filk

What is the value in subtlety?

Recommended Posts

I was having a conversation with a friend of mine the other day, describing how I was having difficulty re-reading one of my favorite fantasy series of all time, The Wheel of Time, because after dipping into contemporary fiction, the writing style of even the best fantasy seems blunt and crude. The friend described how, in interviews, current fantasy all-star Brandon Sanderson said that when accused of shallow characterizations or lack of subtlety, he took it as a compliment, as he was not writing for that audience. Furthermore, my friend questioned the value of subtlety at all.

As I get older, I find I ascribe more and more value to what I would call subtlety, potential for inference, respect for the reader, etc. However, these could easily be recast as obfuscation, vagueness and poor communication. I know I enjoy their presence in a book, and I find too much explicit revelation of, say, a character's motivations shatters the illusion of reality for me. But these do not seem very strong arguments. I used to be fine with the "simple" representation, and given enough fantasy books back to back I can still sink into that mode.

I wonder, given that the Idle Book Club and most of the top topics here refer to contemporary fiction and its swathes of subtlety, what is the value? What do you think subtlety contributes to the experience of being a reader? It seems to me to be uniformly considered a positive, but is its purpose merely that we work more to reach the same conclusions? Does it allow us the room to delude ourselves into a more favorable interpretation of a piece of work (as with the Cloud Atlas discussion re: reincarnation)? Is the effort required to understand developing us more as people, or just more as critical readers?

I would like to think it is the former, but I am not a very social creature. Often, contemporary fiction challenges assumptions I make about my relationship to the world in ways that serve only to destabilize and perhaps even tear down my sense of self. On the other hand, there is a mechanical delight in the puzzle of these books, in feeling truly in the mind of a narrator who does not even know themselves and to try and do it better, knowing that you can at once never know yourself as well nor get the same bird's eye view of another human being. Subtlety serves to make prose sing, and the hanging implication can often be the trigger of a massive dopamine reward when you, clever girl, manage to put it all together.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I think there are a few benefits.

The world itself is subtle. Rarely are people's relationships, motives, and choices as clearly defined as in good vs. evil stories. Humans are incredibly complicated creatures who live in incredibly complicated societies. I think the most responsible way to mirror those lives and societies is to bring a corresponding level of subtlety and nuance.

Subtlety also opens up the range of topics and themes that can be discussed in depth. Some things simply can't be discussed bluntly without doing them a disservice.

There's also, as you suggest, the simple joy that can result from figuring something out--or, just as likely, by hypothesizing about something--that isn't concretely explained. I've often seen literature semi-derided by video game people as a "passive" art form, as compared to video games which are "active," and I just couldn't possibly disagree with that more. I think that, when it comes to the experience of the reader/player/listener/viewer, good literature is probably the most active narrative form. Not only does it require an uninterrupted stream of effort to read the words themselves, it requires continual engagement to bring those words to life. There's a version of that involved with the books children read, when they first learn how the written word can stimulate their imagination, and as we get older we gain the capacity to exercise those same basic faculties to a higher degree. I think good literature should strive to take advantage of that, not to simply deliver everything ready-digested on a platter.

I think there is inherent value in working to understand art. The human brain is amazing; I don't really know why we've evolved in a way such that we are capable of creating and parsing works of such incredible sophistication and beauty, but since we have, I think we should take advantage of it. I think reading literature that traffics in the full range of subtlety of human experience increases our capacity for empathy and makes us better people, more willing to understand the experiences of others.

That's not to say that everything we read should always be dense and inscrutable; that's a recipe for burnout. And literature (or any art) should not be so concerned with sophistication that it discards qualities that allow for genuine joy of reading. But I don't think those things are mutually exclusive. I don't think you should have to "turn off your brain" to enjoy something, and I think you can find evidence of this in books, movies, games, and every other major form of expression. Hooray for subtlety.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I think I react most strongly to the implication that subtlety is the province of a single market segment that can be safely avoided under many circumstances. Unless they're just rewriting Tolkien, fantasy authors, like any other genre authors, have to employ a bit of genre savvy, which is quite subtle to the uninitiated. Subtlety you've been habituated to is still subtlety, I think.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Good fiction isn't just about living through the fictional experiences in books, but also bringing my own experiences to bear in the process. Without subtlety, as Chris said, fiction simply doesn't match up. It also guards against prematurely collapsing the set of potential responses, and ensures that if I go back and read it a second time, I may get something different out of it as I've changed. I'll continue to maintain that the choice of how we direct our attention—and what we think about as we read or watch literature or film—is as crucial in shaping the artistic experience as any player choice in games.

Mainly, though, subtlety is a very good heuristic for whether something is well-written, or shoddily constructed to lead to a predetermined conclusion. There's deliberately making facets obscure (or simply withholding) and it doesn't always track with good writing, but I've rarely come across a piece of good literature that isn't subtle in some crucial way.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Re:fantasy and subtlety: Well, I think ASOIAF has plenty of subtlety to it. So there's that. Sanderson's Mistborn trilogy was fun, but ultimately a video game stuffed in a book.

Anyway, I thought this was worth saying: language matters. I think subtlety and irony work really well in English, but I've yet to see Arabic literature pull it off. I think the English language is one whose words are tools for evoking specific, chiseled feelings or ideas, whereas in Arabic, everything is grandiose and epic, because of the rough, heavy lexicon, making it a different ball game. It'd be hard to explain further without this turning into an essay. But the result is that, while subtlety doesn't work as effectively as it does in English, other tricks, including evoking switching to poetry mid-paragraph, switching between classical and contemporary Arabic depending on whether we're doing dialogue or description, or bafoonish, cartoonish characters, like in Charles Dickens's work, do a better job in Arabic than English.

It's something I've noticed.

I do agree with all of the above. (Including what I said.)

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Subtlety keeps me from being bored; if everything in the book is obvious and spelled out from the beginning, why would I bother reading it?

I can understand the need for pure entertainment, something that requires little to no critical thought, but that's not what I want from books. TV or movies sure, but because books require more of a commitment from me, I expect them to challenge or engage me on a deeper level than other media does.

Reading!

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Subtlety keeps me from being bored; if everything in the book is obvious and spelled out from the beginning, why would I bother reading it?

I can understand the need for pure entertainment, something that requires little to no critical thought, but that's not what I want from books. TV or movies sure, but because books require more of a commitment from me, I expect them to challenge or engage me on a deeper level than other media does.

Reading!

Yeah, I agree with this. I still try to find movies and TV that have more substance and nuance to them, but with books it's much more important to me.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I was having a conversation with a friend of mine the other day, describing how I was having difficulty re-reading one of my favorite fantasy series of all time, The Wheel of Time, because after dipping into contemporary fiction, the writing style of even the best fantasy seems blunt and crude.

I'm in a similar situation. Wheel of Time was so engrossing to me as a younger person. I've been rereading it, too, and I guess I'm sort of hating it because of what you said? Sort of. Robert Jordan takes chapters and chapters of describing every single minute detail of every character the current point-of-view character sees, when 99% of it isn't important to anything.

Fantasy authors, in general, are awful in that way, but Wheel of Time is one of the worst examples. Sometimes the authors seem to prefer spending a lot of time describing their characters and the world they've created, to the detriment of actually telling a story.

I'm actually not sure if that's what you were talking about, now that I reread your post and mine, but hey. I think both subtle and nonsubtle writing styles have their place. Wheel of Time is just bad for its own specific reasons.

Man, I'm kind of upset I started rereading it. The first few books were good (if nothing special), as I remembered, but they just keep growing more and more longwinded. Less and less happens per page. Yeurgh. I enjoy the story, but the writing is turning me off big time. I think I need to stop reading it.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

First of all, I worry I came off completely against subtlety. I chose to play devil's advocate in the hopes of gaining a better understanding of why I implicitly, mostly from an aesthetic perspective, appreciate subtlety. What follows may come across as argumentative, but it is really agreement and curiosity flavored with an aggressive conversational style.

The world itself is subtle. Rarely are people's relationships, motives, and choices as clearly defined as in good vs. evil stories. Humans are incredibly complicated creatures who live in incredibly complicated societies. I think the most responsible way to mirror those lives and societies is to bring a corresponding level of subtlety and nuance.

Subtlety also opens up the range of topics and themes that can be discussed in depth. Some things simply can't be discussed bluntly without doing them a disservice.

I agree with most of your points, and the first one most. To build a better understanding, we probably have to represent internalized processes as they really are: alien, malformed experiences. I'm not sure I agree about subtlety exploding the range of topics, though. The thought of giving up on solid understanding of phenomena in our social world strikes me as a sad one. Oddly, I think that striving to express the difficult concretely is one of those subtly expressed themes.

Do you have any examples of topics that cannot be expressed bluntly? In my relationships (which are arguably the most sensitive topics in my life) I actually strive for bluntness, because contextually it helps my partner reach an understanding. Perhaps in that context it's best to have bluntness be the punctuation mark to a less literal description of sensation.

I think I react most strongly to the implication that subtlety is the province of a single market segment that can be safely avoided under many circumstances. Unless they're just rewriting Tolkien, fantasy authors, like any other genre authors, have to employ a bit of genre savvy, which is quite subtle to the uninitiated. Subtlety you've been habituated to is still subtlety, I think.

Re:fantasy and subtlety: Well, I think ASOIAF has plenty of subtlety to it. So there's that. Sanderson's Mistborn trilogy was fun, but ultimately a video game stuffed in a book.

I think fantasy authors tend to come at things from a very different angle. They are less concerned with recreating or expressing human experience and more with creating worlds, exploring fictional history and consequence, or providing adventure. Human experience tends to suffer in this genre not because it's impossible to do, but because of author priorities. So perhaps you have subtlety in the historical movements, but all of these stories are fundamentally from the perspectives of human beings, and even the most highly regarded fantasy I've read (i.e. ASOIAF) readily falls prey to characters who:

1) Are archetypes or even caricatures.

2) Understand and internalize their own motivations completely.

3) Undergo dramatic personal change as a result of thought processes that are almost too logical.

As an example, the amount of time Cersei Lannister spends internalizing her justifications of action is, to me, absurd. She is not a believable character.

Good fiction isn't just about living through the fictional experiences in books, but also bringing my own experiences to bear in the process. Without subtlety, as Chris said, fiction simply doesn't match up. It also guards against prematurely collapsing the set of potential responses, and ensures that if I go back and read it a second time, I may get something different out of it as I've changed.

I suppose it's the argument that authorial intent does not matter to the subject. I agree with this to various degrees depending on the position of the moon, but I have to wonder if, then, is the artistic value of literature summarized completely in its ability to evoke response? Whether that response be thought, action, reflection....

From that perspective, to me, something like Telegraph Avenue was a failure. Mechanically (I don't know literature terms) I found it more or less delightful, but my lack of personal experience with the themes I extracted (except perhaps obsession with media, which I had not considered until this very moment) left me floating and thoughtless for much of the book. I really look forward to the upcoming discussion of this book, as I think it will be more divisive than uniformly positive.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I'm in a similar situation. Wheel of Time was so engrossing to me as a younger person. I've been rereading it, too, and I guess I'm sort of hating it because of what you said? Sort of. Robert Jordan takes chapters and chapters of describing every single minute detail of every character the current point-of-view character sees, when 99% of it isn't important to anything.

Fantasy authors, in general, are awful in that way, but Wheel of Time is one of the worst examples. Sometimes the authors seem to prefer spending a lot of time describing their characters and the world they've created, to the detriment of actually telling a story.

I'm actually not sure if that's what you were talking about, now that I reread your post and mine, but hey. I think both subtle and nonsubtle writing styles have their place. Wheel of Time is just bad for its own specific reasons.

Man, I'm kind of upset I started rereading it. The first few books were good (if nothing special), as I remembered, but they just keep growing more and more longwinded. Less and less happens per page. Yeurgh. I enjoy the story, but the writing is turning me off big time. I think I need to stop reading it.

Is it subtlety? Or "simply" lower fidelity?

Ludicrously high fidelity is definitely a reasonable complaint against the Wheel of Time, but not what I was getting at in this post. For the most part, what I struggle with in the Wheel of Time is that the characters are very not human in their experiences. They are much more literal and logical (except when they decide to be uniformly illogical on a specific point, with the full knowledge that they are doing do).

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Also, I think its worth mentioning that good art, including fiction, strives to illuminate or stir in the reader a sense of understanding about society/human nature/meaning that goes beyond our ability to actually articulate them. Or at least our ability to articulate them in a powerfully impactful way. I remember being a stupid kid in high school thinking that it was annoying that Nathaniel Hawthorne took all these ideas and encoded them as symbols in The Scarlet Letter because that's how my crappy lit teacher taught it to me. But of course, that's not what he did at all. Most writers are trying to express the ineffable. Generally, they aren't striving for subtlety, they are striving to express something that's really, really hard to express. And we readers use things like theme and symbol to explain (mostly to ourselves) as best we can, what the writer was trying to say.

Most genre fiction isn't striving for that. And that's fine. It's trying to tell you a thrilling/inspiring/terrifying/heart-warming story that is baldly enjoyable. Nothing at all wrong with that. And it's not even an easy thing to do. I know lots of serious writers who've tried to take on genre writing to make a few bucks, and while they are good literary writers, they suck at it. It's a different skill.

The subtlety isn't usually an affected or intended element of a work of fiction. It's a side-effect of trying to say something much much harder to say.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Subtlety can work on many levels. You can have something that is very crassly and straightforwardly written, but that communicates its full intentions subtly on a completely different level. Like, I dunno, propaganda or marketing. They preconditions people to think in a certain way by repeating certain blunt themes ad nauseum in the culture at large. People are oblivious to the extent their opinions and behaviors are modeled on these subtle outside influences and how much they're "their own".

On the other hand, you could argue that marketing and propaganda are the exact opposite of subtle.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Here's an article defending the reading of so called "bad" books:

http://therumpus.net/2012/10/on-the-comfort-of-bad-books/

I don't really agree with the article's main thesis--which pretty much boils down to David Foster Wallace read a John Grisham book once, so it's ok for everyone else to read bad books--especially since I think that books can offer the reader a form of escape and still be considered "good."

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Carl Wilson's excellent book on Let's Talk about Love advances a very cool teleological argument at one point, arguing that we should look at the purpose of a given work in ascertaining its quality. (This is actually my favorite unified theory of criticism and I use it all the time.) His example is Celine Dion's music, which we can evaluate as serving a cathartic function very successfully for certain subcultures. "Bad" books and movies should be looked at the same way, and I have no end of bad movies that I find utterly endearing despite being nowhere near good.

That said, bad-but-interesting is one of my favorite classes of movies, and bad-but-boring is the worst. Most bad books fall into that latter category, just by virtue of the increased effort and time investment books demand.

(Everyone should read that Carl Wilson book because it owns and is short and awesome.)

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

After reading this thread, my confidence in what subtlety actually is has diminished. Are we talking about expressed permutation of detail?; the reproducibility of inference divided by the perceived effort of statement?; or what Hangdog suggests: the traces of attempting to describe the ineffable?

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

After reading this thread, my confidence in what subtlety actually is has diminished. 

 

Well, it's subtle.

 

I think what people forget about Wheel of Time is that Jordan was a pulp writer. He rose to fame through his Conan stories. The most well-known fantasy tends not to be particularly subtle because one of the major markets for fantasy is bookish teenagers who have the time and inclination for epic fantasy doorstoppers, so the best-sellers are going to go to the easily digestible stuff. But Lev Grossman and Susanna Clarke are definitely writing fantasy, and they're certainly trying for something more substantial; literary writers are significantly less afraid, these days, of writing genre works. Even if you're writing pulp, though, you can at least take a shot - on the sci-fi side, I think John Scalzi does a decent job at writing pulpy sci-fi that makes a little time to address more complex emotions and ideas. 

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I'm not sure I would characterize most contemporary literature as subtle, but also at this moment in history I wouldn't say there's a dominant literary style.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I'm not sure I would characterize most contemporary literature as subtle, but also at this moment in history I wouldn't say there's a dominant literary style.

 

That would be true for most periods of literary history. I was just reading yesterday about the standard narrative of early twentieth century fiction that suggest that realism dominated for 10-20 years, only to have modernism come along and replace it. Really, over the course of those decades there were melodramas, science fiction novels, pulp magazines, short stories, poems, children's books, as well as the canonized texts that everyone remembers being read just as widely. 

 

Anyway, more broadly, I was wondering what contemporary fiction you think of as subtle or not?

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Probably the poster child for the so-subtle-it's-obfuscation is Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun (Shadow of the Torturer, etc). I've had a long-running argument with my wife about their value. She reads extensively, but says that the obfuscation for it's own sake undermines the entire work. If the entire thing is unreliably narrated to the extent that you don't actually know what happened, then what's the point in even reading it? There's _so_ much interpretation (and Wolfe assiduously avoids answering certain questions about the events depicted), that you wonder if there's anything actually there. It's like the old proverb about how if you have something to say, you should say it simply. So, if you say something in a very complex manner...

 

I re-read the Book of the New Sun every couple of years, and I don't think I ever would have gathered all of the allegory or meaning in my lifetime without somebody else to guide me towards it, yet I can tell there's _something_ there, which is part of what makes me keep going back. I honestly can't tell you to what extent the presentation adds to the experience of reading those books. I couldn't tell you if it serves any purpose other than making myself feel smart for figuring it out.

 

But the more I think about it, the more I think it does matter though. In this case, the willful misrepresentation is itself a commentary on religious texts in general (probably). While it's possible to express that sentiment in simpler language (see: the previous sentence), that kind of misses the point of literature, which is to tell you something, but also simply to be a beautiful thing that you engage with and experience. Yes, it's partially the writer showing off to his readers, and the readers showing off to each other that they understand it, but to dismiss that out of hand is to dismiss the entirety of human endeavor.

 

(Everyone should read that Carl Wilson book because it owns and is short and awesome.)

 

 

The Carl Wilson/Celine Dion book is indeed awesome. It's an amazingly concise summary of taste-theory, and will probably make you re-think how you engage with media. It's particularly relevant in what has been called the "post-ironic" cultural landscape, where people seem more comfortable holding many such conflicting taste values in their minds at once. Want to understand Bronies? Read that book.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I think one of many reasons to speak implicitly is that subtlety is more difficult to argue with or accuse. I suspect that this may encourage the disempowered to use it more.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

That would be true for most periods of literary history. I was just reading yesterday about the standard narrative of early twentieth century fiction that suggest that realism dominated for 10-20 years, only to have modernism come along and replace it. Really, over the course of those decades there were melodramas, science fiction novels, pulp magazines, short stories, poems, children's books, as well as the canonized texts that everyone remembers being read just as widely. 

 

Anyway, more broadly, I was wondering what contemporary fiction you think of as subtle or not?

 

Sorry, just saw this comment now!

 

There are a couple of problems that I see with how you have framed Anglophone literary history.

 

We can distinguish between what literary scholars refer to as realism, and a realistic style, these are two different things, and as literary scholars are correct to say that modernist literature comes after realism (and if we want to be pedantic we also say naturalism occurs during realism as well)

 

It would be a mistake to refer to modernist literature as a dominant literary style. As you point out there was plenty of popular fiction that lacked modernist aesthetics. That was the dominant literature written and read, even if modernist literature captured the critical imagination.

 

It isn't even correct to refer to modernist literature as a style. When we lump writers together under the header modernist, their shared trait is a desire to "make it new". Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and whomever else you might care to include are all stylistically distinct. It's easier to define them by what they are not, i.e. they all lack the baroque and/or flowery language of their Victorian predecessors.

 

Prior to the 20th century, however, I would argue that there are indeed dominant literary styles. Prior to modernism poetry does tend to have fairly rigid conventions. It's incredibly difficult to properly understand English prose prior to the 19th century without a working knowledge of the Bible or a well annotated edition of a book because there are allusions that are constantly made and the reader is expected to know since that's part of the shared Anglophone culture at that point in time, and that all adds up to particular styles that dominate the conversation.

 

By the 20th century you have different social forces at work. The progressive era ushers in mass literacy, which provides new voices, readers, and shifts the traditional nodes of power within the English speaking literary networks. Most English speaking countries become more culturally, ethnically, and religiously pluralistic. This is also why I'd say that subtlety isn't something I'd associate with contemporary literature. As the English speaking world becomes more diverse, there's less of a shared cultural background, and more opportunities for people to misunderstand each other. Consequently, there's a greater demand for clarity in writing. Subtlety isn't in direct conflict with clarity, but it becomes less important, and other literary effects tend to get deployed instead.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now