bibliolithid:
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oligopsony:
bibliolithid:
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anosognosica:
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brazenautomaton:
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bluesette:
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So, in almost any artistic field, there’s a disjoint between critical and commercial (or if freely distributed, simply “popular”) success - many things that have the first lack the second, and visa-versa. This is widely remarked upon as something that requires explanation, and the explanations always seem to be either aesthetically realist (the snobs are right, the masses are idiots, some things are just better but most can’t appreciate it) or bulveristic (the plebes are just innocently enjoying what anyone would enjoy, the snobs are engaged in signalling games.) These can be put in more nuanced forms than the strawmen I’ve summed them as, but they seem to be the main approaches.
But does this require an explanation? Consider:
1) The most critically successful (say) books are those that most appeal to those who are really really into books; the most commercially successful books are those that most branch out beyond that group; and more generally
2) Desiderata will be tend to anti-correlate after a process of selection; works with no potential for either rarely get propagated. (The exceptions, like say My Immortal or The Room are probably best understood as a strange kind of critical success; they most particularly tweak (whether innocently or by design) the tastes of aficionado communities who seek out and build commentary around them for that reason.)
So while there may or may not be such things as good faith or bad taste, I don’t think you need to postulate either to get the general pattern.
This strikes me as kind of similar to the “aesthetically realist” explanation, except without the moral component. That is, it still explains the distinction by invoking intrinsic properties of the books, and it suggests that the snobs have more experience with which to make judgments (”really really into books”), just without saying that’s a good thing.
In other words, it seems like this is close to restating the notion of “good taste,” but without calling it “good.”
The thing I think this theory has trouble with – which the “aesthetically realist” theory also has trouble with – is how “snob taste” (or whatever one wants to call it) is a recognizable thing that is distinct from “the taste common among people who read a lot.” I know voracious readers who read only “low” fiction, who read only “high” fiction, and (probably the most common category) those who read both and everything in between. It’s only (some of) the “high-only” people who strike me as “snobs,” not exactly because of what they like, but because of what they won’t even try.
So – what I identify as “snobbery” seems like a process of binary inclusion/exclusion rather than a spectrum of taste. It’s hard for me to understand exactly what causes certain works to be included or excluded, and the whole thing seems very cultural, path-dependent, and hard to explain in terms of individual psychology/taste. (Dorothy Dunnett is a better prose stylist than Eleanor Catton, and Elizabeth Bear is a better stylist than Donna Tartt, and all four write plot-heavy books, but if a “high-only” person asked me what fiction I’d been reading, I would guess that Catton and Tartt would “count,” would be “answers in the spirit of the question,” where Dunnett and Bear wouldn’t.)
Hmm, I think you’re mostly right. I think what removing “good” does structurally for the theory, rather than just making it polite, is open things up to the acknowledgement that communities of taste can be pretty varied, and in principle should be able to each be superior to the other by their own standards (though I can’t think of any good examples off the top of my head for that.) “Read a lot of books” may have framed things in a particular way, though I do suspect the most common route to a “snobbish” sensibility is investment in a particular set of aesthetic standards. (Maybe this makes it ultimately still just a polite good taste theory?)
But it does seem to be the case that there is snobbery within pretty much every aesthetic to invest in, not just a single snob community looking down from their art museums and literary fiction reviews. Elizabeth Bear is better/more snobbish than Terry Goodkind, Pillars of Eternity than Fallout 4, Sandman than Spider-Man, &c. I’m too invested in hegemonic masculinity to know anything about, say, genre romance* but I would bet money on the same applying to them (or maybe a large section of Lit-Fic just is the romance snob group? IDK.)
(I’m actually not sure where I’m going with this at this point; I’ll have to give it further reflection, maybe.)
*he said, Bioware fanfic in the next tab over,
I find that a lot of the ‘high level’ stuff does actually require certain experiences and foreknowledge to enjoy. I don’t know a heck of a lot about fiction, but I know about jazz.
Jazz is objectively more complex than rock and pop music. And if you walked up to someone who only listens to pop or rock music and made them listen to, say, this Charlie Parker track, there’s a good chance that they won’t like it. They don’t have the tools necessary to understand what’s happening in the song, so it’s liable to be completely incomprehensible to them. So of course that track is going to be unpopular among the general population. It requires a certain skillset and background to enjoy.
I haven’t read Elizabeth Bear but Sandman does require more foreknowledge to enjoy than Spider-Man, since a lot of the stories in Sandman rely on knowledge of the Western Canon. Someone who doesn’t know about Orpheus and Eurydice is less likely to enjoy Sandman than someone who does, because they’re missing a lot of what is being conveyed. Any references in Spider-Man to non-comic book works are going to be much more incidental to the story than those in Sandman.
I think that there are actual barriers that prevent the average person from accessing certain works, and that these have a lot to do with both skill-based education (e.g. ear training) and cultural background (e.g. the jazz language). Critics necessarily must have the second and are likely to have more of the first than the average person.
I think this is an important factor, but it doesn’t go all the way to explaining what I’m talking about.
In the quartet of authors I mentioned, Dunnett and Bear are also (I’d say) more densely referential than Catton and Tartt, and also much less “accessible" – the reader has to do a lot more work to figure out what’s going on, often through the screen of opaque, reference-heavy prose and dialogue. Obviously, I chose those particular authors because they suited my point, but I don’t think they’re outliers. (Authors who like being densely referential often take gladly to the historical-fic and SF/fantasy genres, for obvious reasons.)
The hypothesis I’m darkly hinting at here is that a lot of this is the result of marketing. Or, more accurately, a broader social phenomenon in which books are marketed differently but also blurbed and reviewed by different people, etc., and some social groups take this as a cue for which books to read or care about.
(The dividing line is very clear if you look at the covers of books by Dunnett/Bear vs. those by Catton/Tartt – the latter tend to be a whole lot more, uh, tasteful.)
I’m not saying this is all arbitrary, though I’m pretty sure at least some of it is arbitrary. But even if it’s arbitrary, that’s not necessarily a problem: no one can read every book in the world, and it’s valuable to be reading the same books your friends are reading for social reasons. Snobbery is to some extent a thing that certain social groups do to focus their attention on the same books, which can be useful even if the choice has nothing to do with what’s between the covers.
I feel like Family Guy is a counterpoint to this argument.
It’s nothing but references, things that require foreknowledge to enjoy – some of them super obscure – and yet, it’s the lowest of the low status even when looking solely at its references.
Hmm, yeah. Ulysses, Homestuck, and Family Guy are all packed to the gills with 1) dick and fart jokes and 2) references to absolutely everything, but one’s gazing down from Mt Olympus, another is a big fish in a small pond, and another is a landfill full of AOL cds.
Probably accessibility in other ways matters? Like Family Guy for instance is episodic - each episode stands entirely on its own. Though maybe that doesn’t matter so much because most Sandman issues stand on their own, too, whereas gargantuan map fantasy series outside of Tolkien and Martin tend to be lower caste even within SFF fandom?
(I could probably throw out better hypotheses on the Ulysses/Homestuck/FG front if my knowledge of all wasn’t mostly osmotic.)
Hmm, okay, hmm, here are some “maximally” like-with-like comparisons: Family Guy vs. Simpsons, Fallout 4 vs Fallout: New Vegas, Sword of Truth vs Game of Thrones. Can we pile up some more examples like these? Do they lead anywhere in particular?
I don’t think you can go that much further on the meta level without picking apart the content in some depth, but when you do that it’s harder to generalize. So just a couple of thoughts:
There is a sort of reflective sensory and emotional reaction that great narrative awakens, one that brings a certain kind of insight, a sort of broadening of empathetic understanding. This is vague, but I think there’s a definite mental state that this refers to.
Certain works can be complex in its vocabulary or references but not manage to do this much or at all. Family Guy, for example, is mean-spirited to its core, and offers little to none of this (most egregiously imo it invites the viewer to enjoy its relentless savaging of Meg). Game of Thrones punctures sentimentality, but it never moves beyond its own brand of nihilism (there’s more to it than that, but I think this generally holds). Something like Children of Men, though, maintains a balance of hope and despair, leading to a note of transcendence, and you may not come out knowing more after you watch it, but you feel like a better person.
Of course this is just the vaguest gesturing towards a whole theory of narrative criticism, but it’s coming out of years of rumination on the subject, so it’s not just some ad hoc theory.
But there’s definitely work that’s both high-prestige and spiritually dead, isn’t there? Houllebecq, for instance?
I think it is more the level of cognitive work required (or perceived as required) to extract the “content” (be it spiritual or otherwise) from the work. The cognitive load can be reduced by skill (i.e. an Literature degree), or the perception of cognitive load can be artificially inflated (i.e. by adding obscure references). I feel like this explains Family Guy (references but no cognitive work required to understand them), Epic Fantasy (A lot of time and possibly effort required to understand them, but it is a low cognitive load), and Ulysses (High cognitive load).
I think the content in the work is also supposed to be worth the effort required to get it, but this is probably more about the perception of the value of the content than its actual properties, due to various biases.
Yeah, I think these sorts of complexity/barriers to entry are definitely part of it, although there also seem to be things that are coded as “pretentious” that have a low cognitive load: post-rock for instance. (Well, likely there are additional treasures to be gained in it through an appreciation of musical theory and history, but I lack all those things and just like to listen to it because it’s immediately pretty.)
“I like everything except rock and country” is clearly just about class, clearly enough that it’s become a stock level-2-signalling joke. But bluesette is probably right about e.g. jazz being objectively complex too. Hmm.
I think this is close to the mark, although I’m not sure I understand the distinction @bibliolithid is making here
Epic Fantasy (A lot of time and possibly effort required to understand them, but it is a low cognitive load), and Ulysses (High cognitive load)
What is the “effort” possibly required by epic fantasy if not cognitive load? Do you mean that you have to work hard to memorize all the factions and characters (etc.), but you don’t have to think much? If so, I agree, but I’m not sure Ulysses is actually much different. Sure, it’s full of long or abbreviated sentences that are very confusing if you try to directly parse them, but no one who tries to directly parse every sentence in the book ever finishes it, I’d imagine.
In other words, I agree that difficulty or cognitive load explains the difference between Family Guy and {Game of Thrones, Ulysses, Homestuck}, but I’m not sure it explains the difference between the latter three. It requires some pretty heavy thinking about causal loops and crisscrossing motivations to “follow” Homestuck fully, but most first-time readers don’t actually do that, just as most first-time readers don’t actually parse the grammar (or lack thereof) of every sentence in “Oxen of the Sun.”
The explanation here, IMO, is something like “how easily can I imagine writing a paper about this?” I found Homestuck intimidatingly confusing when I first read it, but it had a reputation as this fun fandom thing and so I just kept on trucking. Somehow the fans all understood this thing without, like, having to take classes on it, right? Whereas Ulysses took me multiple tries to read – in part because it gets a lot better as it goes on, but in part because it seemed like a legitimate possibility that I was just “missing the point” of a lot of it and that without specialist study I was wasting my time.
For the most part I’ve stopped believing that this “you have to be a specialist” category actually exists – it’s possible to follow along with very difficult works and enjoy them without understanding them 100%, and I ultimately did this with Ulysses just as I did it with Homestuck. But if something seems like “the sort of thing you’d study in a class and write papers on,” a lot of people are going to decide it’s above their weight class. Likewise, the only reason so many people have made it through something like Homestuck is that there are no classes on it.
My concept of cognitive work (and cognitive work per second/unit i.e. cognitive load) primarily derives from my own qualia. When I am under a heavy cognitive load, I feel pressure in my head, and if I do too much cognitive work I get a headache. Conceptually, I feel like it is about halfway between the concept of “mental burden” used here and “cognitive work” used here. For, say, a book instead of game, it may be helpful to think of mental calculations per word, rather than per second. When I am reading epic fantasy (and I have read my fair share) the majority of the effort I exert is willpower: keeping reading despite a slow chapter or a new tumblr post. The cognitive work is mostly so light as to be automatic, I remember people and places in the story as part of my normal brain function, without needing to use any conscious thought or my executive functions at all (which may be the key differentiator). “the sort of thing you’d study in a class an write papers on” seems like a Mysterious Answer, replacing the class of “things people are snobs about” with the class of “things people write papers on”, without really explaining anything.
I think this is the difference. You get more out of spending more energy thinking about Ulysses than you do Family Guy, but unlike Game of Thrones it is hard to enjoy without putting in much cognitive work.
“the sort of thing you’d study in a class an write papers on” seems like a Mysterious Answer, replacing the class of “things people are snobs about” with the class of “things people write papers on”, without really explaining anything.
What I’m trying to say is that people’s reactions are being created here by the culture surrounding a given work rather than intrinsic qualities of the work itself. We’re never going to be able to have a satisfactory theory based on intrinsic qualities if those qualities just don’t actually cause the variation we’re looking at. It’s possible to imagine there one day being classes about Homestuck; there’s nothing about it that precludes that, and once it starts looking like homework it is going to fall on the other end of this dividing line. (Shakespeare is the go-to example of someone who has gone through this process – the groundlings didn’t worry that they hadn’t studied enough to “appreciate” what they were seeing.)
Re: cognitive load, that’s an interesting idea, which I had not thought about before. I think the choice of examples may not be working for me – I’m not sure I was enjoying Ulysses more when I was “thinking hard about it”; I tended enjoyed it when it was less easily comprehensible, but that was mostly a “wow, pretty” reaction without much perceived effort involved. It is possible to mentally strain for comprehension by, say, keeping very close track of the various little things Bloom thinks about repeatedly during the day, but I’m not sure readers generally consider this “more enjoyable” than just watching the fireworks – it’s just something that’s there to do, if you want to, probably on second reading or later.
But now that I think about it, I’m not sure I’ve ever had the experience depicted in your Ulysses graph? Much more common is something where the graph goes up and then down: I need to think a bit to make sense of the thing, but trying to keep track of more than the essentials removes me too much from the experience. (I’m having something like this experience now with Dorothy Dunnett, who I mentioned earlier as an author I don’t think would “count” for a typical snob. But I do have to think when reading her or I’ll be totally lost, and I’m at least 50% lost anyway because I’m not willing to obsess over every detail at the price of engagement. This is roughly my experience with all “hard” fiction.)