News from the front: Genre vs. Literary Fiction
A friend of mine posted this article on Facebook a couple weeks ago and it's taken me all this time to get around to reading past the introduction, but I finally did and it's brilliant and I want to teach it now.
Lev Grossman, "Literary Revolution in the Supermarket Aisle: Genre Fiction Is Disruptive Technology"* (TIME)
The first half of it is a defense of genre fiction, very well stated though nothing I didn't already agree with. But then it gets super fascinating.
Talking about high-quality genre fiction: "To say that such books 'transcend' the genres they’re in is bollocks, of the most bollocky kind. As soon as a novel becomes moving or important or great, critics try to surgically extract it from its genre, lest our carefully constructed hierarchies collapse in the presence of such a taxonomical anomaly."
Yes! This drives me crazy. Or instead, when people set out to prove a genre novel isn't as good as you think it is, because obviously it can't be. Often the tag "...for a young adult novel" or "...for science fiction" is enough.
Regarding genre conventions: "Conventions aren’t the iron cage they’re made out to be. Sonnets are bound by conventions too, but that doesn’t stop them from being great, and wildly various. Conventions are more like the rules of chess: a small set of constraints that produces near-infinite complexity. They’re not restrictive, they’re generative.
The sonnet metaphor. I seem to come across this everywhere. But reasonably so, given that no one questions the cultural cache of the sonnet. Speaking of status...
On judging people by what they read: "Somewhere in its history, reading novels has gotten all tangled up with questions of social status, and accepting the kinds of pleasure that genre novels offer us has become - how perverse are we? - a source of shame. What is it, exactly, that those pleasures are guilty of? Novels aren’t status symbols, or they shouldn’t be. Maybe it’s the last vestiges of our Puritan heritage: if it’s not hard work, it’s sinful. Maybe it’s just that we’re self-loathing capitalists, and anything associated with commerce, as genre fiction is, is automatically tainted and disqualified from having any aesthetic value. Either way our attitude toward genre fiction smacks of mass cultural neurosis."
I don't think Grossman's trying to say there aren't well-written books and poorly-written books, and that there shouldn't be some value associated with reading the former. If he is, I disagree. But it's a great point to make that it does seem insane to judge people by the kinds of stories they prefer to read. By what conceivable standard is it better to want to read about New York than Middle Earth, or to prefer a story about unhappy sex over a story about a murder investigation?
Discussing plot: "True, some plots happen in Westeros, and some happen in London. Some plots are plausible and some plots are not. But that is not, ultimately, the point. Tyrion Lannister isn’t real, but then again neither is Mrs. Dalloway."
And this is where it got really groundbreaking for me: "It’s hard to talk about what plot does, but that’s not the fault of genre fiction. If anything it’s because criticism has failed the genre novel. Most of the critical vocabulary we have for talking about books is geared to dealing with dense, difficult texts like the ones the modernists wrote. It’s designed for close-reading, for translating thick, worked prose into critical insights, sentence by sentence and quote by quote, not for the long view that plot requires. But plot is an extraordinarily powerful tool for creating emotion in readers. It can be used crudely, but it’s also capable of fine nuance and even intellectual power, even in the absence of serious, Fordian prose. The emotions and ideas plot evokes can be huge and dramatic but also complex and subtle and intimate. The things that writers like Raymond Chandler or Philip Pullman or Joe Abercrombie do with plot are utterly exquisite. I often find that the complexity of the narratives in genre fiction makes the narratives in literary novels look almost amateur by comparison. Look at George R.R. Martin: no literary novelist now writing could orchestrate a plot the way he does. Even if you grant that the standards for writing and characterization in genre fiction are lower than in literary fiction, the standards for plotting are far, far higher."
Such a good point. We spend so little time studying plot in the study of literature. It's a crying shame and now I want to go out and teach myself everything I can find about it.
So now that I've quoted a good third of Grossman's essay, you should go read it!
* Think he meant for that to say 'as disruptive technology'?
Lev Grossman, "Literary Revolution in the Supermarket Aisle: Genre Fiction Is Disruptive Technology"* (TIME)
The first half of it is a defense of genre fiction, very well stated though nothing I didn't already agree with. But then it gets super fascinating.
Talking about high-quality genre fiction: "To say that such books 'transcend' the genres they’re in is bollocks, of the most bollocky kind. As soon as a novel becomes moving or important or great, critics try to surgically extract it from its genre, lest our carefully constructed hierarchies collapse in the presence of such a taxonomical anomaly."
Yes! This drives me crazy. Or instead, when people set out to prove a genre novel isn't as good as you think it is, because obviously it can't be. Often the tag "...for a young adult novel" or "...for science fiction" is enough.
Regarding genre conventions: "Conventions aren’t the iron cage they’re made out to be. Sonnets are bound by conventions too, but that doesn’t stop them from being great, and wildly various. Conventions are more like the rules of chess: a small set of constraints that produces near-infinite complexity. They’re not restrictive, they’re generative.
The sonnet metaphor. I seem to come across this everywhere. But reasonably so, given that no one questions the cultural cache of the sonnet. Speaking of status...
On judging people by what they read: "Somewhere in its history, reading novels has gotten all tangled up with questions of social status, and accepting the kinds of pleasure that genre novels offer us has become - how perverse are we? - a source of shame. What is it, exactly, that those pleasures are guilty of? Novels aren’t status symbols, or they shouldn’t be. Maybe it’s the last vestiges of our Puritan heritage: if it’s not hard work, it’s sinful. Maybe it’s just that we’re self-loathing capitalists, and anything associated with commerce, as genre fiction is, is automatically tainted and disqualified from having any aesthetic value. Either way our attitude toward genre fiction smacks of mass cultural neurosis."
I don't think Grossman's trying to say there aren't well-written books and poorly-written books, and that there shouldn't be some value associated with reading the former. If he is, I disagree. But it's a great point to make that it does seem insane to judge people by the kinds of stories they prefer to read. By what conceivable standard is it better to want to read about New York than Middle Earth, or to prefer a story about unhappy sex over a story about a murder investigation?
Discussing plot: "True, some plots happen in Westeros, and some happen in London. Some plots are plausible and some plots are not. But that is not, ultimately, the point. Tyrion Lannister isn’t real, but then again neither is Mrs. Dalloway."
And this is where it got really groundbreaking for me: "It’s hard to talk about what plot does, but that’s not the fault of genre fiction. If anything it’s because criticism has failed the genre novel. Most of the critical vocabulary we have for talking about books is geared to dealing with dense, difficult texts like the ones the modernists wrote. It’s designed for close-reading, for translating thick, worked prose into critical insights, sentence by sentence and quote by quote, not for the long view that plot requires. But plot is an extraordinarily powerful tool for creating emotion in readers. It can be used crudely, but it’s also capable of fine nuance and even intellectual power, even in the absence of serious, Fordian prose. The emotions and ideas plot evokes can be huge and dramatic but also complex and subtle and intimate. The things that writers like Raymond Chandler or Philip Pullman or Joe Abercrombie do with plot are utterly exquisite. I often find that the complexity of the narratives in genre fiction makes the narratives in literary novels look almost amateur by comparison. Look at George R.R. Martin: no literary novelist now writing could orchestrate a plot the way he does. Even if you grant that the standards for writing and characterization in genre fiction are lower than in literary fiction, the standards for plotting are far, far higher."
Such a good point. We spend so little time studying plot in the study of literature. It's a crying shame and now I want to go out and teach myself everything I can find about it.
So now that I've quoted a good third of Grossman's essay, you should go read it!
* Think he meant for that to say 'as disruptive technology'?