A Rumination on Genre
A humble confession – I used to want to be an academic. I even published a couple of papers in accredited journals, back when I was still in hot pursuit of the magical sheepskin and tassel. It was long ago and in another athletic conference, and besides that ambition is dead, but bear with me here, and take a trip back. It’s sort of pertinent. I promise.
***
A book.
But it’s not just any book, mind you. It’s the first book, the one that will be forever associated with its bearer, the one that will help crystallize others’ opinions (hopefully favorable) of them and cement a place in the pecking order. A glance around the table goes from face to spine to face again, as everybody’s book is on the table in front of them. The cool, trendy, with-it types are toting Toni Morrison. The grinds and self-proclaimed serious types have Derrida and other manifestations of litcrit. Old-schoolers have yellow-bordered Penguin editions. The arms race is on, as each set of eyes flicks around the table assessing, checking for evidence that the book has actually been read, analyzing.
Down near the end, on the right side, there’s a guy whose apartment is nowhere near campus. Due to the vagaries of the
Also, it’s got a big honking skeleton on the cover. Instantly, irrevocably, he’s doomed, ‘cause nobody in that room knows what the hell to do with him.
***
A humble ellipsis.
Time passes. The guy reading Dan Simmons takes some slings and arrows. He gets his paper, with honors, and wanders off into the semi-real world. He writes a few things, gets some of them published, and falls into game writing. All the while, though, the memory of that day sticks with him, and so do the questions.
It wasn’t “That’s bad” that puzzled him (alright, me – are you happy now?), because there never was “That’s bad” or “Why are you reading that garbage” or even “Shouldn’t you be reading Proust instead?” The response to that, or to the Zelazny or Brin or Blackwood or whatever else I toted with me down the rickety Green Line tracks, was always confusion. Incomprehension. A question of why was I reading that stuff, and how could it be quantified, assessed, and critiqued.
It was outside the lines. Not in the way I’d thought, mind you, after the scrapping I’d done to defend my precious Lovecraft and write my thesis, but there clearly was a boundary of comprehension, and the stuff I was reading was on the other side of it.
More time passes.
A writer I know joins a writers’ workshop, taught by a well-regarded novelist. She brings to class a section of her novel-in-progress, an urban fantasy. The protagonist starts out competent, urbane, professional, and sharp, and through the introductory “stinger” sequence she demonstrates her competence even while stumbling onto the first inklings of a mystery that will require growth, change, family dynamics, and all that other good literary stuff, in addition to some kick-butt action.
The critique is…confused. There’s a little “Hey, this is just like Harry Potter” and some “Is housebrownie a racist term?” and a whole bunch of trying to cram the well-rounded scene into a hole that can only be described as extremely square. It’s as if there’s no context for the critique, no sense that there’s other work or tradition being drawn on here, no understanding of where the story might go outside the character’s feelings and inner life.
And a light bulb fourteen years dead flicks on.
***
A humble thought:
Literary fiction (at least in its modern, trade-paperbacked incarnation) is, in large part, about damaged people. Throughout the course of the narrative, the characters explore, express, and potentially rectify that damage to arrive at a state of functional integration. They may also affect and change their environment in the process, but the chief action – and the chief demonstrable result – is internal.
Speculative fiction (at least in its classic incarnation) is, in large part, about highly functional people dealing with damaged situations. Throughout the course of the narrative, the characters explore and potentially rectify that situation in order to arrive at a functional environment. The characters may grow and develop throughout the course of the narrative, but the chief action and the chief and ultimate demonstrable result is external.
This, then, is why there is such a collision of perspectives between those two worlds, particularly in the minds of A)reviewers and B)young writers. These folks, when attempting to critique or review speculative fiction, are stunned to learn that the characters they meet at the start of the action are where they expect characters to be at the end of the action - i.e. fully functional and no longer inclined to put a salmon down their pants to express their basic unhappiness. As such, that sort of reader can only wonder where the heck the story can possibly go, since the characters are already where they should end up.
This is not to say, of course, that all literary fiction is exclusively about damaged people undamaging themselves, that all speculative fiction is about Campbellian (John W., not Joseph) heroes sallying forth against a hostile universe, or that there is an intrinsic difference in quality between the two forms, based solely on whether the action is internal or external.
What I am picking at here, I think, is more the question of how speculative fiction – and really, all genre stuff, because detective fiction fits in there neatly with room for the proverbial caraway seeds and movie producer’s innards – gets approached by those who don’t read it, whether from a critical or a reading perspective. Because of the nature of speculative fiction – archetypal in the case of fantasy, paradigmatic for science fiction, or transformative in the case of horror, it’s almost imperative for there to be external action, a big screen upon which the bits of life that drive genre can be taken out and held up to the light. That makes it different, and my growing suspicion is that because it’s different, there are those who don’t know what the heck to do with it.
Is this worth making a federal case over? Probably not, and even my fourteen-years-ago-self would probably agree. But I do think there’s some potential damage there, to readers who miss out on books that exist outside of their expectations and writers whose creations suffer well-meaning attempts to drag them into the charmed circle. For my part, I think competent-veering-toward-kickass is a perfectly sensible starting point for character development, but then again, what do I know? I read books with skeletons on the cover.
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Comments
This is the best essay about literature I’ve read in a long time. I going to link it to my blog. Thanks!
This is a great essay. Throws a whole new lexicon into some previous discussions (and evokes some new ones in me). I’ve tried to come at this from the other end, dealing with what seems to me to be mislabeling or as Richard describes it: “…I do think there’s some potential damage there, to readers who miss out on books that exist outside of their expectations and writers whose creations suffer well-meaning attempts to drag them into the charmed circle.”
Love the distinction between damaged people and damaged external circumstances. For me the latter falls into what I called writing about “things and events” as opposed to a focus on “ideas” and “emotions.” That’s what the five essays I wrote in that series were all about. While I still believe, mainstream (is that different from literary?) tends to balance all three, it occurs to me that using Richard’s yardstick one might describe mainstream (literary) as dealing with symptoms, whereas genre deals with external causes.
My personal experience as a writer is not unique. I’ve published fully balanced treatments of things and events/emotions/ideas starting from the character POV, and been called literary, and when I published other things that moved the things and events center-stage, I was seen as schizophrenic and having multiple styles. Well, I do. But it’s just labeling and emphasis. And the marketing that follows is deceptive. And it wouldn’t be worth a Fed case, as Richard puts it, if it didn’t effect hardened reader expectations and channel audiences in a false way. Writers in this predicament are constantly “being discovered,” by people on the other side of the labeling game. I dunno, comes down to money and audience, I suppose, and how do you cultivate one set of readers without alienating another, if you don’t fall neatly into a certain bias. I get the feeling Frank and other writers are to some extent arguing the same abandonment of labels tacitly when they opine, “…it’s worth reading or it isn’t.” That’s an unexamined way of saying the same thing, for me.
Sidebar: I didn’t discover Lovecraft until a couple years ago, after I abandoned halls of ivy! What I love about HPL is that he can be attacked so easily for his excesses, and yet he has the same undefined magic as Poe, just wonderfully passionate story-telling in language that goes into new rooms. What a beacon. And yet as stand-alone as a lighthouse.
Footnote: I like black velvet Elvis’s too. Skeletons on covers — tried to get them to use that on BORN BURNING.
– Sully (Thomas Sullivan)
when i was applying to colleges, some 20 years ago, i wrote my application essay for duke university (IIRC, “pick a book you like, and describe in detail what you believe it to be about”) on stephen king’s the dead zone. my AP english teacher, who had offered to look it over for me, was very pleased with it. he found absolutely nothing wrong with either my book selection or the essay itself.
i suspect duke had other opinions, though, because i did not get accepted…though more likely it was my academics that did it. i’ll never know. but by the time they sent me their rejection i honestly didn’t care, because a) i already “knew” i was going to clemson (sorry stan) and b) because i knew i had done right by my principles.
Dear Richard –
Your inward/outward damage paradigm is one I’m going to be sharing with a lot of thoughtful friends, over the days and possible decades to come.
In fact, I’m gonna shut up now and go think about that.
THANKS!!!
Yer pal,
Skipp
Gary Braunbeck here, Richard.
Another superb essay. But I hasten to point out that those writers — like Sully and (I’ll say it) myself — who often work with concepts that embrace those characters damaged within (Literature) being confronted by damanged circumstances without (Genre) find ourselves too many times being on the outside of both worlds. But (like you, I suspect), I’ve always found that those stories and novels that deal with the damged within finding a symbiotic sympathy with the damaged without — and in confronting the latter, find that it echoes the former — to be the most rewarding and enriching type of fiction.
I completely agree with you that those who restirct themselves to academically-accepted tomes are missing out on some wonderful writing, but at the same time, those who write in the so-called “Genre” field (I find, anyway) too often miss out on discovering the riches that can be found between the pages of, say, STEPPENWOLF, SIDDHARTHA, THE GRAPES OF WRATH, ISLANDS IN THE STREAM, etc.
Sometimes, like after reading your essay, it hits me what a genuine pity — arguabl;y tragedy — it is that never the twain shall meet.
Superb, Richard.
Brilliant,
And Gary beat me to it. I think the problem some of us who walk the forgotten streets of genre backwaters have faced is that we don’t always start with competent characters fixing damaged situations, but often have complex damaged characters facing equally damaged situations…and maybe it’s confusing everyone.
It’s an interesting perspective, though, and well worth second, third, and even fourth considerations…
I think a lot of the “stylistic” horror authors who have taken such flack in recent years have been writing more about damaged characters, which would fit this description, putting them on genre shelves with literary fiction material…a unique way to look at it.
For the record, none of my characters, damaged or otherwise, has ever stuck a salmon down his pants in the course of a story / novel / screenplay
Dear Gary –
I don’t know, man. I think that twain gets met a lot more often than the culture seems prepared to admit.
It’s one of the ways in which highbrow and lowbrow meet to form the Third Brow: my favorite brow of all, and the one where most of my favorite stuff takes place.
Every time someone writes a genre piece with rich, complex, deeply-observed characters and a fealty to the genuine textures of life, you cross into Third Brow territory.
And every time literary authors write books in which SOMETHING ACTUALLY HAPPENS — outside of their heads, or wrenching familial squabbles — we find ourselves heading there as well.
Just a quick thought.
Yer pal,
Skipp
What a wonderful essay! I really think it brings a meaningful perspective to the genre divide in a way that may actually let people begin to really discuss why one sort of book is different from another.
Was the book you had on that first day Carrion Comfort? I had to do a search for Dan’s stuff to find the one with the skeleton on the cover! I was to busy being a ‘Science Fiction Fan’ back then to appreciate its cousins Horror and Fantasy. So many good books fell through the gap! Thankfully I embrace the whole family these days…
I really enjoyed your essay, Richard, and Sully’s comments as well. HPL stories using “language that goes into new rooms” — love it, Sully!
Just a few disjointed thoughts this evening…..
When I read your phrase “damaged people,” I immediately thought of Flannery O’Conner and her menagerie of great characters!
For myself, I grew up on Asimov and Heinlein, just as every normal, self-respecting young man of my era did or should have done…. and became a Koontz fan a bit later.
As for the “mist-shrouded ivory towers of academe,” I don’t know how things are over there at John’s address, but the atmosphere’s a bit different here on the b-school side of things.
Quite a few genre readers that I can see among the students here…. As for literature, I had to upbraid a young vietnamese student in my class for reading Gone With the Wind during my lecture. Another was wading through the Iliad (and seeming to enjoy it). I quickly turned their attentions back to the current topics — the Core Competencies of the Corporation and the Strategic Planning Process.
Enough of that seditious fiction! And certainly no idyllic scenarios of classes held outside on the lawn and under the late summer sun.
A great read, Richard. Keep the insights coming!
Thanks, Stan. You bring up Dean Koontz, and I almost mentioned him as an example of someone who has exceeded with the hybrid of damaged people (literary) in damaged situations (genre). Anyone who knows Dean knows how much he has struggled with the marketing establishment just to define himself as someone who writes chimeras of fiction. Amazing really. You would think success would write its own ticket after the point was made. But not so. An entrenched market perception — misperception, in my view — still dogs even this overwhelmingly successful writer who simply wants the freedom to pursue his craft according to what he likes. The fact that it links to the greater general readership should be saying something for all of us in the marketplace. I know this is stated a bit simplistically, but then the labeling is simplistic and long past its useful season.
– Sully (Thomas Sullivan)
Richard, why anyone would ever want to be an academic is beyond me. The mind boggles. Academics are so . . . hopeless!
Loved your piece. Reminds me of another, though I uh, can’t quite remember who wrote it. Damaged people versus damaged circumstances. Excellent insight.
However, unless I’m missreading you, and I may be, that’s not the only divide between genre readers and others. It is, though, a very important and significant one.
Thanks for the insight. I’d always wondered why the people who read Literary fiction get confused with genre fiction. That makes a lot of sense and I feel much enlightened.
I’d always felt that since they seem to like stories about people, they ought to like genre stuff because the good genre stories are full of amazing characters. But there’s a lack of damage I guess.
I tried to take a writing class in college… the end result was that I dropped it three weeks in and didn’t write for three months afterwards, wondering if what I was writing was really crap. Then I got my head out of my ass and said, duh it is. Needless to say I was the only genre writer in the class and the teacher insulted me in front of everyone. I’m a bit biased against lit fiction these days.
Until now I couldn’t figure out why she had a problem with what I was doing. This seems to shed some light. Thanks.
Julie
First of all, thanks to everyone for the commentary and feedback
Frank – I’m not sure I have a dog in the fight so much as I want them to get around to sniffing each other in inappropriate places and learning how to play nice. The level of growling and posturing, if I may sprain the metaphor further, looks like 2/3 of your average Dragonball Z episode.
Bill – Thanks, and thanks for the link! Here’s hoping your readers like the piece.
Sully – I’m not so much one for the black velvet Elvis, though my wife and I did visit Graceland once on general principle. Like a lot of the folks here, I’m a big fan of “good”, regardless of label. I’d argue that literary fiction is distinct from mainstream fiction – Dan Brown is mainstream fiction, after all, and if he’s literary I’m a sweet-shooting small forward for Duke – and that all of the genre labels pretty much arose out of the pulp era. Hopefully it’s a short-lived aberration in classification and we’ll be able to get back to worrying more about whether a book is good than where it’s shelved. As for HPL, I did my thesis and first academic publication on him and what I thought was the evidence of deliberate affect in his work. I suspect we’d have a lot to talk about there.
Kuroshii – I made similar “mistakes” back in the day. Don’t regret ‘em one bit, though it did waste what I’m assuming was a perfectly good letter of recommendation from a professor I admired a great deal.
John – Thank you. I’m not sure this is a finished thought yet, but it’s one that rings true for me so far, and I’m pleased it resonates for you as well.
Gary – No argument, and the genre-only types are missing out just as badly. Or, to put it in terms they might understand, it’s like the Mirror Universe episode of Star Trek where…err, forget I said anything. Seriously, though, I have just as hard a time comprehending or having discussion with someone who won’t read a book that doesn’t have dragons in it as I do with someone who won’t read one with dragons in it. Furthermore, I think the writing that you’re doing, and others moving the same direction, is the ultimate answer to the conundrum. You’re taking literary forms and tropes and marrying them to genre effect, and drawing, as you said, the explicit link between internal and external action. That, more than anything else, is going to provide accessibility for the hidebound readers into uncharted territory and ultimately render this debate moot.
Dave – Blame Jonathan Franzen for the imagery of the lox in the boxers. Blame me for being unable to resist the sheer comedic power of the phrase “put a salmon down their pants”. I suspect I’m going to be worrying at this point for a while, though, or for at least as long as that writers’ workshop lasts and keeps priming the pump of thought on it.
Janet – Thanks, Boss. As I’ve said many a time and oft, you’re a tough act to follow.
Teresa – It was indeed Carrion Comfort, all 972 or so pages of it. The neighborhood I was living in at the time was not the nicest after dark, and I figured that in addition to being a great read, the book could either serve as a blunt weapon or, if worst came to worst, stop a small-caliber bullet.
Stan – But was it the Fitzgerald Iliad they were reading? Inquiring minds want to know. I will say that, apart from those train rides, my leisure reading dropped off calamitously while I was in Boston. After wading through hip-deep Wide Sargasso Seas all day and much of the night, I just didn’t have it in me.
John – You are not misreading me in the slightest, and thank you. I still suspect, incidentally, that I bounced off the gates of academia about five years too early. If I’d waiting, I could have snuck into Elysium waving the Penguin edition of Lovecraft along with the journal publications (Lovecraft Studies and Studies in Weird Fiction, respectively) and who knows what would have happened. Nothing wholesome, I’m quite sure of it, and that sound you hear is most likely S.T. Joshi breathing a sigh of relief.
Julie – I’m glad the essay struck a chord, and rest assured, you’re not the only one that’s happened to.
Again, thank you to everyone for the comments and the conversation – they are all greatly appreciated.
Richard — I had twice typed out some relatively deep thoughts about how apt your damaged characters/damaged environment are and Blogger et them as they were being posted. Henceforth, I’m going to have to type things in a text window and paste them here in case they get et again. Suffice it to say that you’ve hit a few nails on the head, and Gary and Skipp — your responses are most thoughtful. Another excellent day in Unplugged land.
–M
A few years ago, while I was completing my MA in Children’s Lit, I applied to another uni to do an MA in Creative Writing. (I’m in Sydney). I was accepted, and the course convenor called me to find out what my areas of interest were. “Well,” I said, “I love sf, fantasy and mystery, so probably I’ll look at writing one or a mix of those.” There was as long silence. “Ah,” she said. “Genre. Well of course, genre’s all very well in its place …” Meaning the garbage. I said, “Yanno? Give my place to someone else, because it’s clear you and I have nothing to discuss.”
Was I a coward? Probably. But I didn’t have the energy to fight that battle. I know someone who did the course subsequently, and her stories made me very glad I chickened out. *g*
As a follow up, while I got my MA in Children’s Lit, because I presented a good argument/examination of the texts, my thesis was criticised for being written in too clear a style.
I ran away from academia and I never went back. Now I’m a fantasy novelist, and proud of it. *g*
Your essay is fantastic, and elucidates one of the lit/genre divides with elegant clarity. Personally, I don’t think there’s much hope of explaining genre to the lit folks in the context of universities, because the lit profs have too much invested in nurturing lit as superior in every way. Too much ego, too much fear, too much intimidation.
So next could you do an essay on why it’s so important for folks within the spec fic community to sneer at each other?????
I’m so glad Alma Alexander pointed me over here. What a wonderful essay.
I can’t help thinking about science fiction and fantasy insiders’ critiques of Mary Sue characters. True, a character who really is too perfect, too universally beloved, too beautiful, etc., can be boring to read about, especially if the author is afraid of subjecting the Mary Sue to suffering or setbacks, but many times I have heard people disdain characters as Mary Sues who were, to my mind, merely competent and relatively undamaged. While litfic readers respond with bafflement when presented with a Campbellian hero, this subset of sf/f readers responds to that same Campbellian hero with a fully developed critical discourse fueled by intense distaste. I wonder how that happens. Internalized self-loathing from too much exposure to academia? A desire to police genre fiction from within, to make it more acceptable to the mainstream? Or possibly they’re born litfic readers who haven’t found their home genre yet? Nah, too essentialist. Anyhow, it’s odd.
Thank you. Your post illuminated some things about my fiction that I hadn’t thought about before.
Karen - I had an interesting time of it academia. Once I demonstrated that I was serious, I got some excellent guidance and instruction from folks at the undergrad and grad levels, but there was some tough slogging along the way. I eventually fell out after the M.A. No luck with that proposed second essay, I’m afraid - my mind is still boggled by the Klingons vs. Imperial Stormtroopers throwdown I saw at DragonCon back in the day.
Sarah - Thank you, and I’m glad you liked the piece. I suspect at this point that the Campbellian hero has been so thoroughly done to death, and often so painfully faithfully in an attempt to provide a classical underpinning to the text, in genre fic that the mere whiff of his appearance is enough to set off alarm bells for some readers. That’s not to say there isn’t a place for that character journey, but at the same time it’s one I’m almost reluctant to take unless there’s strong proof it won’t be covering the literary equivalent of the Jersey Turnpike. I do, however, remain willing to be pleasantly surprised, and hope always to be.
Hey Richard, great story, great storytelling. And, I think, a provocative way at looking at the genre versus literature game. Unlike some, I have no dog in this fight, ( for me the argument is moot. It’s worth reading or it isn’t, I am illuminated, or I’m not) but the dialog between the pit bulls fascinates.
But you hit a homer with your denouement, “competent-veering-toward-kickass is a perfectly sensible starting point for character development.” Man, that’s where my characters are, more to the kickass side, maybe a little arrogant and self satisfied. Okay, they have some hang-ups, but that’s not what it’s all about. Thanks for this perspective, I’ll put it in my little treasure box and pull it out from time to time just for the feel of it.
Frank