Re: OT: art and language and THE DAVINCI CODE

MJR> All I meant [...] was that art in general seems to be in the
MJR> eye of the beholder.  In particular, it gets beheld by many people
MJR> in many cases where I simply don't see it.  I'm unwilling to assume
MJR> that I'm right and they're just wrong, thus my necessarily loose
MJR> definition of "art".

SC> Well, it seems that that's especially true today with the myriad schools and
SC> styles and audiences.

SC> To take an example from the literary world: what makes a good novel, or a
SC> good narrative style, seems to differ vastly depending on readership and
SC> genre.

No kidding. :)

SC> I'm reading The DaVinci Code.  I was told that this was an
SC> intellectual novel, beautifully written, so of course I had expectations for
SC> it that put it in a league with Eco's The Name of the Rose,  a novel that
SC> conbines elegance of writing with elegance of story and pacing and suspense.

High expectations indeed . . .

SC> Clearly, Brown has had to violate the nature of her character and her
SC> upbringing in order to make her the "straight man," the person to whom the
SC> expert explains things for the benefit of the uneducated readership.

So she becomes the reader's proxy for expository purposes.
A cryptographer saying "like anagrams" . . . that just boggles my
mind.  Might as well have an aerospace engineer saying like "Flying.
That's like what birds do, right?"

Admittedly, exposition is darn tricky, especially if the entire setting
of a story (be it historical, other-contemporary-cultural, science
fiction, fantasy, whatever) is unfamiliar to the reader but is not
the main point of the novel.  One of the reasons Buck Rogers (here
I'm thinking of the old comics, not Gil Gerard) worked so well was
because we as readers were first exposed to this unfamiliar future
world through the eyes of a 20th-century man who was also unfamiliar
with it, and who was surrounded by people who knew he was unfamiliar
with it.  So when they took the time to explain something to him,
it felt natural.  So the reader's-proxy technique can work,
but not when you have to violate a character and present her as
woefully ignorant of her supposed speciality.  (Imagine Dr. Huer
taking the time to explain to Wilma Deering how environmental
controls worked . . .)

Another tack is to introduce a character who feels a psychotic
necessity to explain things constantly to everyone around them
even when such explanation is logically unnecessary; I call such
characters "exposition fairies".  As much as I enjoy Heinlein,
for instance, it seems as though every one of his characters suffers
from this illness. :)

SC> there is the abhominable, and unforgiveable lie/lay mistake committed in the
SC> first eighth of the book.  "He laid down on the bed."  "It had lay in the
SC> street."

Prescriptivity!!  Shame on you! :)

But "it had lay" is not a case of "the lie/lay mistake" (using "to
lay" for "to lie"), since "lay" is not the past particple of either
verb.  For "it had lain", I would not be surprised to see either "it
had lied" or "it had laid", but I've never seen "it had lay" before.

SC> My scientist friend can't tell the difference between the quality
SC> in writing between this book and Eco's.  I teach creative writing,
SC> and yet I can't explain to him over dinner what feels like literary
SC> writing and what feels like genre writing,

What is "genre writing"?  Can writing not be both literary and within
a more specific genre simultaneously?

Genre admittedly tends to override quality, in many media.  As you
might have guessed, I'm something of a science fiction fan, and
one of the things that annoys me is that even the best dramatic SF
on television pales in comparision to the non-SF dramas, but SF
fans can't seem to tell.  I mean, the writing and acting and
general believability on "Babylon 5" were so much worse than their
contemporary analogues over on, say, "ER", but because B5 was nevertheless
so much better than anything else within the genre at that time,
everyone hailed it as a masterpiece.  The blinders were locked
firmly in place.

Similarly, to this day I don't understand all the fuss over "The
Matrix".  Great visual effects, impressive action sequences,
laughably silly premise, passable acting and writing - enjoyable,
but hardly "the thinking person's science fiction movie", as I
heard it touted repeatedly.

SC> and what the cues are that make for "hack" writing.

"It was a dark and stormy night" comes to mind . . . :)

-Mark

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