Good books don't have to be hard

[KatG]

Not as much in Crime/Mystery/Thriller books because they tend to be more defined. SF blew up in the 60's and 70's to encompass a lot of different things, like Rock music, it just started taking whatever it wanted from every other genre. Other genres do that to a certain extent but I think it's a question of degree.

It has nothing to do with it being more defined. Suspense elements may be, being realistic elements, less various, but the reason the suspense field has less angst over their literary rep is that they were never really a separate niche market with a defined, separate community, as category SFF had. They had some magazines, but they went under early. I think the Hitchcock magazine is almost all that's left, not counting some anthologies. They've had a few conventions, but nothing like the system that SFF has. Suspense was always part of general fiction, and that made it easier for some titles to develop a literary rep. (It's also an older form of story.)

For some people. For others, suspense, having violent action, is always commercial, genre, not literary. John Connolly, who was brought up, is a successful suspense writer, which means that many don't consider him literary. His fantasy novel, The Book of Lost Things, was published in general fiction from Atria, rather than a category SFF publishing imprint, because they wanted to attract his thriller fans. (And because S&S doesn't have a formal SFF imprint.) This was also why Anthony Durham was published by Doubleday, and not Del Ray or Bantam Spectra, and sold first to the general fiction market -- he's a successful historical fiction writer and they wanted to attract his historical fiction fans. Both books were marketed also to the category fan audience -- Durham through Bantam Spectra -- though it sounds like maybe Connolly's book didn't take.

Oddly enough, by doing the fantasy -- a fairy tale fable with mythological elements -- Connolly enhanced his rep as a more literary writer. But only with those factions who tolerate suspense writing and are not opposed to non-realistic fiction as literary. But that's enough to put another nail in the coffin.

 

[Fung Koo]

I know I'm jumping into this one late, but holy hell...

I think my general opinion on this particular debate is probably obvious to anyone I've argued with before. This debate is important; This debate will never end.

But, there is no such thing as "better" or "worse" ways of engaging in the debate. To believe as much suggests that there is a victory condition that resolves the debate, which validates the war you (*cough*Kat*cough*) are claiming is imaginary. All it does is elevate it to a secondary war about the war. A meta-war, if you will. Or, a cold war.

Clearly it is not imaginary.

As evidence I submit this thread and the "discourse" out there in the blogosphere that has been linked into it. The war is happening.

This whole concept of "scripts" within the debate, then, must be extended. There are also "meta-scripts" -- scripts about the scripts. Instead of supporting an opinion on the subject at hand in the ground war, the fallback position is to have an opinion on the opinions. And these opinions-of-opinions fall into scripts, too. This distancing of oneself from the argument is precisely the same snobbery, exclusivity, and elitism that brings about this war in the first place!

Instead of identifying the strawmen within the debate, you recast the debate itself as the strawman.

And while that may in fact be the case, it does carry the distinct taint of the postmodern era. This postmodern tendency to fictionalize/narrativize reality into a set of "scripts" (and "scripting," I would like to point out, is a process whereby certain modes and ways of saying certain things on certain subject matter is regarded as commonly packaged into a neat little box.... is exactly the same process by which we identify things like "genre" or "category market" which we're apparently to be seeing as imaginary) relies on the idea that all of our interaction with existence can be removed by degrees from objectivity into the purely subjective realm where everything is mystically equal and individual.

This is just one of the extremes in the meta-war. The other side is that the war itself has merit, that the scripts are relevant. That what you call cons I call pros, and vice versa.

Now prove whose approach is "better."

To do so, you'll do exactly what you're denigrating about those who deign to involve themselves in the ground war. You'll play favourites, and pick those things that accord to your point of view and support your argument. Drop names of those who agree with you.

That's just the nature of argument. But don't be deluded into believing that the meta-war is any different from the ground war. They're two levels of the same stupid argument about what constitutes "good" and "bad."

This, too, is imaginary. It is not a truth. It is an opinion. It doesn't matter at all whether or not one engages in the debate in the best way possible, since there is (as far as I know) no universal, perfect, all-encompassing definition of "better." It is a completely subjective assessment, and therefore equally as imaginary as the supposedly imaginary ground war.

---

As far as the original article goes, it's just an example of a recently published person involving him/herself in the SFF community. Someone doing a little self-promotion, and increasing their name recognition as associated with their new product. And if you want to get your name out in the SFF community, all you have to do is make a claim about the place of SFF in the broader literary community. It's their ultimate sore spot. Because of the "imaginary" war that we aren't engaged in fighting in this very thread...

The real issue here is about inclusion and exclusion. That's all.

Modernism, as a movement, wanted to differentiate itself. That is, it was/is exclusive. And, believe it or not, SFF wants to differentiate itself, too. It, too, is exclusive. It necessarily must be, or we would be unable to identify either presentational or contextual or type or content genre, and there those elements belong to the master category of a given genre as distinct from anything else.

Grossman's real point must be about bridging that gap. Bringing the various sets of exclusives together toward common ground. That mythical play-place where all fiction is equal because it's fiction, independently of the focus of specialization.

And that's really the only part of the argument I take issue with. Because the article isn't suggesting that inclusion of difference is the goal. It's suggesting the movement toward similarity is the goal. Where the extremes are muted, and paradigmatically "modernist" literature embraces plot, and paradigmatically "SFF" literature embraces linguistic gymnastics. In the end, the article suggest that barriers are breaking down and the extremes are moving toward the centre.

I call bullshit.

I prefer the war.

 

[Fung Koo]

Oddly enough, by doing the fantasy -- a fairy tale fable with mythological elements -- Connolly enhanced his rep as a more literary writer.

And herein lies the bottom of the issue. You're not being clear on what "literary" means. This isn't actually odd at all.

Literary: "of, relating to, or having the characteristics of learning or literature."

In the simplest sense, a "literary" work is one that is "of, relating to, or having the characteristics of learning or literature." Which is to say: is written such that it displays a broader knowledge of literature in general than a work that does not.

Modernism (and postmodernism, amongst others) carries an easy association with "literary" because it is frequently navel-gazing, art in the love with art, art for art's sake, literature about the act of literature. That isn't to say that it's all the same or that it's all good. But it's literature that is of, relates to, and has the characteristics of learning and literature. It's simply self-obsessed by own admission, and so parades as "literary" without really having to try. It's like calling a pretty girl pretty -- welcome to the department of the redundancy department, Captain Obvious.

Genre writers get labelled as non-literary not because they aren't regarded as good writers, but because they're regarded as limited writers. They do only one thing -- they address one type of subject matter, often in one type of way. They may be very, very good at it. But they aren't literary.

In what genre can one author have an entire career dedicated to writing the same story over and over again in the same made-up world about the same characters? Show me the Tolkiens and Goodkinds and Jordans and Heinleins and Asimovs and Graftons and Grishams of the so-called non-genre crowd.

The only place you find the high level of insular repetition that is stereotypically associated with genre fiction authors is.... genre fiction.

"Literary" would mean that the author in question displays a knack for writing beyond the limited and repetitious scope of the genre wherein they locate themselves. That they've read more than their genre, include it in what they do, and occasionally branch out into other areas.

Yes, the genres (and non-genres) frequently cross over. And yes, this means that they get included in the host of fiction we call "literature." But to ascend to what we call "Literature" (Big L) or "Literary," they have to do more than cross over incidentally. They must do so purposefully, and in such a way that the reader can observe that the writer is attempting to do so.

That the genres are perceived as not being literary is an extension of the limitation of the chosen specificity of many of the authors writing within the genre. When you write in an exclusive mode, expect to be regarded as exclusive ...and therefore limited.

So in the situation you describe, where an author reputed as writing within a limited set of parameters expands into something outside his milieu... Unsurprisingly, yes, that would make him (and therefore his works) seem more literary.

 

[opaloka]

It's true that mysteries, crime and suspense didn't really keep one foot in the pulps when the whole thing shifted to paperbacks in the 50's, possibly becuase it didn't have an organized community (who needs it when you've got that kind of huge market) but there were plenty of short story magazines with mystery stories going back to the nineteenth century. Detective stories were huge in pulps, bigger than science fiction ever was, and police procedurals were the rage then as they are now. And they've only changed a little bit. Science fiction and fantasy only became ambitious in the 60's when the new wave insisted on it - maybe Mysteries never needed a new wave because they are so big, no publishers feel the need to take risks.

Those more mundane genres and romance are more readily defined. One book on the fantasy shelf is not necessarily much like the next - they differ in a lot more ways than quality, whereas romance, even with the genre bending going on recently, is far more formulaic. The vast cascades of Tolkien rips don't change that, and add science fiction into the mix and you've got a lot of variety, which by it's nature invites navel-gazing discussion.

 

[molybdenum]

I don't agree Fung. Many authors are perceived as 'literary' even if they've only written one book. (Harper Lee, anyone) Hard to go outside of a certain genre if you only have one book to classify.

My personal opinion is that books are perceived as 'literary' if they have meaning, and have value in reading them beyond the simple attempt to entertain. For example, I like Robert Jordan, but I wouldn't call him literary as the reading of his books is simply for entertainment purposes. Ray Bradbury on the other hand, or George Orwell, has writing with meaning. These are both primarily sci-fi/fantasy authors, and they are both widely considered as 'literary'.

There's a very good chance I'm missing the point of this debate altogether, or am mis-using the term literary, but in my mind there is no distinct prejudice against genre authors when describing something as literary. It's just that genre authors are more likely to write something simply for entertainment purposes. In other words, they don't try to be seen as 'literary' and therefore, they aren't.

 

[owlcroft]

Back to basics . . . .

In what genre can one author have an entire career dedicated to writing the same story over and over again in the same made-up world about the same characters?

Anthony Powell ("regarded by such writers as Evelyn Waugh and Kingsley Amis as amongst the greatest British novelists of the 20th century"--Wikipedia) did twelve such over a span of two dozen years; Laurence Durrell did the Alexandria Quartet and then the Avignon Quintet; and so on. While I agree that series are something of an indicator of genre, they are by no means defining, inclusively or exclusively.

Genre writers get labelled as non-literary not because they aren't regarded as good writers, but because they're regarded as limited writers.

Sorry, disagree again. Genre writers are regarded by the literary establishment (it exists, let's not quibble over exactly what it is) as both limited and not good: they are seen as doing only one thing, and doing it poorly. That is obviously silly in both respects--many specfic writers are remarkably diverse--but then, that silliness is the whole point of this thread.

In the simplest sense, a "literary" work is one that is "of, relating to, or having the characteristics of learning or literature." Which is to say: is written such that it displays a broader knowledge of literature in general than a work that does not.

I'd say rather (if indeed there is a difference) that it displays a broader knowledge of the human condition, and significant skill in presenting that knowledge.

As I have said before, the degree of "literateness" of a work depends largely on the complexity and subtlety of that work: the Dick and Jane readers are not very literate; the "Viriconium" sequence is. ("Complexity" does not, in this context, equate to "difficulty":The Wind in the Willows, for example, is complex but not difficult.)

It is, as with all intellectual endeavors (again taking care with meanings, "intellectual" here simply means involving use of the intellect, not "in the style of a so-called 'intellectual'"), it is the amount of stuff we are given to chew that largely controls pleasure. And there, of course, is the crux: the pleasure deriving from complexity can only be in proportion as a given reader perceives complexity. At some time in youth, Dick and Jane and Spot's cavortings do please, because they are, at that time, at about the maximum level of complexity the reader can handle.

Putting it another way, a book's complexity, to afford pleasure, must neither undershoot nor overshoot a given reader's capabilities by much. A book that undershoots one's capabilities is "obvious" and usually boring. A book that overshoots a reader may baffle or annoy that reader; or, alternatively, the overshoot may not be obvious and the reader may be pleased by what we may call a limited subset of the book's full potentialities.

The claim that the literary establishment makes is that genre readers have limited capabilities for appreciating "literate" work, and they base that canard on the fact that a lot of genre work is covered by Sturgeon's Law: if genre readers are pleased by crap (so the false syllogism goes), and they are pleased by what exists in their preferred genre, then what exists in that genre must be crap.

The defects of such "reasoning" are several. First, it is very nearly a simple case of begging the question. But the deeper fallacy lies in the implicit assumption that "genre readers" and "genre works" are monolithic. No one defines the literacy level of "mainstream" fiction by the contents of supermarket book racks or "best-seller" lists, nor does anyone assume that those folk who read mainly books on best-seller lists represent the epitome of literacy. But the literacy level of genre readers and genre books is invariably assessed by Sturgeon's 95% (or whatever exact number the version of the Law you've heard invokes)--and it is that which is so grossly unfair.

 

[KatG]

You have your subjective criteria about what literary is and what genre is, Fung, that you have as your measuring sticks. You are ignoring the variety in the genre fields. You are stating genre as a movement, a way of writing and telling stories that you are calling repetitive and limited by its repetition. And you leave yourself loopholes for declaring works of genre not-genre, beyond genre, because they don't fit the "movement" you've created, such as crossing genres. Therefore your notion of genre can never be challenged because anything that challenges it you declare to be an exception that doesn't count as genre writing. You're cherry picking.

I'm well aware that the debate over whether a work is good or not will never end, because it's subjective. It's what we can talk about, although as you know, I prefer to discuss meaning and assessment over good versus bad. Academics have their systems that they debate, and I certainly don't find it awful that they do. But what is different is highly subjective, and you can no more define literary for the rest of the world than you can blow fire out of your eyeballs. Your declarations that certain writers aren't repetitious in using the same character roles over and over while genre is, is highly spurious to my editor's eye, and your claim that genre titles are all full of repetition without layers of meaning and purpose broadly demotes books you've never read. Lastly, your definition of genre is at the same time too narrow and too sweeping to actually work logically, in my opinion.

But you keep on enjoying your war there. I'll just be over here reading P.G. Wodehouse, and various other repetitious writers you claim aren't repetitious, or don't count, or are not literary, or are repetitious but do it with purposeful art, or whatever other dividing line you want to make up.

 

[Bond]

My personal opinion is that books are perceived as 'literary' if they have meaning, and have value in reading them beyond the simple attempt to entertain. For example, I like Robert Jordan, but I wouldn't call him literary as the reading of his books is simply for entertainment purposes. Ray Bradbury on the other hand, or George Orwell, has writing with meaning. These are both primarily sci-fi/fantasy authors, and they are both widely considered as 'literary'.

What is meaning? Entertainment has no meaning? Only work laden with gravitas has meaning? Can only someone who sets out to write with meaning capture meaning? Is meaning a function of the author or the reader?

Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time is far more literary than a lot of the retread "literature" out there that depends on preconceived ideas of what "literary" means. That's the problem with having a narrowly predefined dogmatic idea of what is literary trained into people. Something innovative could stare them in the face and slap them and they still wouldn't know it was literary because it doesn't look like previous examples they were trained with.

 

[Psylent]

Once. Ten years ago. And the literary sections of the nation's newspapers still call it the second-most-important literary prize out there.

I was going to say something snarky but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you just missed the earlier context or forgot it.

I don't think I've seen any serious discussion of Harry Potter as big L literature but I'd imagine that's because it obviously isn't Literature.

There are quite a few people who think it is literature with a capital L, and she has won literary awards for the series.

You'll note that both myself and KatG are careful to specify a particular meaning of the word literature because we are aware of different meanings of the word. Being literate can mean knowing how to read. Literature can mean anything that is written be it Hemingway or this post. However, big L literature means something else (which I'm not going to bother to define since this thread is already trying to thrash that out) and that something else is what we were talking about. So, yes newspapers' may call the Whitbread award literary and in the small l sense they would be correct, however in the big L sense they would not be. The Whitbread award (and now the Costa Award) use some judges that have no qualifications for judging Literature and they are equipped with a mission statement that does not ask them to select a work of Literature; therefore the award is not a Literary award.

KatG,

Thank you for the links. Kelman wasn't exactly what I was looking for--I was looking for a critic in a mainstream publication--but I suppose I can make my point with or without an example. There is a vocal group in SF fandom that seems to feel there is some sort of mainstream critic group victimizing the genre. I don't believe there is. When Time, Newsweek, The New York Times, and the Guardian are all reviewing a work of fantasy positively maybe it is time to realize that the majority of critics are fine with SF and in fact those that have a knee jerk negative reaction to it are in the minority.

 

[molybdenum]

What is meaning? Entertainment has no meaning? Only work laden with gravitas has meaning? Can only someone who sets out to write with meaning capture meaning? Is meaning a function of the author or the reader?

Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time is far more literary than a lot of the retread "literature" out there that depends on preconceived ideas of what "literary" means. That's the problem with having a narrowly predefined dogmatic idea of what is literary trained into people. Something innovative could stare them in the face and slap them and they still wouldn't know it was literary because it doesn't look like previous examples they were trained with.

Why, meaning is completely subjective, of course. And I'd say it's a function of both the author and the reader. If we are looking at public perception, and not personal perception, then if an author is not setting out to write with meaning is not going to have meaning to many people. And of course if not many people find the meaningthat the author is intended to write, that hurts public perception as well.

Obvious, with personal perception meaning is completely a function of the reader. If you find meaning in WoT Bond, that's great. I don't, I don't see any statement it is making to change or reinforce our perceptions of life. To me, it is simply an author setting out to tell a very good story.

I don't think pure entertainment has meaning, no. Something can be entertaining and have meaning, but entertainment of itself is not meaningful.

Of course, I am using my own personal definition of meaning and my own personal definition of literature, but I'm trying to capture how people think in regards to what is literary and what is not.

 

[KatG]

You'll note that both myself and KatG are careful to specify a particular meaning of the word literature because we are aware of different meanings of the word.

And different meanings to the word Literature as well.

So, yes newspapers' may call the Whitbread award literary and in the small l sense they would be correct, however in the big L sense they would not be. The Whitbread award (and now the Costa Award) use some judges that have no qualifications for judging Literature and they are equipped with a mission statement that does not ask them to select a work of Literature; therefore the award is not a Literary award.

So the Whitbread Award "doesn't count" because it does not fit your subjective criteria of what constitutes a literary award, even though it seems to fit numerous other people's views of what constitutes a literary award. Nice scripting there, Psylent, but it relies on everyone agreeing with your criteria. Which ain't going to happen.

There is a vocal group in SF fandom that seems to feel there is some sort of mainstream critic group victimizing the genre. I don't believe there is.

I agree. It's an imaginary script that says critics are a cohesive organization on the other side of the war. They most definitely aren't. But I do understand why Bond feels that way.

When Time, Newsweek, The New York Times, and the Guardian are all reviewing a work of fantasy positively maybe it is time to realize that the majority of critics are fine with SF and in fact those that have a knee jerk negative reaction to it are in the minority.

Unfortunately no, not quite yet. While it's true that many critics are dropping the war or dropping it partly, it can still be difficult to get SFF titles reviewed, and in particular, titles published in the category market. Some critics will reject books put out by certain publishers, or they restrict reviews of them to occasional, special columns. And Ansible regularly documents the writing of media, including the Guardian, that perpetuates the idea that SFF is automatically, inherently trash -- his "As Others See Us" feature. In fact, that remains our biggest problem -- the media still frequently operates as if we were still in 1982 when it comes to SFF, because they don't pay much attention to what's happening in fiction publishing. That's why they always sound so shocked about everything that happens with SFF and scifi, and keep wondering if SFF is "mainstream" now. They are of course better with suspense.

And that's okay, because we're hardly better at it, are we? But attitudes do change. Opera becomes Literature with a capital L.

 

[JunkMonkey]

Just to show not all newspapers treat SFF as trash, the Scotland on Sunday (Scotland's other Sunday newspaper - I prefer the Herald) is giving away a 'free' 28 page booklet today with an extract from Iain Banks' SF-ish newie Transition and a Culture short story.

 

[Fung Koo]

I don't agree Fung. Many authors are perceived as 'literary' even if they've only written one book. (Harper Lee, anyone) Hard to go outside of a certain genre if you only have one book to classify.

This is another case of the term "literary" being conflated with other terms that relate to literaure. "To Kill a Mockingbird" isn't considered "literary" per se -- it's considered to be part of the Literary Canon. Which is to say, amongst eductors and "the pros" of the world of literature, this is an important book. It's a first-of-its-kind.

That the inclusion of a book in the Literary Canon would presumably give it a following status as "literary" is simply a conflation of two different (though related) value systems that employ the same term. Two meanings, one word.

The Literary Canon is essentially one of the major foils against which other works are compared. So when we say that an author or a book are "literary," part of what we're doing is measuring that author or book against the established Canon to see how much learning about the Canon is reflected in the work of that author.

This particular approach is sometimes limited to what might be called "scholarly literary" works -- the play-stuff of academia. The irony is that it is not essential for a work to be considered "literary" on its own to be included in the Canon. This is because the works in the Canon itself need not adhere to the "literary" values it is used to support.

It's one of the grand frustrations with the Canon. Beowulf is part of the Canon, for example, not because it's literary itself, but because it is highly exemplary of its own type. That is, it is "of, relating to, or having the characteristics of learning or literature." It's a first-of-its-kind. In this case, it is characteristic of fantastical or mythological adventures tales, is the earliest known work of its sort from its part of the world, and is seminal to our understanding of fictional mythology.

Take a look at the Literary Canon, and you'll see many works of this sort. It's a collection of precedents (in a common law sense) on the one hand, and a record of great achievements by well-read folks on the other.

"Literary" certainly ain't simple. But if you consider it on its own terms, you can follow the logic. It's actually a very sensible arrangement of a collection of works into a Canon, and following from that it is an assessment tool against which works are judged. It's an attempt to collect the works considered to be meritous by "the establishment" into a sort of collective symbol for achievment.

In the middle of the 20th Century, as part of the upheaval against the Canon, we developed this notion of a split Canon -- a Literary Canon put forth by The Establishment (universities, high-brow crit mags, journals, etc), and the Popular Canon (enter the publishing industry, and 'democratization' -- aka, civil rights). It is with the Popular Canon where genre lit found a revolutionary home, and where we find the seeds of this war.

There's a valid claim here, certainly. The Popular Canon does indeed tend to reflect what people actually read and actually consider to be good moreso that the Literary Canon. But against which standard would you prefer to be judged?

The Establishment, by way of the Literary Canon, quite rightly (I think) questions the movement of such information/status away from the specialists to the unwashed masses. This was the primary obsession within the arts community for the better part of the 20th Century. You'll notice that it's the same argument now between The Establishment and un-vetted information sources like Wikipedia, and Blogs. And between major record labels and independent labels, myspace, etc.

This war is taken by the literary crowd as a challenge against the notion of "expertise." To them, it's like saying "anyone can run the 100m dash." Tell a sprinter that.

Exclusion versus Inclusion, depending on which side you look at it. This debate is really about Populism.

If you buy into the notion of the Popular Canon (and regardless of which side you're on, it shouldn't be ignored) then of course you're going to find the Literary Canon and all associated with it snobbish, high-brow, elitist, etc. The irony I'm trying to point out is that the Populist side is oftentimes equally as pretentious, but instead champion what the Literary folk would call "common" (with a sneer, making it seem like they look down upon such things... which many do ).

In the end, the only real question here is which Canon you think has more to offer in terms of what it says about literature, and what literature should aspire to.

Should literature not give a damn about "expanding the art" and just write tales to delight? Or should literature always attempt to elevate itself, no matter if those unwashed cretins understand it or not?

That's the war.

During the revolution, Genre Lit firmly embraced the populist side. Before then, Genre was actually quite a high-brow sorta thing. And now y'all have got sour grapes when you feel excluded by the Literary crowd.

 

[Fung Koo]

While I agree that series are something of an indicator of genre, they are by no means defining, inclusively or exclusively.

I didn't mean to suggest that this exists only in genre -- just that it's prevalent. Shockingly so compared to the non-genre nebula.

There are, of course, reasons for this. The simplest of which is that the non-genre nebula is largely written in one world -- ours. If you imagined every piece of non-genre fiction as one work set in, say, Bakker's Earwa, then you can extrapolate why persistent settings are popular in genre. But this is a whole other discussion...

Genre writers are regarded by the literary establishment (it exists, let's not quibble over exactly what it is) as both limited and not good: they are seen as doing only one thing, and doing it poorly.

But now you're pasting one label across the whole literary establishment (by which I'm assuming you mean academia and the American East Coast Elite). There are many in the establishment who write genre. There are also a great many who champion the inclusion of genre. And there are many and more who do include genre, but don't necessarily point it out or make any sort of deal out of it.

The big question, generally speaking, is how to include genre.

Just look at the difficulty we have in these threads in even allowing one person to utilize their own definition of what the genre even is... Nevermind how it is included in the Canon, how to teach what it is, what it's about, why it exists, and which genre books are good and which are bad, how to make that assessment... There's no consensus, which means there's no standard. Including genre in the establishment is tricky, just because of the un-fixed nature of genre itself.

The notion that genre writers are both limited and bad is an easy extension of limitation. If you're in a rock band, and you want to be successful, you should probably have an idea of what each instrument in your band does. Jimi Hendrix could play more than just the guitar -- it was just his specialty. You don't need to be an expert at each instrument, but you should at least have good working knowledge. That way you can make arrangements, balance dynamics levels, adapt chord structures, etc. The same is true of literature. If you're limited in your knowledge of the full instruments of literature, how adept a writer can you really be?

Whether that's true in all cases or not, just look at the Writing Forum here. Whenever someone asks for help with learning to write, the answer is, invariably: Read, Read, Read. And so far as I know, very probably no one who says that means "If you want to write Fantasy, then you should read every Fantasy book you can and ignore everything else." Very probably they mean "Read anything and everything, so that you are well-read."

Being well-read, and being able to show it in your writing = literary.

That is obviously silly in both respects--many specfic writers are remarkably diverse--but then, that silliness is the whole point of this thread.

The war rages on.

I'd say rather (if indeed there is a difference) that it displays a broader knowledge of the human condition, and significant skill in presenting that knowledge.

Define "the human condition." What is the relationshiop between the human condition and literature?

So far as I know, being well read is considered as one of the most effective means through which to learn about "the human condition." And since we're talking specifically about fiction literature -- not documentary, travelogue, journalism, politics, philosophy, religion, or any other human art(ifice) -- this would indicate that being "literary" specifically refers to "literature" and not the entirety of the human experience.

As I have said before, the degree of "literateness" of a work depends largely on the complexity and subtlety of that work..

Are you approaching this notion of "complexity" from the New Critical perspective? As in, on a per-piece basis?

Or are we examining the concept of "literary" wholistically, as it pertains to the study of literature in general?

If you're going for the New Critical, then yes -- the "complexity" of an individual work is generally understood as an indicator of "literaryness." But if you're going wholistic, then this is incomplete. How is that complexity scaled? How do you say "this one is more complex than this one"? Do you mean the same thing for each? What's the rubric? And, if you decide in the end that one is more complex than the other, does that mean that the one is more literary than the other? What does that even mean?

The per-piece approach is fine, but it's incomplete. There is comparison going on here. And complexity -- in whatever form -- is not the whole picture.

And there, of course, is the crux: the pleasure deriving from complexity can only be in proportion as a given reader perceives complexity. At some time in youth, Dick and Jane and Spot's cavortings do please, because they are, at that time, at about the maximum level of complexity the reader can handle.

And this is where we come back to populism.

Grossman's point about Modernism is part of what is making this so tricky. "Literary" is not a genre, though the publishers advertising efforts have a lot to do with making it seem like there's a "literary" genre. There's an assumption being made here that a book that is actually literary is the same as a book that is marketed as literary.

First rule of anything -- nothing that anyone markets is truth. You can't call something literary until it's been well absorbed and processed by the culture. The marketing of something as "literary" is more properly "the publisher believes this will come to be regarded as a literary work over time." But publishers are rarely that honest. They, too, apply their own tastes and pleasures to a given work. And most of them -- like most people in general, learned or otherwise -- don't understand what "literary" really, is anyway.

The claim that the literary establishment makes is that genre readers have limited capabilities for appreciating "literate" work

Well, if you're like me, you hate the vast majority of the music that is played on the radio. I think my own taste is far superior to the taste of those who produce popular radio. I even know a whole group of people who agree with me (most of the time). I call them my friends. Ergo, my friends and I believe that radio is not capable of appreciating good music.

But, people like this music. Clearly people buy it, otherwise they wouldn't be continually producing and broadcasting this incredibly crappy music. Right? So how is it that they can't see that they like crap? Is it just because they're so used to listening to crap that they can't tell the difference? Am I the odd one out here? Nah, that can't be it... They must be gettin' hoodwinked!

We all do this to each other. There's nothing special about the literary establishment dumping on what they don't understand, or the genre community doing the same to the literary community.

, and they base that canard on the fact that a lot of genre work is covered by Sturgeon's Law

Perhaps some do. I suspect many don't. And you're right -- if they do that, then they're putting the cart before the horse. Counting their chicks before they hatch. Whatever. Annoying, certainly. About as annoying as genre fans calling the literary establishment a bunch of small minded snobs who couldn't appreciate a good yarn if it was forced under their eyelids...

Pot, meet kettle.

 

[Fung Koo]

You are stating genre as a movement,

No, I call it a tradition. Surrealism, Dadaism, Cubism... those are movements. Genre is a tradition, and operates the exact same was as the literary community does.

a way of writing and telling stories that you are calling repetitive and limited by its repetition.

It may not have been as clear as I would have liked, but I was trying to draw a distinction between the genre as a whole, the writer and his/her entire body of works independently of genre, and any given individual work.

If you have a box, a circle, a 3, and the letter O, and I pull a Sesame St on you and say "one of these things does not belong" then you set out on a discrimintory task to dissociate each item from the other. Those with the least dissocation from each other can be said to be a type, and form the basis of defining what doesn't fit. There are several levels at which this can be performed, and each of those levels gives us the different things we mean when we say "genre" and when we say "literary."

What's the difference between a large apple and a small apple? They're still both apples. You want us to see each book as individual. But the fact that a book is SF or F at all indicates that we're comparing apples to apples and looking for the differences between them. Sure, you can come up with myriad sub-types and individual apples this way.... doesn't change the fact they're still apples.

And you leave yourself loopholes for declaring works of genre not-genre, beyond genre, because they don't fit the "movement" you've created, such as crossing genres. Therefore your notion of genre can never be challenged because anything that challenges it you declare to be an exception that doesn't count as genre writing. You're cherry picking.

Or you're misunderstanding me... Genre is not some singular thing. It's a collection of many things with certain shared properties (that evolve over time). That genre is fuzzy should be understood. And, it's rare that one genre and another are mutually exclusive. But what happens when two of these fuzzy critters walk into the same story? Do you call it a new species, or do you call it a half breed?

In Canada, we call people of mixed aboriginal/european descent "Metis." We refer to them collectively as "The Metis People" -- and when we say this, we really mean people from the Red River Settlement area of Manitoba. Now, was the very first mixed race person Metis if there was no such thing as "The Metis People" against which to make that judgment?

The question we're trying to resolve here is: at what point does the genre inform the work, or the work inform the genre?

If I asked you to write for me a short story that embodies the primary qualities of Science Fiction, could you do it? Independently from me telling you what those qualities are, could you?

If I asked a thousand different authors to do that, I'd get a thousand different stories.

That's basically your argument, right?

But the stories were still written with some sense of what SF is before they were written. There's a tradition that informs the creation of the product -- something against which those stories are judged as belonging or not.

But what is different is highly subjective, and you can no more define literary for the rest of the world than you can blow fire out of your eyeballs.

Except that you're perhaps under the mistaken impression that you're not redefining the term. It's not your term. It's not even "the publics" term. Someone else defined it first, and I'm just relaying to y'all what the term was actually intended to mean -- not how it's been abused, or how I, personally, think it ought to be.

Literature is about tradition. There's a well established model of discourse that allows the literary community to communicate. It has specialized terms and jargon. "Literary" is one of them. You can't go into the community using terms willy-nilly, and propping them up as strawmen. "Literary" has a few very specific meanings that get conflated by those who are unaware of those specificities -- as has been happening in this thread, and in the SFF communities reaction in general to the literary establishment.

As I said in a previous post, during the culture wars of the mid-20th century, the SFF community purposefully chose to distance itself from the literary establishment. It was the teenage phase of SFF. I'd say it's come into its mid-20s now, and is finally realizing that mom and dad aren't really all that bad. (with a few stragglers laggin behind!) But while it's been on its gap year, SFF got drunk and forgot what "literary" means.

It's not the smear term it's being made out to be here. It's just a term that refers primarily to two things: to a quality of an individual book, that it holds demonstrable intertextuality or intertextual awareness against an established Canon of literature, showcasing a level of mastery within the profession to the community; or, to a quality of an individual author, that s/he displays broad well-readedness as evidenced through his/her collected works, showcasing a level of mastery within and about the profession to the community.

Many SFF works, and their authors collected works, fail to meet the requirements of the term. It's the difference between a cook and chef. That's all.

Your declarations that certain writers aren't repetitious in using the same character roles over and over while genre is, is highly spurious to my editor's eye, and your claim that genre titles are all full of repetition without layers of meaning and purpose broadly demotes books you've never read.

I will never claim to have read every book ever. But again... genre is fuzzy. Which is especially scary to me, cuz that means that there's a large, out-of-focus monster roaming the countryside.

Lastly, your definition of genre is at the same time too narrow and too sweeping to actually work logically, in my opinion.

Hahaha! So, the problem is that it's not exclusive enough, and not inclusive enough?

Dang...

and various other repetitious writers you claim aren't repetitious, or don't count, or are not literary, or are repetitious but do it with purposeful art, or whatever other dividing line you want to make up.

Did I say that repetition is exclusive to the genre lit crowd? Repetition is everywhere. It's the process by which we learn. Therefore, repetition is the very basis of writing anything at all. The critical difference is whether or not you're able to grow past repetition.

 

[Fung Koo]

That's the problem with having a narrowly predefined dogmatic idea of what is literary trained into people. Something innovative could stare them in the face and slap them and they still wouldn't know it was literary because it doesn't look like previous examples they were trained with.

The first question is whether or not you buy into the concept of mastery. If not, then it doesn't matter what you read or why you read it, so there's no point in being involved in this debate. If yes, then the question is: what constitutes mastery?

Yes, there needs to be more frequent review of The Canon. But what happens when The Canon becomes so large that it's impossible for anyone to have read even half of it? Because that's about where we're at, now. The recent push has been for sub-Canons, based predominantly on geo-cultural distinctions. But with the advent of the internet and global market production, geo-cultural definitions are becoming irrelevant.

So -- what, if anything, should replace The Canon to help us all understand what constitutes a great achievement in literature? And how do we decide whose mastery is sufficient to make that decision?

 

[Fung Koo]

So, yes newspapers' may call the Whitbread award literary and in the small l sense they would be correct, however in the big L sense they would not be. The Whitbread award (and now the Costa Award) use some judges that have no qualifications for judging Literature and they are equipped with a mission statement that does not ask them to select a work of Literature; therefore the award is not a Literary award.

So the Whitbread Award "doesn't count" because it does not fit your subjective criteria of what constitutes a literary award, even though it seems to fit numerous other people's views of what constitutes a literary award. Nice scripting there, Psylent, but it relies on everyone agreeing with your criteria. Which ain't going to happen.

Psylent's exactly right on this, Kat. That's not his subjective criteria. It's the objectively verifiable, institutionally defined function of the big-L Literary Community.

You're basically revoking the informed oipinion of the big-L Literature Specialists -- those who make Literature (as an instituion) their chosen profession -- to speak to what is and is not "Literary." And it's their term! Whether or not anyone, subjectively, agrees with it is irrelevant.

Unless you're meaning some other word, some other meaning, when you say "literary" -- in which case, I have to ask you to define the term you're using.

When an auditing firm does an audit, does it listen to you when you tell them that business is going well? Or, does it examine your product and processes independently of your opinion to ascertain the truth? In the end, whose word would you trust? Your own? Or theirs? Or -- and here I suspect is the truth of it -- does it depend on how similar their opinion is to your own?

 

[FitzChivalry]

Damn, this was the longest post ever, i think this thread should be closed before it clogs up the internet.

 

[Psylent]

So the Whitbread Award "doesn't count" because it does not fit your subjective criteria of what constitutes a literary award, even though it seems to fit numerous other people's views of what constitutes a literary award. Nice scripting there, Psylent, but it relies on everyone agreeing with your criteria. Which ain't going to happen.

It certainly doesn't require everyone to agree with me. I was having a conversation with one person. Whether or not random people agree with me is immaterial. The question is whether or not she agrees with me. Of course, if she does disagree with me I'd want to see her rationale for why she disagrees because I feel that my criteria for what is or is not a Literary award is both reasonable and rational.

 

[PeterWilliam]

Dang! That angry beaver dammed up the whole thread. I can't sign in, view new posts and follow along with all of that. I call do-over.

Ok, re-start the thread from the beginning.