Did you ever have the feeling your English teachers were full of BS?

Cafe Society
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vontsira: That’s how I felt about Ben Aaronovitch’s “Peter Grant” novels. While they are, in fact, quite good, I had the feeling of being a baby bird, being fed with gobs of regurgitated facts. He went into FAR too much detail, and it ended up like reading his research notes.

Dan Brown had that problem too… A subtle (or suttel) writer can sprinkle the information out, and mix it into the story’s drama, without coming off like a textbook. Dick Francis was fairly good at that. (Doggone, I miss him! Felix Francis is pretty good, but, well, he ain’t his old man.)

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Yeah, but as I remember it*, most of the good stuff seems to happen off page, with the narrator coming back and telling us the “important” parts, which were usually not the exciting parts.

Plus, since the point of Gatsby was its symbolism, as the author crammed it full of it, that’s mostly what you discuss in class. So any excitement you might feel from reading is completely taken out because you are instead discussing why the car was yellow or the light was green.

*At least, that’s how it felt at the time.

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Told before: one of my uncles is a writer (among other things he’s got degrees in Lit, Journalism and History). For years, he’d go to literary contests and not get anything and blame it on The Man and on The Vast Conspiracy To Not Give Him Any Prizes.

Then one day he came to his mother’s house, entered with one of his accustomed flourishes (dude should wear one of those heavy woolen cloaks), dropped on an armchair as if he’d just run all the way from the other end of the country and proclaimed “critics are indeed all full of shit, but I won a prize. I just don’t understand what is it I am supposed to have written, because when I read the descriptions these guys are seeing something I was not.”

The poem that had won the prize was one he’d written in a hurry because he had a deadline to make, so he hadn’t reviewed it to death as he usually did; it was a literal description of his son, lying on a gurney awaiting surgery. The critics saw the suffering of children in the world, but only those linked to some sort of large tragedy, from the “little black kids in Africa dying of hunger while you’re here not wanting to finish your plate” to war orphans or butterfly mine amputees.

Once he stopped trying to extract prizes from the critics, his writing improved a lot.

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Well – humiliating gaps in one’s knowledge, or what? – I’m British, but until reading your post I had never heard of Ben Aaronovitch or his creation Peter Grant, and had to Google them. Nor had I heard of Ben’s seemingly also rather famous father and brothers…

“Subtlety / suttelty”, I do find a valuable thing in literary craftsmanship – an author’s remorselessly beating one over the head with / rubbing one’s face in – whatever – is liable to be a turn-off. Sometimes, one can like other aspects of the author’s material, to the point of being able / willing to put up with the undesired bombardment. Harry Turtledove often drives me mad with his obsessive and repetitious harping on assorted things; but I like other elements in his stuff sufficiently to take pleasure, overall, in reading a lot of his output. Dudley Pope I found in general, IMO a poor “bargain basement” equivalent of Forester and O’Brian re Napoleonic-naval fiction; and his prominent “pedant schoolmaster” side completely did him in for me.

The Peter Grant material does sound potentially of interest – “a young officer in the Metropolitan Police who following an unexpected encounter with a ghost, is recruited into the small branch of the Met. that deals with magic and the supernatural”. I feel inclined to give the books a try: might find that their positive qualities let me tolerate the annoying info-dumping.

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vontsira: Despite my having singled him out for criticism, I really did enjoy Ben Aaronovitch’s “Midnight Riot.” The “Peter Grant” novels depend on internal chronological order, so, if you would read any of them, this is the one to start with.

Have you read any of Dewey Lambdin’s “Alan Lewrie” “Great Age of Sail” novels? Someone here (I forget who, but thank you!) recommended them, and I’ve enjoyed them hugely. But they, too, have faults. As the series gets up into its tenth book or so, the author finds it necessary to “recap” the whole long odyssey of the protagonist’s adventures. This is not a good idea.

Nava: I’m laughing happily at the contest judges seeing stuff in your uncle’s poetry that he, himself, never intended. It takes me back to my old college literature classes, where the teachers (as in the OP) teach interpretations of books without solid evidence that the authors meant them that way.

e.g., Huckleberry Finn is obviously about slavery…but is it also about homoeroticism? I’ve heard people insist it’s about the “forbidden love” between Huck and Jim.

A much lighter and funnier example is “The Macbeth Murder Mystery” by James Thurber. The narrator meets someone who has “solved” Macbeth, by treating it as a typical murder mystery.

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Of course the real issue the anecdote in the OP highlights is that you shouldn’t help your kids with their homework. Whoever you are.

I believe teachers are distributed on some sort of ability bell-curve. I’ve had a few very good ones, and about a similar number of them who shouldn’t have been in charge of teaching a Canadian Goose how to shit. Most were adequate. I remember the bad ones more fondly, though. A special favorite was the history teacher who taught us that the purpose of (czarist) Russia entering WWI was to facilitate the subsequent communist takeover. As in, the Czar or his people planned it all. And their reason was that a communist state could better withstand Germany in WWII.

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My favourite writer, Gerard van het Reve, has remarked that there IS a place for text analysis. But literature is not it. Professional writers don’t need a critic to explain to the public what they actually wanted to convey. If the critic does a better job at that then the writer, why don’t we appreciate the critic over the writer? And why don’t critics write splendid books? Okay, maybe they don’t have the writers talent to write. But by rights, they should be awesome at correcting their own texts into perfection, no?

No., the place for text analysis is for writers who do a bad job of conveying a message. Political programs and statements, for instance. In fact, in those professions critics actually are hired, instead of self-appointed. There, they are called ghostwriters and communication professionals. And they are a lot less arrogant then people indulging in literary analysis.

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Guess what? I’d never heard of Dewey Lambdin or his Alan Lewrie, before reading this post of yours. I have a slight excuse in the form of my not being American; but am getting an uneasy feeling, about large gaps in my knowledge of stuff !

I have read, a while ago, the first couple of the “Kydd” novels by Julian Stockwin (as of now, a total of 14 in the series, which I hadn’t realised). Royal Navy / Napoleonic Wars again – the protagonist is a young guy who gets press-ganged, and tries to make the best of the unwelcome situation. Those that I read, I thought quite good – certainly IMO an improvement on Pope.

Good grief ! Now here’s a new and startling one for the conspiracy-theories department…

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Hey, here’s some advice for writers everywhere: If your “intentions” are important to you, if you want to communicate your innermost thoughts to someone clearly and without incident, if you want make sure that the reader “gets your message”, then don’t write literature at all. Write pamphlets. Or essays. Or memos. Or message board posts. Heck, pick any form you want, just not one where, because of traditions of reader response and inherent stylistic qualities, meaning is inherently unstable. This is especially true if you feel that you have to mess around with poetry, but really, fiction isn’t much better. Seriously.

(And all you guys, stop looking at poor George Orwell like that. He’s taken enough flak already. Besides, this is about literature in general.)

And don’t think your readers or critics are stupid because they find something in your work that you didn’t know that you put in there. You only have yourself to blame. Literature is a machine for generating meaning, and when you put thoughts in there and start the wheels cranking, you don’t always know what might come out. And when the product hits a reader? Some weird chemical reactions are going to be set off. That stuff is explosive. You should know this by now. Just carrying a book across the room might set it off. Expecting someone to read your work and not have some weird sparks fly? Naive, is what that is.

But if you do enjoy some fireworks, keep at it. Just don’t complain about the noise and the occasional seared eyebrow.

(No, really. I mean, come on. If you want your roommate to bring back a bottle of milk, and you write him a *poem *about it, do you think it’s his fault if he comes back with cheese? Besides, the poem was beautiful, and we got some great sandwiches out of it. So don’t complain.)

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Yes, exactly. An author doesn’t own the meaning or interpretation of a work.

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Crikey! Another for my list! I promise to read the first one, anyway!

Is there some rule written down somewhere in the great book of law (or booke of lawe?) that Great Age of Sail stories must come in lengthy series of novels? Has anyone ever written a short story, or a single novel, and let it go at that?

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Heck, look at how many of our message board posts have been misinterpreted!

I sort of agree with you…but also sort of don’t. It’s the “interpretive dance” point of view. There is some room, in this world, to try to convey an idea using indirect aesthetic techniques.

A novel is a very good way to “explore” an idea. You can hold an internal debate, by putting the pro and con viewpoints into the mouths (and actions) of different characters. Dramatic techniques allow for this form of debate better than pamphlets do.

It challenges the writer to be honest, and to have the personal moral integrity to present both viewpoints fairly. When he can do that, he opens a channel to the moral spirit of his readers.

Agreement.

Exactly! This is what I want. I want the reader to think. I want to try to engage the mind, to activate the philosophy, to inspire an internal debate. I want the reader to say, “Whoa! I hadn’t thought of it that way!”

And, yes, I want the choppy, messy, chaos of new meanings, where everyone brings a little of themselves to the table.

Total agreement. An artist may set out trying to convey his own personal viewpoint to the audience – but the audience is not a blank canvas: the artist’s vision can, at best, be overlaid upon the existing viewpoint of the audience. When it works, it can be astonishing and beautiful. Haven’t we all had the wonderful experience of reading a story that “speaks directly to us,” as if it had been written for us personally?

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Perhaps writing fiction set in that milieu is just plain addictive, like crack cocaine – once you begin, death is the only thing that will stop you?

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Oh, I agree completely with this. I think the novel, as a form, is perfect for it, really. It comes with a built-in irony from the outset. It’s great as a “laboratory” for ideas (or a playground).

Heck, you don’t even necessarily need characters. I love the “essayistic novels” (or novelistic essays, if you will) of a writer like Milan Kundera. Kundera has characters, sure, but also lengthy passages where ideas are explored in the narrator’s voice (or sort of shuffled between the characters and the narrator). Just by virtue of being in a novel, as opposed to an essay or pamphlet (or message board post), those ideas acquire a twinkle in their eye and a tongue-in-cheek sort of quality, a sense of “don’t take me completely seriously, I’m not being confrontational, I’m playing to see what happens”.

Another example of this that I like: The South African writer J. M. Coetzee has written a lot on the subject of animal rights. He’s a vegetarian and has frequently expressed clear opinions about the eating of animals and the meat industry. However, in his novella The Lives of Animals, these ideas are put into a fictionalized context, and presented as a lecture given by the fictional author Elizabeth Costello (a recurring character in Coetzee’s writings who is often seen as his “fictional alter ego”).

This re-framing completely changes the tone of the discussion. Instead of being polemic, it’s playful. Instead of being confrontational, it makes you think. (It also bugs the hell out of people like Peter Singer, since it means that Coetzee can follow his trains of thought without really committing to a position.)

Of course, I think Coetzee does this completely intentionally, as a way to explore ideas rather than argue them. (See? Now I’m talking about intentions. Hah! The irony.) Point is, it shows that if you want to be polemic, and convince someone of a point of view, the novel, as a form, is completely crap at it. It you want to invite someone to a discussion, start wheels turning in your readers’ heads, and have them think for themselves, it’s great.

Of course, this isn’t all that novels can do. They spend most of the time doing completely different things. But it is one thing that they can do, and do well. They should probably do more of it.

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I stumbled across a quote by T. S. Eliot that sums up this whole thread:

The term wasn’t used when he wrote that, but he seems to be saying that a poem is an emergent property, one that is not obvious from its basic components and may not even be predictable or deducible from its basic components.

I probably should say that for me it sums up this whole thread. For any of you it may do something completely different.

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I see it as a demonstration of the love of the Creator God for us, his creation.

Also an endorsement of the Thurmond/Wright ticket.

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I don’t think so. I had one, in 10th grade, who drove me absolutely CRAZY (although, in fairness, I think I did the same to her), though not so much because I didn’t think she knew what she was talking about as I just didn’t see the “methods in her madness.” My bigger beef is with those who try to apply the rules of Latin to English such as when they say, “You cannot split an infinitive!!” B.S. Shoot - Star Trek’s opening lines (and I’m sure all of you who are familiar with the show remember this): “To boldly go where no one has gone before…” If splitting an infinitive in English is good enough for the writers of Star Trek it’s good enough for me!