My mom’s watching what looks to be a terrible horror movie, and it got me thinking about genres — it doesn’t take much, as you’re probably already aware. While usually I don’t formally deal with the glass ceiling in the writing world, trying to keep “genre” fiction out of the highest echelons of literary acclaim, that’s basically what this post is about. Hrm.
Of course, it would help if we defined our terms. ”Genre” fiction goes by a lot of other names: ”plot-driven” and “popular” are two other typical names. ”Commerical” is another one. Let’s go through these.
“Commercial” has an obvious implication: it’s written for money. Now, all published fiction makes some money for the writer, so it doesn’t seem like a very good distinction. One of my suspicions is that the defenders of “literary” fiction are all MFA professors who are angry that they can’t make a living only on their writing, and are forced to teach. Certainly most of the MFA professors I’ve ever known were either uncaring or actively angry about having to teach. But the thing is that they’re commercializing their fiction as well, trading on its production and publication for a job that requires little on top of their writing. It’s difficult to see the difference. Also, if anyone’s in fiction just for money, that’s not going to go very well for them.
“Popular” is especially condescending, in that it’s actually pretty much true — more people read it. But it implies that it also stinks of the common man, and for “literary” types (even the ones who try to write about the “everyman”), the common person is anathema. Gene Wolfe once said that the prototypical “literary” story is about a college professor married to, or marrying, another college professor.
“Plot-driven” implies that the plot, and not the characters, is what’s important. This is a thorny one. There is a good deal of “popular” fiction that uses stereotyped or flat characters. However, what a lot of people miss is that so does “literary” fiction. See the above Wolfe reference; also, if you’ve ever gone to a creative writing workshop, you will have lost count of the sexually-starved twenty-somethings, angry loners, and (a bit strangely) wilderness afficianados (that is, it’s strange until you read Hemingway, because all the young male “literary” writers want to be Hemingway). It is difficult to accuse “literary” fiction of being plot-driven, because much of it does not have a plot. Another trope you might have lost count of, in the previous hypothetical, is a roomful of twenty-somethings sitting around talking about nothing, the nothing supposedly being fraught with underlying meaning (if the writer’s good it will be; if they’re not, it will be asinine). Of course, one has to wonder why it matters if something’s more focused on plot or character.
Finally I turn to “genre.” This means that the fiction in question engages in a school of writing, though of course the “literary” folks wouldn’t admit that. I know a professor who adumbrates “genre” fiction and teaches classes on historical fiction. The term is self-fulfilling — something is only “genre” if the speaker does not like it. Everything else is not a genre. This ignores the actual uses of genre as a kind of group-mind collection of expectations and habits a writer can call upon using markers within the text to refer to other markers in other texts (one the most obvious perhaps being a spaceship, which immediately signals “science fiction” to the reader).
“Literary” fiction, of course, is that which engages in the traditon of, er, literary fiction. Which is viewed, by its proponents, as never-changing — a fellow student in the program I just left once claimed that historical tendencies might vary a little, but what’s considered “good” never actually changes. Before one dares to make that claim, one should read the novels of the mid-eighteenth century. The Mysteries of Udolpho was considered a masterpiece in many fields, including suspense. Modern readers tend to stop caring about the suspense because it’s artificially strung out and applied to characters who aren’t sympathetic in any way (think of the first chapter of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows).
“Mainstream fiction” is another term for this stuff. Hilariously, at one point someone in a workshop (this is at my older school, which had a much better creative writing program than my current one) said they understood I wasn’t writing mainstream fiction, but. . . To which the professor replied, “I know what you mean to say, but I’m pretty sure Greg is writing ‘mainstream’ fiction. I mean, more people read this.”
There are terms for it that are less polite, generally drawn up by fantasy and SF fans/writers; these include “mundane” and “quotidian” fiction.
So why is it “bad” to write “genre” fiction? Like much in the modern literary world, it goes back to the eighteenth century.
Once, the main purpose of fiction was to impart a moral on the reader, because fiction wasn’t a very good influence — it needed to be tempered with lessons about how to live life. These had to be pretty simple, one step above an Aesop’s fable ending. Most of what’s considered “genre” fiction was already around by the advent of the modern novel: romance (in its old and its modern sense), fantasy, adventure, epic, so on (the mystery and the science fiction story can be seen as coming from the Gothic tradition, which came from the romance and the fantasy). Epics sometimes delivered morals, but while Homer was revered, no one was imitating him (except Pope, I guess). Because the novel was a new form made for, by, and about the middle-class (another term for “literary” fiction is “bourgois fiction”), the old vehicles of morals (tragedies and epics) were right out — they were about kings and nobles. Comedies and adventures couldn’t work, as they were either about lower-classes or disturbingly accepting of them (think of the noble who lives among peasants until he discovers his lineage).
So novel-writers had to come up with something new. Now, for this, applaud them. Attempting to do something new is never bad, though the results might or might not be. Clarissa was one of the vanguards of this attempt. Like many sentimental novels, it’s about marriages and money and land — all the things the middle class wanted, in other words. Take away the land (reserved for the western) and you get the modern “literary” category.
Given that most writers rebel against some system of writing, we might, at this point, wonder how it stayed so much the same after all this time. The Romantics rebelled against the Enlightenment, the Moderns rebelled against the Romantics, and so on, both back and forth through history. So what happened?
This is just my theory, mind, but moralists tend to be conservative, so maybe it’s possible those who are most likely to cling to the old (very old) standards of bourgois writing end up being those who don’t fight the current.
Genre fiction is viewed as unable to deliver a moral. Now, if you read any of it, you know this isn’t true. Some of them are pretty staid, really — what’s more amenable to typical morals than a Harlequin romance or a mystery novel (where the bad people get punished and the good people get whatever the genre’s after, either love or justice)? But romance novels are often considered immoral by society (and trashy by “literary” writers) because they’re about sex — one of the many double standards is illustrated here, by the way — how many great “literary” works are about sex?
Some of them can be pretty interesting, though. SF and fantasy are often vehicles for gender and colonial morals, both old-fashioned and contemporary (I’m not sure I’ve read anything produced in the 20th century more sexist than C. S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia — but then again, in the same genre, and in direct reference, is Neil Gaiman’s “The Problem of Susan,” which inverts the patriarchal claims of Lewis). SF delights in positing situations or worlds where the moral norm is completely alien to us.
Why is “genre” fiction considered unable to deliver a moral, then? It’s all due to the conservative nature of these people. The history of the Gothic abounds with accounts of critics freaking out about this or that novel because, in the use of supernatural elements, they risk destroying the progress of the Enlightenment by bringing back superstition and irrational fear.
Yes, it’s the same argument that’s going on now about video games and music — and, actually, still books; take a look at the most-commonly-banned books list sometime and catch the common thread (here’s one example: Huckleberry Finn is one of the most-commonly banned books in America, which is weird, as it’s considered one of the most exemplary novels of America. It’s banned because it uses the word “nigger.” And it uses it a lot. A lot. But it’s really a fairly decent examination of race relations in America at the time of the novel’s setting. One of the most famous lines of the book is when Huck, swimming in the morality he has imbibed from his hometown, says it’s a sin to steal someone’s property — he’s referring to Jim, who is a slave, and thus property — but he means to help Jim anyway, and he’ll just go to hell if that’s what it means. So it illustrates someone entirely immersed in racist culture rising above it, at a perceived risk to himself, to help someone he sees as a person and a friend [this is a very simplified reading of the novel, but it serves its purpose]. The idea is that the repetition of the word “nigger” will make people racist. I’ll let you decide how stupid that is).
So a Gothic story couldn’t be moral, despite the fact that they all have conservative moral values — the sinners get punished and the benevolent get saved. And all because they’re not realistic, because impressionable minds will think what’s happening in the book is true, and lose their grip on reality — I’m not really exaggerating the common thought of the time. It doesn’t help that novels were viewed (mostly incorrectly) as a pastime for women, who were supposed to have more impressionable minds.
There’s so much wrong with these strings of assumptions I’m not going to elucidate them all.
But there are some of my thoughts on the divisions within the worlds of fiction.
I know many of you (probably most of you) are members of the otaku-rhombus; while I won’t spend another 1800 words making the connections, much of what I’ve written above can be applied easily to the wall anime hits when it gets to America. Of course, it’s animated, which means it’s for children and thus not art (in the sense that the Gothic was meant for superstitious women and thus not art).
(Oh, a bit of an endnote — one of the common defenses of mundane fiction is that it experiments with human nature. I cite Hemingway, who regaled America with the longest string of typical characters, scenes, and sterotypes [especially regarding gender -- read "Hills like White Elephants," where the woman is wilting but gaining strength to defend her gestating baby, while the man is a flake who insists she abort it]).
Good stuff. Not much to add or comment. You organized and clarified quite a few things I’ve been thinking about. I’m gonna mull these over and mecha anime.
Nice overview of something that’s generally on my mind in some form or another.
Yeah, “mundane fiction” is my favorite term for the stuff. “Literary fiction” is an irreconcilably stupid and personally offensive term, seemingly contrived to divide readers into upper and lower classes. It’s an issue that brings my blood to such a boil that I don’t usually bother trying to be fair and balanced about it, like I do with most things. So, clearly, my grad school professors are going to love me.
[...] Original post here. [...]
There’s a solid connection between Aesop and Richardson: Richardson published his own adaption of the Fables ten days after he began to write Pamela, and there are various explicit and implicit nods to them in the novel.
Do you know where people — well, MFA professors — would put something like Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go? The premise, and the skeleton of the plot (which could be gripping, if the narrator didn’t think it wasn’t) could be ‘genre’ fiction (and sf), but Ishiguro is supposed to write more ‘literary’ fiction. And it has a moral, or at least this person thinks it does (that piece contains spoilers — and also claims that NLMG is science fiction, and refers to ‘genre writers’).
@IKnight: I do not know what they would do with it. I mean, they all seem to love The Road, which is a post-apocalypse novel and thus SF. The thing about genres is that they don’t preclude being “literary” in the sense of “talking issues common to literary fiction.” But said professors believe they do preclude just that.
I see from wikipedia that Never Let Me Go won the Arthur C. Clarke award, so the SF community accepted it as one of their own, at least. More than that, without having read it or heard MFA types talk about it, I can’t say. The bare-bones plot summary on wikipedia makes it sound very SF.
I have noticed that, outside the U.S., differences in “genre” and “not-genre” aren’t as great. J. G. Ballard and Anthony Burgess were SF writers who were well-respected in the “literary” community, though once you ask U.S. MFA types, they didn’t write SF. There was a bit of a row recently, when one of the American obituaries claimed that marking Ballard as a SF writer was insulting to his skill and work. He said it was like “calling 1984 science fiction.” Which puzzled and irritated a lot of people, obviously.
It’s still a bit marked in Britain, but once one looks at some of the great SF writers from non-English-speaking countries, such as Poland (Stanislaw Lem) or Italy (Italo Calvino), no one seems to care. Of course, that’s an outsider’s perspective, but there you go.
Hmm. That sounds possible. There was certainly a line of people like Wells, Huxley and Orwell who could write sf which was taken seriously by their contemporaries: you find Chesterton attempting to refute what he sees as Wells’s worldview, for example. As late as the sixties Lewis is claiming that the Divine Comedy is science fiction. I also think people are less likely to see sf as something that you can be a fan or, or something that has a specific ‘fandom’, in Britain. But I have a suspicion that our concept of sf crystalised at the pulpier end of the spectrum after the sixties. Iain Banks famously adds an initial to his name to separate his sf from his mundane novels.
It’d be interesting to compare the status of British crime fiction which has traditionally been more mundane than mundane writing. ‘The English may not always be the best writers in the world, but they are incomparably the best dull writers’, said Chandler.
Actually, Wolfe was criticizing realism (as in, the sort of stuff one might read in the New Yorker); this is what he said:
GW: The adventurous reader has probably already moved past realism. I
realize that sounds like a smart remark, but I mean past the kind of
fiction that is called “realism” as a literary genre, and that’s what it
is: a literary genre. It is archtypically the story about the college
professor who is married to the other college professor.
Did you read [3]Ursula K. LeGuin’s novel, [4]The Dispossessed? It was
about the college professor who’s married to a college professor, only
science fiction, and this planet is Russia and this planet is the United
States. When I read it I was so disappointed. I’d had a dozen people tell
me how wonderful it was.
@IKnight: if Aldiss’ history is to be taken seriously (and despite its faults I think it does a functional job on the broad view), SF turned to “pulpy” fiction in the thirties, when Hugo Gernsback got ahold of several magazines and started exercising his weird requirements. The sixties, in turn, is when it really starts to come around, with a new focus on the humanistic, “soft” sciences and more attempts at stylistic effects — the New Wave, in short.
And I know very little about crime writing. I’m reading a selection of Holmes stories and essays right now — I’ve read the stories innumerable times before, but the essays will be new. Apparently, according to the intro., one attempts to place Holmes in relation to the contemporary supposition that it was “realistic.”
@gwern: I haven’t read The Dispossessed yet. I will eventually, I imagine. I have read Wizard of Earthsea and Lathe of Heaven. Le Guin is good, but I’m often a little disappointed as well. She tries too hard, it seems to me; never mind that Earthsea is ragingly racist.
And a lot of the Cold War stuff falls flat now. If you want an example that still holds up, try out Stanislaw Lem’s His Master’s Voice. The book’s only partly about the Cold War, but even those parts are great.
Regarding the Wolfe quotation, that’s what I had meant to get across; thanks for providing the full quotation. It is a literary genre, as all genres really are are ways to classify things, and that’s a classification. I believe most MFA types don’t even want to believe that, though; they seem to cling onto some desire for “literary” fiction to be not a classification, but ALL. Everything there is to write is in “literary” fiction, and everything else doesn’t exist.
[...] the Dread Word “Entertaining”. The observation of this perception is hardly news as it’s been going on for roughly two centuries (give or take some decades), but there’s more to it than Sturgeonesque bitterness towards the [...]