I write fantasy. I imagine that if I am ever published, my books will appear in the fantasy/science fiction section of the bookstore. Is that a bad thing? Is it something to be ashamed of? Is fantasy only childish, escapist make-believe? I think the answer to these questions is obvious - a resounding "No."
Genre does not determine the quality or merit of a book. It only describes certain conventions used in the storytelling and helps booksellers decide where to shelve particular books. It is a loose term with ill-defined boundaries. For example, one would probably find Salman Rushdie's Luka and the Fire of Life, a fantasy novel, shelved with literary fiction (which some argue is a genre in itself, with its own sets of conventions and expectations.) On the other hand, China Mieville's The City and the City, though it centers around a mind-bending premise, does not involve supernatural or science fictional elements, and is more of a crime thriller, is found amongst the science fiction and fantasy. And this has mostly to do with how the previous works of these authors have been marketed.
Fantasy is an integral part of our literary canon, from the earliest stories like the Odyssey, Beowulf, and The Arabian Nights to The Tempest, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Gulliver's Travels, Frankenstein, The Time Machine, Brave New World, 1984, Slaughterhouse Five, A Handmaid's Tale, The Life of Pi and so many, many more. It could be said that all fiction is in some sense fantasy, since it is the imagining of things which have not happened. To include heroes, magic, monsters, aliens, strange worlds and technology, imagined futures, does not preclude a work from being literary. But what does it mean to be literary? Is it an important distinction? Does such a thing even exist, or is it just another manner of arbitrary categorization, a way for elites to feel superior? Can we truly hold up some works as being literary, artistic and meaningful, while relegating others to being pure entertainment? I would argue that you can, but it is certainly not a black and white issue. There is not a line where on one side you have literature and on the other you have pulp. Everything has a degree of literariness and a great deal of subjectivity is involved in making these judgements. But I do think there is a strong objective case to be made for why certain works are superior to others.
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| The Persistence of Memory - Salvador Dali |
Floweriness of prose does not make a thing literary. I think there is a misconception that literariness is somehow tied up with long, convoluted sentence structure, big words, figures of speech and experimental style. I blame James Joyce for this. But one only has to look at Ernest Hemingway, one of the great American novelists, but also the poster-boy for sparse, straight-froward prose style. And you can see a spectrum of writing styles within the fantasy genre itself. Compare the long, multi-clause sentences of Fritz Leiber with tight economical prose of Cormac McCarthy's The Road, for example.Being literary does not mean being difficult, obscure or inaccessible. But I do think it means being challenging. It means having a certain level of sophistication, complexity, nuance, or subtlety that makes the reader think about aspects of the human experience or question preconceived notions.
The notion of literariness was the principal concern of Russian formalist thinkers. Their answer to what makes a work literary was what they called defamiliarization (or ostranenie, 'making strange.') It is the process by which art and literature slows down our perception of the familiar, those things that we automatically perceive, those things we take for granted, and thus makes them strange, casts them in a new light.
And here we find the essential difference between genre and literary writing. Genre writing, at the extreme end, aims to be pure entertainment, to be comfortable. It wants to take readers on a thrill ride but not jar them too much. It uses genre conventions as a tool for familiarity. Having the reader linger over a phrase, re-read or stop to think, having the reader "thrown out of the story," is not what the genre writer wants. It is all about momentum and keeping the readers attention (which these days tends to have a very short span) without necessarily connecting or communicating with them.Now, there is nothing wrong with entertainment. And I believe we should judge books based on what they are, the intentions of the author and the expectations of the audience. But there is absolutely no reason why a book cannot be thought-provoking and entertaining at the same time. In fact, I am not entertained by things which do not engage me intellectually. And I find fantasy and science fiction to be the genre which most captivates my mind because it is so well positioned to make things strange.
Nice entry.
ReplyDeleteI don't think the whole literary versus entertainment is either or. I don't tend to enjoy fiction writers who (I feel) are just playing with words for the sake of their beauty. When I want that, I read (or ideally listen to) poetry. But I like my entertainment/escapism to have meaning and to evoke emotions and to make me think also. In order to do this, writers need to choose their words carefully and create worlds and characters that make sense. Plainer language can have literary merit too. It might be the difference between someone liking minimalist painters who create their images and evoke emotion with an economy of line versus someone who prefers ones who apply their paint more liberally and use finer brush strokes to different effect. It's even possible to admire both kinds.
And on a different note, I don't know if you're following the latest Hugo Award "kerfuffle," but the assertion that the genre is only recently being pushed (by the evil SJW "cabal") towards rewarding/recognizing literary writers or writers who embrace social/political themes in their work versus plain ol' adventure stories (also, that this is a bad thing, but that's an argument for another day) is puzzling, given a quick perusal of winners in different categories going back to at least the 50s and 60s. The genre has a rich history of both experimental writing styles and social commentary, and it goes a long way back.
A good account. What you were saying about the formalist thinkers reminds me of one side of what Wordsworth and Coleridge were aiming at with the Lyrical Ballads - making the familiar strange, and making the strange familiar. It could be argued that SFF has that unfamiliar element already built in, so the process can work in reverse, making the reader think by tying the strange and often already metaphysical into ordinary experience. It's not better or worse than doing it the other way round, just different.
ReplyDeleteI read an interesting article about the difference between literary fiction and genre fiction a while back. It claims that genre fiction can indeed be evocative and artistic, and literary fiction can be entertaining, but it's about the approach to storytelling. Genre fiction tends to pull you into the story via interconnected scenes that move the reader through the story as if they were there, i.e. genre fiction relies more on showing than telling. Literary fiction has a narrator that is more introspective, more inclined to "tell" the reader things, and literary authors tell their stories more through creating postcards that show the reader flashes of life, insight, setting or emotion from without (though the language is usually very evocative and descriptive). "This is where I am and what is happening right now." It's not strictly either or or all-or-nothing, of course, but a matter of preponderance. An interesting read.
ReplyDeletehttp://writerunboxed.com/2016/06/01/what-makes-fiction-literary-scenes-versus-postcards/
Great post, and I think you hit the major points regarding how we generally perceive a work as literary. Fantastical elements certainly do exist in plenty of classical works, and so you're right that the test of time may be the truest test.
ReplyDeleteIt's interesting to me that some authors resist the label of SF/F when their work is shelved in the bookstore. Mainly, I still think about how Crichton supposedly resisted the label (thinking back on it, it may have been my sci fi teacher who told us the story), but I can't really find anything online about whether or not that is true. But I do think it is true that speculative fiction is sometimes disregarded simply because it is sci fi/fantasy. As you said, who knows which ones will stick around and resonate in the future - in any genre.