coalescent: (Default)
[personal profile] coalescent
Following on from the duelling reviews of Learning the World that [livejournal.com profile] immortalradical and I had at Strange Horizons the other week, and from this conversation about valid critical opinions (which itself spun off from this post by Matt Cheney about this story by Eliot Fintushel), [livejournal.com profile] greengolux has a fascinating post here about accessibility as a quality of fiction:
The questions I've been asking myself in relation to all this are: can a reader who is outside of the target audience make a reasonable judgement about the quality of a work, and can a work's overall quality be judged on the size of the audience it's targeted at?
These are not questions with particularly easy or obvious answers, as the resulting discussion shows. They are also questions that come up time and again in discussions about sf, as John Scalzi's recent discussions about 'entry-level' science fiction, and all the satellite discussions of that concept, demonstrate.

After linking to all that discussion, I'm not sure there's a lot I can add, except a brief position statement. I think the answer to [livejournal.com profile] greengolux's first question has to be 'yes and no'. Everyone's entitled to their opinion, and I'm sure I'm on record somewhere as saying that an outside (or 'naive', for non-pejorative values of 'naive') perspective is valuable. It's one of the reasons I value [livejournal.com profile] immortalradical's reviews, and more broadly, why some of the most interesting and useful reviews can be the ones I disagree with. But I also think that, as an outsider to something, it is possible to Just Not Get It. Like [livejournal.com profile] greengolux, that's my basic reaction to Jane Austen, and although I would defend my right to have my opinions of Austen's books, I fully accept that I don't have a lot to bring to an informed discussion of her work.

I could learn, of course--any set of reference points can be learned--and that brings us to the second question. Primarily because context is learnable, I strongly doubt that the size of a work's audience has any bearing on the assessment of a work's quality. On the part of the writer, I am skeptical of the idea that aiming for universality is a good thing, or even a possible thing; I'm not even sure what a universal story would be, or what it could say. On the part of the reader, I am skeptical of the idea that that barriers to entry are inherently bad things. Just because I wouldn't give someone who's never read sf Accelerando doesn't make it a bad book, and just because anyone with a reading age in double digits can pick up The Da Vinci Code doesn't make it a good book. Historical context, or conceptual density, or linguistic complexity, or literary context--all of those are things that an individual reader may or may not appreciate. It is not the work's fault if a reader doesn't appreciate its strengths (indeed, it can be a shame, but it's not anyone's fault as such).

Yes, writing within a context may limit the audience to which a book is accessible, and yes, that has to be accepted--and yes, such writing can be artistically limited as well. I'm not excusing works that, to borrow [livejournal.com profile] immortalradical's phrase, preach 'a weak sermon to the baying choir'. It's just that the flipside to those books--the books that extend or develop an ongoing argument (which is one of the things I suggest Learning the World does), or that explore their context in minute depth (say, The Name of the Rose)--are, not infrequently, the books I wouldn't give up for the world.

(Bonus marks for anyone who can link this debate back into the self-indulgence debate of earlier in the year, thus constructing a hideous meta-debate impenetrable to anyone who hasn't read fifty posts on two dozen different blogs. Go on, I bet it'd be easy.)

EDIT: [livejournal.com profile] zarabee comments on accessibility here, and [livejournal.com profile] sartorias does the same here.

Date: 2005-12-29 10:15 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] coalescent.livejournal.com
A couple of things--

1. Surely Tolkien isn't writing mock-epic, he's writing, you know, epic? Which is not to deny Tolkien's linguistic skill, but it is, for me, the problem: the writing in Return of the King seems like a parody.

2. As Mattia pointed out, Cryptonomicon isn't a great counter-example, because it is written in a style that's married to its content. It's written in High Geek. (Charlie Stross is the same.)

3. The counter to your last argument would be that relatively plain language can be the best register to convey the ideas sf is trying to convey. I came across a lovely phrase in a review of Transcendent: "occasional Stapledonian drop-kick sentences." You can tell exactly what it refers to, a completely matter-of-fact shift in perspective from the personal to the cosmic that leaves your head spinning because it is plain.

Date: 2005-12-29 11:21 am (UTC)
white_hart: (Tales)
From: [personal profile] white_hart
1. He's certainly writing in the epic tradition, but I think that true epic pretty much has to be the product of an oral tradition, therefore Tolkien is mock-epic. He's also mock-epic because he's deliberately harking back to older forms and adopting their language and rhythms, which are not natural to him.

I wouldn't say parody, but I think there's an inevitable element of pastiche.

2. OK. Perhaps I'm just not geeky enough to have got Cryptonomicon. But I definitely found the narrative voice one of the turn-offs.

3. Plain does not necessarily mean mediocre; I quite agree that very simple prose is sometimes best. (One of my favourite writers is Bruce Chatwin, who produced simple, concise prose that was absolutely breathtaking in its elegance and lucidity.) There's a difference between plain and clunky, or just inappropriate.

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