I've never been able to give myself a good justification for why I should be reading any of that stuff.
The example of noise music came up elsewhere in the discussion. It’s an important example. Most people won’t ever like it. You fill the pipeline with noise music, 99% of us will literally listen to anything else, or to nothing. I like a little bit of it, but in general I’m simply not going to acquire that taste.
The PIAAC surveys, while imperfect, indirectly address what percentage of adults can read and appreciate "literary fiction."
The first part of the definition of level 3:
>Adults at Level 3 are able to construct meaning across larger chunks of text or perform multi-step operations in order to identify and formulate responses. They can identify, interpret or evaluate one or more pieces of information, often employing varying levels of inferencing.
The first part for Level 4:
>At level 4, adults can read long and dense texts presented on multiple pages in order to complete tasks that involve access, understanding, evaluation and reflection about the text(s) contents and sources across multiple processing cycles. Adults at this level can infer what the task is asking based on complex or implicit statements. Successful task completion often requires the production of knowledge-based inferences.
The full definitions can be found here: https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/measure.asp
Based on the full definitions, understanding the use of metaphor in a longer text probably sits in Level 4. A simple metaphor might sit in Level 3.
Based on the recent survey results, only half of US adults read at Level 3 or above. Around 15% read at Level 4 or above.
I invite you to look at this PowerPoint of sample questions for each level: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwjJ...
Based on that, what level of literacy do you think indicates someone capable of reading and enjoying literary fiction? I think the hypothetical cutoff is somewhere between Level 3 and 4.
Based on all of this, let's use Sally Rooney's book "Normal People" as an example. If we're being super charitable, at most 50% of people would be able to read and comprehend that book. If we're being less charitable with our definition of "comprehension," I think we're probably looking at closer to 30% of people really understanding it.
Based on this, you could reach both of these conclusions:
1. Most literary fiction is inaccessible to the average adult.
2. It's a big problem that even moderately complex novels are inaccessible to the average adult.
The first statement (which I think is where you're coming from) is absolutely true. If you want to write a very popular book, it should be easily readable at a 6th grade level.
The second statement is more a statement of values. Some people (such as myself) find it problematic that the average adult can't read/understand a book that is more complex than Harry Potter.
You don't have to agree with the second statement. A lot of people don't. But I think understanding why someone might find that problematic is important. Personally, I think there are a lot of things worth knowing that can't be written at a 6th grade level.
This is like saying to a musician: I like the melody but you chose all the wrong instruments.
Obviously, the entire character of a song depends not only on the melody (idea) but also on the instruments chosen, the performance, etc. (material).
For literary fiction, the words are the material. What distinguishes literary works is not merely the "ideas" they present but the way in which they are presented. The words are the author's instruments, his paints. This is the difference between writing/reading for information and writing/reading as an aesthetic experience. Literary fiction of course imparts information and ideas, but it is predominantly about the latter experience insofar as the point is the evocative expression of those ideas.
This is why just reading the cliff notes for a literary work is missing the point.
No it is not. It is a central and vital part of literature.
Wound you like to have a friendly debate, each of us using quotations from any fiction writers we like?
That said, I would stand by the assertion that reading literature only for the information it imparts is missing much of the point. We esteem authors not solely for their plots and characters, but also for their stylistics—the difference between a great writer and a passing one is often little more than the well considered phrase. The arrangement, use, and rhythm of words are a major component in a literary work.
My point is that asking a writer to "express it more simply or more accessibly" may in many cases amount to asking them to butcher the stylistics that they felt achieved the highest aesthetic quality for the kind of work they wanted to produce.
If one is given a business briefing it is probably the apex of reason to ask a writer to simplify. Are there cases in which this or that phrase in a literary work would benefit from simplification? Yes, but to ask an author to simplify their entire aesthetic approach generally, really seems to me to fail to have appreciated a large part of what distinguishes literature from basic expository writing.
Faulkner, Thomas Bernhard, John Barth, Henry James, Herman Melville, Fleur Jaeggy, Dostoyevsky, Marguerite Duras, Poe, Hawthorne, Rosemarie Waldrop, Kraznahokai,
These are just a couple that came to mind. Among them, probably Waldrop, Jaeggy, and Bernhard are the most experimental, but I would argue that none of them aesthetically speaking write books that are simple, and I don't think I could argue that any of them should have simplified their themes or style or general employment of language to be more accessible.
Kraznahorkai and Bernhard are great examples. Are walls of text without paragraph breaks harder to read? Yes. But this is an important aesthetic choice. In both cases (all of bernard, melancholy of resistance for Kraz) it speaks to an overbearing oppressiveness that ties directly into their thematics. If you missed this I think you missed out an essential point of their aesthetic and what they were trying to say. We cannot sever form and content. This is why I think it's absurd to complain that someone's work is "not accessible" —its really silly to demand any sort of aesthetic capitulation on the part of any artist, literary or otherwise, in the first place.
Edit: Faulkner is another good example that's less experimental. I'm sure some readers would have found As I lay Dying or The Sound and the Fury more accessible if a narrator mediated between the various first person voices he presents, but this would so drastically change the aesthetic character of these works that I doubt you'd be able to claim they aren't essentially different and would not be equivalent pieces of art.
As far as I can tell, as far as your entertainment options go, literary fiction is THE best option to exercise your mind.
Ranked, in order, it's: literary fiction, nonfiction, computer games, movies, TV.
"Meta-analyses show fiction reading has stronger associations with cognitive skills than nonfiction, with medium-sized benefits for verbal abilities and general cognition. Fiction enhances social cognition by exercising the brain's default network involved in theory of mind. Reading fiction increases brain connectivity, particularly in language areas and sensorimotor regions, with effects lasting beyond the reading session."
"Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth." - Albert Camus
I mean that in the sense that non-fiction is still very much fictionally presenting a world view of the author or the subject, but in a way that's bounded by real facts. Literary fiction doesn't have that constraint.
Human history and society is actually made up of ideas and by taking 2-300 pages to digest a set of ideas you come away with a new perspective you can't get any other way.
I think people simply realize how boring and pretentious much of contemporary literary fiction is; many choose to go pick up a science fiction, or thriller, or even romance novel that can convery all the same ideas in more interesting and accessible ways.
Not to say that the distinction itself, literary vs non-literary fiction, isn't extremely pretentious. But we all recognize that some book's ideas are more shallow than others.
Folks, downvoting the comment above is literally destroying what you claim to support.