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 The themes may become outdated; or the formula or the style too rigid.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?
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Last week Salon.com ran an article excerpted from Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean by Douglas Wolk. Wolk hits several themes pertinent to romance culture. What is it about these genres that creates so much "cultural baggage"? And to what extent is the genre’s culture nostalgic? Wolk also touches on genre defensiveness and the wish for "legitimacy".
I know nothing about comic culture and, as expected, a number of Salon commenters disagree with Wolk. Nonetheless, Wolk’s arguments resonate with some of my recent thoughts.
Nostalgia
Wolk characterizes comic book culture as nostalgic. He has some biting things to say about artists’ nostalgia that clings to the familiar instead of keeping comics vibrant. But his description of readers’ nostalgia connects with a thought I've had on romance readership:
The comics collecting market was called the "nostalgia market" at first.... In mainstream comics, nostalgie de la boue manifests itself as stories whose main point is to trigger nostalgic responses in their older readers--forgotten Golden Age characters being trotted out
"Nostalgia" means, literally, a longing to return home. The word was originally a medical term for "physical and emotional upheaval... related to the workings of memory". If nostalgia arises from a sense of longing, then in a sense, much of romance reading is nostalgic. We sometimes read to reexperience a specific feeling--not for a new experience or to learn someone else's story (see comments on
male stereotypes and
happily ever after).
Character-driven genre fiction is the perfect medium for nostalgic reading: (1) it provides familiar
structures or situations that we know will tug at our emotions in particular ways (see
Sarah Frantz on reader expectations), and (2) it provides well-developed
characters with whom we can identify, increasing our chances of an emotional response—if not by placeholding then by reader identification (see
Laura Vivanco on reader response theory).
Incest and shorthand
Not to draw too solid a correlation here, but Wolk's description of an inward-looking comics culture:It's frustrating to love comics, because there's so much cultural baggage.... A lot of the people... think of comics readers as some kind of secret, embattled fellowship.... That incestuous relationship between audience and medium has been encouraged by the big comics publishers. Mainstream comics pamphlets that are incomprehensible to anyone not already immersed in their culture aren't just the standard now; they're the point.
bears some resemblance to Robin's comments on Smart Bitches and Dear Author on the increasingly telegraphic style of romance novels ("increasing reliance on genre shorthand"):with page counts shrinking, part of the burden of the novel-writing craft is being shifted... to readers—we have to fill in blanks and flesh out characters or worldbuilding and make critical links between plot points. And because so many Romance readers have read so much Romance, I think this process becomes almost unconscious
Like comics, the romance genre has developed its own stock worlds and character archetypes. For fans with a long history in the genre, certain key phrases resonate like a hypnotist’s trigger word; some story components may be unwritten but culturally available. Interestingly, this seems like a style of active readership that would be natural in comics; the comic reader is required to do a great deal of the interpretive work, akin to the views of Stanley Fish, "who argues that the interpretive strategy of the reader creates the text, there being no text except that which a reader or an interpretive community of readers creates" (Laura Vivanco again).
Most romances are set in realistic worlds; the barrier to entry is low except for a few paranormal romances. Nonetheless, insider shorthand is increasing in romance. In comics, the use of genre shorthand results in overtly referential novels that make for more difficult reading. In romance, the genre shorthand in use generally reduces the books' apparent complexity. If a graphical novel cuts out backstory explaining its complex world, the action could be completely incomprehensible. If a romance novel cuts out backstory explaining its characters, it'll likely be readable--but the characters may seem shallowly drawn and their actions, lacking support, arbitrary; or lacking deflection, predictable.
Legitimacy and irony
One experience shared by romance readers and comic readers is a mingling of love and embarrassment for the genre. We enjoy “bodice rippers” even while we revile and deconstruct them.
Wolk says this awkwardness is about "comics culture's slightly miserable striving for ‘acknowledgment’ and ‘respect’...." That could be said of portions of the romance community (witness the hostilities between authors Jennifer Weiner and Curtis Sittenfeld over the status of chick lit; Janet's response to Salon's summer book list; and Kassia Krozser and Diana Peterfreund on reviewing). Certainly it's easier to strike an ironic attitude toward romance or comics because they're in the "not serious literature" ghetto. As Erica Jong said recently, "War matters; love does not. Women are destined to be undervalued as long as we write about love."
Of course, it's not all embarrassment over status. We're in an era that's discomfited by un-ironic praise. Linda Hutcheon writes about the conflation of irony with nostalgia as a characteristically postmodernist mode of discourse. This rings true with the tone of current romance, and romance discourse. We revel and mock simultaneously; we value sweetness but are embarrassed by it.
I'll finish by quoting several of Wolk's points on legitimacy that directly echo current conversations in genre romance:It's hard to imagine what kind of cultural capital the American comics industry (and its readership) is convinced that it's due and doesn't already have…. demanding (or wishing for) a place at the table of high culture is an admission that you don't have one; the way you get a place at the table of high culture is to pull up a chair and say something interesting....
there's a longing for the medium to get more of something that's usually called "legitimacy." There's an element of comics culture, sometimes called (a little derisively) "Team Comics," that gets excited whenever anything that looks like that acknowledgment or respect… turns up in the outside world -- a college class on the graphic novel, a Hollywood movie based on a graphic novel, a newspaper or magazine article about a cartoonist, somebody reading a comic book on a TV show….
The "Team Comics" culture vultures… are driven by the desire to turn their hobby into some kind of success or validation, whether through affluence or cultural power, and that impulse is directly connected to the class aspirations that afflict the entire medium. A lot of comics readers are unhealthily attached to the idea that everyone else thinks what they do is kind of trashy and disreputable, and that they have to prove their favorite leisure activity worthy of respect -- to show the world that they were right all along.
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