As a reader I do not see this as a case of seeking equality which is what your argument implies.
Huh? I don't understand what you're saying here.
I do not see the need for SFF to try to fit snugly into the modernist worldview.
Neither do I. But some SFF authors will be using modernist style, some won't, just like in any other area of fiction, and neither has to change that.
I do not associate the recent successes of fantasy with a shift to more modernist writing.
Neither do I. Grossman, in trying to make an argument for genre writers, is stuffing them in a box and using the classic script that the reason people like a book has to do with the writing philosophy of that book, and not the numerous other complex factors that cause it, from hit movie adaptations to the work of schoolteachers to the Internet to the symbiotic word-of-mouth nature of the fiction market, etc.
This is in fact the main problem. The culture wars were actually started by social class systems (I agree with Hal Duncan on that,) and how fiction was sold. It continues to be fueled by people concentrating only on great successes -- bestsellers, phenoms, Pulitizer Prize winners -- and not on the whole markets and what happens in them, separately and in relation to great successes, how publishers get people aware of fiction, economic factors, etc. So it becomes that people must like this particular book or gave it a prize because of X -- that one magic formula reason that the media is particularly fond of.
And they make a lot of erroneous assumptions based on selected and misinterpreted data. Grossman was postulating that Twilight and YA has become successful because people now want simple plots. Which is ridiculous. If you know anything about how the YA market has developed over the last twenty years, you know it's ridiculous. Which is part of the reason a lot of the SFF community, which has been long involved with YA, was miffed with him, because they thought he should know better.
The literary establishment has become more accommodating because of popular success.
Again, no, magic formula reason. There are a host of factors that have led to people dropping the culture wars and becoming interested in genre fiction. Popular success and movie adaptations of a handful of books is one factor, but remember, the genre had huge successes and movie adaptations in the 1960's, 1970's, and so on. Suspense used to dominate the bestseller list. Other factors include that the nature of the "literary establishment" has changed. Quite a lot of it are people who grew up with genre, and studied and taught it in high school and college. Then there are changes in how books are marketed, changes in the media, the upsurge of reading book clubs that occurred in the 1990's, and lots of other stuff. That Chabon went around saying my award-winning book is genre and genre is great had a huge effect, in part because the media sucked it up.
Psylent is incorrect in that numerous critics did and do object to Harry Potter. I had to sit through a whole speech by a Tolkein scholar about why Tolkein is lasting literature but Rowling didn't qualify, which I endured with a sigh. And yes, quite a few of them object on the grounds that it is plot-heavy. But they don't really mean plot-heavy. They mean it has violent, suspense action in it. This is an idea that was relatively recent, in fact it developed mainly in the 1980's, not coincidentally when thrillers dominated the bestseller lists. Others object on the grounds that it is YA. These are all scripts, imaginary perceptions. You don't play into a script; you point out why it's imaginary and then ignore it. Which Grossman was trying to do, but he played too into the scripts and made it about the writing in the books, instead of just saying that it's ridiculous to demand that all books be written in the same way to be quality, as some people do.
Owlcroft is still going with the fantasy fans are mostly morons and publishers commercial hacks script, which I am also really tired of, along with the idea that the literary stuff struggles in the gutter, which is incorrect. The culture wars are not between fans who are discerning and read literary SFF put out in general fiction, and SFF publishers that hardly ever do literary SFF and instead cater to those other not discerning fantasy fans who read trash. This particular script is really damaging to a lot of SFF authors.
The book he brings up, Oh Pure and Radiant Heart by Lydia Millet, is published by Mariner Books, which is a trade division of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, which at this point is largely an educational publisher. HMH doesn't have a SFF imprint, not counting what they do in kids/YA. Therefore the book is marketed just to the general fiction market, and possibly also to the school market.
But if the book was published by HarperCollins in its general fiction imprints, like William Morrow, it would be marketed to the general fiction trade audience and also it would be publicized and marketed through Harper Eos, its SFF imprint. The book would come up if you do a SFF search of their catalog, they'd put it in their email newsletter for Eos, get reviews in SFF media, etc. If they were doing a big enough push, they'd do ads and online ads in SFF places. They did this with Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist and subsequent novel The Witch of Portobello, which were published by their general fiction arm HarperSanFrancisco -- they plastered ads on SFF sites and marketed it relentlessly to fantasy fans through Eos. They moved Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett into William Morrow to market to the general fiction audience, while also doing massive publicity to the SFF audience, and the booksellers will put their works in the SFF section or the general fiction section or both. They maximize as many audiences as they can get. Literary fiction -- whether it's genre or not -- is big business, and they can get anybody to read it. And all those novels, from the Pulitzer Prize winners to the Warhammer tie-ins, are put out largely by the
same publishers who use all their resources. Margaret Atwood owes a large chunk of her bestselling sales on her two latest SF novels to those novels being endlessly marketed to SF fans, who have read her despite her belief that they won't be interested -- and who read a ton of general fiction SFF, like Anthony Durham's series, which was also put out in general fiction because he was a historical fiction novelist, but is also considered genre/category.
The writers who are trying to do "literary" works who think using genre elements will damage their career, and those who think it should damage their career or assume it will (much of the media still,) are working from an old script that was always imaginary, and that has no real understanding of how fiction sells and why it appeals to people. It was idiotic in the past, and in our current society, even more idiotic. (A few of them still work in publishing, sadly, but you can often convert them.) They believe in an imaginary war that fewer and fewer people subscribe to, and which looks stupider and stupider as time goes on.
Grossman knows this. As a member of the respectable media who has also written a YA fantasy novel, he's in a good position to contribute to the evidence that believing in the culture wars is stupid. He's trying to show people who subscribe to it that it is stupid, but he did it by trying to build a culture wars argument that he thought might convince them. Which isn't the worse thing in the world. But it would have helped a lot more if he hadn't called all the genre stuff "simplistic."
And it would help if people stopped believing that some books should be labeled "hard" and some books labeled "easy" just because some people subjectively view them as such. It would help if people would stop trying to build two box either/or systems. The two really problematic ones are the idea that literary fiction is an actual, separate country from the rest of fiction with specific criteria, and that genres are separate countries; and the idea that there is high-brow culture and low-brow culture and everything has to be shoved in one category or the other, which is a left-over from our 20th century social classes days.
But I'm not holding my breath. Erosion, though, erosion works. Grossman will help with erosion. Michael Chabon has been an immense help with erosion. Atwood helps with the erosion even though she doesn't know she's doing it. And the more SFF fans we can get to drop the either/or scripts, the better.
