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When I was younger, both I and my elder brother wanted to be writers, but we disagreed strongly on what made good writing. Probably the simplest way to describe it was that he liked art and I liked entertainment. We've never really resolved the disagreement, but I've spent a long time contemplating why I enjoy what I enjoy, and most of it seems to come down to one of two things; either the piece encapsulates a feeling, or it encapsulates an idea. Either way, these encapsulations are valuable in that they give one significant control over one's own mental state, and that is both pleasurable and useful in many ways.
I think a lot of my own bogglement with the general category of "literature" is that so much of the time, there doesn't seem to be anything useful being encapsulated. I can imagine that the encapsulations are in some incompatible format, but the general impression left is still...
Is that from Blindsight? Looks familiar.
Anyway, I see what you (and @coffee_enjoyer) are getting at, but as a book nerd (and also a wannabe-never-was writer) I think the great Literature vs. Entertainment debate is a false dichotomy. Literature, I submit, does do more than entertain. But good literature is entertaining. Conversely, you can enjoy being entertained by something that you recognize is objectively not good literature.
I love me some Dickens (as my post above should make clear). He was a massively popular author in his time. He is still read today because he was a good writer, but also because he gives us insights into his world that are valuable and useful. People have criticisms of his politics and proto-socialism; fair enough. I believe it was Oscar Wilde who called him maudlin and melodramatic. But we still read stories about a time and place that is utterly foreign to most people today because it's still recognizable on a human level, they are human stories told by someone who had a way with words. To me, Dickens is "useful," though I know there are those who do not like him. (Peasants!)
Now, Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert was assigned to me in high school. I found it utterly boring. Gustave Flaubert was an early "realist" writer. It's useful today to know how he fit into the evolution of literary schools, but you could say he's kind of like JRR Tolkien, in that someone reading him today might wonder what the big deal is because we've seen hundreds, thousands of books since that look just like this - not realizing that they are copying his beat.
I reread Madame Bovary a few years ago, and still didn't love it, but... I liked it and understood it a lot more. Because it's about a French housewife who is unhappy and bored with her marriage. It's about middle aged people being unsatisfied and disappointed with how their lives turned out, and how clinging to your juvenile fantasies as an adult is pathetic and a path to ruin. Of course I found it boring and pointless as a teenager, I couldn't relate! As a much older person, I suddenly found myself appreciating what Flaubert was trying to illustrate.
I am not sure if you are complaining about "literature" that seems pointlessly navel-gazing with no real message to it, just exercises in masturbatory wordsmithing, or literature that you think has a bad message (i.e., a weapon in the culture war). Both those things exist. But appreciation for literature doesn't necessarily mean being a Barnard English major sniffing one's own farts.
I also like Stephen King and Brandon Sanderson and JK Rowling and Ian Fleming and Robert Heinlein, and I could go on. All of whom have their own virtues and flaws as writers. I've even read some litrpg and fanfiction and the like, though I find 99% of it unreadable drek. So it's not about having snooty reading tastes.
Pinging @Hoffmeister25, since he seemed interested as well.
Yup!
To be clear, I entirely agree! One of the things I learned as I got older and a bit wiser was that entertainment for its own sake is, ultimately, empty, and not even particularly entertaining. You can't extrude it by the hundredweight according to a set formula without losing the special something that makes the best of it so delightfully seductive in the first place, and part of that special something seems to be insight, something that echoes and accretes in the inner self, that leaves an impression where lesser matter washes in and away without consequence.
Both, certainly. Some of it definitely feels either pointless or juvenile, in a Wow-I-Am-Very-Deep sense. On the bad message side... I'd be hard-pressed to find an author with worse messages than Peter Watts, but he's still a treasure to me because even if I fundamentally disagree with his worldview, I still come away feeling like my perspective has been sharpened thanks to the clarity with which he communicates it. To quote another favorite, "here comes, thank heaven, another enemy". And it's not even about naïve enjoyment, either; his Rifter trilogy was horrifying in the most literal sense, did permanent psychic damage to me, and I don't think I ever will want to read them again... but boy, did they leave an impression!
But there's a lot of other stuff that's just sort of unreflectively, unrefinedly bad. On the recommendation of a Mottian, I read Middlegame. There was a lot I really liked about the plot and the characters and the style, and I really wanted to enjoy it. but ultimately, the villains were one-note caricatures of misogyny, and eventually they stopped being monsters to me, and just became cartoons. They weren't doing what they were doing for sensical reasons, but rather because it was Very Important that I Update My Opions About Misogyny Now. And it killed the narrative for me, not because I think misogyny is super cool and don't like seeing it attacked, but because trite sermons from someone else's religion are really boring.
...Your point about Madame Bovary is well taken. Here's the thing, though: why was it assigned to you in high school?
Suppose that there's this idea that books and humans interact deterministically. People observe that good books leave an impression on the reader, and that the best books leave an impression on most or even all readers, and they think hey, we can shape people into the sort of people we want by having them read the right Good Books in the right sequence. Only, it doesn't actually work like that for a whole host of reasons, not least because people are different, and what they're ready for and what's relevant to them is different, and we lie to ourselves or are mistaken about what actually leaves an impression and which impressions are valuable... and so the end result is this big, unpleasant, brutalist machine covered in grime and bloodstains with a sign on it that reads "happy fun good-things dispenser."
There's a wealth of wonderful creations out there, no doubt. But there's this mass in the middle of it, with an ossified narrative maintained by a sort of pseudo-priesthood, and I'm deeply skeptical of the whole edifice. I would rather talk about "I liked this because I got such-and-such" out of it, and they seem to think they're doing something much more involved and much more serious than that.
Does that make more sense?
Madame Bovary was probably assigned to me in high school because my high school English teacher had to read it in college...
But seriously, Flaubert is important (at least, knowing how he influenced literature) and Madame Bovary has something to say, it's just maybe not a message that a teenager will be receptive to. My personal reading list for high school students might be very different, but I'd still make them read some "difficult" and "old" books, and if they ask "Why should I care about Dickens or Tolstoy or Flaubert?" I'd say "Because these are a few of the small stones in the foundations on which your culture was built. And you should also have some understanding of history, not just seen through history books."
Yeah, I understand the skepticism towards the "literary establishment" and teachers who decide on the curriculum for high school English students. But what I got from you and coffee was a general disdain for literature as something worth studying, or even appreciating beyond the enjoyment you get from any given story. And I think literature is worth studying and appreciating, for its cultural relevance, for its insight, for its facility with language and showing us what can be done with words in the hands of a master.
Fiction can teach a lot about history and psychology and human relationships. (Obviously it can teach incorrect things and even bad things, but then, how much do you trust any given supposedly non-fiction book?)
If we're complaining about whoever the NYT or the London Review of Books has anointed as the latest Important Writer To Read, sure, a lot of the literary establishment does seem like a self-regarding, incestuous coterie. But, ya know, just like Hollywood. Or Wall Street. Or Washington. There is still (arguably) something being produced there that is of value.
I've read some Pulitzer and Man Booker Prize winners that had me going "Why?" But when I reflected honestly, they were actually well written and had something to say - it just wasn't for me.
I think we maybe don't disagree that much, I just dislike seeing people dismiss Literature as if it's all something invented by hoity leftist college professors.
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What are some specific examples of literary works which you consider to contain nothing but “useless” content? And do you believe that such content is not useful to anyone? Or merely not to you?
Douglas Coupland. I love his prose, it goes down your throat like a perfect dessert, he would be a perfect dinner guest, but there's no message, just /r/til/top.
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I'm not overflowing with examples because I actively avoid most of the stuff, but I can offer a few, direct and indirect.
Bless Me Ultima, a babbies first lit book assigned in an institution of higher learning.
Indirectly, Jude The Obscure by Thomas Hardy. A friend was enthusiastic about the book, and neither they, the wikipedia article, nor reading a few passages myself revealed why.
Bonus: the poetry of Sylvia Plath.
Theoretically, these texts fit the particular shapes of some particular population's mind, sure. But when I try to engage with the people actually claiming to find value on what value they find, I am left mystified or alienated.
All of "literature" ostensibly states it's trying to find "deeper truths to the human condition" or something. I think, at its best, literature is a kind of compliment to moral philosophy. It wrestles with the Big Questions - Why are we here? What does it mean?
The reality is that 80% of literature is just aesthetic mood affiliation and fashion. Over at Scott's Blog, they just had some millenial (!) post a review of David Foster Wallace's last book. David Foster Wallace was probably a genius, and he used that genius to write thousands of pages of Gen-X nonsense .... and Gen-x (and I guess millienials now) love him for it. He was very, very, very cool.
Charles Bukowski wasn't very cool when he was alive (except in Germany for some reason). At the end of his life and after he died, he became cool in (another) post-ironic "dirtbags are cool" way. He started popping up in literature classes at Bard and Oberlin. That was a real shame. The hipsters turn him into this "poet of the streets" when, in reality, Charles Bukowski wrote about real truth in life - a lot of it is desperate, gross, weak characters mutually exploiting one another to get through the day. Forget the intellectual goofyness of "making the profane divine" ... Sometimes life is just cheap whiskey and run down whores in East L.A.
I don't think literature is important because I don't think there's enough of it that can be generalized. Use my DFW example - there are people who love him dearly. I appreciate their love for him, but I never will. "Well, you don't have to love him, but can't you learn something from him?" No. No I can't. It's all too personal, too mood affiliation, too "what's your aesthetic?"
I'll quibble with DFW's work being nonsense.
It's dizzying, which is not the same thing. It's trying to capture the feeling of the modern world in all of its immense alienating complexity down to the mundane.
If you wanted to explain the feeling of living in our era to someone from 100 years ago, Infinite Jest would be more helpful than a history book in the same way that reading Burroughs is more helpful to understand the feeling of living 100 years ago.
There's lots of people you can accuse of being rote postmodernists with no ideas but the butchering of what is, they run most of entertainment right now. David Foster Wallace is not one of them.
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