jargon; in many cases, it streamlines the communication process
between practitioners of a discipline. This is true of a lot of the
jargon that's involved in 'lit-crit bulls__t,' as another poster
recently put it. And as far as 'accepted interpretations' goes, I
think you're talking about critical consensus regarding quality
judgements in fiction. A lot of people in this newsgroup seem to want
to believe that quality judgements are meaningless, since (apparently)
anything which can't be described by an algorithm is subjective. I
think this is wrongheaded, simply because so much of human culture and
human behavior is subjective. My feeling is that the 'lit-crit'
consensus is correct in many cases, and just plain wrong in others.
Guess what? It's no different in any other field of intellectual
endeavor, including the sciences and engineering disciplines.

>A postscript:  Bill Ingogly has mentioned _Lord_of_Light_ as an example
>of SF that he disliked, especially mentioning the ``he was called
>Mahasamatman, and Binder,... but he preferred to be called just Sam''
>section as being a part of the book that he especially disliked.  The
>particular comparison he's used was to that awful ``you can call me Jim,
>or you can call me...'' comedian.  Well, okay, clearly this business
>broke the clarity of the dream for Bill.
>
>However, as a long-time student of the various sutras and storys of the
>life of the Buddha, I really enjoyed it.  That was a very nicely used
>parody or pastiche of a stylized phrase that happens over and over
>again in Sutras and in Vedic literature, and really gave me the feel
>that this was a story in the Eastern sort of world that the book is
>meant to evoke.  If indeed the measure of ``literature'' is the
>sophistication required to read it, perhaps -- just perhaps -- the
>sophistication that was lacking was not Zelazny's.

I've already admitted that it's been ten years since I read the book.
I am not an unsophisticated reader, and you know it; just a human
being with a memory that's sometimes defective like everyone else. The
quote, as you and at least one other poster have pointed out, is
little like my recollection of it. If I've unfairly criticized
Zelazny, I apologize. 
                                         -- Bill Ingogly