I've meant to post Ruth Franklin's Slate review of The Yiddish Policemen's Union. She jabs at both the literary-genre fiction divide and genre boundaries. This week The Valve found a great follow-up--Ursula Le Guin's funny and apt response in Ansible.
In my experience, fiction is often identified as "genre" by either of:
- It's so formulaic
- It’s a fun read... but it's not Shakespeare
Formula central
Genre readers react badly to the charge that genre is formulaic or predictable. Truthfully, genre is formulaic, and the formulas are both a strength and a weakness. Formula is supremely convenient; it helps us choose a movie, or a novel, based on how it will make us feel.Formula also allows us to explore important themes within fixed parameters. Genre writing en masse is so good at this that it can resemble a scientific experiment. The stories of the virgin sacrifice, the isolated community in space, the bargain with the devil have been told an absurd number of times, but these elements still resonate; there's more to tell.
At the same time, all genres can become straitjacketed by the very conventions that make them recognizable. The themes may become outdated; or the formula or the style too rigid. The genre can go stale, no longer exploring themes with sufficient freshness (see Emma on Smart Bitches). It's as if our Magic 8-Ball is stuck, so we can only ask one kind of question because it can only give one kind of answer.
Which is why I sat up straight at Franklin's review:
Rather than forcing his own extraordinarily capacious imagination into its stuffy confines, he makes the genre—more precisely, genres—expand to take him in.Wrestling with conventions doesn't always make for a great novel. In fact it's too cowboyish for some at The Guardian, and even at times for Franklin ("Chabon has produced a paradox: a mass entertainment largely inaccessible to the masses"). But I appreciate when someone makes the attempt.
The cult of Shakespeare
While I can hold my own as a Shakespeare fangirl, I find it a little unfair that he (or James Joyce, or Jane Austen) is so often invoked as the death-knell of genre's aspirations.Franklin introduced the image of genre as zombie:
Michael Chabon has spent considerable energy trying to drag the decaying corpse of genre fiction out of the shallow grave where writers of serious literature abandoned it.Le Guin's riff on the undead theme is worth reading. She ends by attempting to hold off all of Genre with a single totemic literary work:
Where was her copy of Ulysses? All she had on her bedside table was a Philip Roth novel she had been using to prop up the reading lamp. She pulled the slender volume free and raised it up between her and the ghastly golem -- but it was not enough.... Genre breathed its corpse-breath in her face, and she was lost.It's a great metaphor for the way that genre fiction is put down by comparison to an established Great Name: "It's a fun read, but... it's not Shakespeare." The "Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy" form is explicitly intended to deflate; and it depends on a specific type of star power to make its point.
How many Shakespeares are there in the canon? Ignoring the controversy, only one; but there are plenty of Marlowes and Websters. And plenty of Troilus and Cressidas: not every Shakespeare is a Hamlet. I'm not arguing that the "canon" authors are less than fabulous; only that they've been romanticized into literary heroes. Their successes are lauded, their missteps hardly remembered. There's no point arguing against a mythos at that scale.Fiction... essential to people's daily lives
Ruth Franklin is my hero for the day. Here's her interpretation of Chabon's self-styled "rant" introducing McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales:In the "lost genres"—horror, romance, detective, adventure—Chabon saw a tradition of "great writers writing great short stories." Genre fiction, he argued, is simply fun to read, but it also enables a democratic reading experience.... What Chabon seemed to long for most was a culture in which fiction, in whatever form, could permeate the national conversation and be essential to people's daily lives.
Edit: I can has picture... it be thousand wordz. See what I found on Nothing New Under The Sun:
Genre-Zombie says: I can has critic?
9 Comments:
The invocation of Shakespeare or Austen is ironic because their writing does fit into particular genres. Shakespeare's comedies, tragedies and sonnets were written within a 'formula' or 'genre'. Austen wrote love stories with happy endings.
I also wonder how many people thought their writing was great at the time when it was written, and how many people just thought it was 'fun'. I suspect that there were both kinds of responses, but I'm fairly sure not everyone instantly recognised that they were in the presence of genius ;-)
The invocation of Shakespeare or Austen is ironic
Absolutely; that's why I used them. Austen and Shakespeare didn't start out literary heroes, but they've become so today. Joyce, OTOH, set out to be a literary hero, and he achieved it in a genre that's influential but not popular. By either path, once something becomes an icon, it's hard to fight the comparison: "It's not Shakespeare" means "It hasn't achieved mythic status", and arguing over the paths to mythos makes for a convoluted rebuttal. (I should have said before, it's not only genre fiction that's put down this way: "It's not Shakespeare" is just as harshly intended in literary fiction--any fiction.)
I'm of two minds about "reclaiming" authors like Austen for genre romance. Sure, she wrote romances with generally (though not entirely) happy endings. But I think both she and Shakespeare wrote differently from the general run of what we find under "romance" and "comedy".* Not simply in an older style, but with a fuller world fleshed out in characters, symbols, and fabulous use of language--and in their best works, keeping it a rollicking good read. That isn't the most common mode in romance or comedy (now or in the authors' times), but it's an excellent reason to call a book a classic. Which is what I tend to do: call an Austen work a classic, and appreciate that some fiction aspires to that, while some does not.
I realize the reclaiming is part of deghettoizing romance; fine, whatever needs to be done on that head. Reclaiming might expand people's concept of genre fiction. At the same time, I think that effort gets discredited in the public perception by whichever easy contrast first comes to mind: short, to-the-point Harlequin or bombastic dynastic historical, either one gets "It's a fun read, but it's not Austen." (Or, more likely, "I haven't read Austen. Isn't she just women's fiction?")
* To my mind, Richardson's Pamela, with its tight focus on emotion among its main characters and its overtly moralizing dimension, is more akin to most of today's genre romance.
Just saw on Paper Cuts:
“Moby-Dick” without the narrative. There’s the putdown of the week.
I realize the reclaiming is part of deghettoizing romance; fine, whatever needs to be done on that head. Reclaiming might expand people's concept of genre fiction. At the same time, I think that effort gets discredited in the public perception by whichever easy contrast first comes to mind
The main reason I tend to bring up comparisons with Austen or Shakespeare or any of the other of the literary 'greats' is to demonstrate that it's quite possible to write love stories with happy endings which are not 'fluff'.
Of course, as you say, it not enough in itself, because 'that effort gets discredited in the public perception by whichever easy contrast first comes to mind', but sometimes it's a starting point, which we can then follow up with other arguments, and examples of the ways in which particular romances are well-written, thought-provoking, emotionally valuable etc.
to demonstrate that it's quite possible to write love stories with happy endings which are not 'fluff'... it's a starting point
It's also a relatively pithy response to a slam of the "It's not Shakespeare" variety. Would-be Slammer reframes discussion by referencing the "greats"; Don'twannabe Slammee reframes the "greats" themselves.
That's true, and a detailed examination of the merits of any given romance novel is not going to be pithy so there just isn't time for it if you're in a debate with someone who really just wants to do some slamming.
And then there's the comparison meant to praise:
on the back of One Hundred Years of Solitude... it says something like: "The first book since Genesis that ought to be required reading for the human race."
That's quite breathtaking in the extent of the claim it's making, and an ingenious variation on 'the best thing since sliced bread'. I notice that even the other books of the Bible don't get a look in.
It does sound like a prologue to the creed for a post-apocalyptic religion. The harking back to "the beginning"... then mistakes were made... and now a new cycle begins. How appropriate for the Márquez :)
Actually, I love seeing critics say things like that. Now and then I'm bowled over by a book and want *everyone* to read it. When a critic gushes, I hope it means she's had that glorious experience.
Unfortunately, I most often see that type of praise for political "nonfiction"; that's a total turnoff, as it's generally praise for an ideology not a book.
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