~~ no more guilty pleasure!
Nov. 29th, 2004 09:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
reenkaI was just thinking how oddly different reading or experiencing a piece is from thinking about it, to me. There are so many stories I really enjoy as I read them, with all my heart, and then I think back in disappointment and realize 'oh. That was really nothing special, was it. Oh.' Those would be what one would call the 'guilty pleasures', I guess.
And I think that's how I gain my semi-elitist attitude about most fiction while remaining an utterly voracious reader-- because it seems like once I start analyzing something, it falls to pieces, and the disappointment is such that I can't bear thinking of it. Reading is something I've always done mainly for pleasure; indeed, I can't stand to read for class a lot of times because reading is so tied with pleasure for me. Especially when it comes to having found a favorite subject to read about-- I simply cannot get enough. I love seeing variations on a theme, and it takes me a -really- long time to lose interest if there's lots of material to go through. And another thing is that this enjoyment I get from reading isn't really tied to quality. It's a basic function of reading about the things I enjoy, and generally if there's some basic level of competency in style, my compulsion to continue supplies quite a bit of the pleasure.
So even post-analysis, the memory of my emotional response remains rock-solid, completely beyond the nitpicky questions of style, language, characterization or plotting-- usually, a piece either works emotionally or it doesn't, and analyzing it is always going to be somewhat redundant in that way, though it could easily turn one off from reading more.
I was remembering just how much I loved oodles and oodles of H/D fics, especially after Aja's post about favorite moments. I know I say 97% of (fan)fic sucks, and yet I myself have enjoyed about 75% of the (H/D) fics I've read, and many of them I wouldn't be able to reread without an equal level of emotional investment and suspense, which I'm rarely able to attain. How to reconcile that?
True, there's a small contingent of fics (or published works) I could reread with an analytical mindset and enjoy equally-- but these 'thinking' stories would be the exception. Usually, they're the works of what one would consider some form of 'genius', perhaps, because they stand the test of time & return where most works don't. And yet, while we could enjoy them repeatedly, do we really enjoy those works more than the 'guilty pleasures' at the time? Perhaps it depends on the kind of reader one is. In my own experience, I wouldn't necessarily say so, especially because I don't tend to reread anything at all, no matter how great I find it. So this theoretical repeatability of the experience shouldn't factor into how highly I rate it.
Perhaps in this case, my notion of 'return' gets translated into 'thought'-- that is, my 'ultimate test' is whether a story can bear thinking about afterwards. That experience was never meant to be enjoyable, per se, but with some 'great' fics there's some sense of... lingering admiration or wonder. The story then becomes part of one's 'ideal' set or even an example of how a subject -should- be written. But is this idealization really all that important to a casual reader-- or rather, why should it be?
Analysis sort of puts down a reader's emotional response to a story if one could label the scene being responded to as 'out of character' or 'badly written'. It's not so much that anyone says it doesn't matter as it's 'wrong'-- the reader is wrong (because the story is 'bad'). I fall prey to this often enough-- and yet, I'm fully aware that no reader can have a 'wrong' response, because there's no such thing as an 100% objective 'reading' of fiction (nor does there need to be).
And then... what does literary analysis (or 'meta') matter, in those terms? It has nothing to do with how we feel about art. If one enjoyed the piece, it's only this... masturbatory examination, after the fact, that pulls apart our own hearts and labels them faulty. And if one didn't see the appeal-- then one could never really understand what the others saw enough to really criticize them by default, because the reader's response is always as much about the reader as it is about the text. I've often found that people respond strongest to stories that tell them something about themselves as much as or moreso than about the characters, so a symbiotic relationship between reader & fic evolves. I know from personal experience that I read to understand myself and the world around me at an instinctive, intuitive and perhaps even cumulative level, and from what I've heard, this approach isn't all that uncommon. Maybe this centering of a story's perception in the reader's unconscious mind is what makes conscious thought seem counterproductive sometimes. It seems as if rational analysis only taps the surface phenomena at work in the story, and thus reduces the actual complexity of the work-- intentional and perhaps more importantly, unintentional-- into a summation of its parts.
Taking that into account, the emotional response is really at the root of the actual import of what one reads, isn't it? It's the driving force that makes the incision of a story into an individual's or a collective consciousness, therefore making the story known as truly Great.
Basically, I realize that this is all basic 20th century lit-crit theory stuff and I'm reinventing the bicycle and so on and so forth-- but it's nice to say to oneself, 'it's okay that you liked all those silly OOC H/D fics, Reena, and no one could really argue with you' :D I think that's what people mean when they say some (often very popular) stories are written as 'kink-fic'-- there to push the writer and/or the reader's buttons, and not much else. I suppose the criticism there is that the work has no 'higher meaning' or maybe no direct relationship to canon, which would also lend it meaning-- but this only seems relevant if meaning was being seen as rational rather than emotional in nature. And of course it's both, but how could one rank one over the other? Though perhaps the way we react to the two approaches begs the ranking; for instance, there's my own instinctive rejection of my initial emotional response to a story once the analytical functions had kicked in. Unless the story is great, it often appears as if you could either accept it 'as is', with zero analysis, or throw it out as intellectually worthless.
And I still like those silly OOC H/D fics, though I have little need to reread them. And even less need to reread the ones I thought were 'really rather brilliant, actually'. In fact, I get sort of intimidated about rereading the 'really good' ones 'cause I'm worried my expectations have become too high and the initial rush of 'omg, amazing!' would wear off upon second reading.
Reading seems like such a transitory, fleeting pleasure, even though it can last for days or at least hours. You are never the same person you'd been, in the same circumstances you'd been in, when you first read a beloved story. You could never really get back the feeling of falling in love with a piece for the first time, though you could remember it fondly, of course. And it really is like falling in love, isn't it? You do it only once per person, usually, but sometimes the memory of that moment lasts, and sometimes one's reminded why it was made.
~~
On that note, gods, I love Cyber Love & Tickle Me Pink & Harry: On Top of Things. Porn should always make you laugh, man. Even after it's over, but also during, eheheh <3
Ahhhh, yet another H/D parody = ♥ Sometimes I think sarcasm really is as good as porn.
And I think that's how I gain my semi-elitist attitude about most fiction while remaining an utterly voracious reader-- because it seems like once I start analyzing something, it falls to pieces, and the disappointment is such that I can't bear thinking of it. Reading is something I've always done mainly for pleasure; indeed, I can't stand to read for class a lot of times because reading is so tied with pleasure for me. Especially when it comes to having found a favorite subject to read about-- I simply cannot get enough. I love seeing variations on a theme, and it takes me a -really- long time to lose interest if there's lots of material to go through. And another thing is that this enjoyment I get from reading isn't really tied to quality. It's a basic function of reading about the things I enjoy, and generally if there's some basic level of competency in style, my compulsion to continue supplies quite a bit of the pleasure.
So even post-analysis, the memory of my emotional response remains rock-solid, completely beyond the nitpicky questions of style, language, characterization or plotting-- usually, a piece either works emotionally or it doesn't, and analyzing it is always going to be somewhat redundant in that way, though it could easily turn one off from reading more.
I was remembering just how much I loved oodles and oodles of H/D fics, especially after Aja's post about favorite moments. I know I say 97% of (fan)fic sucks, and yet I myself have enjoyed about 75% of the (H/D) fics I've read, and many of them I wouldn't be able to reread without an equal level of emotional investment and suspense, which I'm rarely able to attain. How to reconcile that?
True, there's a small contingent of fics (or published works) I could reread with an analytical mindset and enjoy equally-- but these 'thinking' stories would be the exception. Usually, they're the works of what one would consider some form of 'genius', perhaps, because they stand the test of time & return where most works don't. And yet, while we could enjoy them repeatedly, do we really enjoy those works more than the 'guilty pleasures' at the time? Perhaps it depends on the kind of reader one is. In my own experience, I wouldn't necessarily say so, especially because I don't tend to reread anything at all, no matter how great I find it. So this theoretical repeatability of the experience shouldn't factor into how highly I rate it.
Perhaps in this case, my notion of 'return' gets translated into 'thought'-- that is, my 'ultimate test' is whether a story can bear thinking about afterwards. That experience was never meant to be enjoyable, per se, but with some 'great' fics there's some sense of... lingering admiration or wonder. The story then becomes part of one's 'ideal' set or even an example of how a subject -should- be written. But is this idealization really all that important to a casual reader-- or rather, why should it be?
Analysis sort of puts down a reader's emotional response to a story if one could label the scene being responded to as 'out of character' or 'badly written'. It's not so much that anyone says it doesn't matter as it's 'wrong'-- the reader is wrong (because the story is 'bad'). I fall prey to this often enough-- and yet, I'm fully aware that no reader can have a 'wrong' response, because there's no such thing as an 100% objective 'reading' of fiction (nor does there need to be).
And then... what does literary analysis (or 'meta') matter, in those terms? It has nothing to do with how we feel about art. If one enjoyed the piece, it's only this... masturbatory examination, after the fact, that pulls apart our own hearts and labels them faulty. And if one didn't see the appeal-- then one could never really understand what the others saw enough to really criticize them by default, because the reader's response is always as much about the reader as it is about the text. I've often found that people respond strongest to stories that tell them something about themselves as much as or moreso than about the characters, so a symbiotic relationship between reader & fic evolves. I know from personal experience that I read to understand myself and the world around me at an instinctive, intuitive and perhaps even cumulative level, and from what I've heard, this approach isn't all that uncommon. Maybe this centering of a story's perception in the reader's unconscious mind is what makes conscious thought seem counterproductive sometimes. It seems as if rational analysis only taps the surface phenomena at work in the story, and thus reduces the actual complexity of the work-- intentional and perhaps more importantly, unintentional-- into a summation of its parts.
Taking that into account, the emotional response is really at the root of the actual import of what one reads, isn't it? It's the driving force that makes the incision of a story into an individual's or a collective consciousness, therefore making the story known as truly Great.
Basically, I realize that this is all basic 20th century lit-crit theory stuff and I'm reinventing the bicycle and so on and so forth-- but it's nice to say to oneself, 'it's okay that you liked all those silly OOC H/D fics, Reena, and no one could really argue with you' :D I think that's what people mean when they say some (often very popular) stories are written as 'kink-fic'-- there to push the writer and/or the reader's buttons, and not much else. I suppose the criticism there is that the work has no 'higher meaning' or maybe no direct relationship to canon, which would also lend it meaning-- but this only seems relevant if meaning was being seen as rational rather than emotional in nature. And of course it's both, but how could one rank one over the other? Though perhaps the way we react to the two approaches begs the ranking; for instance, there's my own instinctive rejection of my initial emotional response to a story once the analytical functions had kicked in. Unless the story is great, it often appears as if you could either accept it 'as is', with zero analysis, or throw it out as intellectually worthless.
And I still like those silly OOC H/D fics, though I have little need to reread them. And even less need to reread the ones I thought were 'really rather brilliant, actually'. In fact, I get sort of intimidated about rereading the 'really good' ones 'cause I'm worried my expectations have become too high and the initial rush of 'omg, amazing!' would wear off upon second reading.
Reading seems like such a transitory, fleeting pleasure, even though it can last for days or at least hours. You are never the same person you'd been, in the same circumstances you'd been in, when you first read a beloved story. You could never really get back the feeling of falling in love with a piece for the first time, though you could remember it fondly, of course. And it really is like falling in love, isn't it? You do it only once per person, usually, but sometimes the memory of that moment lasts, and sometimes one's reminded why it was made.
~~
On that note, gods, I love Cyber Love & Tickle Me Pink & Harry: On Top of Things. Porn should always make you laugh, man. Even after it's over, but also during, eheheh <3
Ahhhh, yet another H/D parody = ♥ Sometimes I think sarcasm really is as good as porn.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2004-11-30 09:49 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-11-30 12:30 pm (UTC)Anyway, my point wasn't about silly fics being masterpieces or about fandom, so it's all right.
no subject
Date: 2004-12-01 12:45 am (UTC)