Ideal questioned

[supergee]

Against subtlety

Thanx to Arts & Letters Daily

Comments

[weofodthignen]

Interesting, but as usual I couldn't evaluate all the up-to-the-minute cultural references. And the comments section is almost unreadable and really nasty, which I suppose says something about what the article says, I'm just not sure what.

To go a little deeper for a moment, literary subtlety presents a problem not just of limitation of audience - and I know you are particularly aware of how marginal literary fiction" is these days - but also of coding. Dickens was really good at mass appeal. He was arguably the best at exploiting the explosion of literacy after the introduction in Britain of compulsory schooling and of the ethos that reading was good. So he's an obvious example in such an argument. But my responses to his characters have always been at odds with what he apparently intended. I found Great Expectations almost unreadable, because I was horrified by/sympathetic to all the wrong people. I strongly suspect this misfiring of symbolic cues is common, because time and cultural changes - not to mention the greater diversity of reader backgrounds - undermine the body of shared references that symbolism draws on. (Hemingway's and others' allusions to the Fisher King are less often cited as profound symbolism these days because they don't resonate very much with women.) Gatsby defies analysis partly because it's now hard to reconstruct how some of the symbols are supposed to be read - like Jordan(?) the tennis player - and others have demonstrably shifted (pink suit), plus it's always trotted out as an example of the unreliable narrator, and with that the bottom kind of falls out of reading it the way the cited critic read it.

Anyway :-)

M