Terry Pratchett and "Real" Literature

We interrupt our regularly scheduled post to bring me getting pissed off at elitist anal sphincter lit snobs! 

[Remember, keep sending in your questions to chris.brecheen@gmail.com with the subject line "W.A.W. Mailbox" and I will answer each Friday.  I will use your first name ONLY unless you tell me explicitly that you'd like me to use your full name or you would prefer to remain anonymous.  My comment policy also may mean one of your comments ends up in the mailbox. And sometimes–not often, but sometimes–I write the hate mail.]


Cathy asks:

Given that you're now (Contrarian allowing) reading some Pratchett - wondered if you had any opinions on this piece?

Pratchett is not a literary genius.

Text below - it does seem to be very much "it can't be literature, it's speculative!".

(Yeah, 'cos Vetinari's approach to immigration into Ankh-Morpork isn't at all a comment on actual politics, and the war with Klatch has nothing to do with the war with Iraq...)

My reply:

My Facebook exploded with this fecal matter–every third or fourth post for a few hours–including several PM's wondering what my take on it might be, so even though I'm in the last 24 hours or so of trying to get out to Burning Man, I'm going to cobble together some barely coherent thoughts about this enema suck of a sentiment.

I can't say much about Pratchett in this case, but boy do I have a thing or three to say about Jonathan Jones. And it's not like the critically obtuse criticism of speculative fiction is anything new for its fans to have to deal with.

Every once in a while someone in academia or the lit sommelier world gets their knickers totally fucking twisted that they don't get more input into what people ought to read. They just can't stand that the plebs dare to find mainstream authors culturally resonating. So obvi they have to go and drop a high and mighty deuce on some popular author just to make sure we all don't forget that they're the real word on what's good according to....well....them. It's not enough to celebrate what they love. They have to wag their fingers at the unwashed masses for daring to enjoy anything else.

The problem is these lit snobs are just....fucking....comically bad at trying to predict what will be canonized or considered literary in the next generation–precisely because their heads are jammed firmly up their ivory towers (if you know what I mean). Double their irrelevance and inability to predict what prose will echo through the ages when they say anything (ever) that dismisses a writer who comes up from the working class (and more recently from other marginalized groups like writers of color) instead of wafting across on a cloud of florid-prosed, high-art-aesthetic privilege.

They hated Walt Whitman.

They hated J.D. Salinger.

They hated Mark Twain.

They hated John Steinbeck.

They hated William Golding.

They hated Charles Dickens.

They hated Fitzgerald.

They absolutely hated Gertrude Stein.

They hated Herman Melville. (Okay, actually, it's hard to blame them for that one.)

And until he had inured himself into Queen Elizabeth's court, they hated Shakespeare.

Oh many of them got past their initial works, and were respected in their lifetimes, but we're not even cracking writers like Jules Verne, Mary Shelly, H.G. Wells, Tolkien, LeGuin, PK Dick, Vonnegut, Delaney, Lessing, Lem, and more. All of them found mainstream literary culture didn't like them–certainly not when they started writing to mainstream appeal, though some of them even long after their deaths. And if you really want to watch lit snobs miss the mark, start including writers of color like Butler, Hughes, McCay, Everett (until the mid 90's when he started winning awards) and DuBois.

Of course, the next generation's lit snobs will clutch these very same authors to their breasts and say how self evident their worth is. They will delight in their simple grounded prose and the way they observe the world with a more "real" eye. It was just those crusty old lit snobs of yesteryear that were the problem, not the entire underlying ideology of elitist bilge upon which much of the literary world rests. Surely this time we've got it straight and those authors all the kids are reading today really aren't even worth looking at.

And it has nothing to do with the fact that they grew up reading the stuff and were willing to give it a second look.....or, you know, even a first. RIGHT JONATHAN???

People find pretty much anything to be insufferable snobs about, but the literary community are among the worst because they are so fucking out of touch with what ends up being culturally relevant. At least the Emily Post table manners folks really actually do know what a fish fork is. Lit snobs, on the other hand, keep acting like Charlie Brown trying to kick the ball. "Don't worry Charlie Brown, this time you can ignore entire swaths of the art you claim to be an authority on with an upturned nose and it won't cost you your street cred for being able to find your literary asses with both hands." What???? Lucy pulled the ball again?

Who would have thought?

Basically there's a really good, relevant, working, topical reason that no one outside the literary community gives much of a fuck what those in the literary community have to say. Sure sometimes they take a run at the bestsellers and those authors feel a sting, but their horses are so high, they really can't understand cultural relevance anymore. And it shows! Their (in)ability to predict the lower class writers who will be the voices of the social struggles of their generation are high among the reasons that they have elitismed themselves into utter irrelevancy.

Air gets a bit thin up in that tower, I guess.

I have to pack tomorrow. We're leaving on Wednesday and I could literally die if I don't make sure every damn thing on that checklist is in the car. But something about these lit snobs has me up after midnight, clacking away furiously. These guys are everything that's wrong with the high art world and its snotty disconnect with actual cultural relevancy and their "right kind of literature" nonsense that epicphailz pretty much every time their mouths open.

At this point I've read about 200 pages of Pratchett, so I can't defend his prose or his stylings or anything really. But what I can do is point out what a monumental unwashed, sweaty sphincter wrote this steaming pile of pimple squeezings.

So here we go (letter not quoted in its entirety–because seriously it's just more of the fucking same):

"It does not matter to me if Terry Pratchett’s final novel is a worthy epitaph or not, or if he wanted it to be pulped by a steamroller. I have never read a single one of his books and I never plan to. Life’s too short."

Full stop. You're done. Go home. Drink a coke, and fuck off with your absolutely irrelevant opinion. If life is too short to read Pratchett it is surely too short to bloviate about Pratchett without having read him.

My cat, Princess Mononoke, has advancing kidney disease and has recently developed incontinence. There's a pretty decent chance when I go into my room, I'm going to find an oily black turd near, but not in, the litter box.

As of your second sentence, I value that turd more than your opinion.

Literally nothing you say after this point contains even an iota of anything I could respect as a writer, an artist, or even as a reader who happens to quite enjoy the literary genre despite all its whitewashed bullshit. I can respect the difference between commercial and literary prose (even if I think it's usually mostly classist crap). I have read thousands of "literary" novels including Marquez and Grass who you later cite as unlamented because I guess they didn't get enough likes on FB to make you happy. [Both magical realists in case that speculative fiction stick up your ass weren't ironic enough.] I can appreciate the difference between them and what might be considered more commercial work and why mainstream appeal is sometimes muted for the artists of the highest artistic integrity.

And yet I STILL cannot respect anything that comes after that second sentence. You just identified yourself as a completely insipid twit. The worst kind of critic imaginable (though sadly common among the lit snobs): one who attacks a work that you haven't even engaged. You've got this snotty, condescending paragraph about harder literature being "worth it," but you can't even be arsed to cruise through 250 pages to have the first fucking clue what you're talking about.

Can you imagine any other artist doing this? In any discipline at all? "I haven't ever seen a Scorsese film, but I'm sure they're crap." "I haven't ever listened to Vivaldi, but I'm going to write a whole piece about how he's sub par." "I've never really looked at a Picasso. Glanced at it once. It looked kind of like he needed to learn to draw."

The reason those examples sound absurd is because it's preposterous to have an opinion on art that you haven't actually experienced. In any other discipline it becomes instantly recognizable as ludicrous. Only in literature is there some sort of latitude for critics to have opinions of works they've never actually read.

Who in the actual fuck aggrandizes their own opinions to the point that they believe they can honestly talk about a work with any authority without having actually engaged it? Lit snobs. That's who.

"I don’t mean to pick on this particular author, except that the huge fuss attending and following his death this year is part of a very disturbing cultural phenomenon."

Of course you do. That is exactly, precisely what you mean to do. You took a run at an über-popular author when he was prominent in the news because of his death and even more prominent because his the book he was working on when he died is due out today. You did this for the topicality of it, but without doing your due diligence as a respectable critic. Maybe you did it to cash in on the traffic. You will probably make more money from what you wrote trashing an author you've never even read than in the rest of your writing career. Certainly if you approach everything you do with as zero ass (we can't even call it half ass, can we?) research as you did Pratchett.

But even if you didn't do it for the money or the lulz, you absolutely used the timing to shoehorn in a soapbox mounting of your smug egotism about how awful people are for having feels about authors dying.  Sure, maybe you're not actually exploiting a beloved author's death and you really, honestly, truly just want to take his fans who deign to mourn popular authors' deaths down a peg or two. But then....actually, no, that's about the best thing that can be said at this point.

"Their books, like all great books, can change your life, your beliefs, your perceptions."

Funny, I've heard the same thing said about Pratchett.

Everyone reads trash sometimes.

Not everyone, right John? Not you. You don't lower yourself to anything that common. You're better than those potboilers, right?

"Because life really is too short to waste on ordinary potboilers. I am not saying this as a complacent book snob who claims to have read everything."

Jesus you just got through saying everyone reads trash. Which is it? Or is this entire article as poorly conceived as an attack on an artist you are UTTERLY unfamiliar with?

We would probably settle for having read the books in question, you pretentious asshole. You know, the ones on which you are now claiming to be a literary authority? The only thing you have said with this is that you ARE a complacent book snob. You are complacent not to challenge yourself to read a book before you take an exploitive smear of author (who's too dead to fire back) who has resonated with millions. You aren't even willing to face the possibility that you might be wrong. To me that shows how complacent and snobby you are.

Also callow and ignorant...if you're keeping score.

"Actual literature may be harder to get to grips with than a Discworld novel, but it is more worth the effort. By dissolving the difference between serious and light reading, our culture is justifying mental laziness and robbing readers of the true delights of ambitious fiction."

Laziness like say, not reading an author before discussing their flaws with the world? Laziness like presuming an unengaged work of art has no ambition? Laziness like letting other (also priggish) people dictate to you what is cultured and what you ought to enjoy? Perhaps you mean lazy like the intellectual laziness demonstrated by arbitrating aesthetic ideas like "actual literature" and "true delights" instead of discovering those things for oneself? Did you mean more like the logical laziness that is evident in the fallacy of false dichotomy in the suggestion that a reader could not somehow enjoy both kinds of books? Or was this just about the laziness of humans with the temerity to spend their money and time on art and entertainment that they enjoy.

I think it's important we nail down what caliber of laziness we're talking about here.

"This summer I finally finished Mansfield Park. How had I managed not to read it up to now? It’s shameful. But at least now it’s part of my life. The structure of Jane Austen’s morally sombre plot, the restrained irony of her style, the sudden opening up of the book as it moves from Mansfield Park to Portsmouth and takes in the complex real social world of regency England – all that’s in me now. Great books become part of your experience. They enrich the very fabric of reality. I don’t just mean 19th-century classics, either. I also read Post Office by Charles Bukowski this summer. My God, what a writer. Bukowski is a voice from hell with the talent of an angel. I must read every word by him."

Hey here's a fun game. For fifty points, can you guess two other writers who were soundly rejected by the literary establishments of their day? Did you guess Austen and Bukowski? (25 points each.) Good thing the plebs were willing to lift them up to the point where the lit snobs simply had to take a longer look. Or, GOSH, you'd never have that morally sombre plot or restrained irony. (Seriously did you get that shit off of Sparknotes because I can talk about Mansfield Park without sounding like I'm reading literary criticism off the back of a cereal box.) It's almost like cultural relevance involves....being relevant in a culture......or something.

Oh Bee Tee Dubs, I know another author who is really good at irony and social satire....

"But Terry Pratchett? Get real. It’s time we stopped this pretence that mediocrity is equal to genius."

But you wouldn't even know, would you? You're like the asshole fuckwit in my lit classes who kept raising his hand during the discussions but hadn't read the book. He thought the teacher didn't realize he was just saying a bunch of bullshit until the day she shot him down: "Sorry Dan, I only want the opinions of people who've actually done the reading today. Your thoughts aren't actually germane." Oops. I guess doing the reading you want to talk about as if you know fuck all about it actually IS important.

You would think people would have learned after the whole Lynn Shepherd debacle that admitting you haven't read an author you're about to roast makes you look like you are a particularly smelly drip of willfully ignorant butt-crack sweat. Oh let me guess, you didn't read that either?

You know, my great-grandkids might be sitting in a Pratchett class fifty years from now discussing the close reading of one of the great turn-of-the-century satirists. (Notice I don't claim to know if he's a genius since I am still only about half way through my first book. See how that works?) This is because time and again it's those pesky plebs who decide what is culturally relevant, not the ivory tower. Not everything is about prose and linguistic flourishes. Sometimes it's about who speaks to a generation against the elitist establishments of power who dismiss them without even really knowing what it is they dismiss.

But if my grandkids are in such a class, I'm pretty sure they will have to suffer some kind of viral article (or futuristic wavecast or something) by a bloviating pee hole of a tiny man who sneers at the great working class authors of the day without ever even reading them because that's what a bunch of upper class white dudes told him he ought to do. "You all should be reading Pratchett," he'll say. "My god, what a writer!" And he'll think that makes him a better person because he didn't even have the imagination required to question such classist emu-diarrhea bloviation. To say nothing of the incredible wealth of imagination–whole worlds of it–created by the person he refused to read.

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No Apologies! A Defense of Why Speculative Fiction Needs No Defense (Part 7)

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Conclusion

What ignites our imaginations isn't realism. It never has been—not through the recorded history of our stories, and all we know about oral tradition.

What ignites our imaginations is that which is just outside our experience. Something rooted in what we know, with just a tiny bit beyond the pedestrian. The power of metaphor, allegory, and parable drew authors of the past and draws authors of the present time and again to write outside the realm of the banal. It is the ability of speculative fiction to bring fresh life to age-old philosophical questions and engage in social critique that gives it such strength.

We learn in reader response theory that no author can avoid a reader coming to the table of their fiction without pre-generated thoughts and feelings. This is more important in the age of identity politics and globalization than ever before. Confirmation bias and disconfirmation bias constantly get truly quality works of literature disregarded because of their message, themes, or even criticisms.

Speculative fiction upsets this balance. A piece written today about gay marriage—no matter how poignant, no matter how filled with concrete details, no matter how expansive, no matter how generous, no matter how honest, and no matter how empathetic—would find mostly an audience of people who’d made up their minds, one way or another, about the issue. That voice is lost and diminished by the preconceptions and prejudices of the reader. Those who agreed would nod their heads and relate. Those who disagreed would roll their eyes and probably never finish.

However, through speculative fiction the themes and relationships and characters and IDEAS can be explored “under the radar” of prejudice. A reader may not realize that the forbidden love between elves and humans is an allegory for same sex relationships. They may not realize that the criticism of class issues and the propaganda of meritocracy that exists in this lunar colony is really a critique of the U.S., even if a direct criticism would have slammed their patriotism-addled minds shut to the concepts by page two. The issues, the inequities, the emotions can all be explored without encountering the preconceptions of the reader. And even when such an allegory is blatantly transparent, it somehow still has power as an abstraction to inform—as a long and full history of the use of metaphors to make points clearly illustrates.

Lewis Carroll’s criticism of Victorian society wouldn’t have been nearly as interesting if not seen through the eyes of Alice or written up as expository essays, or perhaps a “realistic” tourist through the world of Victorian idiosyncrasies and political failings—indeed Carroll may have ended up a fair bit shorter and in little need of a hatter himself after such a work.

When gritty realism will get you executed, maybe talking cards aren't so bad.

Shelly’s warnings of science’s proclivity to rush ahead without consideration for consequence would not have been as engaging without a monster in it.

Nonfiction about the communist revolution isn’t particularly interesting. Even a fiction piece characterizing the ring leaders of the communist revolution and delving into their psyche would have fairly limited appeal. But a group of farm animals taking over the farm from its owners captures the imagination with the supernatural. Right or wrong, the opinions of half the English speaking world on the communist revolution are based largely upon the power of Orwell's talking pigs…upon the power of speculative fiction.

Or had we forgotten that Orwell liked to write fantasy and science fiction when issuing the blanket statement that “genre is not real literature”?

My point in playing the Star Trek TNG clip in the previous section was not to show how great Star Trek was or how great Data was or how great that clip was, but to illustrate the strength of speculative fiction. If anything the clip suffers from The Next Generation’s habit of getting a little too preachy when the music starts and Picard begins his didactic-a-thon.

And yet, from this simple clip, we see where science fiction can take us if we give it half a chance. The works of Hume or Descartes are a bit dry, and “realistic” fiction exploring the nature of sentience and philosophical questions so directly would probably come off at least as bad as Ayn Rand exploring the philosophy of objectivism through Atlas Shrugged (the mention of which caused every English major's anal sphincter to slam shut just now).

In the TNG clip however we can see several implications and ideas being explored, not just about possible morality surrounding our ongoing development of artificial intelligence, but also about what it means to be conscious, what it means to have a soul, and why we are sentient. It touches on slavery and exploitation as deep issues of social and cultural morality. All because Data wanted to resign. That is the power that speculative fiction brings to the table--a power that is idiotic to ignore.

If “genre” is going to mean “bad” within literary circles then we have to stop assuming something is genre until we have established its quality, and that judgment must come without regard to a quantum laser, a superpower or prominent canines.

If “genre” is simply going to mean possessing of certain stylistic characteristics or plot elements then we must acknowledge that there can be—and is—good genre, great genre, canon genre. And we must acknowledge that more is still being produced today by superb writers.

In either case, the conversations within the literary community must shift from the mode of storytelling to the effectiveness of the storytelling, and the prejudice against certain elements must be rethought. The alternative is to face an increasing backlash from the speculative fiction community who are upset that they can’t get a fair shake—and who have absolutely every right to be so. Further, the sneering genre-bending by today's avant garde will make such classifications increasingly meaningless mostly because (as has always and ever been the case with academia in the arts) the Ivory Tower doesn't seem to realize that it IS the establishment that modern artists seek to upset.  The dismissive attitude of the literary community to a work, simply because it contains a speculative element (and conversely to shelter the "literary" speculative fiction from the label), must be exposed as nothing but baseless prejudice and rank elitism…and breathtaking stupidity.

I want a world with good, well-written speculative fiction.

I want speculative fiction that engages in subtext and lives up to its potential as an art form with artistic integrity.

I want to talk about what is effective without a prejudice about what “counts,” and let what counts (or not) speak for itself.

I want a world where literary voices are hard on the settings of some authors that add nothing to the story—but that they do so without regard to whether that setting is a starship, a castle, or a rehab clinic.

No not THAT Starship.
Fire the image-finding intern.....again.

How much better would a writing teacher be to engage a student with the idea “that dragons historically symbolizes some human failing that your hero needs to slay,” rather than to simply, flatly demand its removal before proceeding. I want instructions (and instrucTORS) that concern themselves with craft rather than content. I want to discuss fiction, irrespective of its hasty generalization into some pigeonhole.

Further, I want the lit sommeliers of the world to get their heads out of their collective asses and realize that it is not speculative fiction, but literary fiction that is the new kid in town. It is literary fiction that needs to work on its street cred if it wants to be anything but a joke (outside the ivory tower), and that they can’t just dismiss the most powerful storytelling medium of recorded history just by sneering through their monocles.

Speculative fiction is the giant talking Ents that roam the forest where our sommeliers are standing, even as they casually discuss how forests are inferior. Perhaps it is time for them to look around before the Ents grow too irritated with their nonsense.

Forest...trees...you get the precise idea I'm trying to convey about backlash and consequence and seeing things for what they are and how such hubris might be part of the human condition...even though the metaphor has talking trees in it right?

No Apologies! A Defense of Why Speculative Fiction Needs No Defense (Part 6)

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As the vaunted literary minds increasingly eschew and disdain genre, two things happen that form a downward spiral and self fulfilling prophecy:

1) Those writers who want to be taken seriously by the literary world do not consider speculative fiction viable and avoid it–much to the diminishment of those modes of expression. Many artists, of course, don't care what others tell them isn't worthy of their art (they simply create what they are moved to create), but enough do consider the trajectory of their career that some talent pulls away from the genre on principle.

2) However, the far more pernicious and damaging effect is that those who are drawn to speculative fiction find themselves less interested in the opinions or education of the very literary minds that could help them deepen their work with subtext and stronger prose. They find the doors barred, the backs turned, the minds closed, the eyes narrowed dubiously, and the path to literary speculative fiction overrun with gatekeepers who do not take it seriously (and further make it absolutely clear that they WILL not take it seriously).

Speculative fiction is then relegated to niche reviews and exposure, parallel literary awards and accolades, and its own literary sub-community. (Which is, of course, exactly what has happened in the last sixty to seventy years.) The literary community is then increasingly the target of well-deserved backlash for its baseless prejudice. Then the process is started all over again. Camps are formed, lines are drawn, and each side begins to develop contempt for the other. Over and over again the whole kabuki theater is enacted where good genre is ignored, bad literary fiction is ignored and only bad genre "counts." The absurdity is never examined.

Speaking of the human condition....
Oh wait. Supernatural entity: GENRE.

While some genre writers will grit their teeth and play by the rules of an MFA program for long enough to get a degree and get out, many avoid them. They would love to have that kind of learning experience with their craft, but they will probably never devote that much time and effort (and money) to a world that openly castigates them. The contempt with which a spell or a robot is held would make anyone drawn to create such stories wonder if it's worth years of their life. Even if they go to get the skills and beat a hasty retreat, they will ever feel like they are in hostile waters.

And in many cases this is absolutely the MFA program's loss.

Prejudice is invisible until examined, and the lit sommeliers have not yet examined theirs. Most of them would be horrified if a writing program openly told a writer from Nigeria that the program will not be accepting any post-colonial works as they are filled with tropes of EuroAmerican oppression and often poorly written by the standards of US academia. Unthinkable! However when it comes to Speculative Fiction they have absolutely no qualms saying "I've no interest in making you a better writer if your subject matter isn't something I approve of." If anything, many of them are stubbornly digging in.

Come on widdle Lit Snob.
Orwell wrote sci fi and had talking animals.
You like Orwell don't you? And maybe a sugar cube?

The truly inane thing about our darling, sweet, lovable sommelier’s prejudice is precisely how much they have pitted themselves against human nature with their insistence that they know what’s best for us—or at least what’s best. As if standing and demanding that the sky is bright green for long enough will convince people that maybe this whole "blue thing" was just a phase. They stomp their feet and with purple faces and flying spittle insist that a lack of realism destroys the message, ignoring the whole time how powerful messages of speculative fiction can be.

If anything the pre-generated audience that genre publishers can count on to flock to the mediocre offerings speak volumes to speculative fiction’s ability to capture the imagination of its readers. JK Rowling—whose prose almost every fan of speculative fiction will admit is a little rough around the edges—wrote 7 of the 20 best-selling books of all time. Six of those twenty are religious tesxts. Not too many people can say they have written more bestsellers than God.

It’s almost as if a school for wizards captivates our sense of wonder.

Funny that.

The power of unrealistic elements lies in their contrast. Though snobs are loathe to admit it, the sharp relief of what is unrealistic with what is all too realistic (and every bit of speculative fiction has something rooted in reality) creates a contrast that brings out what the writer is examining.  Much like how any art draws out the contrasts of various elements (like beauty and its opposite, life and death, or the banality of sublime moments and the sublimity of banal ones). Like the technique of using vibrant color in the background to bring out what is simple and ordinary. (A popular example of this would be the costuming of Christine in A.L. Webber’s Phantom Of The Opera during the Masquerade ball.) This contrast can actually help bring our attention TO the human condition in a way that literary fiction fails.

Oh yes, literary fiction’s precious human condition is not only not lost on speculative fiction, but is arguably better explored by it.

See, while literary fiction does love a chiasmus, a paradox, and seems to adore liberal use of juxtapositions, the contrast of a setting that draws into relief that humanity seems to have escaped them. In many ways science fiction is like science itself—it isolates the variable that it seeks to explore. We will stop to think more about what it means to be afraid in a terrible situation when Data the android shuts his emotion chip off before facing the Borg than we will to read a page of vivid descriptions about how scared someone is before battle.

What has also escaped our darling, sweet, naïve sommelier’s notice is the irony that sometimes concepts are so big that reams of realism exploring them simply are not as effective as a conceit that explores what they are not. It is entirely possible to learn more about the human condition watching Data make a mess of things, be almost human, or have his humanity challenged than by reading gallons of ink spilled about childhood angst or people coming to terms with their own prejudice.

Take the clip below from Star Trek: The Next Generation*. A season 2 episode called "Measure of a Man." This clip was from a show that HAD commercials when it aired, so you can't get much more "commercial" than this. Yet it explores what it means to be human in seven minutes better than many textbooks written with the task in mind.

*The original version of this article was a paper for school that had an oral presentation component to it.  I showed them this. The instructor, who had been proudly boasting that she was one of the anti-speculative sommeliers, found herself more and more quiet as my presentation went on. By the end she was silent, and clearly thinking. This clip was the end of my presentation. After it was over, she sighed and said, “That was really good. Maybe we should rethink how tough a stance we’re taking with our department’s pedagogy.” I don’t know if she ever brought it up in a department meeting, or if she convinced anyone else if she did (I hit the no-genre pedagogy over and over even after this, so I doubt it), but I always wonder about that exchange. What kind of unexamined prejudice must exist if an undergrad can play a clip from a 20 year old show of pretty generic sci-fi ideology and expose a member of the faculty in a Humanities department a completely new concept.

The Exciting Conclusion (Part 7)

No Apologies! A Defense of Why Speculative Fiction Needs No Defense (Part 5)

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Literary sommeliers’ failure to acknowledge speculative fiction is a classic case of not realizing the forest for the trees because of cognitive dissonance that comes from bias. 

If you don't believe me (maybe you think they're just too smart to make the kinds of mistakes I'm accusing them of) watch how the irony comes through with absolute clarity from even a cursory glance at the canon.

Because buckle up kiddos. Much of the best literature in the English language is speculative.

The term “speculative fiction” was coined by Robert Heinlein. At the time he intended it as an exact synonym for science fiction, and didn’t even intend it to include fantasy. But like most coined phrases and the cranky old white folks who coin them, the word got away from his prescriptive ass, moved out, carved out a life of its own, and did things its parents wouldn't approve of while singing Billy Joel's "My Life."

It grew and changed despite what he wanted. People can be so pesky about ignoring curmudgeons who claim fiat over semantics. While there are still some Heinlein purists and some contention about precise meaning these days, speculative fiction describes a number of sub-genres mentioned earlier [science fiction, fantasy, horror, supernatural fiction, hero (or superhero) fiction, utopian and dystopian fiction, apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction, alternate history, and possibly even more] and tends to encompass any kind of fiction where there is something "out of the ordinary" or "unrealistic" happening—something that couldn’t really happen, didn’t happen, or hasn’t happened yet.

In a sense, any time an author is saying “what if” in an impossible way it falls under the auspices of speculation, and speculative fiction. We will ignore the GLARING irony that this is essentially what any fiction does and that only NON-fiction is not in some way speculative. (I mean do people think Victorian Realism with it's alls-well-that-ends-well denouements and bad people--always disfigured physically--getting their comeuppance is even a little realistic?) Any fantastic element, be it technology yet to be invented, magic, or creatures that never were fall under the umbrella of speculative fiction in modern parlance.

Some try to limit the word’s scope to narrow various communities of readers--recently the die hard hold outs of "Only Sci Fi and Fantasy have basically been forced to put a few more chairs at the table because of the popularity of young adult distopian literature.  Others cast the umbrella far and wide, pulling in even magical realism, literary fantasy, and sometimes surrealism. (I suspect even our lit sommeliers will have to grudgingly admit that waking up to find out that you have turned into a cockroach does lack a certain realistic je ne sais qua about it--oh Kafka you genre hack!) 

~snotty voice~
Sorry, I don't read books where magical things happen.
It's not real literature.

Regardless of what sub-genre’s are included or excluded from our list, or why, there’s a bit of a linguistic shell game going on with speculative fiction and the gig is up.

The term “speculative fiction” enjoyed a modicum more respect in literary circles for a time, being used by snotty writers who didn't deign to write science fiction or fantasy (even though that's exactly what they were writing); however, most of speculative fiction’s traditional sub-genres generally carry the full stigma, and it seems like the literary community is starting to catch on to the semantic switcheroo.

Regardless of terms, lit snobs are running into the trouble of whether speculative fiction genre is a descriptive term or a prescriptive one, and the ramifications of trying to have it both ways. (Here's a hint: they can't.) If they use it to describe fiction with certain supernatural, preternatural, or theoretical elements within it, they have to accept that good fiction can be genre. If they use it to describe only trope-laden writing, they're going to have to release their knee-jerk prejudice of these elements as there are plenty of fresh, innovative writings that contain said elements. Their attempts to use terms however they goddamned well feel like it lack intellectual rigor and integrity and, to be blunt, comes across as exactly the petulant elitism it is.

While we might kerfluffle over the exact meaning of how the word "speculative" ought to be used, let’s keep using the Wikipedia conventions to get a sense of how it IS used. Let us also acknowledge (as our sommeliers seem to have conveniently ignored) that speculative fiction has been around for much, much longer than its current label. In much the same way as things reflected electromagnetic waves of 520-570 nanometers long before the angel begged to be allowed to call it “green,” speculative fiction has been around before it had a term to denigrate define it. If we look back through the canon literature we can find it replete with examples of speculative fiction.

And this is where the sommeliers get into big, big trouble.

The fountainhead of English literature is a story of a superhero vs. a horror monster. Beowulf's inhuman skill, prowess, and even breath-holding ability remind one more of Professor Xavier’s mutant condition than the human condition. He fights horrific monsters who embody the most terrible fears his culture can imagine, each with descriptions so grisly and horrid that they feel like they belong on the pages of a Stephen King novel. Easily this could be classified as heroic fiction, superhero fiction, horror, or supernatural fiction.

In the Green Knight our intrepid hero gets into a head chopping-off contest...AND HE LOSES—not exactly the pinnacle of realism.

Le’Mort De’Arthur has all the elements of fantasy, even at the time Malory wrote it.

The Iliad and the Odyssey are rife with gods and demi-gods.

Plato’s Republic is utopian fiction.

Gilgamesh is another tale of a superhero in a world of monsters.

Spencer’s The Fairy Queen was actually written with the express intention of creating speculative fantasy as a political allegory.

Shakespeare had fairies, ghosts, magic and still we would go so far as to suggest that perhaps he had a thing or two on the insightful side to say about the human condition and may even have written "real art."

Dante described an impossible journey through an impossible place—realism was not on the menu.

Easily two thirds of anything within the canon from before the Age of Reason is speculative fiction. But ask anyone in the literary community if the canon is filled with genre, and they would find the question absurd.

Of course there are more modern examples as well. Lewis Carroll created a very fantastic setting across two of the most well known books of all time. (Though placed in something called the “nonsensical genre,” these books arguably contain speculative elements--journeys, quests, dragons, talking animals, magic.)

Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein would be considered science fiction by any bellwethers today.

Nathaniel Hawthorne was always writing about dark and foreboding forces just beyond the realm of possibility, and “P’s Correspondence” is basically alternative history.

Mark Twain wrote repeatedly about time travel—is he a genre hack?

And this is to say nothing of more modern authors who wrote, or write, almost exclusively within speculative fiction like LeGuin, Poe, Orwell, Bradbury, and Clarke. Each has given us literature of tremendous value. And perhaps one of the most confusing case to people who attempt to define speculative fiction by its elements and all genre as sub-par writing, is the case of H.G. Wells. If we do widen our semantic net to include magical realism, literary fiction, and surrealism we must suddenly have Kafka, Marquez, and Esquivel—all strong, literary writers. But propose to literary sommeliers that these authors are genre and you might be run out of town to banjo music.

The question really isn’t why the literary community won’t let speculative fiction sit at the big kid’s table; the question is did they seriously think that by simply declaring that they were real and serious literature, they would fool the world? Did they seriously think no one would notice that over half the canon comprises a type of literature they say has no value? Did they seriously believe that we would fail to realize that when speculative fiction is good, they give it other names like “magical realism” —perhaps one of the most patently ironic names for a genre ever—or “literary fantasy” (as they have labeled Murakami...since he continues to have dimensional travel, fantasy elements, AND is probably going to win a Nobel Prize for literature one of these years). This whole charade of literary fiction is like the little kids at Thanksgiving putting on airs and insisting that their sippy cups are champagne flutes and that actually they are the adults.

Play your cards just right and "minority" becomes "elite."

These question of why this is happening is interesting, and the answer is more so. The term “genre” didn’t become a dirty word until the post-war era. The upper-middle class has struggled hard in the modern age to maintain its control over the “rules” of polite society, and for what should or shouldn’t be taken seriously.

They want to tell you how to talk, how to eat, how to converse, how to argue, how much body hair is okay, how to spend money, how to dress, how to bathe, how to debate, and of course, what to listen to, what to watch, and what to read. The last bastion for the bourgeoisie to claim they have the lease rights on what makes for propriety is to control the very conversation itself--as they have across many of the arts.

Is it any wonder that few new art forms are considered “real art” in their own generation and that their most stanch critics come from the upper middle class (usually of established academia)? Is it any wonder that with the incorporation of millions of new voices, Bloom and company STILL cannot seem to separate literary canon from the voices primarily of dead white males? And in much the same way that social justice has pointed out that the “tone” argument is just a way to maintain the status quo, so have many speculative authors realized that their struggle for acceptance is equally rooted in a judgment about what is valid that comes from a very specific power stratum, and a very specific demographic, and a very specific class. By controlling the “rules” it is entirely possible to rig the outcome, and so by defining “what is literature” the literary world has been able to keep the genre of literary fiction in power.

I'm not racist, sexist, ethnocentric, heteronormative, or anything like that!
Heterosexual, white, men really are the best writers.

And why not? Of course this is the case given the timber of the discourse. It becomes impossible for speculative fiction to “redeem” itself when none of its good examples “count.” Its illustrious tradition within the canon is conveniently ignored. Any modern examples of good speculative fiction are relabeled as literary fantasy or magical realism or just given a pass.

If you take away everything good, of course what is left is going to be...not good. A two year old can keep up with that concept. And then, of course, literary folk get to keep pointing at genre as inferior writing, and they have ensured that they will be correct. Further, when non-genre fiction is NOT held accountable for all the crap it produces, the issue of confirmation bias is compounded. No one is gathering up all the examples of mediocre gritty fiction in halfway houses with homophobic dads.

On to Part 6

No Apologies! A Defense of Why Speculative Fiction Needs No Defense (Part 4)

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There is no need for lovers of speculative fiction to be apologists for there is a strata of speculative fiction that is good--even very good, literary, and possibly "the best writing you'll ever read in English." This strata is not particularly rare or hard to find either. There is no need for fans to cry obsequiously: “If you but dig through the mountain of crap, quality exists. Diamonds in the rough are there if only you look hard enough…” There is no call for such a disclaimer that most is bad but some is good. Indeed, the literary world misses the boat by only looking at a genre’s worst contribution, and they are fools to do so.

I apologize for Fahrenheit 451.
Would it be too ironic if I burnt it?

Every genre, indeed all fiction, and actually even all forms of art, have within them a continuum of quality. It isn't exactly shocking to see such a continuum within speculative fiction.

“Realistic” fiction is no stranger to flat characters. Realistic fiction is no stranger to tropes. Realistic fiction has settings that do nothing to add to the story. Some realistic fiction is good, considered, and exemplary of its craft and other realistic fiction is hastily produced and of little worth to humanities (except for possibly the observations of lots of such work for general trends).

Art in general has the same continuum. Television, film, theater, painting, and sculpture all have quality examples and poor examples of work. Therefore, of COURSE genre fiction has poor quality, and bad examples.

This is not a remarkable observation.

The problem is focusing on this poor quality work to the exclusion of everything else. The problem is failure to acknowledge poor quality in all art mediums—including the vaunted “literary” fiction—and treating genre like it is somehow special in this regard. The problem is ignoring genre fiction's contributions to great writing, literature, and even canon.

Genre has given us The Maltese Falcon, The Moonstone, The Tropic of Cancer, Blood Meridian, Brave New World, 1984, Invisible Man, Animal Farm, Slaughterhouse Five, Wuthering Heights, Lady in White, A Christmas Carol and so much more. I realize these titles in no way influence modern western literature, but they....

Oh wait. They do.

No one conveniently forgets the Raymond Carver when they’re talking about minimalism. No one would describe minimalism only in terms of its worst, late-eighties emulators. Why then are they comfortable with forgetting great speculative fiction when examining the latest slap-dash 10-page filler piece for the September issue of Asimov magazine? Indeed, if we rounded up all of the worst minimalism we could find from every source, and CONVENIENTLY left out Carver, Wolff, Lish, Beattie, and a few others of note, we could probably make a stunningly good case that all minimalism is always atrocious writing.

See how that works? I can do it too.

No one is defending this.
Staring maybe, but not defending.

Let's make sure we understand that no one is suggesting that a conversation discussing quality would not be worthwhile. Speculative fiction fans routinely castigate their own for prose quality. Though many (correctly) point out that J.K. Rowling got nearly an entire generation hooked on reading, only the most rose glasses fans don't know her writing has some deep troubles. It is the subject of considerable amusement in the reading world that during the last week or two before the release of Deathly Hollows, a copy of the book was leaked online, but readers were unable to distinguish whether it was genuine or second rate fan fiction.

Don't even get me started on the uncharitable things said about Stephanie Myers's writing.

No one is defending the dregs of speculative fiction, and no serious writer or student of craft merely wants to be given leave to write at non-engaging level because they've made the setting be....IN SPACE.

But... (and this is a big but)

There is a real and genuine harm being done by our well-intentioned sommeliers by hyper-focusing on the worst that speculative fiction has to offer, ignoring the best, and wading into the discourse with raging confirmation biases and knee-jerk prejudice. With their selective vision about genre fiction, the sommeliers have set themselves up to always be right. Their “proof” is irrefutable because they ignore any examples that disprove them. Their own offerings unassailable because they cheerfully ignore the gallons of ink spilled on mediocre and bad writing with their own genre, and they ignore the best that speculative fiction has to offer.

The problem is the corner they have painted themselves into with this kind of rank elitism and blatant lito-centric value judgments. In declaring genre inferior, they have pitted themselves mostly against semantics.

And examining those semantics reveals how absurd their position is.

Especially facing trends of 21st century authors to defy genre, sommeliers myopic prejudice in this regard has become particularly...(what's the nicest way to put this?)....idiotic. In recent decades, the presence of a speculative element—be it a monster, a space ship, or an inhuman power—automatically makes a piece "genre," which to their minds means that it cannot be good. After all, they argue, look at how much bad speculative fiction there is. Realism trumps! And while this is prejudice is damaging in and of itself, it requires a complementary perception to be complete and that truly demonstrates the power of this prejudice to create blinders that are as justified and defended as the blinders surrounding racism or sexism or homophobia. (Again, I want to point out that this illustrates a behavior pattern of prejudice in action and is not meant in any way to establish a moral equivalency to bigotry.)

It's not enough to only focus on the bad in something. If you really want to be judgmental, you also have to ignore the good. If you ever want to see a Creative Writing instructor with a no-genre policy lose their shit, ask them what “genre” means specifically, listen carefully to their definition, and point out exceptions to their criteria in the reading list they gave you for the class. (Or maybe this is just me.)

Because here's what happens: when lit snobs see magic and supernatural entities within excellent literature, suddenly it is no longer speculative fiction. Suddenly it gets a pass.

Ain't nothing here but us grittily realistic oracular witches.

If it’s modern fiction, it is usually relabeled as “magical realism." Fantasy that lit snobs like becomes "literary fantasy." Even the dreaded science fiction" gets relabeled as "futurism" (just ask Atwood fans).

This is where the blind pathology of prejudice and rank confirmation and disconfirmation bias comes into the literary community’s relationship with speculative fiction. This is where its fans and writers have the most legitimate right to be outraged. It’s bad enough to focus on the worst of a genre’s contribution as exemplary, but the sin is compounded when the best of a genre’s contribution is reclassified, or isn’t counted at all. In many ways it is analogous to so many other kinds of stereotyping and prejudice (racial, sexist, sexuality-based) where only the examples that fit preconceived notions of what to expect are “counted” and the rest are forgotten, rationalized, or otherwise converted into token non-examples.

The literary community is particularly guilty of this prejudice. Rather than simply admit that there is good science fiction and bad science fiction (or fantasy or whatever), they twist themselves into pretzels trying to create new categories so they can go right on claiming that all science fiction is bad. You might think students of humanities ought to know better than to behave in such ways, but if anything they just have more sophisticated and well expressed rationales to justify what amounts to the highest order of knee-jerk intolerance.

I wish I could even say that this is always an unconscious manifestation of human failing. Sadly no. Sometimes this is just lit snobs being giant dillholes. Sometimes these actions are absolutely deliberate and conscious and jerkwadian to the extreme.

Kazuo Ishiguro, a multi-award winning author who wrote Remains of the Day, wrote a book called Never Let Me Go, which is about...

[spoiler alert]

[seriously walk away if you've never read Never Let Me Go]

[totes not kidding; it's a good read]

[Just go down to the paragraph below the next picture.]

...the young adulthood of a group of clones before their organs are harvested. It's a great book. There’s symbolism, theme, setting, marvelously powerful character development, and a sensational social critique behind the allegory of what is literally going on.

However, Never Let Me Go is, a speculative fiction novel. It has human clones, organ harvesting, medical technology that is way beyond where we are now, and it takes place in the 90’s on an alternate timeline. This novel isn’t “realistic.” Yet because Never Let me Go is good—because it had deep subtext, social critique, symbolism, strong characterization, and was written by an MFA with a fistful of “literary” awards—there has been a strong reluctance to define it as genre.

Clones. Organ harvests. Crazy advanced medical tech. Alternative 90's timeline.
But that doesn't make it SPECULATIVE. Come on!

Well why not? If speculative fiction means “Presence of speculative elements” why wouldn’t this novel count?

Sadly, the reticence of lit snobs about Never Let me Go is no isolated incident surrounding a single author. We see this trend time and time again especially as genre-bending becomes more and more compelling to our contemporary, powerful writers. If a work of speculative fiction is good, it dodges the label of genre.

Ask a typical “no genre” creative writing teacher if a ghost story is genre, and they will say yes because ghosts aren't realistic. Ask them if Toni Morrison writes genre, and they will say no with a condescending shake of their eyes and a "what-a-sweet-idiot" smile that lets you know it is only their fear of harassment complaints that keeps them from patting you on the head. Ask them to explain Beloved, and with spittle flying from their lips, they will tell you to leave their classroom if you’re just going to be difficult. (Really.)

Ghost stories are speculative.
Unless they're really good.
And then they're....um.... Fuck you; see me after class.

On to Part 5

No Apologies! A Defense of Why Speculative Fiction Needs No Defense (Part 3)

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It is actually very hard to get a reader to keep reading some avant-garde, experimental work long enough to appreciate what an author is trying to do with language when the reader couldn’t give a crap about the characters or the plot. This isn't about "good literature" vs. "genre." It's about "a good story" vs. "a boring story."

And "literary fiction" is guilty of an awful lot of boring stories.

That's why so many people like certain canonical authors beyond just what they are forced to read of them in high school or college. Austen, Dickens, Woolf, and Shakespeare are all great with language, but they also spin an irresistible yarn. Even the cardboard dry writers like Melville and Hawthorne that take some getting used to are enjoyed and appreciated by more fans than most modern day authors.

It's almost like plot is a major element of literature. It's almost like stupid linguistic flourishes don't much matter if your story sucks.

Dismissing the audience for philistines is all too easy.

"Ug do appreciate human condition.
But Ug rather hear story about great hunter.
Boring story about Oog not interesting--even if deep."

Sadly, when you have a perception so ingrained about the superiority of a single style, things in the sommelier word can get a little...circle-jerky. This idea that the unwashed plebs don’t appreciate good art is simplistic. It’s seductive. It’s comforting. It makes a writer feel better about the fact that even small press won’t take a chance on them because their last book only sold 128 copies...mostly to their MFA writing group peers.

Oh and ten copies to their mom.

However, the perception of mainstream unwashedness isn't true. It’s a sweet lie. Literature sells. People read it. And a good writer, like Woolf or Joyce, can create compelling plots and characters AND be completely avante guard for the time. And of course, Shakespeare can play with language beautifully AND sell out a theater to those plebs with a compelling plot and some bawdy jokes.

Another factor to consider is that there often is an illustration of the quality of a work as being EITHER commercial OR literary (and mind you, I hate these terms) in the same way that a light is either on or off. However, I would also suggest that this dichotomy is not a dichotomy at all, but a continuum. The literary world speaks in absolutes, and in value judgements. But the reality of a work’s quality is far more complicated.

Exactly when has this light switch sold out?

Authors like Kurt Vonnegut, JRR Tolken, and Phillip Pullman (all speculative fiction authors if you're keeping score) clearly present a conundrum to the ideas of writing as EITHER commercial OR literary (in as much as either of those terms is synonymous with “high artistic quality”). Unless one is dismissing speculative fiction outright (as some do), none of these authors could be put squarely into either category—commercial or literary. Not, at least, without considerable difficulty and a number of exceptions. There is clearly more going on in these authors’ works than could be dismissed as commercial, and yet none write definitively at the caliber of high literature—whether we define that by canon authors or by the quality of “literary fiction” we might find in the Pushcart or awarded an O Henry. We could probably debate about exactly where on a line each author might go. (Personally, I would place Pullman slightly to the commercial side, but just about dead center, Vonnegut very close to literary, and Tolken somewhere between the two, but that’s just me). The point is that they defy straight classification, as do many other authors of both “genre” and “non-genre” alike.

Stevenson, this is really hard to pigeon-hole.
Can we add a Vxendrathi space cruiser and be done with it?

Like the assumptions of most communities, the assumptions behind the vernacular of the literary community usually go unexamined and most dialogue or discourse assumes their truth without question, but we must be careful about letting established community culture fall into the fallacy of begging the question, EVEN if that community is the literary community. It is this sort of examining the forest for the trees that can reveal how patently absurd the rest of the prejudice towards speculative fiction really is.

Really, REALLY stupid.

To fully understand the prejudice against speculative fiction, it helps considerably not to try to be disingenuous about its quality. The devil must be given its due if we are to proceed honestly or with integrity. So let us be honest. There is a lot of extraordinarily bad writing within speculative fiction. Genre sells well—and speculative fiction sells particularly well among genre—so publishers and agents will lower their standards when deciding to take a chance on speculative works--particularly sci-fi or fantasy.

It is possible that this might not be some of the best literature ever written.
Maybe.

It is not unlike how the current trend in the popularity of reality television has led to producers giving the green light to shows SO stupid that they actually have the power of performing non-surgical lobotomies on the audience.  They do this because they know that a bad reality television show is a better risk than a bad sit-com.

Within speculative fiction there is work that isn’t so much plot driven as plot railroaded, there is character dialog that is mostly a round robin of exposition, there is melodrama, sentimentality, Star Wars and Star Trek clones by the cartful, and there is work where the fantastic elements do nothing for the story but change a pedestrian setting out for a fantastic one often called the “….in space” factor.

As in “this is just Beverly Hills 90210…IN SPACE!!!!"

And while we all care if Kelly is going to pick Dylan or Brandon before Starship Melrose docks with Dawson's Space Station, this writing pretty much sucks.  Speculative fiction is the comfy EZ chair for flat characters, clichés, tired tropes, and enough truly awful work to fill a giant library with nothing but writing that the world would probably be a better place without.

Beyond the patently bad exists another strata that is simply mediocre and uninspiring. Reams upon reams of speculative fiction exist that aren’t necessarily of poor quality—and when some people grab for pleasure reading, it’s their first choice—but it certainly isn’t deep, moving, or literary writing either.

This is the fiction of preference—the fiction of someone who would prefer to read a story about space pirates than one about Somalian pirates. This is the fiction of people who want to read to visit other worlds, or take fantastic journeys. (That this motivation to pick up a book and read is judged as a less valid than immersion into banal realism is little more than a value judgment manifest as an objective criteria, but we’ll explore that soon.) Speculative fiction is home to Harry Potter, Twilight, Xanth, Dragonlance, dozens of Stephen King novels, and so much unnamed dross as to—at first glance—warrant any degree of prejudice about its quality as absolutely valid. A glance across the landscape of speculative fiction would seem to confirm that it is the denizen of little but bad and mediocre writing. And this is the position from which many fans of speculative fiction find themselves defending their tastes.

But of course they shouldn't have to.

On To Part 4 

No Apologies! A Defense of Why Speculative Fiction Needs No Defense (Part 2)

Return to Part 1


These sommeliers consider genre to be commercial, a word that in literary circles has an antithetical meaning to “literary.”

The first fallacy we must consider (among the many many many our darling lit snobs regularly make) is a false dichotomy. For those not up on your logical fallacies, "False Dichotomy" (or "false dilemma") is an informal fallacy that exists when only two options are presented in an "either/or" context. For example literary OR commercial.

“Literary” tends to be at the good and proper end of an awful lot of dichotomies. We hear literary paired up as opposite of words like “commercial,” “mainstream,” “non-literary” “popular” and of course “genre.” Also “expository” and “informational,” but those seem more like classifications than value judgments. (Really, I’m not kidding. Plug in “Literary vs.” into your Google field and then run down the letters of the alphabet. You’ll get all of these words as top hits.)

Totally not making this up.

What is notoriously lacking from these dichotomies is any indication of the actual qualities that place them at odds with each other.

Most art forms have an awareness of the commercial or the mainstream, but we get a sense of what makes them commercial or mainstream in the pairing of their opposites. You have mainstream film and independent film, which reveals something about the movies’ budgets and the studios behind them (they are independent of the same concerns of major studios). You have commercial television and public television, a difference in how funding is procured (also a difference which immediately becomes apparent when you have to pee during Hurcule Poirot, and you decide to wait for the commercial).

With “literary” we face an increasingly nebulous word that has consistently been used simply as a synonym for “serious,” “valuable,” or “proper,” and not actually adequately defined except by what it is not. Rather than actually meaningful dichotomies, we increasingly see a self-referential one that just gets used as a sloppy way of saying good vs. bad. And it’s time the ivory tower stopped accepting that as anything but intellectually lazy elitism.

Increasingly from lit snobs it has come to mean little more than, "Whatever the hell we dictate it is, for we are the arbiters of such things."

"I deem this blog post....unliterary."

Wait.

Stop.

Am I actually claiming that “literary fiction” doesn’t have any meaning? Am I claiming that someone familiar with it wouldn't know the difference between it and speculative fiction?

Oh perish the thought, my friends!

If none of these guys has a bionic arm or sparkles in the sun,
we might be on to something literary here.

Literary fiction is its own genre, and the hegemonic genre of our era, but it does not mean—and never has meant—“good.” That is simply the way it is being used these days in literary circles to avoid more meaningful discourse. Cultures in power often set themselves as the bellwether for what is proper and good and invalidate the way any other cultures choose to do things. If they do regard another culture it is only through the lens of their OWN culture’s values, resulting in Kipling-esque portrayals. Post-colonial criticism and Orientalism are rife with this sort of observation of judging one culture through the lens of the hegemonic one. Currently, it seems that the culture in power of the literary community is no exception to this tendency. They are the imperials, laughing at the genre savages, and possibly giving the approving nod of “noble savage” to the genre writers like LeGuin, Orwell, or Bradbury, who come the closest to reproducing what they value in a work.

However, before we pick apart the genre of literary fiction (and let’s be absolutely clear that it IS its own genre), let us first look at its enemies across the "divide" of those dichotomies I mentioned earlier. “Non-literary.” Well that charming bit of circular logic certainly doesn’t tell us much except in as much as anything can be said to be the opposite of not it. Cats are very much not like non-cats, and green is very much not like non-green colors. “Genre,” of course is what this is all about and we’ll get back to that. But let’s look at the other three for a moment: “Commercial,” “Popular,” and “Mainstream.” “Commercial” is a strange little word in the context of fiction, seeing as most fiction doesn’t have any commercials at all. Ever.

And if you cruise into a book store, they don't give away "literary" books–you have to buy them like everything else. With money. Filthy art-corrupting money.

How dare you not struggle on in ignominy.

BACKHAND SLAP!!!!

So what this little back-handed bitch slap of an aspersion actually is getting at is that the writing made money--probably a lot of money. That doesn't happen unless a lot of people are willing to spend their hard earned money buying it. “Mainstream” means having appeal to many groups and sub-groups instead of just esoteric ones. “Popular” means liked or enjoyed by many people. What we quickly realize is that all three of these words mean successful.

People like this fiction. Lots of people like this fiction, and not just people who’ve had 7 years of being told what they ought to like and ought not to like.

Now let’s be clear here. “Good” and “bad” are opposites, but “literary” and “commercial” are not. (Nor "mainstream" nor "popular.") They are USED as opposites in a very sloppy, intellectually lazy way. They exist upon separate axes in a way that it is entirely possible to have a work of high commercial value and high literary value at the same time.

“Real literature doesn’t sell very well,” I hear echoed in my head from the Lit Sommelier professor’s voice. “And what does sell well is inevitably crap.”

Oh really?

Orwell’s 1984, Dickens’s Tale of Two Cities, Heller’s Catch 22, Nabokov’s Lolita, and Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye are all among the top 30 selling books in English OF ALL TIME—and this must also be considered in the context that most books in the top ten are religious texts.

These works are absolutely literary—some are canon. Yet they have had extraordinary commercial success. If we widen the list to the top fifty or one hundred bestselling books of all time, it brings even more literary works to that list.

Sure, you’re going see J.K. Rowling and Dan Brown on that list too, but the assumption that anything with mass appeal must not be quality work is patently absurd. The opposite claim is even more ridiculous: not everything that sells poorly is literary—some of it is just crap that you wonder who the holy fuck published in the first place. And while there may be the possibility to find some correlation between the literary quality of a work and its general commercial appeal, the presence of data points in explicit contradiction to that claim would make any assumption of causation laughable.

International bestseller?
Obviously mainstream crap.

In some cases, like in the works of Antonio Belaño, a conscious, deliberate attempt to make money (to give as an inheritance after his death) has turned out works of extraordinary quality. Charles Dickens wrote serial novels to support a horrendously huge family, and no one denies his literary quality. Even William Shakespeare was trying to gather up the money for a family crest. Maybe he's a sellout too? Even most literary purists can, in theory, acknowledge that literary fiction can make money. However, the fact that anywhere in the literary community, folks will instantly understand a conversation of “literary” vs. “commercial” as being one of quality, shows how deeply the perception is ingrained that this dichotomy is actually valid.

Let’s make sure we are crystal clear here. What is called “literary fiction” is a genre of its own. It has distinctive stylistic markers, such as banal protagonists (rather than extraordinary ones), settings that work as kinetic landscape for the themes, intense psychological depth, ambivalent or negative endings, a strong emphasis on the elements of linguistic manipulation, style, and theme over plot and sometimes even character, and of course…the intense concern about its message regarding the human condition. This of course and the fact that it visits certain thematic landscapes so often as to create its own tropes that boarder on the cliché—landscapes like childhood trauma, parental rejection, addiction, suicide (especially by siblings), and sexuality. This genre gained a hegemonic dominance in the 60’s that was so powerful that it has since been able to call ITSELF “literature” or “serious” and everything else around it “genre.” It’s not much different than the way the Dutch, then the English, and most recently The United States have been able to declare their culture superior and all others "uncivilized" in some way. Unfortunately for the writers of this genre, “literary fiction” has the problem of being not particularly compelling to wide audiences....even when it's really good.

Watch a Samuel Beckett play. You'll understand.

I wouldn't WANT those plebs to understand my work!
I'm glad I didn't even make back a $500 advance.
GLAD!!!

It’s kind of hard to look at what’s happening within all these dichotomies of literary vs. “people actually like it” synonyms and wonder if this isn’t a case of sour grapes. To think that somehow the entire literary community has managed to collectively do the equivalent of petulantly saying “you people just don’t appreciate my genius!”

The world of art, regardless of discipline, is often an austere labor of love to all but a tiny few who scrape out a bohemian life and even fewer who could be said to be successful. But this stark reality of an artist is made that much worse when the dominant acceptable and “proper” form of that art is particularly uninteresting to almost everyone who hasn’t had nearly a decade of indoctrination telling them that by god they will fucking well love it. To see the material gains of those with far less concern for those parts of craft that are supposed to be the “real” and “serious” parts—or so we’ve heard for over fifty years—must seem at times to present success as antithetical to artistic integrity. However in the case of commercial vs. literary, like most overly-academic perceptions, a bellwether created to illustrate something has turned into a false dichotomy with a life of its own.

Continue to Part 3