Pointing to entertainment.
by phill
photo credit: Eva the Weaver
It’s been a while since I updated, and I do have about four and a half drafts waiting to be finished and posted, but in the meantime a good friend of mine, Thomas, asked both myself and Todd a question the other day that yielded two separate and (I think) perfectly valid arguments. The question was:
“What do you think the most important part of a story is? That it carries a profound message/point, or that it is entertaining?
Don’t cop out and say a mixture of both. I’m interested to learn which one holds more weight with you.”
I’ll post my reply here (spelling mistakes gleefully included), and you can read Todd’s reply over at his website. Comment is welcome, and discussion encouraged.
“To give you a simple answer before I go off on tangents, I would say the former. I enjoy books that have a point more so than ones that are purely entertaining. Which isn’t to say that I don’t enjoy books that are purely entertaining, but they don’t stick around in my brain for very long after I’ve finished them. They’re bubblegum, to be chewed loose of all flavour and spat out again and forgotten. That said, I don’t think that there is an exclusivity present in books whereby a book containing a point can’t be entertaining, or a book that’s entertaining can’t carry a point. But you know that.
I think it also depends on what you believe is considered to be profound. I find that books that try to be profound often fail horribly, because they take themselves far too seriously. They are the earnest young student of a professor trying eagerly to impress by using big words and long sentences and pubescent facial hair and a pipe to hide their acne. And these books are hardly ever entertaining, but they might do enough in their trying to be profound that they do actually get taken seriously, and lauded for their efforts. Whereas a book that is written confidently, with a message that is carried through without being forced upon the reader, can sometimes be thought to be leaning towards the side of entertainment, while still casually making very incisive comment on society or love or sex or whatever it is that it’s set its sites on.
Which brings around the idea of entertainment as a vessel for profundity. Some of the most profound books I’ve read have been incredibly entertaining. There is no exclusivity involved in producing something that makes comment, in that it has to be completely devoid of laughter or sex or sideshow characters or fart jokes. And if it weren’t for entertainment value, I’m pretty sure that a lot of the books that are nowadays considered to be classics wouldn’t have made it off the shelves in the first place for people to dig deeper into the words.
There is a lot of scale involved. You can have books that are mainly entertainment that carry a light moral point, you can have books that are very poignant that allow themselves to be irreverant every now and again. You cna have pure entertainment (ala the demon vampire bullshit that goes around nowadays) and you can have pure unbridled message-giving. Any and all of these are valid, and there’s no need to limit yourself one way or another. If I ever ever found myself saying “You know, this scene would be good for the book, but I prefer to write more serious than it would be” then I’d slap myself. Hard. The story goes where it wants to.
So yeah, I’ll stop rambling now. My answer is that I prefer books with a point, but ones that aren’t so obsessed with getting it across that they forget to entertain.”
So what do you think? I did ramble a bit, but the essence of my argument I think is still there. Discuss!
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Comments
I replied to Todd’s blog post first, and I’m too lazy to type again.
Here’s what I said:
I tend to agree with you rather than Phill. I am suspicious of messages, just as in Keats’ famous quote: “We hate poetry that has a palpable design on us.”
In fact, I think “message” and “point” are the wrong words to use, unless you’re talking about those awful moral stories we were told as kids. Even religious texts don’t simply offer messages, they offer explorations of dilemmas through stories or tropes — some of the best in literature, if I may add.
Novels are explorations, modes of enquiry, of partial illumination. And entertainment has much to do with it.
A book /must/ entertain some people (it can’t obviously entertain everyone) and you can leave it at that, or take it forward. I used to judge people who read books “just for fun” and didn’t then fall into a great big philosophical contemplation about them. But lately I’m trying to jump off that awful elitist bandwagon. Read books for whatever reason you like. Entertainment is a good reason.
I also think that you can read a book you don’t like just for the exploration of it, and later, the struggle to come to grips with the book can be entertaining. Why should “entertainment” have only one dimension? Why should it be the first step towards liking a book, or contemplating it?
There is something else that we keep forgetting about. Thom’s question currently divides books/elements of a book into “entertaining” and “profound”. Clearly, all books cannot be entertaining. But can all books be “profound”?
The common belief, I assume, is: “No, of course not. Tolstoy is more profound than Anne Rice. In fact, Anne Rice just writes rubbish.” Or something like that.
On the other hand, literary theory has clearly moved away from that idea. Technically, anything can be considered, anything can be analysed. I remember arguing with Phill about this, because he seemed to think my writing was more “thoughtful” than his. Completely untrue. You can explore his work just as much as mine, and his work is infinitely more entertaining, which is a big bonus. My prose just sounds like it has something great to say.
For something to be “profound”, you have to be able to think about it and come to certain conclusions. Something has to be inferred — right? You can do that with a billboard, an ad in a magazine, a silly Lear poem, a poorly written romance novel (poorly written by workshop standards, say), a flyer on the street, a photograph, a crappy horror film, anything. Theses have been written on the most mundane things.
Ultimately it boils down to entertainment.
(My two cents sound rather like a lecture. I blame a recent discussion on Joyce and his literary pyrotechnics at a lit forum. : P)
The question posed by Thom is a loaded one, in that it presumes you think of entertainment and having a point as two separate entities. I think the two archetypes he had in his head when he was asking the question were something like pure genre fiction where you want to get your fix of a dashing hero, or a futuristic alien race, be entertained, walk away with an epic having played through in your head, and never think of it again (and no, I don’t have anything against genre fiction, I read it regularly). This versus things you might find in the ‘literature’ section of your bookshop, which are generally thoughtful books that require a little more than just remembering that the main character’s name is “Horrunug” and he can decapitate things with his fingernails.
I do think that these two archetypes exist in a broad sense. It’s the same thing as in movies, where you _will_, without a doubt, find examples of movies that are used to entertain, and those that are used to explore. But within that industry, and within the book industry, there are a large range of books that do both to various degrees, and a rare few that manage to do both so incredibly well that they transcend either and become an experience that cannot be found in any other medium.
Ooh, you’ve definitely hit on an interesting point in asking ‘why should entertainment have one dimension?’ There’s no way you can reduce what people find entertaining into a few, or even a lot, of boxes to tick (though I know I did make a few sweeping statements above, so call me a hypocrite if you will). I might be more entertained by a cleverly hidden literary device than a scene involving a man getting out of prison by hanging upside down on a ceiling and beating up a whole security deployment. I might even be entertained by mills and boone, which could be considered as the zero-point of both of the categories that have been introduced in the question. Ultimately it’s fruitless categorising anything that relies on individual interpretation.
Again I’m going to go with my feeling that stories are only worth anything if they are read, and in reading, they are judged on an individual basis. You can’t truly ask ‘Is this book good?’, but you can ask someone ‘Do you think this book is good?’ or ‘Did you enjoy this book?’
Oh dear, it appears I’ve lost my thread once more. Anyway, good discussion!
It is a very good discussion, especially because I get to test ideas I’ve formed/adopted/evolved in lit classrooms with someone who is primarily a writer and reader, not a literature student. That sounds weird, because what is a literature student if not a reader? But often I feel that my identities as a writer, reader and literature student are completely distinct, with very slight overlaps. Sometimes I can reconcile being a reader and a writer, but the literature student part of me confuses everything. It’s (at the risk of sounding po-mo*) fragmenting.
Anyway, from what I can tell, you do sort of agree with the idea that there are “entertaining books” and “thoughtful books”, but that this sort of decision about a book can only be made by an individual. I agree with that with respect to entertainment. But “thoughtful” — no.
Let me explain. Say, you and I are supposed to decide whether book “XYZ” is entertaining or not.
You say: “No, I don’t find this book entertaining because blah blah blah.”
And I say: “Yes, it is entertaining because blah blah blah.”
That seems perfectly reasonable. Now when we come to thoughtful/profound/”literary”, this subjectivity does not really work. I may think the book is very profound and may think it is not; or we may agree about its profundity or lack thereof, but at the end of the day, you can still analyse the book. Maybe not “you” or “me” per say, but someone. Any text, any cultural product, falls into a structure within which certain truths can be discerned or verified. Elaborate arguments about the nature of existence or of society or whatever can be made. That’s just how it is these days with the humanities.
There will always be a tendency to go back to the “classics”, to the “literary”, but the problem (or reality) of literary theory will always disrupt any classification of texts as “literary” and “non-literary”. This classification is not important anymore, except at a common sensical level or at the level of publishing, because there you sort of need a label.
This is the sort of thing that always worries me. I have to bring different premises to the workshop, the classroom and my private reading space. The workshop and private reading space will always triumph with me, but one “classroom” notion that will stick with me is the idea that there aren’t thoughtful and non-thoughtful texts; there are just texts and you do what you want with them.
*Haha, “po-mo” is my favourite word now.
your answers are way too long, especially to be prefaced as “short responses”. Jesus, are you guys those talking trees in the Tolkien books?
Interesting premise, lost me after the first paragraph. I forgot what my vote was going to be.
Hey man, I tried! But I overthink everything, and questions like this are no exception.