Why I'd rather write something pretentious than something good · 6:49pm May 2nd, 2016
Okay, I'll own up. That's a deliberately confrontational clickbait-y title. I couldn't help myself.
Really this blog is about language. Contrary to the bleating of the Average Internet Intellectual, the meaning of a word is not absolute. We, as a community, can choose how to use words and consequently the meanings we give to them. If we're sensible, we choose in a way that reflects the real world and enables discussion.
And I think there are good reasons for choosing to abandon both “pretentious” and “good” as critical terms when speaking about stories. Both tend to obscure discussion. Both communicate little. Both tend to discourage thought. I'm going to discuss each of them individually.
(Mind you, it follows from this discussion that it's perfectly cool to write something that would fall under the common usage of “pretentious” and not under some usage of “good”, so the title isn't all that inappropriate.)
Better Pretentious …
What do me mean when we say something is pretentious? Well, let's have a look at the dictionary definition …
Actually, no. Let's not. You can do that on your own time. I think we all get the gist of it: A pretentious story has image but not substance; it overreaches itself; the author is trying to project some quality such as intelligence or culture that they lack. There is a sense of showing off. And the undertone is that all this reflects badly on the author and the story.
And if that the way we actually used the term, it wouldn't be so bad. Projecting an image is close to a universal human social (and antisocial) behaviour, and one that we occasionally get carried away with.
But I don't think that is the way we use it.
More often, in my experience, it's nothing more than a term of derision for a certain set of techniques that smell too high-brow. Especially those that the critic doesn't appreciate.
It's not hard to spell out the sort inappropriate techniques that ask for this label:
Lyrical prose. Unreliable narrators. Playing with narration in general. Playing with style. Playing with typography. Using something other than the standard conflict plot formula. Any layer of meaning that's too obscure. Leaning on theme more than plot. Some forms of realism, but not others. Some forms of non-realism, but not others.
But do any of these techniques automatically mean the author is trying to project an image without substance, that the story is overreaching? I don't think so. Some authors might try and use them that way, but that's not the same thing. You might dress up properly to a black tie event because you believe it's an oh-so-cultured-&-elevated thing to do – or you might do it because it's fun to dress up every once in a while. And on the principle of good faith I think that, lacking enough information to decide, we should assume the latter.
Writing is a form of play: A mutually gratifying activity for all participants. We do it because it's fun. And, I think, it takes all kinds. Why should playing with style be considered any less worthy (or more worthy) than playing with plotlines?
When the accusation of pretension is used as a term of derision for the inappropriate techniques, it's coming uncomfortably close social control and snobbery. Who do you think you are, playing with tricks like that? Why don't you stick to the standard mix of character, plot and setting like the rest of us? A veneer of populism obscures this side to it – I'm just an average reader without a literature degree who doesn't understand any of this fancy-shmancy flouncing – but it's there nonetheless.
A concrete example? Look no further than the recent mess made by the Whiny Puppies in the Hugo sandbox. The accusation of pretension as an attempt at social control was essential to their righteous crusade.
“Ah,” my anonymous critic might say. “That's all well and good, but I never said it's bad to be pretentious! In fact I agree. You can be pretentious as you wish. It's fine by me.”
Isn't that lovely and accepting? Well, no, it isn't. Pretentious is a normative term. With it, to classify is to judge. It carries the implication that you look down the techniques. Suppose I said to someone, “Yeah, you're allowed to be stupid. I don't mind.” Is that not an insult? The same applies here.
Well, perhaps so. But perhaps there's another good reason for classifying things as pretentious. It is, after all, the pretentious stories that are unpopular. They don't sell well.
Okay, so this isn't a proper criticism. It doesn't really engage the point. But I want to deal with it anyway, because it's so evidently nonsense the moment you look at the outside world. In film, Tarantino and Nolan are certainly the sort who would classified under pretentious. Has it hindered their popularity at all? Nabokov was a best-seller, and continues to sell today. Trainspotting, a plotless realist novel filled with dialect and dashes to indicate dialogue, made Irvine Welsh instantly famous. Meanwhile on the other side of the Atlantic, there's Cormac McCarthy. Even in the world of genre, consider VanderMeer's recent success. All these are outliers of course – but the same is true of the popular non-pretentious authors.
As a final note, I should say I have nothing against having preferences. I'm not saying you're a bad person if, say, that recent literary darling bored you to tears. I have preferences too. I thought Railsea's ampersands were really fun; I couldn't stand the lack of quotation marks in McCarthy. But I see no good reason to classify either as a pretentious move by the author – not when I can communicate more clearly and effectively by just saying what about it I liked or didn't.
… Than Good
So why is “good” a poor term for discussing stories? That's much simpler: Because it's an arbitrary.
Consider: What makes a story good? Unless you consider it an entirely subjective term, you need some theory of goodness, some set of properties you can point to and say, “It's good because it had these.” Most critics have some pet theory. A few go to the trouble of spelling it out in detail.
But ask five critics what constitutes good literature, and you'll get six different answers. It needs to embody this moral virtue. It needs a plot of this form. It must be judged by history. It must be realist. It must encourage suspension of disbelief. Etc
Which of these theories is the correct one?
We're asking the wrong question. “Good” does no semantic work in any of these theories; to pick out any of these theories as true is just to define the word as along the lines of that theory.
So why define the word according to one theory rather than another? The choice is arbitrary.
You might argue, “Well, this theory better accounts for stories I like.” But that's adding your subjective preferences to the matter. If we all did that, we'd all have different definitions of the word “good”, making it useless as a term of communication.
Now, what does the term “good” add to the discourse? Suppose you and I, using the word attached to different theories, come together to discuss a particular story. I say it's good, you say it isn't. What follows? In all likelihood, miscommunication followed by the same endless and pointless wrangling over definitions that you see all over the internet these days. In the end, everyone goes home grumpy and without having learned anything.
Suppose instead we discuss the story without worrying about what constitutes good literature. We don't jettison out theories – we discuss them directly. We may still disagree, but now at least there's a chance we can discuss the story's actual properties without getting caught up in trying define a term. Nothing important is lost; clarity and insight are gained.
Writing is communication. Writing tricks are nifty when they they're used in the service of communicating. 99% of the time, if someone (and especially if multiple people) complain about something being pretentious, they felt that got in the way of telling a good story. And that is indeed a problem in writing, because there are a number of people who think those tricks can be used in place of a story or idea to write about to make their writing seem intellectual and artistic. That's worth criticizing, unless we want writing to go down the same path as poetry, where no one that people want to read is actually called a writer, and writers write pretty much only to be read by other writers.
Otherwise, if someone uses a unique style and successfully tells a story, there are other words we use, like mind-blowing, unique, creative, stimulating, etc. That's what those successful artists you mentioned are.
Basically, pretentious means you tried something and it failed to communicate with some people. That's... fine, for you, in the sense of getting better, but it doesn't mean other people want to read it.
As for good, I already said my take here. Good is a word that useful in relation to specific audiences. If you can't figure out what good means to your specific audience, your taste level is off. That is, you have bad taste.
I think I'm with 3913666 here—though, of course, it's probably relevant that "pretentious" is one of the most common judgments I seem to make about stories.
I have no problem with people playing around with fancy techniques. Heck, I love to do it myself. I hate when they play around with fancy techniques to the exclusion of telling an actual story (and I get mad at myself whenever I wind up doing that, too). I know that I'm kind of a stickler for stories actually being stories, but I honestly don't understand how someone can judge a story positively when it's built like the literary equivalent of the Maginot Line—elegant, refined, and completely ineffective for the job it was designed to do.
As for 'good', I'll just say that I find myself thinking of the first sentence to Tolstoy's Anna Karenina.
3913666
3913982
This'll be shorter than I want it to be because I need to go to bed soon.
Okay, so writing is communicating. Or, to get a little more pedantic, the goal of writing is to communicate. That naturally implies a set of virtues -- clarity, accuracy, and the like. This all fits together because communication has fairly well defined success conditions.
I think this holds for the vast majority of writing. For popular science, for manuals, for histories, for bureaucratic records, &c.
The one bit I think it doesn't hold is fiction writing. Fiction writing is different. It's not a means to an end in the same way the other forms are. Like I said, storytelling is play; the goal is simply the enjoyment of the participants. It follows from this that the above virtues don't hold. In a trivial sense, this is obvious -- we discard the accuracy requirement.
That's not to say you can't use communication in a sense, because that's what writing does. Obviously -- the traditional story communicates a false sequence of events. But that is no longer a fundamental requirement of the activity. It's just a thing you can do.
Another thing you can do is these "fancy tricks".
"Another thing" -- that's crucial here. It's not a matter of clear or stained glass and the object you see through it. The two activities are on equal footing. They're ways of making a story enjoyable, and they succeed or fail on that basis alone. And since, of course, readers differ, the success conditions are much less well defined. If some population of readers get a kick out of the fancy tricks and not out of plot (we might argue whether such a population exists, mind, but put that aside for now), then a book of fancy tricks and no plot may as well be a success if its aimed at them.
That's why comparing stories to the Maginot Line doesn't work as a metaphor. The Maginot Line had a job it was designed to do. It had very clearly defined success conditions that everyone could agree upon, and it failed to meet those. Fiction, in the general sense, has success conditions that are very broad and relative to the readership. (Indeed, being "judged positively" is a sort of success condition, which breaks the metaphor even more.
That's the big disagreement, as I see it, out of the way. Now let's go back to communication. Obviously it's a two-sided process, and the onus is on both sides to try and ensure clear communication. If you're a writer receiving the message "pretentious", yes, you may well have a problem, and should probably try to understand what's gone wrong. But I'm aiming this at critics. Those of who want to tell the writer what we think -- or just share our thoughts with other readers. (Truthfully, it's sort of aimed at myself -- when I started to worry I was being disingenuous for saying a film I didn't like was pretentious.)
We want our communication to be clear. My main argument is that we, as critics who want to communicate our reactions, can serve those aims better by dropping the word and thinking a bit more about the barriers to our enjoyment.
It's all well and good saying 99% of the time people who use the word mean something got in the way of the story. But is it true? Really, I'm asking. I don't know. I wasn't using it that way, but perhaps I'm an outlier. Where I've seen it used elsewhere, I'm not convinced it's been carrying that meaning, but I could be wrong. If I am, and everyone but me really is both sending and receiving the word clearly, then this essay is indeed pointless. But I'm still not convinced.
... There's other stuff I want to say. But since it's mostly that I agree with the rest of what you've both said, I'm gonna dash. Thank you, honestly, for the contributions.
3914362
Similarly, I may be an outlier but I'm pretty sure whenever I use pretentious I do tend to use it in the sense of "you've compromised your ability to tell a decent and enjoyable story by using fancy tricks with no substance."
Some people disagree with my opinion on these things—but that's actually a big part of the reason why I decided I'll be voting in the Hugo Awards from this point forward. Because I find it really annoying when authors fail to tell a compelling or interesting story because they're too hung up on being artful. I think art is great—if it's in the service of actual content. But without character, setting, plot, or theme, I don't think I can really have any respect for however well a story may pull off being "artistic". And it usually drives me up the wall to see people try.
This is just one of those attitudes I've developed about storytelling, and I'm pretty strident about it: if you're not going to tell a story, stop trying to pretend you're a storyteller.
3914362
The word "story" implies the precedence of some kind of narrative. If you're focusing on literary tricks, calling what you're writing a "story" is false advertising. It is in fact pretending to be a story-- coincidentally, the root of pretentious.
And since most of those literary tricks were pioneered by storytellers who used them well in service of a narrative, and who received quite a lot of academic respect and credit to their intelligence and creativity, if you claim what you wrote is a story people are probably going to assume you are pretending to be in that class of storyteller. Which is not coincidentally close to the definition of pretentious.
Critics can't be blamed for pointing that out.
"This'll be shorter than I want it to be", followed by six hundred words. Good lord, I'm becoming long-winded.
Anyway!
3914454
I'm still not buying this distinction between style/fancy tricks/artiness on the one hand, and substance/plot on the other. I've already argued why there's no reason to privilege one over the other in my previous post (And while there's no rebuttal, I'll consider the point uncontested).
But beyond that, I'm not even sure those terms line up.
Take, for example, an imaginary modernist novel in which a bored, middle-aged rich professor spends twelve hundred pages wandering around his house, wondering about the meaning of his life, and wondering whether he can get away with having an affair. I'd say that's a pretty good candidate for the label pretentious. But it's not because fancy tricks are obscuring the plot; it's because, while there is a plot in the sense of things happening, it's nothing like the common conflict-&-three-act plot you see in genre. So "fancy tricks" don't seem to align with "pretentious".
As a second example, take an imaginary late 80's fantasy novel in which some street urchin uses his magical powers and secret heritage to help the elves and forest critters defeat a dark lord. That would never earn the label pretentious. It's a novel that's purely plot, with maybe a little bit of character and setting. Can it be said to have substance, though? I don't think so. The plot is just some stuff happening in a formulaic way. (Of course, some people like that sort of thing, and that's fine by me.)
So as quick recap, my conclusions so far are that (1)plot and substance don't take precedence over other elements (fancy tricks or whatever) as a marker of a story's success, (2)things that get labelled pretentious aren't necessarily just fancy tricks, and (3) plot is not necessarily substance.
I've not been thorough, but I think that's enough say that "pretentious = style or fancy tricks obscuring substance or plot" is an incoherent notion.
Ugh. I'm going on again.
As for getting annoyed at art trumping content. Well, I'm aware I may be coming off as snotty here, but I don't really understand that at all. There are lots of things people do in art, and in life generally, that strike me as dull, irrelevant, intractable, silly, revolting, or whatever. But I can't really get angry about it. If they enjoy it, good for them. If I don't enjoy it, I learn pretty quickly to keep out of the way.
(On the other hand, and this is a complete tangent, I do get annoyed when I see things like "You have to read this book" or "You're missing out if you don't read Soandso." My immediate reaction is, "Oh, piss off. I'll read what I damn well please." Which is a silly and irrational reaction to fairly harmless bit of exuberance. But there you have it. I can't claim any sort of righteousness when it comes to getting annoyed.)
3914476
I don't buy the false advertising argument.
First, in purely practical terms, it's never a risk. With all our genres and subgenres and blurbs and reviews and whatnot, we have a complex and very effective infrastructure for to make sure we can find the sort of books we like and avoid those we don't. You'd have to be paying no attention at all to pick up the Book of Literary Tricks if that wasn't what you wanted to read. It's be like complaining you left the bookshop with A Series of Unfortunate Events when you were looking for erotica.
(Actually, I know someone who did manage to do this. He ordered some Joyce solely on the basis that he's heard the guy was a great author. But it was his own fault he wasted his money on a book he hated; he should have done the research.)
Second, yes -- the definition of story has to be bounded somehow. If you push the boat out far enough, if you really do throw away plot, setting, character and theme, what you have left probably can't be called a story. But most of the "pretentious works" get off far short of that point. Finnegans Wake is a possible exception, but Ulysses has a character, a sequences of events, and a place in which is all happens -- it still has a narrative, if an obscure and knotty one.
Maybe you mean that a story that's primarily fancy tricks still can't be called a story, even if it has a plot (and characters, setting, etc.) But that strikes me as simply wrong. If nothing else, why should we exclude such bits of writing from the definition? Especially if they have an audience. It seems churlish to do so.
Regarding what people are probably going to assume: People assume all sorts of things, often for poor reasons. As writer's, there's not much we can do to change that. But what I'm asking is -- should we as critics assume the writer of such a piece is pretending to be in the class of writers who pioneered experimental techniques? I think not. It goes against the principle of good faith, and it hinders communication. I've no desire to blame critics (in this case, anyway), but I do want to argue some terms they use aren't really helping.
3916535
So I think it's fair to say that I use "pretentious" as effectively synonymous with "self-involved". I'd absolutely consider your Wonder Boys Without the Good Bits story to be both pretentious and self-involved, regardless of whether it does or doesn't contain fancy literary tricks. I guess to me, the issue is that I see writing (and pretty much all art) as consumer-driven. Not in the capitalist sense of "I want to make money for this," but in the simpler sense that I view art as fundamentally communicative. I don't think you can make art for yourself. I think you can make art because you love doing it, but I think that it is fundamentally and necessarily a social act. (Obviously anthropologists would argue with me on this, since anything artistic from 6000+ years ago is necessarily "for religious purposes", but anthropologists can be dumb.)
I'm going to go with the etymology of pretension other people have mentioned before: that it's fundamentally rooted in the idea of "pretending" to something. In the artistry domain, I think it's entirely fair to say that a work is pretentious if it's taking on the trappings of high-level artistic skills without bothering to ground itself in an understanding of where those skills come from. This is why free verse, and the execrable tendency for high school English classes to teach it, rankles me so often—to me, free verse is all about understanding the deep mechanics of poetry and violating them in a knowing way. You don't get to abandon ideas of rhythm and meter just because it's easier. Good free verse is one of the most difficult poetic skills, precisely because you need to accomplish all the standard poetic tasks without any of the easy fallbacks. If you want a metaphor, it's like pulling a manual on a skateboard.
So to me, Bad Wonder Boys is textbook-standard pretentious as described because it doesn't seem to make any serious effort to engage with the reader. It's probably worse than artistic pretension, if anything, because at least that gives some readers a vacuous sugar-rush of style.
The example of the fantasy novel is bad in a different way. Nobody tends to call those things "pretentious"; critics call them "derivative". But there's really no way to look at Bad Shannara and say that the author isn't reader-focused. The author is explicitly going with the tried-and-true formula of what readers enjoy, to the point where the author isn't offering anything new. To me, that's a very different problem from the author not bothering to write something reader-facing at all.
Incidentally, one last thing:
Maybe I'm not doing a good job rebutting this? I guess I just consider it so plainly untrue that I have a hard time wrapping my head around how to rebut it. At least for me, personally, I can find some interest in fancy literary tricks, but it won't last more than a paragraph or two. I think Herman Melville, James Joyce, and Kim Stanley Robinson are generally terrible writers; and I am wholly incapable of understanding why people like them (with the caveat that KSR did write one book that wasn't awful). My big problem with all of them is that they're incapable of telling a decent story. Melville is the most needlessly circuitous writer I've ever encountered, Joyce should literally have his picture in the dictionary next to the word "pretension", and KSR seems to think combining science ideas with stream-of-consciousness writing will paper over the fact that he can't find a plot or a reasonable character voice to save his life. Obviously a lot of people seem to think that Melville, Joyce, and KSR are high on "substance", but I don't know what those people think substance is. Whatever it is, it's certainly not anything I'm interested in reading.
That said, I agree with (2) and I agree with (3) inasmuch as I don't think those two things are synonymous. I think you can get plenty of substance out of characterization, world-building, and thematic work. I just don't think you can get it out of fancy word tricks, and I personally disagree with (1) categorically.
3916535
What I mean is that a story that's primarily fancy tricks with a plot, characters, and setting that aren't well realized is not a good story. Because the story parts are not well realized. There's nothing wrong with a story where the plot, characters, and setting are well realized and that uses lots of fancy tricks. That's a good, creative story. Not pretentious at all. And a book of fancy tricks and no plot, which you theorized, is not a story.
Now keep in mind that this doesn't mean the plot needs to be an adventure, or feature characters doing lots of things. Hills Like White Elephants is a good plot; the weight of the decision makes it an interesting story, at least at the length it's written. (It might not fare as well stretched out as a novel.) The literary trick of dancing around the actual subject is part of communicating the weight and controversy of that decision. Hemingway did something weird, but it was to make the story better. That's not pretentious; it's a bold and interesting decision made for an understandable reason.
If you have the same kind of story, but what they were not-directly-mentioning was whether go to Paris, that would be a bad story. The narrative isn't interesting without more context, and the trick of purposely avoiding the context makes no sense in service of the narrative.
Since Hemingway made this famous as a way to tell a certain kind of narrative, if you try it without understanding why it worked to tell that story, you're going to look like you think you can pull off Hemingway without Hemingway's understanding of writing. That the only reason anyone would have to think you'd do something like that. Saying "maybe they weren't trying to imitate Hemingway" is almost worse, because in that case they're trying advanced writing tricks without understanding what they're for and without even being aware of the important figures in their own craft.
In either case it's pretentious, in that you're trying to be a level of writer that you can't back up, whether that level is "Hemingway" or "literary-and-artistic-without-knowing-Hemingway."
3916786
Well, I said in my first reply why I'm not quite willing to call fiction writing (or art in general) communicative. Not in the way we'd usually use the term, anyway. But in general I agree. I've been harping on about it being a form of play. More than that, though, it's a form of social play. And you don't get social play without social participation. The writer who writes things only he will ever understand isn't doing that, and I'm not interested in defending him. (For now, at least ...)
But let's mix things up a bit. (And by this point we're some distance from my original blog, but it's an interesting road, and I want to explore it.) Let's suppose the author of our imaginary modernist novel -- BW -- had his audience in mind every step of the way while writing his book. He knew what they wanted: Introspection, psychological realism, an investigation into the complexity and richness of the minutae of daily life. And indeed, in out little fictional world, it was a resounding success among that group, even if nobody else could get past chapter one.
Let's also suppose that out fantasy writer wrote his novel, BS, as a near-solipsistic exercise. He read LotR and loved it, and wanted to write some magic for the hell of it. He never showed the result to anyone, and selling it never crossed his mind,
Okay, so I'm sure you can see what I'm doing here. It's a topic (if I remember right) that you're fond of: Death of the author. At least in a very weak form. I think we should be really careful about reading the author's motives from the text, and even more careful about using those motives when considering intrinsic properties of the text itself. Otherwise, we tend to get absurd results (like "BW is pretentious if the writer didn't care about the audience, and non-pretentious otherwise -- even though the text itself doesn't change at all in these two situations".)
So it seems that if we're trying to use these examples to extract a good definition of pretentious using the author's relation to the audience, we've hit an impasse.
That's a good thing! Okay, yeah, maybe I'm being a bit perverse here, but I think it's generally pretty cool to challenge and try to justify your foundational beliefs every now and then.
Anyway, as for the substance itself, I want to stress that we're talking about something objective here. Or, at the very least, we want some sort of result that won't immediately fall apart the moment someone comes alone who says "I hate Tolkien and love Joyce." I'm looking for an understand that encompasses not only you and I, but my friends who happen to fans of Joyce and Eliot and that lot.
Maybe that's a bit clumsy. What's I'm trying to get at is that we're in the area now where it's illegitimate to use your personal preferences as a justification. So when you say, "I don't know what those people think substance is. Whatever it is, it's certainly not anything I'm interested in reading", that's a fine sentiment to have, but it has no place as part of a rebuttal.
Now, I have no understanding at all of what it's like to enjoy Joyce. I sort of understand why people would (because it's a sort of puzzle, if a ridiculously oblique one). But I know people who do. I trust them when they say they do. And, really, I don't need to understand in detail; I need only trust that it's true, and that truth needs to be accounted for.
On the other side, for fairness, I have no understanding of what it's like to enjoy Brandon Sanderson. I've read two of his books, which is more than I can say for Joyce, and in neither of them did I find anything but the thinnest of substance. But I know you like him, and a lot of other people like him, and find his works substantive. I need to account for those facts too.
All of which is a roundabout way of saying, we still don't have a proper rebuttal.
Thing is, being pretentious is bad. It alienates the reader. The fact that people misuse the term - or misidentify stories as being pretentious when they're not - doesn't mean that pretention isn't a problem.
I would actually say that the real warning sign isn't these things:
The actual warning sign is doing these things without purpose. It ends up being a form of narcissism, really - basically, trying to show off without regard for what impact it is having on the audience.
You become the Great and Powerful Trixie. And then everyone makes fun of you.
The thing is, pretention isn't just about fancy tricks, either. A story can be pretentious without doing anything fancy. Heck, one of the problems with many self-insert stories and moralistic stories is that they are pretentious.
Well, the Hateful Eight, which Tarantino went pretty overboard on in some ways, didn't end up being very successful, and he went ballistic.
3916786
I have come to the conclusion with regards to Joyce that the people who dig into his crap want to be special, so because it is so inaccessible, they assume it is great. In reality, it is awful, and the "literary puzzles" that he created in making his works inaccessible are what drives people claiming it to be good - they want to feel special because they went through it. It is basically a means of showing their "nerd cred" and an attempt to lord it over others.
To be fair, there's nothing wrong with wanting to dig into word puzzle type stuff, but I think that the prize for digging through it isn't very good - the main point of Finnegan's Wake is to dig through the ridiculous writing rather than for the actual content of it, which makes sense. After all, why write a good story which is so heavily obscured?
I can't speak to KSR (though I recall being bored by Red Mars, I think that's the only thing of his I've read), but as for Melville, I liked Moby Dick. That said, I think that whether or not you enjoy Moby Dick is extremely dependent on whether or not you are really, really interested in 19th century whaling.
I'm not sure that I would think of Moby Dick as being pretentious, though; honestly, it has always fit into my mind alongside works like Frakenstein and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, having a sort of archaic style to its writing.
I can totally see why it might feel that way to some people, though.
I think this is one of the problems with the use of the term pretension, really - if something is misaimed, they may well dismiss it as pretentious, but it may be inaccessible to them because it is trying to appeal to a different audience. The problem is that unless you understand who that audience is/what the appeal is (or actually understand it and realize that there is, in fact, no audience at all, or that the thing is mostly there to act as a puzzle for the reader rather than actually being something worthwhile) it is hard to distinguish between pretension and something being misaimed.
I don't know if anyone would care about Moby Dick as a work of literature were it not for the weird depth he goes into about whaling.
I mean, you could perhaps argue that Finnegan's Wake is not pretentious so much as it is meant to appeal to a certain group of people who are pretentious. I don't really know what his motives in writing it were. But I think that the primary appeal of that work is working out what it says, rather than actually reading what it says. Does that make it pretentious, or is the fact that the underlying story is crap mean that it isn't pretentious and is doing what it is supposed to be doing, or is even a prank on the reader?
Sometimes I wonder if that book was written solely to troll people, The Emperor's New Clothes of fiction. But given how seriously he seemed to take it, I suspect he really did think it was great.
3916918
Okay, separate claims, then. I'll have a look at both.
(1) “A story without a well-realised plot/setting/character is not a good story.” Well, uh, I guess that depends on what you mean by well-realised (…said every dumb philosophy first-year student ever). Really, though. If you just using that as a substitute for “bad”, then it's true, but in a trivial and circular way. If you mean minimal or skeletal or something like that, then it doesn't follow. Not even if we allow the claim that plot/setting/character are necessary elements to make something a story.
Actually, it also depends on the meaning of good. And right now I'm not really willing to go down that rabbit hole, because its one from which I might never return. I'll just go back to my original consideration: If such a story (and we are agreed it is a story, right?) can be enjoyably read by an audience, it meets its success conditions. Even if they have bad taste or whatever.
None of this is to say, incidentally, that we as critics can't tear such a story to shreds based on the choices the writer made in its composition.
(2) “A book with fancy tricks and no plot isn't a story.” I stand by my original reply: that there's no good reason for defining a story in such a limiting way – and that it seems churlish to do so. Now, it seems impossible to me to write a story that has neither plot nor setting, because the moment you write about some fictional static object you have an element of setting and the moment you introduce something changing over time you have a plot. So if you have neither, I agree: No story. But if you have only one or the other, there's a bit of wiggle room.
And what tips the balance for me (besides the fact that its charitable to do so) is that such stories already exist. The one I'm thinking of in particular is Miéville's Entry Taken from a Medical Encyclopaedia, which as you might imagine, takes the form of an encyclopaedia entry for a fictional disease. Since it's by an author who is both critically acclaimed and sells well, and since it was published as an entry of a short story collection by professional publishers (Macmillian and Del Rey), we may assume there's a fair degree of assent to the notion that it's a story and not something else pretending to be a story.
All this is rather tangential to the issue, even though it was fun to explore. So lemme try and rein this in a bit.
While all sorts of stories can meet their success conditions so long as they please some audience, they can still be criticised. “You've used this technique for no good reason, and it's working against the rest of the story” is a valid criticism, one I could imagine using.
Where we differ is that I would rather say that than “This is pretentious”, because I think the word has become so bleached by misuse and so often pressed into service as a from of social control that it's no longer a useful tool of communication.
3918093
Check the second and third paragraphs on the “Better Pretentious” section again. I think we broadly agree on this matter. That collection of things you're calling pretentious (and which I'm trying not to) really can break a story, and we as critics can call out those things.
This is some good insight.
A couple of months ago I saw a film, and at the end I told the person I was watching I didn't like it because it was pretentious. But it wasn't actually using any tricks, and I find it hard to imagine the director was writing in a self-indulgent way (I actually quite respect him).
I only said pretentious because (1) I didn't like it, and (2) it used some “arty” stylistic choices. Which of course makes “I don't like it because it's pretentious” rather circular.
In other words, I was being very silly.