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From: judith@proper.UUCP (Judith Abrahms)
Newsgroups: net.sf-lovers
Subject: Re:  critics
Message-ID: <295@proper.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 16-Sep-85 07:51:26 EDT
Article-I.D.: proper.295
Posted: Mon Sep 16 07:51:26 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 19-Sep-85 05:38:54 EDT
References: <>
Reply-To: judith@proper.UUCP (judith)
Organization: Proper UNIX, Oakland CA
Lines: 127

In article <> chen@mitre-gateway.arpa writes:
> [quotes me here:]
>>Do you mean that if a large no. of people can't understand it, it
>>can't be great art?  And if you have to work to understand it,
>>ditto?
>
>Judith and others,
>
>Basically, a classic piece of literature should be able to be
>read at many different levels.  It should be like an onion with
>many different layers (but no bad spots).  You should be
>able to read it for fun and enjoy it one time and be able
>to read it for something deeper some other time and enjoy it as well.
>When reading a classic piece of literature, you should get out
>of it what you put into it.  There should be deep and profound
>ideas, conflicts, etc. in the novel for those who are willing
>and able to look for them.  Yet, there should also be
>something for those who only want solid entertainment.
>
>Shakespeare, for example, in his time was a very popular playwright...
>...He was well liked because his plays were FUN.  There were sexual innuendos,
>puns galore, and slapstick humor throughout all his plays.  They
>just don't appear that obvious to us now, because we don't know
>Elizabethan slang.

But we still read the plays of Shakespeare, despite the fact that most of his
puns, sexual innuendoes, and slapstick humor are lost on us unless we study his
writing.  (Of course, a lot of this does come across in stage productions by
directors who know the work well and can give visual cues as to what the
increasingly difficult language means.)  But we don't READ Shak. because he's
the same spinner of rollicking hilarious yarns TO US that he was to his less
educated contemporaries.  That was exactly the point I made when I said that
the classics may have been great fun when they were contemporary, but that as
their language and their references become increasingly obscure to us, we read
them with more difficulty and for different reasons.  For that matter, we still
read the sonnets of Shakespeare, and I don't believe they're susceptible of
being read on your "onion" model; they don't work as easy doggerel and also as
compact, dazzlingly inventive, intricate constructions of nested metaphors that
economically illuminate the depths of human emotion.

My point, which I tried to make in my earlier post, is that neither you nor I
nor Steve Brust IN FACT is committed to reading only works that give immediate
pleasure and are capable of appealing to a wide variety of people on a great
no. of levels.  We all love Shakespeare, and we love him more when we know 
what he's referring to in those metaphors that are no longer current.  I used
him as an example because he's the classic case of the difficult work that's
worth studying, the work whose obscurities -- once investigated -- are 
transformed into sources of new light on the deepest places of the human heart.

And the more general point I tried to illustrate with this example is that if
so many of us find Shakespeare worth working through, even though his writing
has become difficult to understand, it's certainly possible that more recent
writers, who simply don't bother to write at a level accessible to any high
school graduate, are also worth the effort.

As William Ingogly recently pointed out, there are definitions of "fun" that
denote other activities than the mindless enjoyment of a work that makes no
demands on the reader.  The work of deciphering an elegant little program,
which does in three lines what I'd only been able to do in six, is incredible
fun, for a variety of obvious reasons: I learn something about programming, I
feel the presence of the other programmer & rejoice that I have found someone
I can learn from, and thereby improve my own creations; and I simply feel joy
at watching the great trapeze act that is an agile mind moving in perfect
grace among its creations.

I get exactly the same feeling when, after ten or so readings of William
Gaddis' _JR_, which is almost all dialogue, I begin to be able to tell who's
talking and where the plot's going at almost all points in the book, and begin
to be sure that everything's perfectly connected and there are no loose ends
in over 700 pages.  After about 5 readings, I began to see that almost all of
this book was overpoweringly funny, too... but that's not the level I began at.
I got into it because I was tantalized by the idea that an author could 
entirely abandon the whole stream-of-consciousness tradition and show nothing
but dialogue, and yet make that dialogue so consistent that with a bit of
attention I became able to tell at almost all points who was speaking, and
about what.  THEN the fun began.

You just never know until you get in a little way.  And I don't feel it's a
writer's obligation to put a sugar coating of easy, fun, helluva-good-read
stuff on the outside of the work to draw the reader into the recesses of his/
her view of the depths of human reality.  Nor do I believe a reader should
expect him/her to do so.  It makes more sense to me to develop my abilities
to watch the sheer mastery of language and idea that our most brilliant writers
invariably display, and, if I see that going on in a book, to go on and 
investigate the possibility that it also has a plot, ideas, humor, characters
I can identify with, and so forth.

Why should a novel or a play be required to provide instant gratification in
some way, then to draw the reader into more profound levels of discourse?
This has never been required of poetry, or at least not since poetry moved
away from the song form in the Middle Ages.  And it's still not required of
those "classics" which almost all of us read, and read in translation.

If we're willing to go after the fun that's still in the Odyssey, by reading
translations of it, and we don't condemn it for being difficult in its "raw"
form, i.e., in Greek, on what grounds are we to condemn a recent work that's
difficult the first time around?  If we read an annotated version of 
Shakespeare in order to appreciate the humor of the plays, does that make him
less of a "great" writer?

If we're to go on seriously with this discussion, we might consider working out
-- by consensus -- a set of working definitions of the terms we're bandying
about.  It makes little sense to me to speak of "accessible" literature, "art"
literature, "fun," and "good reads," when these words obviously refer to 
different works depending on who's using them.  There exist more exact terms,
used routinely in the work of criticism of all kinds.  For example, the term
"entertainment" normally means anything -- a book, a piece of music, a TV show
-- that gives immediate pleasure, essentially to everyone, and makes no demands
on a typical mind that has developed in our culture without making any special
effort to train itself to process recreational input.  The word "art" is 
usually used to denote work that assumes rather more education on the part of
the consumer, and more willingness to assume an active role in pulling meaning
or pleasure or anything else out of it.  It we use these terms, we may then say
very simply that entertainment is by definition fun.  We may also say that some
art is, or includes, or may be taken to be, entertainment, and that some art
isn't, doesn't, and isn't.  We can allow Steve Brust to reserve the use of the
term "great literature," in his private lexicon, for description of art that
doubles as entertainment and hence gives pleasure to more people than art that
doesn't.

But all this juggling of subjective judgments -- "Well, *I* had fun with 
Hamlet" ... "I found Ulysses hilarious!" ... "Melville is great fun!" ...
"This work FAILS as literature, because it wasn't fun [for me]." ... is getting
us nowhere.

Judith Abrahms
{ucbvax,ihnp4}!dual!proper!judith


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