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What makes literature good? Academics and the value of art
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Those kinds of definitions give me a big soft one.
A: If it's as monolithic as War & Peace.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Hi, Tube!
That explains Tunguska.
bant!
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
They get people to read them, once, or at least buy them and leave them laying around the house. That's an awfully low standard for compulsion. Look, I'm not Podly. I'm not talking in a mysterious moon language. Compel means compel. If you genuinely think there are thousands and thousands of people around the world who, when sitting on their couch with their girlfriend go "oh man, this guy says it better than I ever could" and pull down a much-loved, dogeared copy of Dan Brown's Digital Fortress - well - you live in a world way more hilarious than mine and probably don't need books to have a good time anyway.
The guy's a bestseller because his easily-digestible books are prominently displayed in places where people need to kill time. What I'm curious about is how much of that text lingers in the reader's mind. I read a bunch of fun Greg Rucka thriller novels a year or two ago, had a blast, and now remember almost nothing, and can only tell you the main character's name because it is "Atticus Kodiak," which is hard to forget. Quiz someone who's reading one about what their favorite passage from Da Vinci Code was, or their favorite line of dialogue.
(Besides, where would the fine writing even fit in a typical airport thriller novel? They're all plot! There's no time for careful descriptions and apt metaphors - the President's new pacemaker is actually nuclear bomb and Special Agent Dirk Sodomy only has 14 hours to save the world!)
This all goes double for romance novels, which are specifically written to adhere to a publisher-dictated formula with only minute variations from book to book. It was an everyday occurrence at my bookstore to have people return books they'd forgotten they'd bought and read already.
"But but," you say, "what if Dan Brown or Romance Author Chick had legions of fans who could recite their favorite books word for word? That would sure show you, you crafty elitist." To which I'd reply that if they were that, then they'd be John Le Carre or James Ellroy or Ursula Le Guin or any one of a multitude of writers who've proven that they can work in a genre but write books that aren't one-off, disposable reads, that resonate year after year.
I mean, thirty years ago, on the alternate-universe PA arpanet group, you would have been citing the sales figures for the latest Frederick Forsyth. Well, I don't know who in D&D has read The Devil's Alternative lately, but a book published around the same time - A Confederacy of Dunces - wins new converts year after year.
As for Rowling - what about her? She has lots of devoted readers, people who reread the books over and over, and it seems likely that her books will endure in the public imagination for some time to come. I'm comfortable thinking of them as children's literature. I had my issues with the books, but I thought they had moments of infectious beauty and whimsy.
Look, there's nothing wrong with writing fiction solely to entertain or titillate, and I consume my fair share. It's just that such stuff tends not to endure, either in the popular consciousness or even in the minds of its consumers - or else they wouldn't need to buy so much of it, would they? They'd be happy with what they had. "Literature" is a useful word to describe things that have value above and beyond entertainment - books that teach, or outrage, or inspire, that leave the reader changed somehow, not just benumbed for an evening.