Comment by karaterobot | Hacker News Reader

Comment by karaterobot | Hacker News Reader

> Putting Ballard on a master’s course list, as I’ve done a couple of times, provokes a reaction that’s both funny and illuminating. Asked to read Crash or The Atrocity Exhibition, the more vociferous students invariably express their revulsion, while the more reflective ones voice their frustration that, although the ideas might be compelling, the prose “isn’t good.”

I've been in these kinds of courses. I always found the least helpful part to be hearing people's opinions about books, especially what didn't work for them. The opinions of a group of grad students is pretty worthless to me. Even the hotter takes, which can be entertaining, do not forward my understanding of reading or writing.

What's much more valuable is acknowledging that it is a book, it was published, people did get something out of it—sometimes many people—and then asking why that might be. I always wanted to break apart the mechanics of the style, the architecture of the story's structure, ask why the author did certain things instead of certain other things, etc. What I got instead was an airing of personal grievances, set vaguely against the backdrop of the story, with thin (or nonexistent) textual evidence as support. I always wanted the professor to say "I don't care, what made you think I would care about what you just said?" but they never did.

In fairness, neither did I. But, those classes were my vaccine against academia and literary criticism, so they were not useless and probably saved me from a career of sitting through that.

The worst is when people complain about "unlikable" characters or not being able to "identify" with them. Who cares? The book wasn't written so you could make imaginary friends and has zero to do with its literary merits.

Books are written for one of two reasons: to make a point, or to make money.

If you write to make money, and people can't identify with your characters, other things being equal, you're going to sell fewer copies.

If you write to make a point, and people can't identify with your characters, other things being equal, you're going to attract fewer readers to whom you can make your point.

Why? In both cases, because people don't like reading stuff where the characters do random things for incomprehensible reasons. That's not an interesting book. You might as well write a book about squares in a video game that move according to the output of a random number generator.

That's not to say that surprising things can't happen. They have to, or again, the book isn't interesting. But the characters have to be recognizably human to us, or it quits being a book about human characters.

> But the characters have to be recognizably human to us, or it quits being a book about human characters.

It seems like there could be considerable distance between "likable" and "recognizably human". Lots of complaints are around the characters being "unlikable", when they're doing completely human things that are just not nice. If an author is forced to only include friendly and likable characters, there's a pretty substantial limitation on the types of human behavior that can be covered.

It's more a question of whether an individual can identify with a character. If a book makes it into a literature class, chances are there's a reason for it. I'd like to get at that, learn about that. Saying whether or not you, specifically, identify with a specific character is simultaneously the most low effort observation you can make, and the least relevant to anyone else in the world. It's one thing to talk about what makes the character hard to identify with in general, but just telling me "I didn't identify with this character" is a waste of everyone's time.

Sometimes the dehumanization is the point. I think that's fair to say of Ballard, certainly in the subset of his work with which I'm familiar.

Sometimes you can't use "recognizably human" characters to make the point you need to make. Peter Watts is a good example of this; not only in Blindsight but throughout his body of work, the most effective characters are typically those least recognizable as human.

Such works are typically labeled as "high-concept", and I concede they can be an acquired taste. But it's not at all true to say every story is either at heart about human relationships or worthless, else this other sort of stories would never have been common enough to need naming what distinguishes them.

> Books are written for one of two reasons: to make a point, or to make money.

How about to inform, to amuse or entertain, or to tell a story?

Or because the author feels compelled to write things, or is bored and needs something creative to do?

> ask why the author did certain things instead of certain other things,

I think that the answer to that is unknowable to any mind other than the author's, and the best speculation can come from someone who's digested many of their work for a long period of time. It's certainly an interesting discussion to have if you can find enough people like that but it's tough!

You can definitely make a good guess at it in some cases. It’s often easier when the writer’s not very good at e.g. plot.

Getting too good at it usually means you start automatically spoiling a lot of books for yourself, though. “Why’d this character show up in chapter 3? What do they do for the story? Ohhhh they’re secretly the villain” or “why are we spending so much time with this character right now, in this way? Oh, the author’s gonna kill them.”

I guess you're thinking more plot oriented narratives.

I was thinking about something like Ulysses, Virginia Woolf, Proust, where the artistic choices are more stylistic and about examining thought itself, rather than structurally about characters and events.

Ah, sure, that does work differently. You’re not so likely to spot the seams of the author’s stitching-together of the plot in those. (Any readers who’ve wondered, unprofitably, what literature nerds mean when they separate out capital-L “Literature” as a distinct category: that right there is one factor that tends to push it into literature territory)

Though if one is not constantly asking “what might be intended here? What might this signify?” and similar questions while reading those kinds of works, I’m not sure what one is doing while reading them. That’s not identical to asking what the author was thinking, but I do believe that considering why the author chose one thing instead of another (why doesn’t the boat get to the lighthouse? What would change if it did?) is often worth doing, and I think sometimes one can arrive at something like the author’s reasons (even if it can’t be known for sure).

[edit] “But who cares if some reading of an episode or element of the story is the one intended by the author?” is the obvious question, then: I’d say if we can get at a plausible intended reading, with some reason and evidence behind it, that’s likely to present a more-useful lens or jumping-off point for unraveling and drawing meaning from other parts of the work, or even the author’s other works, than any given WAG one might think up. It’s not necessary to create and support a hypothesis of what the author had in mind at every turn, but if likely intent can be teased out, it helps direct profitable lines of inquiry elsewhere.

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