LeftLibertarian2 : Messages : 37526-37555 of 82561

#37526

From: Jeff Olson <jlolson53@...>
Date: Sat Sep 4, 2010 2:59 pm
Subject: Re: Re: Historical fiction

Charles:

"Well, I think the plausible response here is simply to say that novels and plays are not always like chess."

That would've been the obvious tack, but I kind of like the idea of working with Dan on the parts which may be analogous, and trying to accept his premises insofar as possible.

We obviously are more free to imbue chess pieces with various powers and characteristics than we are with people (which in itself underscores my claim that we are aesthetically limited by human nature in creating human/sentient fictional characters), but would it be true to say that we can give chess pieces any characteristics we desire without paying an aesthetic price?

It seems clear that the answer is "NO."� Some piece-attributes would not lead to as felicitous a game - I'm fairly sure that Dan (and Charles - even JR - would agree).� Why would that be?� I think the - equally clear - answer is that, as Charles pointed out with his various arguments for why chess is uniquely popular, is that chess, as with all art and games, is to some degree circumscribed by human nature. � What I'm saying is that what appeals to us about chess - its complexity, logic, and creative scope - flows from how our minds work.� Is there a right and wrong when it comes to piece-movement?� Not in any absolutely specific sense, but in a general sense, I think there is.�� The way chess pieces maneuver pleases us in ways that other combinations of motions/powers would not.�

I think where the analogy between chess and fiction may hold is between fictional characters and chess pieces.� Just as certain attributes in chess lead to felicitous interactions on a variety of levels, so do certain attributes in fictional characters.� But Dan's aesthetic theory doesn't allow us to evaluate either the aesthetic "rightness" of chess piece attributes or the "rightness" of fictional characters' behaviors, attitudes, and so on.

The idea of being able to evaluate the appeal of chess without considering the nature of the pieces composing it seems absurd - impossible, really; but no more impossibly absurd than the idea of evaluating fiction without being allowed to consider the nature of the people which provide its motive force.

JO

On Thu, Sep 2, 2010 at 10:49 PM, xipetotec56 <groups.to.read@...> wrote:

�

--- In LeftLibertarian2@yahoogroups.com, Dan <dan_ust@...> wrote:

> I'll try to come up with a longer reply -- one that does justice to all your
> points below -- but I think�an analogy might prove helpful here. Think of
> fiction like chess. What is chess? It's a game, right? I don't think that's
> controversial. Now, imagine judging a chess game. At a minimum, were I watching
> two people playing, I'd expect them to follow the rules of chess. But let's say
> someone came along and questioned whether a particular rule -- say, how the
> knight is supposed to move -- had or lacked an "overarching fealty to reality."
> How would that sound to you? Wouldn't it sound like someone didn't understand
> that this is just how chess is played -- the accepted rules -- and that's that.
> There is no judging whether the way a knight moves in [conventional] chess is
> more or less true. It's simply the convention. Someone surely invented this move
> at one point, but I don't think one would seriously question its "overarching
> fealty to reality" or seriously think about it that way.
>
> To me, fiction is like chess or like making up a game. The author is analogous
> to the inventor of a game.

Dan,

Well, I think the plausible response here is simply to say that novels and plays are not always like chess.

Of course, there are cases in which authors play within genre as within a formalized, conventional system, which is more or less hermetically sealed from considerations about the real world. Sometimes this is because the work is genre-bound in relatively simple ways (a potboiler, say); sometimes because it is self-consciously playing within an acknowledged conventional form, for good or ill, partly in the interest of meta-commentary. (This is common in literature written by people who have read structuralist or poststructuralist literary theory; also in books made up for Borges short stories.) Some critics -- structuralists in particular -- are fond of reading all literature as if it is supposed to work this way; but I think they're just wrong about that. Some works are best evaluated on those kind of terms; others are not; most are mixed bags.

The category of "games" is, notoriously, a pretty wide-ranging one. There are games like chess in which (1) the goals are *internal to* the game -- that is, the rules of chess themselves define what counts as "winning" or "losing," rather than some external set of criteria (such as pleasure or practical success); and (2) the criteria that are internal to the game are determined entirely be a formalized set of conventions, which can be specified without reference to anything the pieces "represent." I agree with you that aesthetic judgment of literature shares feature (1) with the evaluation of good or bad moves in chess -- the criteria that you are using to evaluate are criteria that are *internal* to the practice of aesthetic judgment, not external criteria. But I don't think that feature (1) entails feature (2) -- and I reject that aesthetic judgment has feature (2). This is not even the case in all games -- setting aside the question of how far appreciation or criticism is analogous to enjoying games. Kendall Walton has a very good discussion of the different ways games can be played in _Mimesis as Make-Believe_ (a book that you might like a lot, if you're not already familiar with it); as he points out, there are many kinds of play which take up features of the actual world *into* the fictional world of the game.

Suppose you had a chessboard with a big hill rising up through d4 and e4 that prevents you from putting pieces there -- if you tried to balance them on top, they would just fall over and slide into another square. Now, if you couldn't move a piece into d4 or e4, that would certainly affect what would count as good moves and what would count as bad moves for the purposes of that game. But given how chess is played, you have a right to complain that the problem is that you have a defective board -- chess is played on a flat board where any piece can occupy any position that it can legally move to. But now consider a game of capture-the-flag or paintball where you have a ridge that keeps you from standing in a particular location. In capture-the-flag, you don't have a right to complain about the physical realities imposed by the terrain on the playing field. Dealing with those physical realities is part of the point of the game; it's part of the representational system of the game that real-world facts -- if it's just rained and the hill is muddy, or if it is fall and the hill is covered with fallen leaves and twigs that will make a noise, or, or, or... -- *are imported into* the make-believe world of the game, and so these real-world features all *matter* to the evaluation of moves as good or bad. In ways that such physical realities aren't supposed to matter to a game of chess.

I would argue that it is often the same with novels or plays. Part of what matters in understanding them is understanding how far they do or do not take up features of the real world into their fictional worlds, and how this may affect the criteria that are relevant for judging the literary "moves" that they make as good moves or bad ones. (In fact, that's not all that they take up from worlds outside of the work. In addition to taking up features of the *actual* world, they also take up features of *other stories* -- by means of quotation, allusion, genre, satire, et cetera.)

> Also, I don't think one should come to judging art esthetically from the
> standpoint of closely defining something and then seeing if the work fits the
> definition -- except for the broadest definitions. I don't want to go too deeply
> into this now, but I was thinking of, say, there being a novel that you believe
> is, say, a Western, but it lacks some features you believe belong to Westerns.
> Well, then maybe it's not a Western -- at least, by your definition. But is that
> an esthetic judgment? And would that make it a bad novel or even a bad Western?

I agree that works of literary art should be judged on their own terms -- not simply as exemplars of a predefined genre. But think of a work which makes use of some features of a genre, and ignores or stomps on others -- mystery novels in which nothing is solved or the detective's solution is wrong, Westerns that take place in Siberia or outer space, Westerns in which gunfights turn out to be useless and largely irrelevant, social novels in which the striking producers turn out to be hyperliterate CEOs, engineers and philosophers, etc. Now, it is one thing (and quite correct) to say that it shouldn't be judged bad because it deviates from the conventional goals or mechanics of the genre. But is the fact that it *has* a certain relationship to that genre aesthetically irrelevant? If so, why? Isn't it often important to see that it *is* related to the genre in such-and-such a way, and that it *deliberately* differs from, or plays with, established conventions thus-and-so? Would you be able to, say, get all of what's aesthetically significant about _Memento_ if you were to think only about what's there in the film, without taking into account some facts about how detective stories (and stories in general) usually work? Or if you were to go about reading _Don Quixote_ without any knowledge of, or any reference to, the genre of heroic romances? In cases like these, isn't it a *part of what the work itself contains*, that it has certain references to, and relationships with, other things that you are expected to know about, which exist outside the covers of the work?

-C

Reply | Messages in this Topic (102)

#37527

From: Juan Garofalo <juan.g71@...>
Date: Sun Sep 5, 2010 2:35 am
Subject: this means?

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