Biocrit?
coalescent took advantage of my absence at the end of last week to post all sorts of interesting things I couldn't reply to. One of these was on the topic of the phrase "self-indulgent" as used by critics. (There are many more blogosphere posts on this that are linked within.) Personally I was surprised so many people were against the term. I was even more surprised people regard it as a judgement of the author's character, rather than a judgement of the author's work. Now hal_duncan has weighed in with a very interesting post:Sometimes you have to give the story its head. Sometimes you have to rein it in. To me that's just a banal platitude, a given. And I think there is a use of the term "self-indulgence" which basically boils down to "this story needed to be reined in and it wasn't". To me, saying something was "self-indulgent" translates as "it needed more ruthless rewriting, better editing to expunge redundancies of plot, character, setting and / or style, to tighten it up". It's saying that the writer spent too much time in the Zone, too much time giving the story its head, and riding it wildly, letting it take them wherever it would and just enjoying the ride; and not enough time and energy on turning on that story, hacking and slashing at it, pruning it into shape, giving it a good tight plot, coherent character dynamics, optimum description of setting, thematic integrity and ergonomic prose. If you can appreciate a novel for being tight, you can criticise it for not being tight. I think that's fair comment.
I find this particularly interesting because I just reviewed Duncan's debut novel, Vellum. In the review I said:Although it first appears to be the book, just like the Book, is not rigidly structured. It swings back and forth through time, across multiple universes, the narrative built up of brisk crosshatching, layering over and over itself. Duncan is a clever and instinctive writer and he has allowed himself pretty much free rein... Duncan makes no hard choices about what to include in his novel, he simply throws it all in, mixed with the bones of myriad cultures.
I don't use the term "self-indulgent" but its presense does hover behind the review. Duncan continues:But the biggest problem for me -- and again this relates to the above -- is that an accusation of "self-indulgence" is an application of, to coin a term, authorial unintention. To me, it implies that the aspect of the book perceived as overdone is a product of the Zone rather than the Crucible, that the author couldn't possibly have intended that aspect to have been overwhelming, ramped-up to the max, as a thematic necessity of the story they're trying to tell, as a conscious decision...Instead, it's assumed, the author must have been so carried away in the pleasure of writing that particular aspect, so entranced by the sheer joy of being a clever clogs, so caught up in their love for what they were doing that they became a slovenly wastrel, squandering their potential tale in redundancies of [plot/character/setting/theme/style]. At best this is condescending. At worst it's an outright insult.
I can see where he is coming from but I can't understand how this is that different to any other criticism a reviewer might make. Surely to say "McBlah's characterisation is amateurish" is at best condescending, at worst an outright insult? Writers aren't supposed to like reviews. This is why I think he misteps here:One problem with the critique [of "self-indulgence"]is that it's unspecific. It doesn't distinguish whether the writer has let one character run away with the story, or let flowery prose mask shallow characterisation, or spent so much wordage on describing the world that the pace of the book slows down to utter turgidity. I want to know as a writer, if this book doesn't work, exactly why it doesn't work. As a writer those specifics act as feedback into further writing, or they give me something solid to disagree with.
Fair enough but of course the review is not directed at the writer but at the potential reader. His wider point that the phrase "self-indulgent" on its own doesn't tell us very much about the book under discussion is true. I don't think anyone was disputing this, though.
As a reward for getting through this long post...
Poll "Self-indulgent"
I find this particularly interesting because I just reviewed Duncan's debut novel, Vellum. In the review I said:Although it first appears to be the book, just like the Book, is not rigidly structured. It swings back and forth through time, across multiple universes, the narrative built up of brisk crosshatching, layering over and over itself. Duncan is a clever and instinctive writer and he has allowed himself pretty much free rein... Duncan makes no hard choices about what to include in his novel, he simply throws it all in, mixed with the bones of myriad cultures.
I don't use the term "self-indulgent" but its presense does hover behind the review. Duncan continues:But the biggest problem for me -- and again this relates to the above -- is that an accusation of "self-indulgence" is an application of, to coin a term, authorial unintention. To me, it implies that the aspect of the book perceived as overdone is a product of the Zone rather than the Crucible, that the author couldn't possibly have intended that aspect to have been overwhelming, ramped-up to the max, as a thematic necessity of the story they're trying to tell, as a conscious decision...Instead, it's assumed, the author must have been so carried away in the pleasure of writing that particular aspect, so entranced by the sheer joy of being a clever clogs, so caught up in their love for what they were doing that they became a slovenly wastrel, squandering their potential tale in redundancies of [plot/character/setting/theme/style]. At best this is condescending. At worst it's an outright insult.
I can see where he is coming from but I can't understand how this is that different to any other criticism a reviewer might make. Surely to say "McBlah's characterisation is amateurish" is at best condescending, at worst an outright insult? Writers aren't supposed to like reviews. This is why I think he misteps here:One problem with the critique [of "self-indulgence"]is that it's unspecific. It doesn't distinguish whether the writer has let one character run away with the story, or let flowery prose mask shallow characterisation, or spent so much wordage on describing the world that the pace of the book slows down to utter turgidity. I want to know as a writer, if this book doesn't work, exactly why it doesn't work. As a writer those specifics act as feedback into further writing, or they give me something solid to disagree with.
Fair enough but of course the review is not directed at the writer but at the potential reader. His wider point that the phrase "self-indulgent" on its own doesn't tell us very much about the book under discussion is true. I don't think anyone was disputing this, though.
As a reward for getting through this long post...
Poll "Self-indulgent"