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I sometimes find myself thinking about art and accessibility. There is in any professional field, I think, a tendency to move away from accessibility the further in you go, because the more someone knows the field, the more that person is speaking with the assumption of an audience that also does. Which no one really complains about in biochem or anthropology--one assumes that the professionals will be speaking to other professionals, and one does not expect those conversations to be particular accessible to people outside of the field--but which ends up being somewhat more fraught in capital-A Art, which is presumably speaking to people who are not professionals in the field.
A lot of the fuss about modern art (in the paintings-and-sculpture sort of sense) seems aimed at indignation that professionals would, in fact, not be trying to make their art accessible to absolutely everyone. It's the "My kid could do this!" and "This isn't art!" problem, where it's taken as an attack--or cheating--to produce a piece of art that's in conversation with the rest of the field, but not really speaking in a language that people outside the field can understand. Or more pejoratively (and more commonly used when talking about literature that does this) it's called some sort of "masturbation", as if speaking to a relatively closed group is inherently self-indulgent.
Frankly, I have nothing against self-indulgent art, and self-indulgent art that does well with a crowd generally is showing that the self in question shares a lot of qualities with other people interested in said part. But I digress.
So, anyway. Literature. Confining myself to fiction, at that, since it's the only part of the field I can really speak to. (I mean, I could speak to the issues with modern poetry (not to be confused with modernist poetry) and the perception thereof, but I'd probably say something dumb because I know just enough about the field to make a fool of myself while feeling confident in my statements.) A lot of the things that I appreciate in literature are very much...mm. Not exactly inside baseball, but speaking to a definite subset of the pool of people who read English and thus might theoretically be the audience of that literature.
There's a conversation being had among people who already read a lot of books--inevitably, this is a conversation, even if some people participating in it don't think of it as such, and let's not go down the rabbit hole of defining "discourse" at this point--and someone who doesn't read a lot of books will therefore be missing some nuance and context if they grab a book written inside that conversation. I love Companion to Wolves because I've read other books with mind-bonded animal companions, and a lot of the narrative choices in there are much more meaningful because of that existing knowledge of other stories it's responding to.
And, you know. I don't think there's anything wrong with that, any more than I think it's wrong that two graduate students in classical archeology are going to have a conversation that I, as a pre-grad student on the literature side of classics study, can't really follow and appreciate properly. But it does complicate things, in that "Who has the necessary prior knowledge to understand what I'm talking about here?" needs to be answered by a much larger number when trying to get a book published compared to getting a journal article published. It is no wacky coincidence that my Latin prof knows exactly who the authors of the papers we're reading in his class are, and has met/interacted with most of them in a professional capacity.
So, on the one hand, I reject "This book is only talking to people who are already on the inside!" as being useful criticism, in the sense of being a strike against that book. Having a narrow audience--and the freedom to speak to people who have certain types of background knowledge, such that one can do all sorts of very focused and tricky things--is not a Bad Thing. On the other hand, it's a damn important criticism, in the sense of being analysis of a book, and when thinking about practical "Who would buy this?" matters.
Anyway. I think about these things, sometimes, when working on my writing. Because a lot of what I love most in literature--certain types of prose, nuances of trope subversion and conversation with other things going on in the wider world of literature--are just...hard to find, because they do reduce potential audience. Or at least they sure don't expand that audience.
This does not have a conclusion, because any argument I was making has already been stated above. I always was bad at writing closing paragraphs for my essays.
A lot of the fuss about modern art (in the paintings-and-sculpture sort of sense) seems aimed at indignation that professionals would, in fact, not be trying to make their art accessible to absolutely everyone. It's the "My kid could do this!" and "This isn't art!" problem, where it's taken as an attack--or cheating--to produce a piece of art that's in conversation with the rest of the field, but not really speaking in a language that people outside the field can understand. Or more pejoratively (and more commonly used when talking about literature that does this) it's called some sort of "masturbation", as if speaking to a relatively closed group is inherently self-indulgent.
Frankly, I have nothing against self-indulgent art, and self-indulgent art that does well with a crowd generally is showing that the self in question shares a lot of qualities with other people interested in said part. But I digress.
So, anyway. Literature. Confining myself to fiction, at that, since it's the only part of the field I can really speak to. (I mean, I could speak to the issues with modern poetry (not to be confused with modernist poetry) and the perception thereof, but I'd probably say something dumb because I know just enough about the field to make a fool of myself while feeling confident in my statements.) A lot of the things that I appreciate in literature are very much...mm. Not exactly inside baseball, but speaking to a definite subset of the pool of people who read English and thus might theoretically be the audience of that literature.
There's a conversation being had among people who already read a lot of books--inevitably, this is a conversation, even if some people participating in it don't think of it as such, and let's not go down the rabbit hole of defining "discourse" at this point--and someone who doesn't read a lot of books will therefore be missing some nuance and context if they grab a book written inside that conversation. I love Companion to Wolves because I've read other books with mind-bonded animal companions, and a lot of the narrative choices in there are much more meaningful because of that existing knowledge of other stories it's responding to.
And, you know. I don't think there's anything wrong with that, any more than I think it's wrong that two graduate students in classical archeology are going to have a conversation that I, as a pre-grad student on the literature side of classics study, can't really follow and appreciate properly. But it does complicate things, in that "Who has the necessary prior knowledge to understand what I'm talking about here?" needs to be answered by a much larger number when trying to get a book published compared to getting a journal article published. It is no wacky coincidence that my Latin prof knows exactly who the authors of the papers we're reading in his class are, and has met/interacted with most of them in a professional capacity.
So, on the one hand, I reject "This book is only talking to people who are already on the inside!" as being useful criticism, in the sense of being a strike against that book. Having a narrow audience--and the freedom to speak to people who have certain types of background knowledge, such that one can do all sorts of very focused and tricky things--is not a Bad Thing. On the other hand, it's a damn important criticism, in the sense of being analysis of a book, and when thinking about practical "Who would buy this?" matters.
Anyway. I think about these things, sometimes, when working on my writing. Because a lot of what I love most in literature--certain types of prose, nuances of trope subversion and conversation with other things going on in the wider world of literature--are just...hard to find, because they do reduce potential audience. Or at least they sure don't expand that audience.
This does not have a conclusion, because any argument I was making has already been stated above. I always was bad at writing closing paragraphs for my essays.