truepenny | My two cents

matociquala has some lovely and interesting things to say about the sf genre as a chimera.

I understand Matt Cheney's point at a deep gut level, possibly because I've had that conversation with undergraduate students, who were deeply offended by the experience of reading a story they didn't understand. And I didn't know what to say to them.

I think this may be an attitude one sees less of in the sf/f/h readership, because sf readers, like mystery readers, are in love with puzzles. We (since I definitely include myself in this category) go into a story assuming that we won't understand everything immediately, that we will have to invest a certain amount of faith in the narrative to get to the payoff. We understand deferred gratification in the narrative sense.

It always comes as a shock to me to be reminded that not everybody reads this way.

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Another way to put what he's saying is what Terry Pratchett once said: That seems to point up a significant difference between Europeans and Americans. A European says: "I can't understand this, what's wrong with me?" An American says: "I can't understand this, what's wrong with him?"

I wouldn't necessarily draw that dividing line down the middle of the Atlantic, but like Cheney, Pratchett is pointing at two very different ways of approaching a text. (And we can rework Pratchett slightly to make the two options: (a.) what am I missing? and (b.) the author is doing something wrong.) And we can observe that one of these methods protects and barricades the reader from having to cope with anything new. The other at least gives breathing room and some rope to the idea that we can LEARN when we read.

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This doesn't mean that the author is omnipotent and can do no wrong; it doesn't mean the reader should allow himself to be browbeaten and cowed by an author's claim of intellectual superiority. It means that you try to read with sympathy rather than with entitlement. Give the author the benefit of the doubt; assume that if she does something you don't understand, there may be a reason for it, and it may be rewarding to figure out what that reason is. Don't assume (like the students both Matt Cheney and I have encountered) that the author is being difficult just to be a jerk.

But don't be afraid to say the emperor is bareass naked if he is.

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It means that you try to read with sympathy rather than with entitlement.

I like that.

I do notice the difference in the reading experience when the reader gives the author the benefit of the doubt, and when she doesn't.

Another way to put what he's saying is what Terry Pratchett once said: That seems to point up a significant difference between Europeans and Americans. A European says: "I can't understand this, what's wrong with me?" An American says: "I can't understand this, what's wrong with him?"

I wouldn't necessarily draw that dividing line down the middle of the Atlantic...

Probably I wouldn't either, but it's the explanation that gels most with the kinds of rows I've had on lj over the years. That is, it's a useful predictive model for the kinds of persistent issues which arise; by no means all the Americans will be on one side of the line and all the Europeans on the other, but if you want to guess which side of the line a given person will be falling that particular rule of thumb and derivatives of it help enormously.

Oh and as an American how much I wish it didn't.

Which is not at all to say you're wrong.

Well, but the attitude "what's wrong with him?" isn't necessarily the wrong one: there are passages of some authors that are to me self-evidently written to put the reader in the wrong (in that no interpretation is the "right" one to satisfy the author). The problem is that if one inclines towards the one or other side of the divide the arguments are necessarily more bitter: I once went out with someone (he was half-American, come to think of it) who would admit he was wrong but never that he was mistaken. That is; one was allowed to win on the argument - if one persisted long enough - but never on the perception of relevant facts. If one reached an impasse I found often going back and examining the assumptions and whether we genuinely shared them or not helped, but the notion that there could be an underlying misunderstanding of the facts, which seemed to me a natural approach to resolving an apparently fundamental gulf between two intelligent well-meaning people, never occurred to him.

Matt Cheney protests too much: There are times when an author is wilfully obtuse. There are times when an author is over-ambitious and lacks the ability to convey a clear story.

And there are many, many times when a reader sees nuances that the author hadn't seen. I recently asked Richard Paul Russo about his choice of the name Benedict for an empath in Inner Eclipse thinking it was from St. Benedict, reputed to be able to read consciences, and thus applying a religious reading to the novel. Richard was unaware of the allusion, but did not dispute how it might change the reading of the novel from that which he originally intended.
In Matt Cheney's eyes if I am wrong to read the author's mind and suggest that he was being too clever with an obscure meaning am I also wrong to be too clever myself in seeing an obscure meaning the author missed?

Historicals too. My mother taught me that one - she doesn't like to read things where it's too much 'work' to understand the background, the worldbuilding (as she did *not* call it.) I was boggled - that's a major part of the enjoyment for me.

Y'know, the only times I've thrown a book are for the crime of insulting my intellegence. A supposedly "fashionable" wealthy woman... who only wears Clinique makeup. Worse, a "fashionable" woman who is supposed to always wear cutting edge clothes... who only wears Calvin Klein. Research! Do your bloody research! Throwing around recognizable names does not mean your character will be seen as having the trait. Don't tell me the brand names, show me what she is wearing. Your book will age better that way. If you *must* use a brand name in fashion, for god's sake make one up.

Describing a "brilliant physicist" as someone who can't manage basic calculus would also cause me to throw a book.

Stuff like Faulkner is not something to throw. It's something where I acknowledge that the style is difficult and I either read it or don't. Stuff like Phillip K. Dick scares me, but that's not good reason to throw it either. If I'm uncomfortable with a work, I can choose to not read it. If I'm in a situation where I'm required to read something I'm not comfortable with, well, I do it. I hated the style, characters and storyline of A Clockwork Orange but it was not beyond my ability to read and understand. It taught me the valuable lesson that dystopia is a valid style of fiction, and that I don't enjoy dystopia no matter how well written it is.

There are times when the fault is the author's, but a large chunk of the time the fault is competent (or even excellent) book, paired with a reader who simply doesn't suit the book and vice versa. Not every reader likes every kind of story. Some enjoy pulling apart dense tangles of prose, others enjoy formal poetic styles, others like dystopias... Part of what a literary education is for is to teach us that we *can* read books that are actively unpleasant to us, and to help us learn to find the good in even an unpleasant book. Heck, if we're lucky, some of the stuff that starts out actively unpleasant will surprise us by being something we love forever.

There are more than two possibilities. The confrontational "what's wrong with him?" attitude, does not seem particularly American to me. The insecure "what's wrong with me?" attitude, does not seem particularly European. Not all misunderstandings evaporate in the face of one or the other. Not all books become readable when read with one attitude or the other. There's also, the simple search for consensus, "why don't we fit?" Sometimes that extends to "how can we fit better?" but sometimes it's an end in itself.

I think you're right.

Plus there's also a stubborn resistance from some folks (both readers and writers) to the idea that a book can be good, and a reader can be willing, but they just don't make a match. Exactly the same book and reader might find themselves better suited in ten years time, or never. This being no more or less of a tragedy than two people not hitting it off.

Of course, the one person could be a jerk or the other as dim as a two-watt bulb and proud of it -- but I've known people get along fine so long as both sides made an effort at understanding, or at least didn't go out of their way to not make one. And just as you can never quite tell who'll love or hate a book until they read it, some very odd pairings can hit it off where the logical ones fail abysmally.

My two cents

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