Actually, I'd agree that "fundamental misunderstanding" is too strong. Obviously there is a certain threshold of comprehensibility one needs to achieve regardless of whether one is pursuing aesthetic ends or informative ones.
That said, I would stand by the assertion that reading literature only for the information it imparts is missing much of the point. We esteem authors not solely for their plots and characters, but also for their stylistics—the difference between a great writer and a passing one is often little more than the well considered phrase. The arrangement, use, and rhythm of words are a major component in a literary work.
My point is that asking a writer to "express it more simply or more accessibly" may in many cases amount to asking them to butcher the stylistics that they felt achieved the highest aesthetic quality for the kind of work they wanted to produce.
If one is given a business briefing it is probably the apex of reason to ask a writer to simplify. Are there cases in which this or that phrase in a literary work would benefit from simplification? Yes, but to ask an author to simplify their entire aesthetic approach generally, really seems to me to fail to have appreciated a large part of what distinguishes literature from basic expository writing.
I’d agree with your original assertion. Liking the content but not the form is like looking at a Turner and wishing the ship were closer and he’d chosen a clearer day, or thinking that Monet had some nice flowers in his garden but you’d like him to have painted them more clearly to be sure.
Faulkner,
Thomas Bernhard,
John Barth,
Henry James,
Herman Melville,
Fleur Jaeggy,
Dostoyevsky,
Marguerite Duras,
Poe,
Hawthorne,
Rosemarie Waldrop,
Kraznahokai,
These are just a couple that came to mind. Among them, probably Waldrop, Jaeggy, and Bernhard are the most experimental, but I would argue that none of them aesthetically speaking write books that are simple, and I don't think I could argue that any of them should have simplified their themes or style or general employment of language to be more accessible.
Kraznahorkai and Bernhard are great examples. Are walls of text without paragraph breaks harder to read? Yes. But this is an important aesthetic choice. In both cases (all of bernard, melancholy of resistance for Kraz) it speaks to an overbearing oppressiveness that ties directly into their thematics. If you missed this I think you missed out an essential point of their aesthetic and what they were trying to say. We cannot sever form and content. This is why I think it's absurd to complain that someone's work is "not accessible" —its really silly to demand any sort of aesthetic capitulation on the part of any artist, literary or otherwise, in the first place.
Edit: Faulkner is another good example that's less experimental. I'm sure some readers would have found As I lay Dying or The Sound and the Fury more accessible if a narrator mediated between the various first person voices he presents, but this would so drastically change the aesthetic character of these works that I doubt you'd be able to claim they aren't essentially different and would not be equivalent pieces of art.
That said, I would stand by the assertion that reading literature only for the information it imparts is missing much of the point. We esteem authors not solely for their plots and characters, but also for their stylistics—the difference between a great writer and a passing one is often little more than the well considered phrase. The arrangement, use, and rhythm of words are a major component in a literary work.
My point is that asking a writer to "express it more simply or more accessibly" may in many cases amount to asking them to butcher the stylistics that they felt achieved the highest aesthetic quality for the kind of work they wanted to produce.
If one is given a business briefing it is probably the apex of reason to ask a writer to simplify. Are there cases in which this or that phrase in a literary work would benefit from simplification? Yes, but to ask an author to simplify their entire aesthetic approach generally, really seems to me to fail to have appreciated a large part of what distinguishes literature from basic expository writing.