What we go to when we go to literature is an exit. Even social realism is escapist: We escape from ourselves into another self, that of the character. Readers like a character with whom they can “identify” precisely because it makes the escape, the unselving, easier. Writers seek out this path of least resistance, too—consider all the “semi-autobiographical,” Zuckermanesque novels written by middleaged novelists about middleaged novelists.
I myself go to literature for the maximum escape possible. Reading about a white English adventurer among brown people he regards with undisguised contempt (Kipling’s “The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes” and John Buchan’s Greenmantle, most recently) is something I find wildly enjoyable. I love reading that perspective raw, as it expressed itself before political correctness; such stories draw me out of myself. Reading Jhumpa Lahiri, with her minutely observed descriptions of Indian-American life, feels like going on vacation next door. A novel about a thirtysomething Indian-American radiologist who writes novels in his spare time is a novel you will never see me reading, much less writing. The bulk of my reading tends to be very ancient, often translated, literature; I like to sightsee through foreign eyes.
Genre fiction such as fantasy, however, can benefit from the readily sympathetic, recognizeable prince or princess; the often-reviled “one-dimensional” or “cardboard” character is not always a drawback in such fiction. The imagined world is already strange; to people it with characters difficult to identify with, or possessing anything more than rudimentary complexity (a Traumatic Past Experience is ok), would be to shut the reader out entirely. The reader should vicariously inhabit that imagined world. The character is the reader’s entry point into that world. This character must be, not a mind, but a sleeve for the reader’s mind (and therefore, empty).
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Writers often get asked whom they imagine their readers to be. Categories, demographics, and individual tastes of readers aside, the primary division in readers consists in their relationship to language. There are readers for whom artful language can assist in literary unselving. Imagery, observed detail, metaphor, and a general complexity of language serves to draw such a reader in. For other readers (and I suspect this group, already numerous, will only increase), complexity of language is a hindrance to their entering the story. This is not a differentiation between the literary fiction reader and the genre fiction reader; this responsiveness is an addition, not an either/or—that is, everyone likes a well-told story, but only a subset likes a well-written story.
Bad, cliched, trite, or merely serviceable writing—like the one-dimensional character—has its own purpose to serve. They assist, paradoxically enough, in the same unselving as the language in Ulysses. In Ulysses, note how Joyce’s simultaneously imitative and one-of-a-kind language recreates Dublin through vocal inflection, linguistically charmed detail, and pure panache. His language is so powerful that he can substitute plot with pattern and still draw a reader in (after the initial resistance, of course). This is a sustained feat of language even Dante, the master of pattern, stopped just short of; in spite of the elaborate patterning, Dante made sure to flank his tripartite journey with a dark wood and a Beatrice. This is what we might call a “narrative arc.” Joyce is bolder than that; his play proceeds by interplay, and to hell with character and destiny alike. Homer never thought his language stronger than the need for a gripping story; Shakespeare himself, the one writer linguistically more resourceful than Joyce, was willing to ride on language alone no farther than fourteen lines.
Even in Ulysses, the writing is a barrier. You must persist, gain momentum in it, maybe grow up fifteen years and wait for your tastes to sophisticate themselves a little, as I did between my first failed attempt at experiencing Ulysses and my successful second one. In Finnegans Wake, though, what was a lens is a tinted window. With Ulysses, we could peer through the dense language and see Dublin more clearly. In the other novel, we are shown a word wall, and must take it on faith (in Joyce himself, and in his commentators) that something is happening on the other side.
So there are readers who see language as a portal, and readers who see language as a wall. In our day, Cormac McCarthy writes for the former, while Dan Brown writes for the latter. Dan Brown can lose a certain kind of reader for whom cliche and awkward dialogue are so jarring that they interfere with the ripping tale. These readers form a small minority, at the opposite extreme from the (vast) readership of straightforward genre prose. Many readers who enjoy language can do without it, if the story is good enough; I happen to be one of them, and read Dan Brown and Cormac McCarthy with pleasure, albeit different kinds of pleasure. There’s no particular trick to this—you simply don’t go looking for what isn’t on offer. There are plenty of us out there, I suspect—which is why Brown will always outsell McCarthy, but McCarthy, too, will have his measure of sales and fame. The DaVinci Code can appeal to readers in both categories, Blood Meridian only to readers who aren’t alienated by brilliantly fustian sentence-sequences like boxcars full of dark ore hitched each to each with “and.”
To understand the end purpose of writing is to understand (forgive?) its means—bad writing, depending on the reader, can be successful writing. Whatever unselves a reader, whatever takes them out of the chair and into an experience, is what that reader will love. Such a book, for such a reader, accomplishes the metaphysical end common to both “high” and “low” literature. There are thousands of readers to whom our flashiest literary techniques are as distracting as a strobe light. Fortunately, there is room for everything in the Library of Babel. Even Finnegans Wake.