yes... incoherent jibber is not very entertaining. that is a very basic requirement of entertainment. but i think what i am really trying to say by entertaining, or at least what i think that people mean when they talk about something being not entertaining enough, is something to do with pleasure. people think that Moby Dick is not entertaining, they describe it as boring, they refuse to finish reading it. because certain chapters seem to describe material that they are not familiar with, or cant immediately apprehend the purpose of, they decide it is boring and they dont finish reading it. this is the kind of distinction people make about entertainment - or at least, these are my own judgments about what people decide is entertaining.
i think literary fiction can be entertaining, it can be unputdownable and still have a high artistic value - ie still deal deeply with issues about what literature and art really are, what different types of art (eg romantic, classical, postmodernist) really are and why they should exist or what they should do. i also think that popular fictions, such as genre fictions, can contain content that transcends popular or genre status, is not purely "entertaining". so i think the distinction between popular and literary fiction is meaningful to some extent.... but in other ways a little bit artificial.
im always confused that people think that something is unworthwhile if they put it aside on the basis of being boring. they didnt finish consuming the communication, so how can they be an accurate judge of what it was communicating, when they failed to engage with the communication? how can they say that something was boring, when they dont even really know what it contained? they didnt finish it - how can they accurately judge? we dont even really know what they mean by it being boring. does that mean that there were too many big words? does it mean that it contained too much content that they were personally unfamiliar with? and perhaps not willing to understand?
why should the burden of communicating necessarily be the complete responsibility of the communicator? surely we have all had the experience of trying to say something important to someone who just did not want to listen. even just as children, when someone who was taking care of us cautioned us about something that we refused to hear, and did things our way anyway, and got ourselves hurt. its not always the fault of the person doing the communicating, that people are not interested in what they are saying.
i feel that there really is an idea that works of fiction should be consumer-centered, should supply to consumers what they want. i dont agree with that... i dont think a work of fiction must have high readability in order to be worthwhile as an artistic product. sometimes things even have to be unreadable in order to deal with certain ideas, like the work of James Joyce which is highly unreadable from a consumer perspective - most people just do not finish it, and they say "it was boring because thats just how most irish people talk" - but despite that, they failed to finish it, and so they cant really say for sure what its content was. it seems overwhelmingly commercial to me that things should cater to the will of consumers as a primary concern.
i think theres nothing inherently wrong with readability and entertainment value - but surely shouldnt be the only concern in judging a work of fiction?
