(Cheesy) Aphorism of the Day: It is better to entertain thoughts than to entertain people. It is better still, to entertain people entertaining thoughts.
I’ve been thinking about the wonderful laboratory that is Amazon’s reader review system.
There’s no fact of the matter about the intrinsic value of books. The argument is simple: Consciousness is a product of brain function. Meaning is a product of consciousness. Meaning, in other words, is all in our head.
Here’s an interesting theoretical cartoon for consideration. We have a physical object before us, one that encodes a semantic object. The tendency is to attribute the clarity and stability of the former to the latter, to conflate the semantic content with the material vehicle–to weld our experience of reading to the thing we hold in our hands. Let’s call this the Illusion of Semantic Objectivity. We seem to have a hardwired tendency to think of our reading experience as a kind of thing, and to use the logic of things to structure our subsequent reasoning about books and readings.
The vast majority of readers, I would also hazard, actually think they possess exhaustive knowledge of what they read. “This book is over my head,” is a comment only rarely found on Amazon. Let’s call this the Illusion of Semantic Exhaustion: the impression that one has gleaned, if not all the meaning, then all the significant meaning, from what they have read. A philosophy professor friend of mine once complained about the sexism of Neuropath, perhaps the most layered reading experience I have ever attempted to create. When I told him that the sexploitation so common to the larger cultural genre was something I was mucking with, he told me that “if he didn’t pick up on it, then it either wasn’t there, or it wasn’t significant.” Not only do people think their reading is a thing, they think it is a complete thing. The possibility of more nuanced, more sophisticated readings, escapes them–even when they preach the promiscuity of the signifier!
This ties into the third illusion I wanted to throw out for consideration. The vast majority of readers also, in my opinion, assume they are more intelligent than the books they read. The general, which is not to say universal, tendency is for people to think that they are more intelligent than others. In fact, there is a correlation between the lack of intelligence and the propensity to think oneself more intelligent. The dumber you are than others, the more likely you are to think yourself smarter than others. I’m convinced that this lies behind the tendency of people to label things they don’t understand ‘pretentious,’ simply because the alternative, the fact that you have encountered something you are incapable of understanding, is too unpalatable. I know I’ve caught myself doing this innumerable times, and I can only imagine how often I fail to catch myself. Let’s call this the Illusion of Semantic Authority: sense that your semantic evaluation somehow trumps the evaluations of others. That somehow you’ve won the Magical Interpretation Lottery.
Now I can feel the Horde of qualifications storming the gates, but simplification is the point of heuristic theorizing. Since no conceptual cartoon can ‘capture’ the reality of the thing, the best we can hope for are cartoons that let us leverage some kind of actionable understanding.
All three of these contribute to what might be called the Illusion of the Book, the sense that reading is perceiving, that rather than an idiosyncratic ‘fusion’ (as Gadamer might say) of you and the semantic possibilities encoded in this material object, you are simply the passive observer of some object hanging in public space.
A couple points in service of my ongoing polemic against literary culture: You would think the literati, who are well aware of the conflation of the material and the semantic (some have even raised theoretical empires about the dichotomy) would be immune to this tendency, but this is almost certainly not the case. For all their rhetoric they still think of literature as a kind of thing possessing, as things do, abiding properties–rather than a psychological event. They fail to realize that something is or is not literary based on what it does–and this is demonstrated, I would argue, by the way ‘literate reviews’ on Amazon exhibit all the same characteristics as ‘lay reviews,’ only expressed through a veneer of greater sophistication.
Regarding my own books, I would say that they tend to generate a wild range of semantic experiences, some positive, some negative, for a wild range of readers, and that is better than generating a narrow range of semantic experiences for a narrow range of readers. Some books make nary a ripple going in. Plop-plop-plop. Others splash your ass with cold water. That’s what I’m after: an experience that makes you feel the need to shower.
hmmm….so couldn’t you have just said ‘my books are smarter than you’
Since books don’t have brains I should have said I’m smarter than you. But since I’ve had 1000 hours preparing for an experience that takes you 10, that’s not really what I’m saying. What any author is saying is I’m better prepared than you. Nothing more, nothing less.
This is a central component of all entertainment if you think about it.
To be honest, Scott, I think that if the reader can’t pick up subtext beneath what strongly appears to be the surface meaning, then it’s a failure on the part of the author. Potential readers shouldn’t have to be constantly hedging their bets because they can’t read the author’s mind.
I’m surprised that you put in the subtextual gender stuff in Neuropath, particularly after all the controversy and turn-off of female fans that it had with the Prince of Nothing books. You might want to steer clear of it in the future.
How could it be a failure when it is inevitable? Especially since so many readers see so many different things. What’s obvious to one is invisible to the other, and on it goes. The idea, it seems to me, is to write something deep enough that as many kinds of reading experiences as possible can be generated – don’t you think?
You want your writing to be bigger than the reader’s ability to fully grasp, otherwise, where’s the interpretative challenge?
As for the sexism charge – I’ve always taken that seriously, but I’m not sure I’m doing anyone any favours by steering clear the topic. What I refuse to do is consider it through the lense of conventional political correctness: to show, as I tried in Neuropath, that the situation is much more ugly and complicated than many presume. Desire may be shaped by ideology, but it is not constructed by it.
I took my chances, and will continue to do so.
“As for the sexism charge – I’ve always taken that seriously, but I’m not sure I’m doing anyone any favours by steering clear the topic.”
That’s my thought exactly. Pretending something doesn’t exist (or that you aren’t susceptible to it) is like inviting it into your home then promising you won’t look as it rifles through your valuables. Your candor on the subject encouraged me to tackle it as well in my own writing.
I used to write reviews on amazon.com as a means of warming up the brain for more serious composition. I still feel the site is useful as a means of sifting through the vast amount of books the industry pumps out month after month–no longer (usually) does sheer hype dominate consumer choice, and even poorly-written reviews, yea or nay, can expose the limitations of the reviewer–a more honest feedback loop, if you will, lacking literati gloss (well-written but agenda-driven opinions).
The last review I put up, interestingly enough, was for The Darkness that Comes Before (alas, amazon has divided the reviews and mine can’t be found on the paperback listing…
).
http://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/A2B0XO8BTPRX7R/ref=cm_cr_rdp_pdp
As you can tell, I certainly didn’t think myself superior to that book! More daunted than anything else. I thought about typing one up for TJE, but never got around to it.
Totally disagree with Brett concerning the subtext issue–that seems a surefire spiral to dumbed-down craft across the spectrum, IMO.
On a side note, I finally completed my seventh novel today! I mention it because you’re one of my biggest inspirations, RSB. (Of course, by ‘finished’ I mean the rough draft is done; I’ve hundreds of hours of agonizing red-pen rewriting to come.)
Oh, and thanks for answering the questions concerning WLW — not trying to badger you, but a little morsel concerning a big big anticipation for 2011 is much appreciated.
I think you’re correct in taking on the ugly subjects head on, with as little candy coating as you can manage. Living in Canada tends to lead to being over conscious of political (in)correctness to the point where I find that discussing real issues that matter is all but impossible. The next time I hear a euphemism like ‘unwilling sex participant’ for a rape victim I’m gonna scream.
I think that we need people who aren’t afraid to drop the foam padded candy coated bs and get down to the grimy dirty rusty sharp reality of the things that are happening around us. Otherwise when we are inevitably forced to look at the mess around us we’ll be totally unprepared to deal with reality.
I’m not talking about “dumbing it down”. My point was just that if you have to be constantly explaining the book to most of your readers after-the-fact because they didn’t grasp your “clever” subtext from the surface meaning, then you probably weren’t clear enough on it as the author.
I brought up the point about gender because that was the source of some truly monstrous discussions over at the Westeros Forums.
Perhaps then the book shouldn’t be explained…? Allow the work to stand on its own, cavaet emptor and all that? I can’t even imagine Proust or Melville correcting reader assumptions on message boards.
I do remember those discussions, they ranged from insightful to ridiculous. It’s hard for me to take serious the sexism charge, though, as the “pc conundrum” often infects reactions… more importantly none of the characters in PoN are shown in an entirely positive light. I had a negative reaction to Akka when he almost bedded down with that young girl in TWP — but the state he was in, his internal motivations, were all clearly expressed and thus I could understand the situation if not emphathize. It felt painfully *real* — which I assume was what Bakker was getting at.
The way I look at it, the only way to do anything remotely interesting is to risk misreadings. I literally consider that exchange on Westeros as an example of what happens when you do things right. It’s all about thresholds, and since no two readers are the same, the only way to know whether you’ve pushed things to the line is to have some readers call you offside.
This was one interesting read, though I lost myself in the language a few times.
Brett, I do agree with you in some sense, but I don’t think it describes the situation at hand. As far as I understand, the after-the-read explanation was (in this case) not done in order to show to the reader what the book intended but failed to show to him. But rather to point out to him that one can see more in the book than he did – that his reading was not a complete one.
Though I might be a fool to be guessing at RS’s intentions on this site of all places.
Communication between people requires a mutual understanding of the tools with which the people choose to communicate. If one argues that people don’t know/learn exactly the mirror of the meaning of said tool in the person they are communicating with, is that really a sign/lack of intelligence in one or both parties?
i realize this is a philosophical discussion, but as a writer, do you really care about the ‘reader’?
This reminds me of the film Finding Forester in a sense. I personally love your writing and will freely admit that at times it was above me. That said, I don’t think TPoN could have been written any other way and still maintained the aura of dark fantasy that had so many, so enthralled. I think the ultimate responsibility for understanding any work ultimately lies with the reader. If I write a book in Chinese, I don’t expect someone to turn around and tell me my English is either poor or pretentious.
But what if there’s as many ‘understandings’ as there are readers? How does ‘responsibility’ fit into that?
Interpretations will always be different, but dismissing a work for being ‘pretentious’ is simply irresponsible. I think the reader’s responsibility ends with his interpretation of his own experience with the book and has little to do with how the book was written. The bible’s a difficult read, but that doesn’t make it any less relevant.
Bakker, you raise some very interesting points in this (and other) posts, especially zeroing-in on the haughtiness of academia. “Promiscuity of the signifier” indeed. I find academic’s pedantic use (and abuse) of jargon to obfuscate all meaning in their language a very postmodern irony in itself.
Regardless…. You are receiving much of your criticism, I believe, because you are NOT one of them. In your own words, you are a failed academic. Had you a PhD and produced these works, you could find yourself hailed as the Canadian Umberto Eco. The reason the professor thought he was smarter than your work is because he thinks he’s smarter than you because he holds the PhD and you do not. Call academia a priesthood.
I like to think of Haruki Murakami as an example of writing that is incredibly layered. I am most certainly not qualified to analyze his works, for they are, genuinely, over my head, partially because of the cultural differences and the rifts in interpretation between Japanese symbols and Western culture. The same goes for something like Cormac McCarthy’s BLOOD MERIDIAN. These are works I’ll speculate on, comment about, and talk about, but I won’t ever claim expertise on them. In many ways, they’re well beyond my ken.
I feel that way about THE PRINCE OF NOTHING. I’d have to read it again, perhaps several times, before I can really start to pick up on everything that’s in there. Withholding things for the sake of political correctness would have cheapened the work. The fact that THE PRINCE OF NOTHING makes the reader uncomfortable is a strength. If intellectual elitists who rarely emerge from their ivory towers deign to turn their noses up at your work, perhaps you should take that as a badge of honor.
It’s just the way these things work. Another ‘three pound brain effect.’ People develop their yardsticks depending on who gets to them first, then they set out measuring. If they happen to be unfortunate enough to think themselves the longest of the long, then everything is bound to come up short.
After a while their arms get tired, they begin looking one to the other in boredom, then they actually think, What’s that loser saying again? His terms are familiar enough for me to respect… Maybe I should look a little deeper. Then when they think they’ve found a way to enhance their yardstick, a way to whack their bored friends and say, Oh, I’m so past that! Then they suddenly see the force and reason of what that loser had been saying all along.
This is when my revenge fantasy begins…