> However, I'll stick to the plain style, for the following
> reasons:
>
> 1) it is a very difficult art to make sure that the reader can
> get what the author put in the story (novel, novelette, short story, and
> so on). You can't forget anything, you can't hide anything. Everything
> has to be there in plain view, and logically interconnected in a
> self-supporting structure; otherwise, everything falls down and the
> reader is cheated.
I would disagree that the reader is cheated if the style is not plain. A
large part of the beauty of literature has nothing to do with its moral,
its point or its philosophy. Rather, it has to do with the beauty of
language. Frequently, I finish reading a book not particularly caring for
the plot or point but loving its sounds, its play of language. Examples
range from poetry (Eliot's "Prufrock"), to general fiction (_A Winter of
th Fisher_), to sf (Burgess's _A Clockwork Orange_).
In opera studies, there has been some interesting work done on what is
really important to an audience in opera, and it is relevant to the sf and
sex threads I will mention them here. In the 1980's, lots of opera
scholars commented upon gender roles in plots of operas (in particular,
that strong female characters always die or go mad at the end so that
"normal" gender roles are restored). Recently, some scholars (e.g. Paul
RObinson and Carolyn Abbate) mentioned that, despite the plots, the female
voice is what the audience remembers at the end and therefore that female
characters somehow live. I will expand upon this if anyone is interested.
Anyhow, the issue at stake (and one that I hope the list would discuss)
involves the relation between the plot and other aspects of science
fiction literature. What is it that one remembers about various sf books
that one likes? Is plot paramount to readers on this list?
I would also argue that "getting what the author put into a story" is not
necessarily the goal of a reader, and perhaps I will expand on this later.
> I went through two thesis, and, oh boy, the most common question
> asked by my advisers was: "What do you mean with that?". When I gave them
> the corrected version, the follow-up question was usually: "Why didn't
> you say so the first time?"
I agree that in expository writing clarity is generally the most important
issue. Even here, however, I think there are exceptions. Sometimes the
author wants to describe a dialectic (or something like that) and the
author also wants the reader to feel the constant swing of the dialectic.
In such situations, clarity might not be as important a the feel of an
ongoing dialectic. (I guess this is what you mean by a correct use of an
ornate style.)
Eric Hung
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