On genres, readers and perceptions
Jun. 18th, 2006 12:42 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
flyingskullPompous, amn't I? ;)
Apart from that, I'm using this to reply to my dearest Baeraad several pithy responses to some of my and his entries in both our Ljs, shamelessly using them as trampolines to launch into another sodding rant about how publishers pander to lazyness in readers by categorising books by 'genres'.
It taught me something about how readers can fill in the missing pieces in a fictional world, so that they end up reading the story as they think it should be and not how the author wrote it. Essentially, they do the author's worldbuilding for her.
Exactly, but not only worldbuilding - coo, you've got a really STRONG mindset, haven't you? - Books are wonderfully interactive things that snare the senses and delude the mind. Most readers don't read what's written, but what their brain tells them it ought to be written, given the premise, their knowledge of the author's life and times and the genre the book is supposed to be an expression of.
There was a spiffy good article about my namesake, Jane Austen, that argumented that readers never actually read her sting-in-the-tail remarks about the society she lived in at the end of her most apparently innocuous series-of-observations-in-a-kinda-uplifting-way remarks. I concur, it's quite easy to miss them, the sly woman was not above plating traps for the unwary, disguised as platitudes for the wary. I heart her immensely for that.
But, boy, did genres make this all easy!
Once there were only books, written by hand, copied by hand and telling all kind of tales or discussing everything under the sun and moon. They were just the written-down words of thinkers, historians and storytellers, and even that sort of difference wasn't taken into account. You read them - if you were able to read - and thought about what they said.
Ah, Arcadia! Utopia! Wonderful state of innocence about written things! *sigh*
It was a long long process, but the victory of the burgeoisie and the industrial state, the birth of schooling for all created a monster: the 'Look, all people are ignorant eejits and they need to be told what kind of thing what they are reading IS or they will get confused and not buy lots of them' Publisher. So genres were born. (Yeah, right, I'm simplifying something terrible and I shoudn't, but I can't really write a WHOLE book about it)
Genres make everything simple. You want to laugh? Buy a Humorous Book! Guaranteed to make you roll on floors! You want to feel justifies in your slightly odd obsession with murder and mayhem? Buy a thriller and rejoyce in the copious amount of blood! You want to dream and dream of magic and mystical oddments of pseudo-lore? Buy a Fantasy and clash your might against Evil! You want to speculate about a techno future? Buy Sci-Fi and fly to the stars!
You get my drift, don't you? Why in hell, or Earth, for that matter, should readers not know everything about a genre book? You know the story before even opening page one. And - to paraphrase the immortal word of Stoppard, though he was talking about tragedy - you know the good will die, piteously and the bad will die, satisfyingly. Actually most genres respond to this simple plot, now I come to think of it, but Fantasy, like Tragedy, is more rigid about the formula than other genres.
There are some authors who use the 'genre' thing to find a personal voice, unfettered from the Academic and, frankly, ridicuouls demands of 'High' or 'Art' fiction, but they are a handful. Most genre writing is formulaic and most - not all, oh yes, not all at all! YAY! - genre authors are nothing more than competent - some less than others, of course - craftswo/men who make a living by re-heashing the same things over and over again.
As soon as the kind of reader who is positively grateful for the genre categorisation thingy reads that some character is the 'hero/ine' they enter a fugue state in which all judgement is suspended (BTW, that's what Tolkien said he was aiming at, though as regarded world-building [happy?] and not character viewing). S/He is the Hero/ine so whatever S/He does is RIGHT begorra! They see a flashing light ordering them to: "IDENTIFY! IDENTIFY!" and they do. From that point on, S/He is them and nothing will disturb them more than a book where such flashing lights and clear signs are absent.
Yeah, I'm harsh. NO, I'm not sorry to be harsh in this. Books are books, all equally interactive on quite another plane. They talk to you, they read you, you talk back, sometimes to agree, sometimes to argue. You stop reading and jump up and curse or stop reading and sag down and croon. Whatever. Books are windows and doors opened to Other Realities. The Trousers of Time without any actual consequence, though they may make you run down one leg without realising it's for true this time around.
Genres are idioting down the 'wonderful discourse of minds' to babblings and self-satisfied blindness. I hate them. I do really HATE them. But they have a totally cool and groopy advantage: they create fen. And fen are generally maybe blind in some things, but not so blind that they don't positively itch to rewrite the babblings into a more coherent whole, into their own version of what the books, films, comics, whatever, should be about. Fen are sensitive to subtext to an extent that I would send lit crit professors to learn from them. Fen like the general idea, but abhor the actual expression of it. Fen create internally logical and coherent rules for the reality the author just sketched in, if that.
I love fanfiction as an exercise of the creative and critical mind. Have you noticed how the best fanfics in every fandom are all metas on the original work? Oh, granted, I bitch about a lot of fanfics, but then I bitch about a lot of books as well. The gems are what it makes it all worthwhile to me, enjoying a gem - book, film, comic, TV show, cartoon... fanfiction - makes having to wade through all the annoying, boring, poorly written/filmed/drawn mess worthwhile.
As a final thought: the worse the original is, the better the fanfic can be. We have proof with Maya/mistful and HP, with Cass and X-Men and so on and so forth. Now tell me fanfic is a genre too and I may not bite your head off, but that's moot. *G*
Sorry, meant to reply and got off in rantland's rantfest.
Apart from that, I'm using this to reply to my dearest Baeraad several pithy responses to some of my and his entries in both our Ljs, shamelessly using them as trampolines to launch into another sodding rant about how publishers pander to lazyness in readers by categorising books by 'genres'.
It taught me something about how readers can fill in the missing pieces in a fictional world, so that they end up reading the story as they think it should be and not how the author wrote it. Essentially, they do the author's worldbuilding for her.
Exactly, but not only worldbuilding - coo, you've got a really STRONG mindset, haven't you? - Books are wonderfully interactive things that snare the senses and delude the mind. Most readers don't read what's written, but what their brain tells them it ought to be written, given the premise, their knowledge of the author's life and times and the genre the book is supposed to be an expression of.
There was a spiffy good article about my namesake, Jane Austen, that argumented that readers never actually read her sting-in-the-tail remarks about the society she lived in at the end of her most apparently innocuous series-of-observations-in-a-kinda-uplifting-way remarks. I concur, it's quite easy to miss them, the sly woman was not above plating traps for the unwary, disguised as platitudes for the wary. I heart her immensely for that.
But, boy, did genres make this all easy!
Once there were only books, written by hand, copied by hand and telling all kind of tales or discussing everything under the sun and moon. They were just the written-down words of thinkers, historians and storytellers, and even that sort of difference wasn't taken into account. You read them - if you were able to read - and thought about what they said.
Ah, Arcadia! Utopia! Wonderful state of innocence about written things! *sigh*
It was a long long process, but the victory of the burgeoisie and the industrial state, the birth of schooling for all created a monster: the 'Look, all people are ignorant eejits and they need to be told what kind of thing what they are reading IS or they will get confused and not buy lots of them' Publisher. So genres were born. (Yeah, right, I'm simplifying something terrible and I shoudn't, but I can't really write a WHOLE book about it)
Genres make everything simple. You want to laugh? Buy a Humorous Book! Guaranteed to make you roll on floors! You want to feel justifies in your slightly odd obsession with murder and mayhem? Buy a thriller and rejoyce in the copious amount of blood! You want to dream and dream of magic and mystical oddments of pseudo-lore? Buy a Fantasy and clash your might against Evil! You want to speculate about a techno future? Buy Sci-Fi and fly to the stars!
You get my drift, don't you? Why in hell, or Earth, for that matter, should readers not know everything about a genre book? You know the story before even opening page one. And - to paraphrase the immortal word of Stoppard, though he was talking about tragedy - you know the good will die, piteously and the bad will die, satisfyingly. Actually most genres respond to this simple plot, now I come to think of it, but Fantasy, like Tragedy, is more rigid about the formula than other genres.
There are some authors who use the 'genre' thing to find a personal voice, unfettered from the Academic and, frankly, ridicuouls demands of 'High' or 'Art' fiction, but they are a handful. Most genre writing is formulaic and most - not all, oh yes, not all at all! YAY! - genre authors are nothing more than competent - some less than others, of course - craftswo/men who make a living by re-heashing the same things over and over again.
As soon as the kind of reader who is positively grateful for the genre categorisation thingy reads that some character is the 'hero/ine' they enter a fugue state in which all judgement is suspended (BTW, that's what Tolkien said he was aiming at, though as regarded world-building [happy?] and not character viewing). S/He is the Hero/ine so whatever S/He does is RIGHT begorra! They see a flashing light ordering them to: "IDENTIFY! IDENTIFY!" and they do. From that point on, S/He is them and nothing will disturb them more than a book where such flashing lights and clear signs are absent.
Yeah, I'm harsh. NO, I'm not sorry to be harsh in this. Books are books, all equally interactive on quite another plane. They talk to you, they read you, you talk back, sometimes to agree, sometimes to argue. You stop reading and jump up and curse or stop reading and sag down and croon. Whatever. Books are windows and doors opened to Other Realities. The Trousers of Time without any actual consequence, though they may make you run down one leg without realising it's for true this time around.
Genres are idioting down the 'wonderful discourse of minds' to babblings and self-satisfied blindness. I hate them. I do really HATE them. But they have a totally cool and groopy advantage: they create fen. And fen are generally maybe blind in some things, but not so blind that they don't positively itch to rewrite the babblings into a more coherent whole, into their own version of what the books, films, comics, whatever, should be about. Fen are sensitive to subtext to an extent that I would send lit crit professors to learn from them. Fen like the general idea, but abhor the actual expression of it. Fen create internally logical and coherent rules for the reality the author just sketched in, if that.
I love fanfiction as an exercise of the creative and critical mind. Have you noticed how the best fanfics in every fandom are all metas on the original work? Oh, granted, I bitch about a lot of fanfics, but then I bitch about a lot of books as well. The gems are what it makes it all worthwhile to me, enjoying a gem - book, film, comic, TV show, cartoon... fanfiction - makes having to wade through all the annoying, boring, poorly written/filmed/drawn mess worthwhile.
As a final thought: the worse the original is, the better the fanfic can be. We have proof with Maya/mistful and HP, with Cass and X-Men and so on and so forth. Now tell me fanfic is a genre too and I may not bite your head off, but that's moot. *G*
Sorry, meant to reply and got off in rantland's rantfest.
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no subject
Date: 2006-06-18 09:19 pm (UTC)> mindset, haven't you?
It's true that my mind tends to move with a lot of force in a single direction. =] But really, the reason I only mentioned worldbuilding is that that's the area covered by the conversation I mentioned. And because that's the area where I'm the least willing to do the author's work for her.
I am however all too willing to do the author's work for her when it comes to characters. Hence my adoration of Neil Gaiman, who I'm told has very one-dimensional characters.
> sly woman was not above plating traps for the unwary, disguised as
> platitudes for the wary
Aaaaahh, that explains a few passages that just sounded too innocent to be trusted... =]
Now, for the rantfest (which is something I'm all for =]) itself...
It's a bit hard for me to respond here, for two reason. The first is pretty obvious - I'm in a position where I have to leap to the defence of my beloved fantasy, and fantasy is a difficult thing to defend, not because there's any real flaw with the premise, but because it's been misused by unimaginative hacks (Terry Brooks, my curse shall hunt you into the grave. I have spoken >_<).
Fantasy could be used for anything. At its core, it's simply metaphorical as opposed to literal storytelling - not that most fantasy authors see it that way, but that's the source of it. A sword is not just a sword, it's the King's power to weld the nation together. A book is not just a book, it's wisdom incarnate. A ring is not just a ring... well, you get the idea. What is more, everything is writ up large - in fantasy, things in the outside world has the signifance they have in our own mind. In reality, the world may not care whether you live or die, but you care. In fantasy, your feelings about an issue and the reality of the issue is the same; the world really will end if you don't succeed. =]
There is no issue, no emotion, no situation that could not be clarified and elevated through fantasy. It's the genre that encompasses all genres. It's the oldest and most powerful form of storytelling in existance.
But this sort of thing is hard to handle, and fantasy authors tend to be a rather ham-fisted bunch. The symbolism tends to be on the level of "the Power of Love will vanquish the Darkness of Egotism!", and as for the larger-than-life-ness, the affirmation of the importance of your feelings... well, it tends to turn to wish-fulfillment. Instead of the heroes succeeding or failing on an epic scale, they succeed against all odds as a matter of course, and everyone showers them with praise and rewards.
Even as I write this, I am aware that I can't pinpoint the difference between those two things. But that doesn't mean there is no difference - it's there, and I know it when I see it. It means that you have to be very skilled to write good fantasy. You have to have spent a lot of time figuring out the human condition. Fantasy should be written by philosophers (mind you, I tend to think that so should all literature - indeed, I tend to view art exclusively as philosophy given shape). Sadly, most authors, of any genre, are not philosophers.
Having thus tried to prove fantasy's right to its existance, I can only say that I've found a number of authors capable of doing it reasonably well, if not as expertedly as Terry Pratchett or...
... okay, you'll kill me if I compare him to Pratchett, but by that fact alone, I think you may have an idea to whom I am alluding... =]
no subject
Date: 2006-06-18 09:20 pm (UTC)Are you suggesting people should just read... books? At random - or, to be fair, I guess it'd be more like going through a used bookstore until you found a book with a blurb you thought sounded promising? I admit that that would certainly give everyone a more balanced reading experience.
But, different people like to read about different things. Now, I like to think that I'm old enough - and have read enough absolute crap - to be grateful for any author who can, regardless of his exact topic, portray the complexity of human existance. As such, I'll try any author ones, even if he writes about... (*tries to think of the absolute last thing he'd ever want to read about*) the Swedish working class during the early parts of the twentieth century, in the hopes that he might have a genuine understanding of life and therefore be a joy to read.
(not offense to the Swedish working class or, for that matter, the early parts of the twentieth century, you understand. It's just that in school, we had to read Jan Fridegård. I still think that should be considered child abuse. ^_^; )
But, having that said, I like fantasy. It's what I'm interested in. I'll read any sort of book for good writing and be happy, but I'm even happier if it's good writing and fantasy. :)
If you were to say that I should read more outside of that genre, I'd plead guilty and add that I'm working on it. If you say I should be completely indiscriminate of genres...
... well, I'd see where you were coming from, but I'd feel you were a little harsh against the concept of personal taste, and perhaps we could just agree to disagree? :)
no subject
Date: 2006-11-25 12:42 am (UTC)*tips my hat at you*
Oh wait, I'm not wearing a hat.