Comment elevated to a post

Michael Blowhard made such an awfully intriguing comment that I want to make sure that it is not missed so I am making this a Michael Blowhard Guest Post. He's commenting on my earlier post on the genre fiction stuff.

He draws an exceedingly interesting connection between literary and architecural forms and the utility, even the desirability, of having firm structures, structures which might appear at first to the uninitiated to pose nasty limitations --- "all action takes place at sea; there must be a bloody death every 3 chapters" --- but in fact aid creativity by offering a tight form within which to work.

Perhaps if I understand his approach, one might say that "just as a building must have a door on the streetfront, so too must a sentence have a verb and a novel have a plot." They all fail to do their job of simultaneously giving pleasure, succor and enlightenment unless they adhere to certain norms. So-called "genre fiction" may have certain expectations which must be met ---I'd still like to know what they are when it comes to, say, "sea stories" except that it must involve water --- but those requirements are not even remotely impediments to "genius."

But Michael says it better:

"Hear, hear. But I'd add a couple of things. One is that the distinction between genre fiction and serious lit is, for better or worse, like it or not, a market reality. That's the way it's divvied up in the publishers' computers as well as the bookstores' computers. And, again like it or not, that counts. It's nothing we have to accept intellectually, but it does affect the making and production of books, let alone (unfortunately) how they're taken and discussed. As a writer, you can choose to do genre book or you can choose to do a serious-lit book, or you can choose (daringly!) to do a hybrid. But you can't really choose to ignore the distinction.

I'd be a little rougher on TT than you are. I see no reason why genre shouldn't be a source of strength, rather than a limitation, in much the same way that the rules and laws of writing formal (ie., patterned according to accepted rules) poetry can be a strength. I think claiming that the no-rules-apply, wide-openness of serious lit leads, or even can lead, to better, deeper literature is buying into a naive belief. "Total freedom" in an absolute sense tends to lead to despair, overambition and collapse rather than blazing, all-guns-firing creativity-- and I'd argue that that's a pretty good description of a lot of what's issued as serious lit in this country. In my experience, the genre fields are much less ego-ridden and much more centered on delivering an enjoyable and comprehensible experience to readers than the serious-lit world is -- and I take that to be a sign of health. The serious-lit world is peddling inspiration, genius, etc. Balls to that. And it ain't healty -
- they're peddling the equivalent of what you call precious-object architecture. Fine, sure, why not. But let's not mistake it for what's really important. (And, a minor sidelight, the serious-lit world has its own subgenres -- multicultural extravaganza, protest novel, po-mo picaresque, etc. Which means that "serious lit" has become every bit as much of a meta-genre as, say, "crime" is.)

I'd argue, with a perfectly earnest and straight face, a couple of things. First, "The Long Goodbye" and "The Maltese Falcon" are every bit the achievements "The Great Gatsby" is (and I say this as someone who loves "Gatsby.") And that it's got to be acknowledged that some of today's very, very best writers are people like Donald Westlake, Ruth Rendell, Patrick O'Brien, P.D. James, George V. Higgins, etc.

I confess I don't know how or why someone like Teachout, who eloquently makes the case for jazz and for the Classic American Songbook, doesn't see that the fiction-book equivalent of that stuff is genre fiction ... But I've run into this before -- movie critics who eloquently make the case for trash and for art, and for the two of them a mutually complementary, yet who fail to accept that the same dynamic might apply in the fiction-book world.

Part of my guess on this is that the serious-lit advocates often haven't read much genre fiction, and that they fail to register that genre fiction writers are playing a different game than serious-lit writers. Would someone who's drunk on Gehry and Hadid even be able to register that much is going on in a pleasant neighborhood that works? Yet that pleasant neighborhood is, in my view, probably the greater achievement than a flashy new Gehry or Hadid...

Comments

[Ian]

One of the drawbacks of an obsession with 'precious object' (or 'magazine') architecture is that there just aren't enough skilled practitioners around to deliver on the scale and in the quantity we need to make our towns and cities livable - setting aside for the moment whether such an approach is actually the right one to take.

So - like it or not we cannot rely on the alleged genii of the architectural world in creating livable towns and cities - unless I suppose they are people like Samuel Mockbee or Christopher Alexander. It seems to me that their strength is precisely in eschewing the obsession with the precious object as the primary objective of architectural design, instead putting their effort instead into finding out what really works and seeing beauty in that.

[Brian Miller]

I don't frankly have the patience for most "literary" novels. To me, many are the equivalent of "performance art" or the other types of pointless modern art.

I read mostly mysteries and sci-fi, and there are gems in those fields equal in artisticness to any "serious" novel. Although his latest novel was slightly flat, I would add James Lee Burke to your list of "genre" novelists who I think produce serious works of art.

[Wax Banks]

Someone's gotta put in for 'serious lit' at this point.

The major difference between 'serious lit' and 'precious object architecture' - the difference that makes the metaphor a little more complicated, hopefully - is twofold.

1) Architecture is inescapable; literature is wholly optional (more's the pity!).

2) It's posible to build up the formal vocabulary required to parse Great Books like Gravity's Rainbow or Ulysses (both of which I love), which in turn immediately opens up a number of other literary avenues. Grokking a 'clever' piece of urban design, on the other hand, doesn't make it any easy to comprehend some other 'difficult' building.

To clarify, without going on too much about literature (though I disagree with Mr Blowhard's assessment of Chandler vs Fitzgerald [much as I love Chandler], find his praise of Hammett laughably over the top, and am dead tired of the need to praise 'genre fiction' as a general class when most of it, like most every novel ever written, is tawdry rubbish)...

The idea that societal norms, aesthetic norms, should be the baseline against which architecture is evaluated isn't too bizarre. But consider the point of something like the Stata Center (my local monstrosity): it's meant to work in contrast to the buildings around it. Its identity is bound up in violating expectations, but also working (in an ironic vein) within them. I may not like the Stata Center, but it presents me with a straightforward metric for evaluation: does it work, somehow, next to the buildings around it? And my answer is, 'I'm not convinced.' It's not as if Gehry designed a sideways building, just a crooked one. It's not completely unthinkable, but it surely isn't 'genius'.

Ulysses is similar (and similarly monstrous, though more profitably); each of its chapters strictly obeys certain schemata, which as a whole obfuscate the basic plot of two men wandering around the city, going about a typical day (sort of), bound to meet though they don't know it. You can appreciate the levels of meaning being toyed with in the purely formal sense, but the basic test of the book's worth is, do you give a damn about Leo and Stephen? And the answer (for me at least) is: absolutely.

If you think of 'creativity' as 'novel solutions to old problems', the line between good literary fiction and good 'genre fiction' breaks down. But it's snobbery to erect that line in the first place. My objection to Mr Blowhard isn't just that he's lionizing rubbish, it's that he's doing so via the same means that lit. crit. snobs (like me!) use to praise the 'genius' of Difficult Novels - pretending there's some fundamental meaning. The difference is often one of seriousness, and of the particular kinds of allusion and incantation - a spectrum, not just an either/or world of writing..

A difficult novel is a treasure box - it's not a problem for those who don't read it. [We can talk about the social effects of praising 'tough lit' to the walls later, though!] Prestige architecture, when it fails, is an obstacle. There is a real social responsibility in putting together the fabric of a city. Joyce has not abdicated what he sees as his responsibility in writing Ulysses - his arrogance was that he thought he could capture all of life in 600 pages, not a belief that everyone should be subjected to his version of it - but architecture (as a field) at its worst is far more dangerous.

Writing a difficult novel is exhibitionism in the sense that having sex, partly clothed, in the back seat of a nearly-empty bus in the middle of the night is exhibitionism: you might be discovered, but more likely people will just turn away. Those who watch are welcome to watch.

Designing a difficult building is also exhibitionism - but it's more like having sex on the floor of Grand Central Station. You impose your will at the expense of the common will (if one can be said to exist, e.g. 'we don't want to see strangers having sex on the floor'). You can't opt out of a dumb building.

Interesting topic.

[Michael Blowhard]

I think Ian's right on the money. And Brian's response to "serious" contempo lit is both interesting and symptomatic. I do marvel at the fact that the lit set (generally speaking, of course) takes so little note of the way that many intelligent, potentially interested readers actively dislike and feel hostile towards contempo lit writing.

It's a free country, of course, and as WaxBanks notes, writing a difficult lit novel does no one any harm, unlike constructing a difficult building that ruins a block or a neighborhood, let alone degrades the lives of the people who live or work inside it.

Still, the close-mindedness of the lit-and-publishing is something to behold -- and not, IMHO anyway, something to celebrate. I'm quite a taste snob myself in many ways, but I value being open to the world a bit (quite a bit) more than I do worshipping at the same ol' temple, which is the accepted thing in the lit world. There's a pretence that "we" know what "real books" are, and what "real lit" is, and that "we" are here to celebrate it and fight for it, and that "we" roughly agree in our judgments.

Pshaw to all that. And for a few reasons.

1) What's finally settled on as important lit isn't really for us to say. The future will decide, and then may change its mind. Why do any of us pretend that we know what future judgment will bring? (I have something that's more than a hunch: because it makes some people feel important to pretend that they know. It may also help their careers, if they're in the publishing biz, or in the opinionating biz.)

2) I spent 15 years following publishing (and new books) closely, and the list of books I'd suggest as super-terrific from that period barely overlaps at all with the one the various semi-official lit worlds would give you. Yet, gosh, I think I'm as smart and knowledgeable and tasteful as the official lit-world crowd is. Actually, and just between you and me, I think most of their judgments are pretty nuts, and I suspect you'd enjoy the books I'd suggest more than the ones they do. I could be wrong, of course. But the fact that there's such a wide divergence between their list and mine ... Well, what to make of that? My degree's just as good as theirs, I'm just as bright as they are, and I know publishing pretty well.

3) I also know that I'm not unusual, even in the publishing and covering-publishing worlds. If you know publishing at all -- and I do, much better than I'd like to -- you discover a few things. One is that many people in publishing disagree with the publishing and lit world's consensus. They might well, for public consumption, agree that someone like Salman Rushdie is an important writer -- it's a professional obligation to voice that opinion. But on their off hours? Many of them wouldn't be caught dead reading Rushdie. The other thing is a very common growth pattern: you emerge from college full of literary ideas and nonsense, and within five or ten years you find yourself shaking much of it off and thinking, "Gee, these other (fill in the blanks here: genre, self-help, technical...) writers are really just as intelligent, and care just as much, and write really well, and are often better people. And maybe I've been wrong to set 'literary values' above all other writing values. And what's really meant by 'literary values' anyway? And why should we care about them?" And pretty soon the guy or gal who was crazy about George Eliot and Beckett is reading, say, Emore Leonard and thinking, "Hmm, you know, this isn't per se better or worse than contempo lit. It's different, is all. They're playing a different game, is all. And, unlike lit, it's a game whose rules are to some extent set by what works for audiences, and maybe that's not a bad thing. And, heck, this Elmore is one heck of a creator of characters and situations and stories, and that droll-but-brutal tone of his really is distinctive ... "

A few specific responses to WaxBanks's comments.

* I'd never praise "genre fiction" per se -- much is garbage. I would, though, argue that as fiction-book forms, crime and romance and horror benefit from something that lit fiction doesn't, which is an openness to a larger, and more honest, readership. (Check out reader reviews on Amazon -- the readers of horror and romance know what they like and don't like and are very direct about it. The readers of lit fiction are often trying oh so very hard to "appreciate" what they've read...) The forms writers in these fields work with are comprehensible to many people -- they're the equivalent in fiction terms to traditional poetic forms. I guess you could argue that this is a bad thing, or a limiting thing. I'd argue that wrestling with standard, comprehensible forms is, in general, a good thing for artists and writers to do -- good for the artists, good for the readers, and good for the art form too. There's a lot of vigor and life in the genre worlds that isn't to be sneered at. And I'm a long way from being alone in thinking that lit-fiction long ago steered itself into a corner ...

* I can't see why it's "snobbery" to erect a line between genre fiction and lit fiction. What if there's only description and no quality-judgment involved? It isn't snobbery to make a distinction between red and blue.

Drawing a line between lit fiction and genre fiction is a handy and useful way of making a first pass at categorizing the kind of fiction that gets produced, and it certainly doesn't mean that a writer who wants to dissolve the boundary can't go right ahead and do so.

Also, and purely as a matter of practicality, there is a real and important difference between lit and genre fiction, which is where it's slotted in the databases of publishers and bookstores, and where and how it's displayed in bookstores. Like it or not, this has quite an impact on the production, distribution and consumption of fiction books.

* My objection to Mr Blowhard isn't just that he's lionizing rubbish, it's that he's doing so via the same means that lit. crit. snobs (like me!) use to praise the 'genius' of Difficult Novels - pretending there's some fundamental meaning.

Not quite sure what you mean by this, although I marvel a bit that you'd dismiss Ruth Rendell, for instance, as "rubbish." Are you saying that I shouldn't be drawing lines between lit and genre? Well, OK, I guess.

But there's another point to the line, which is that lit authors are playing a different game than genre authors are. Lit these days generally has to do with language, and with a certain set of social/political/aesthetic "issues." Genre fiction generally has to do with situation, storytelling, characters, and a relationship with genre expectations. Judging a Ruth Rendell novel (let alone a Stephen King) by the standards that'd suit a Toni Morrison novel would be kind of silly. And judging a Toni Morrison novel by the standards of, say, romance fiction would be absurd. You'd be missing the point of the books. Why not get familiar with, if not all at least some, of the many different forms and games that fiction writers play?

[Michael Blowhard]

I have no idea with the word "books" in the previous comment got highlighted, or why it leads the clicker to B&N. Apologies for that -- I certainly didn't intend it!

[David Sucher]

huh? "books" highlighted?

[James Russell]

I have no idea with the word "books" in the previous comment got highlighted, or why it leads the clicker to B&N.

Not sure what causes that, but I think it's because there's some sort of spyware on your computer. Whatever it is, it reads the web page you're on, hunts out specific terms and highlights them with a link to another site. A piece of complete bastardry, however it works. One of the computers at the radio station where I do my show suffered from it, and it was exceedingly distracting...