I don't do this often, so forgive me: but Jeannette Winterson writing in The Guardian, and spinning off all the Man Booker Prize conversations, is worth quoting at length:
Subject matter is not the point. It might be socially relevant, or it might not. It might be historical, science fiction, a love story, a crime novel, a meditation in fragments. There is no point judging a novel by its subject matter; what is in vogue now will be out of date soon. Nobody reads Jane Austen because we want her advice on marriage. And we don't care that she lived right through the Napoleonic wars and never mentioned them once. Who cares about the Napoleonic wars now?
Novels that last are language-based novels – the language is not simply a means of telling a story, it is the whole creation of the story. If the language has no power – forget it.
The problem is that a powerful language can be daunting. James Joyce is hard work. Virginia Woolf's The Waves is a very slow read. Schools teach language-friendly versions of Shakespeare.
Ali Smith's There But For The is a wonderful, word-playful novel, ignored by the judges this year because it doesn't fit their idea of "readable". It is better than anything on their list. Why? It expands what language can do and what fiction can do, and when a reader collides with that unruly exuberance, he or she has to shift perspective. That is what literature is supposed to do.
I don't see this row as one about dumbing down though. Rather, it is a misunderstanding about literature and its purpose. We are nervous about anything that seems elitist or inaccessible, and we apologise for the arts in a way that we never do for science.
Nobody blames maths for being difficult – and it isn't difficult – but it is different, and demands some time and effort. It is another kind of language. Literature is also another kind of language. I don't mean literature is obscure or rarefied or precious – that's no test of a book – rather it is operating on a different level to our everyday exchanges of information and conversation.
Via The Literary Saloon.
you're more than forgiven; you're thanked. did you read the gekoski column (8/26/11) for which there was a link under the comments of the winterson column? i liked that too.
Posted by: pjl | October 19, 2011 at 11:11 PM
I love this. I'm with you on it being very worth quoting at length. Steven Beattie blogged about it as well and I left another comment on my thoughts there.
Only, I say maths IS difficult, damn it.
Posted by: steph | October 20, 2011 at 08:24 AM