# Moderately offensive article about genre fiction



## M. LeRenard (Oct 27, 2012)

So I thought this merited a little discussion, if people cared to discuss it:
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blo...n-not-that-theres-anything-wrong-with-it.html

The basic gist is... well, it's a little hard to pinpoint, because the author was clearly on the defensive, but it more or less talks about limitations inherent in genre fiction, and why that makes genre fiction not as respectable as literary fiction.

Now, of course, there's an argument to be made there, but I think it really hinges on what you want to call 'literary fiction'.  In other words, what is literature?  This author seems to take the oft-traveled road that literature is like other fiction, but holds a strong degree of realism and makes some kind of as-yet undiscovered and very important point about humanity or whatever.  He argues that genre fiction has a much harder time doing this because it, by necessity, relies on tropes and formulas, in order to stay within the walls of its appropriate genre.  In which case, genre fiction is geared more toward people who just want to read an easy story with clear lines between good and evil and plots that are formulaic and simple.  Good genre fiction is thus whatever has the most creative variation on old themes, and hence introduces little that's new to humanity's body of philosophical knowledge.

It's no secret that I abhor the New Yorker's fiction.  They consistently choose, without fail, the most idiotic and inane bullshit stories imaginable to publish in their magazine.  Stories that just ramble on for a while, telling some long pointless anecdote about some person who does some things, and then they either end without having resolved anything (the infamous 'let the reader interpret it as he wishes' approach, which is also quite popular in modern art), or with the character going on to live a boring uneventful life, as though the deeper message is that regular, every day people can have stories told about them, too.  They're the kinds of stories that only snobbish assholes can appreciate, because if you concentrate on them long enough and hard enough you can come up with some really great reason why they're brilliant.  A reason which, consequently, only you can understand.  Which obviously means you're the smart one for having figured it out, right?  You get my drift.

So I do find this article just a wee bit offensive, because I (and many of you, I'm sure) have read a great deal of genre fiction that's poignant enough to provoke interesting ideas and thoughts in my head, things I hadn't thought about before.  Things don't have to be realistic to be able to ring true to me.  I mean, one of the reasons I write furry fiction is to explore the non-human, something of which literary fiction, by this author's definition, is totally incapable of exploring.  I mean, after all, what's the purpose of a story about a fox-man who goes around seeking the truth about his world's past?  Why did I bother to write that, if it has no relevance to, say, genocide in Rwanda, pre-Soviet era Russia, feudal Japan, the Civil War, whatever?  Could it possibly be that I wanted to expand on my own thoughts regarding what it means to be human from the perspective of a rather solitary carnivore who has every reason to not follow traditional human ethics?  Maybe that's getting too far out there, too irrelevant to what's actually important in life.  Maybe because there's magic in my story, it takes away the seriousness of it and weakens the message.  Maybe I should have written a personal story of a human male who lacks empathy and thus has to deal with the social hardship that brings him, thus illustrating both the importance of empathy in society but also showing that empathy in humans may be limited only to those who appear to empathize back, putting into question whether or not it really is a noble thing we have.  You know... something real and thought-provoking.  None of this Star Trek baloney regarding ethical dilemmas of the future that no one has to deal with right now.
And I sure could have done that, but that wasn't the point I was trying to make.  I wanted to get into the Star Trek baloney, because even though it may not be immediately relevant, it's something I still think merits consideration.  I mean, maybe one of the reasons people have such a hard time explaining ourselves is because we keep trying to come at it from the inside.  Everyone knows it's easiest to see the bigger picture from far away.  You can easily tell the Earth is round from space.  So what does it mean that you're not allowed to go into space in literary fiction?

I'm just rambling at this point.  Someone else weigh in.


----------



## DarrylWolf (Oct 28, 2012)

Well, writing my character's backstory has been somewhat cathartic for me and I consider it a form of literature, meant to be read by the people of FA. But he's not just your average self-extension fursona, I know everyone thinks they have a fursona who is different but I think I'm on to something. He's a professional basketball-playing wolf from Philadelphia who lost his father at the age of 9, and he is a devotee of the "Philly soul" genre of music, the 1970's music that became a key contributor to "disco". The controversial thing is that I am white, but given his life story, my fursona crosses the color line. I hope that doesn't make me a regressive, backwards-minded person for having a character whose race is different than mine.

So I can understand that "blackface" is extremely insulting but I just can't "un-write" what I have written already about my fursona. And I feel that the only race that matters is the human race so whether or not my alter ego is racially different than I am should not be important. I just hope nobody thinks of me as being racist, though.

As for what you said earlier, I find the "New Yorker" to be a magazine read by a bunch of annoying white-bread WASPs who think that they know everything because they have a college degree, listen to NPR, and drive a Volvo. They're the kind of people who think that owning abstract art constitutes being "cultured" and only do that because everybody is doing that. I have more respect for the college frat boy who furnishes his apartment with blonde bombshells and band posters because he's following his instinct, not the crowd. That's why I like Furries for doing something different! Who says that fiction has to be about one thing or another, just let it be good, (no more effeminate sparkle vampires, please) and stop pretending you know what's best for everybody!


----------



## M. LeRenard (Oct 28, 2012)

DarrylWolf said:
			
		

> As for what you said earlier, I find the "New Yorker" to be a magazine read by a bunch of annoying white-bread WASPs who think that they know everything because they have a college degree, listen to NPR, and drive a Volvo.


I read the New Yorker.  They have a lot of really interesting and insightful articles a wide variety of topics, and they're well-known for being extremely accurate with their fact-checking, despite how left leaning they are.  I respect just about everything about the magazine, except I happen to think the fiction they publish is fucking terrible.
Anyway, since every college frat boy furnishes his apartment with blonde bombshells and band posters, I would say he too is following a crowd.  Just not the same crowd.  But that's not really the point.  I just felt like this particular article was trying to justify the New Yorker's choice of fiction, but I still wasn't buying it.  I was wondering if maybe I'm just biased because I perceive that type of 'literature' to be hoity-toity pseudo-intellectual crap.  Maybe I'm just trying to justify *my* preference in fiction.


----------



## DarrylWolf (Oct 28, 2012)

M. LeRenard said:


> I read the New Yorker.  They have a lot of really interesting and insightful articles a wide variety of topics, and they're well-known for being extremely accurate with their fact-checking, despite how left leaning they are.  I respect just about everything about the magazine, except I happen to think the fiction they publish is fucking terrible.
> Anyway, since every college frat boy furnishes his apartment with blonde bombshells and band posters, I would say he too is following a crowd.  Just not the same crowd.  But that's not really the point.  I just felt like this particular article was trying to justify the New Yorker's choice of fiction, but I still wasn't buying it.  I was wondering if maybe I'm just biased because I perceive that type of 'literature' to be hoity-toity pseudo-intellectual crap.  Maybe I'm just trying to justify *my* preference in fiction.



And the fact "Twilight" and "50 Shades" are doing so well at the bookstore makes me wonder if Americans have any real taste in fictional literature. I'm in a tournament right now with my fursona and I'm going to write up stories of him beating opponents, which would actually be better than Meyer's work. But I'm not making the millions of dollars for my amateur writing, she is.


----------



## Aleu (Oct 28, 2012)

DarrylWolf said:


> And the fact "Twilight" and "50 Shades" are doing so well at the bookstore makes me wonder if Americans have any real taste in fictional literature. I'm in a tournament right now with my fursona and I'm going to write up stories of him beating opponents, which would actually be better than Meyer's work. But I'm not making the millions of dollars for my amateur writing, she is.



Well, to be fair, 50 Shades is erotica. People who read it are really in for the porn rather than the story.


----------



## Conker (Oct 28, 2012)

I love genre fiction, but sometimes I question how good some or most of it is. It's fun and entertaining, but gosh, I just keep running into fantasy stories that are all the bloody same. I haven't hit up any sci fi in some time, but I'm sure that genre runs into the same problem. 

It's sad because there are so many possibilities with science fiction and fantasy, yet so many of the books I run into (either by cover judging or by friends telling me its good) are just repeats of each other with different characters. If they aren't repeats of each other, they are repeats of other books (and not always written very well either). 

Part of the problem is: I mostly read genre fiction in high school. I've moved away from it somewhat to more literary fiction or actual literature written in bygone days. It's hard to go back sometimes.

But the other thing is that I like genre fiction because of the tropes. Dragons and magic and sword fighting for fantasy, space battles and aliens and the like for sci fi. Shit's just fun.

I'd like to write a fantasy novel, but damn, I'd try to shift the focus a bit so it just isn't GOOD FIGHTING EVIL. There's so much more to a world where magic is real.

I do think there's a difference between genre fiction and literary fiction, though the two can overlap. A book with "literature" in its genre name needs to have something more than your simple plot read about killing dragon or fighting off evil aliens. There has to be a greater point than going from A to B. A book written to be fun is fine; I love those books because they are fun, but they aren't literature. They are just genre novels. 

I don't see anything wrong with saying one is better than the other because honestly, I'd say most literary fiction is better. The problem is there are so many examples and books and I'm not exactly well established in new authors, so my opinion is very much narrowed by what I've read in the past.


----------



## M. LeRenard (Oct 28, 2012)

Well, I think we can all agree that 'literature' is just better writing.  I'm just wondering how one might define 'literature', and how it's really fundamentally different from genre fiction assuming that example of genre fiction is on par with literature.  If you get my drift.


----------



## kitreshawn (Oct 29, 2012)

DarrylWolf said:


> And the fact "Twilight" and "50 Shades" are doing so well at the bookstore makes me wonder if Americans have any real taste in fictional literature.



This is overly harsh.  First off, such behavior is hardly specific to any one location.  The thing to remember is that what we see coming out today is no different form things that came out in the past.  The difference is that we are seeing all the, for lack of a better term, shit as it comes out while history will ultimately forgets the 'bad' writing and only remembers the good (it is the same for music and movies).  Consequently it is very easy to look at past art and thing "Wow, things have really gone downhill" simply because you do not see all the bad that came out at the same time.

Case in point, yeah we recently got Twilight, but we also got Harry Potter and the Hunger Games.  Yeah we got 50 Shades, but we also got Name of the Wind and Game of Thrones.  Conversely everyone remembers Lord of the Rings, but if I were to ask you about the book Hijack you would wonder what the hell I was talking about.


----------



## Conker (Oct 29, 2012)

kitreshawn said:


> Case in point, yeah we recently got Twilight, but we also got Harry Potter and the Hunger Games.  Yeah we got 50 Shades, but we also got Name of the Wind and Game of Thrones.  Conversely everyone remembers Lord of the Rings, but if I were to ask you about the book Hijack you would wonder what the hell I was talking about.


Name of the Wind and Hunger Games are both bad. 



			
				M. LeRenard said:
			
		

> Well, I think we can all agree that 'literature' is just better writing.   I'm just wondering how one might define 'literature', and how it's  really fundamentally different from genre fiction assuming that example  of genre fiction is on par with literature.  If you get my drift.


Edit: I had a tl/dr thing typed up, but it was mostly word vomit on reflection. I guess I don't know how to answer that question. What I tried to define as literature works for one book in the literary canon but not another. 

I'd like to think certain books are literature because they are well crafted or for some other reason, but I'd like to think there's more to it than that. In some ways, it boils down to personal opinion. Some books just have this undefinable umph to them that makes them better than others.

I do think that genre fiction can spill out into literature though. Tolkien seems to have, at least by the opinion of a few of my college professors, and I'd like to put A Song of Ice and Fire in there as well, since those books are great, but perhaps those are both just really good genre fiction.

Bugger if I know.


----------



## kitreshawn (Oct 29, 2012)

Conker said:


> Name of the Wind and Hunger Games are both bad.



And I can grant you that and you still have to deal with Harry Potter and Game of Thrones being on that list.  My point stands.


----------



## cpam (Oct 30, 2012)

I believe the difference between Literature and Genre has more to do with intent and results.  Literature is about the writing, and Genre is about entertainment.  Literature is about words and style and using the writing to pursue an idea or an ideal, trying to push the envelope, whereas genre is simply telling a tale within its accepted tropes without concern of expanding  beyond its own boundaries.

Now, there's not a hard and dried boundary between the two; you can certainly do literature within a genre.  But generally speaking, the two go in different directions with different goals in mind.


----------



## kitreshawn (Oct 30, 2012)

Personally I think the difference between Literature and Genre is really just time.  Anything you write is going to end up in some genre simply because people like making categories to organize things.  Really the only difference between books that are called literature and what is published these days is time.  Looking at something that is now thought of as literature, such as Moby Dick, and saying that it is literature because of how it was written is putting things backwards.  While the writer was no doubt among the most talented published at the time much of the style is also impacted by what was popular during those years.



cpam said:


> I believe the difference between Literature and Genre has more to do with intent and results.  Literature is about the writing, and Genre is about entertainment.  Literature is about words and style and using the writing to pursue an idea or an ideal, trying to push the envelope, whereas genre is simply telling a tale within its accepted tropes without concern of expanding  beyond its own boundaries.



While I don't specifically disagree as such I think you put them in the wrong categories.  While those are clear things done in literature, I do not thing it is because the author is trying to write literature but rather trying to tell a story with meaning.  Determining if the story becomes literature is another since it needs to withstand the test of time.  There are plenty of books that are good, have a very clear intent to push the envelope, explore style, and so forth that will never become literature.

I will agree that 'Genre' writing tends to be much more about cashing in (Twilight or Anita Blake are good examples) and often ends up being very follow the leader.  I would personally call this Pulp though.  It isn't necessarily bad, it just stays very 'safe' to get a paycheck.

Side note: Depending on your source you will find that anywhere between 1 million and 2 million books are published every year (not all of these are fiction obviously), so it should come as no surprise that there is a lot of bad getting published along with the few good books that come out.


----------



## cpam (Oct 30, 2012)

kitreshawn said:


> Personally I think the difference between Literature and Genre is really just time.  Anything you write is going to end up in some genre simply because people like making categories to organize things.  Really the only difference between books that are called literature and what is published these days is time.  Looking at something that is now thought of as literature, such as Moby Dick, and saying that it is literature because of how it was written is putting things backwards.  While the writer was no doubt among the most talented published at the time much of the style is also impacted by what was popular during those years.
> 
> 
> 
> ...



'Pulp' is just another term for 'Genre', since all pulp stories fall into the Genre categorization.

It doesn't take years to recognize a work as being Literature; the 'test of time' will only reveal whether or not it is _good_ and _enduring_ Literature., which is another matter altogether.  I decided to check the dictionary for definitions just to add some clarity to the discussion.  Literature is described as "written material such as poetry, novels, essays, etc., esp works of imagination characterized by excellence of style and expression and by themes of general or enduring interest", and Genre is defined as "a category of artistic composition, as in music or literature, marked by a distinctive style, form, or content".  That would make Genre a sub-classification of Literature.  (Pulp, or 'pulp fiction', which is what we really mean by 'pulp', is further defined as 'fiction dealing with lurid or sensational subjects, often printed on rough, low-quality paper manufactured from wood pulp' (referring to the pulp magazines of the 1920's), which would actually make Pulp a sub-classification of Genre.)

Books like *Kavalier And Clay* or *The Life Of Pi* can be considered Literature, but don't really fit into recognizable genres; *Twilight* is definitely Genre, but could anyone really consider it _Literature_?  Only in the broadest sense, in that Literature can simply mean any written work.  *The Lord Of The Rings* can be considered both Genre and Literature.  (Although, in LOTR's case, the specific genre is kinda slippery; we'd consider it fantasy today, but I don't think that classification (as we know it) existed at the time of its writing, when it would likely have been considered a fairy tale or modern day mythology.)  *I, The Jury* by Mickey Spillaine would be Pulp.


----------



## Conker (Oct 30, 2012)

cpam said:


> I believe the difference between Literature and Genre has more to do with intent and results.  Literature is about the writing, and Genre is about entertainment.  Literature is about words and style and using the writing to pursue an idea or an ideal, trying to push the envelope, whereas genre is simply telling a tale within its accepted tropes without concern of expanding  beyond its own boundaries.
> 
> Now, there's not a hard and dried boundary between the two; you can certainly do literature within a genre.  But generally speaking, the two go in different directions with different goals in mind.


I think that's mostly fair. When people start talking about literature, they start namedropping people like Herman Melville and Nathanial Hawthorn and Mark Twain etc etc etc. What they have in common is they are all dead. I've gotten into plenty of arguments over the quality of those authors' writings, but books like _The Marble Faun_ are still put into the "literature" category despite them being god fucking boring (ergo, shitty). 

I could make an argument that some of Stephen King's novels are literature, but I dunno if I would be taken seriously because A) he makes a ton of money off of his work, so it's popular B) he's still alive, so his work hasn't had to transcend time C) the horror genre isn't exactly well respected as fine art.

But then, not all of Melville's works are considered literature by my knowing. Before he wrote _Moby Dick_, he wrote a few really popular adventure novels. They sold well and made him money, but they were well within the genre fiction of the time period. I've never read them, and I hope to change that, but from what I know: they were pretty much written to be fun adventure novels. _Moby Dick_ has more of a reason to exist than being a good whaling yarn. It sets out to say something specific. It was also hated when it was published.


----------



## cpam (Oct 30, 2012)

Conker said:


> I could make an argument that some of Stephen King's novels are literature, but I dunno if I would be taken seriously because A) he makes a ton of money off of his work, so it's popular B) he's still alive, so his work hasn't had to transcend time C) the horror genre isn't exactly well respected as fine art.



I don't think making money or being popular affects the quality of the writing, which is what really determines a work as Literature.  Charles Dickens attained both in his lifetime, and his works were already being hailed as classics before he died.  As for the horror genre being literature, well, Poe did quite well with it.


----------



## Conker (Oct 30, 2012)

cpam said:


> I don't think making money or being popular affects the quality of the writing, which is what really determines a work as Literature.  Charles Dickens attained both in his lifetime, and his works were already being hailed as classics before he died.  As for the horror genre being literature, well, Poe did quite well with it.


That's true. I forgot about good ol Mr. Poe. Lovecraft is well respected now as well (despite him being a racist twat)


----------



## kitreshawn (Oct 30, 2012)

cpam said:


> I don't think making money or being popular affects the quality of the writing (...)



It certainly doesn't have to, but it seems that often it does.  Frequently you will find that the very first book an author writes is one of their best.  As being a writer becomes their job, however, things seem to gradually get less good though they will obviously have the occasional excellent book.  Obviously nobody is capable of writing amazing stories all the time, but I think there is a little bit more to it then that.

There are a fair number of studies that show rewards, especially monetary rewards, can hamper creativity.  Beyond even that I expect that there are a lot of authors who end up under pressure to write another book even when they have run out of ideas or run out of their best ideas (I suspect this is what happened with the Ender's Game series).  Then there of course are going to be the ones who find a message that resonated very strongly and then keep to that for most of their future works, trying to play it safe and becoming fairly stagnant (This seems to have happened to Terry Goodkind).


----------



## sunandshadow (Nov 1, 2012)

Stupid New Yorker magazine is stupid, and has been stupid for decades.  I think that's really all that needs to be said about that article.  Genre fiction is extremely varied "under the hood" and it's basically impossible to say that anything that can be don't in fiction can't be done in genre fiction.


----------



## M. LeRenard (Nov 1, 2012)

sunandshadow said:
			
		

> Stupid New Yorker magazine is stupid, and has been stupid for decades. I think that's really all that needs to be said about that article.


Did you read the article?
I thought it worth posting here not so a bunch of people could agree with me, but because I thought the author of that article made some good, thought-provoking points.


----------



## sunandshadow (Nov 2, 2012)

M. LeRenard said:


> Did you read the article?
> I thought it worth posting here not so a bunch of people could agree with me, but because I thought the author of that article made some good, thought-provoking points.


I did actually, though it's a fair question, as the opening paragraph made me facepalm so hard I almost didn't get to the true stupidity further in.  Problem with the opening paragraphs: the writer says that he did something stupid and clueless (to wit, writing an article about genre fiction's newfound respectability which is not newfound at all), got properly scolded (the topic is in fact "no news, finis"), yet the writer did not learn any kind of less or admit being humbled by this.  He's got LeGuin's simple, powerful truth in front of him (literature â€œis the extant body of written art. All novels belong to it.â€) but he ignores it in favor of deprecating his own writing (completely irrelevant to the topic).

The really offensively stupid part is this: "A good mystery or thriller isnâ€™t set off from an accomplished  literary novel by plotting, but by the writerâ€™s sensibility, his purpose  in writing, and the choices he makes to communicate that purpose. There  may be a struggle to express whatâ€™s difficult to convey, and perhaps  weâ€™ll struggle a bit to understand what weâ€™re reading.    No such difficulty informs true genre fiction; and the fact that some  genre writers write better than some of their literary counterparts  doesnâ€™t automatically consecrate their books."

And the Raymond chandler quote: â€œTo accept a mediocre form and make something like literature out of it is in itself rather an accomplishment.â€

And this: "What Iâ€™m trying to say is that â€œgenreâ€ is not a bad word, although  perhaps the better word for novels that taxonomically register as genre  is simply â€œcommercial.â€ Born to sell, these novels stick to the  trite-and-true, relying on stock characters whose thoughts spool out in  Lifetime platitudes."  That's a perspective that's so wrong-headed it's hard to even disagree with effectively.

Having gotten a bit more distance on the article, I'd say the writer's actual problem is that he deeply wants to take one type of writing and put it up on a pedestal.  That's why deprecating his own writing seemed relevant to him; it would be relevant if the point was to contrast the stuff on the pedestal, which gets at the "frozen seas inside of people" (fairly sure I don't have one of those...)  So I guess that's the part I'd have to argue with - that putting any fiction or other art on a mental pedestal is wrong, it deliberately misunderstands that fiction in order to satisfy some wrong-headed religious urge.  The same stupidity that makes people idolize anyone when in fact no one deserves to be idolized.


----------



## Conker (Nov 2, 2012)

sunandshadow said:


> Having gotten a bit more distance on the article, I'd say the writer's actual problem is that he deeply wants to take one type of writing and put it up on a pedestal.  That's why deprecating his own writing seemed relevant to him; it would be relevant if the point was to contrast the stuff on the pedestal, which gets at the "frozen seas inside of people" (fairly sure I don't have one of those...)  So I guess that's the part I'd have to argue with - that putting any fiction or other art on a mental pedestal is wrong, it deliberately misunderstands that fiction in order to satisfy some wrong-headed religious urge.  The same stupidity that makes people idolize anyone when in fact no one deserves to be idolized.


I pretty much agree with this, cept maybe the last part. Some authors should be idolized in the context of they are really good authors and wrote fantastic books; they should be appreciated for that work. Idolize is a word with some baggage to it though.


----------



## M. LeRenard (Nov 2, 2012)

sunandshadow said:
			
		

> So I guess that's the part I'd have to argue with - that putting any fiction or other art on a mental pedestal is wrong, it deliberately misunderstands that fiction in order to satisfy some wrong-headed religious urge.


So what you're saying you disagree with is the premise that some writing is quantifiably 'better' than other forms of writing.  Which I suppose is why you wrote off the whole article, and I didn't, because I do happen to think that it's possible to tell the difference between a 'good' book and a 'better' book.  Same way you can tell whether or not a musician practiced the piece he plays as he's playing it; the more refined player has taken into consideration all of the mechanical necessities to cause the music to flow as it was written, and thus allowed himself the added benefit of giving his own personality to the piece as he plays it, to make it something new and personal rather than just correct.  With writing, you can have a perfectly written novel that tells a story from beginning to end without any holes and with perfectly understandable actions by the characters, but in some ways that's just the basis on which to place what you'd call 'literature'.  'Literature', I think, is what you get when you write a story well and also give it another point, something that chips away a bit at those notions we all hold dear in a convincing way.  Which is what this author was saying.
Where I disagree with this author is that he claims this can be done effectively without a plot--at that point, I'd just call that a really confusing essay rather than a story--and the way he categorizes 'genre' fiction versus 'literature', as though literature can't have a genre or it magically becomes base and rehashed.  It smacks of that old irritating sentiment that mystery, horror, sci-fi, fantasy, and so on are all just written for the dumb slobbering masses who are too dumb to process new ideas.  Like it wasn't possible to write a thought-provoking science fiction novel.  I mean, really?  You'd have to really lack imagination to think that, or worse yet, you'd have to have not read hardly any science fiction novels.  But I said it was hard to tell if that's what he meant, because he wrote the thing on the defensive (as he should have!), so there was a lot of waffling around and not making any concrete conclusions.  What I think that reveals is that once you start making broad statements about vaguely-defined categories of art, you run into the old problem that in art, as in many things, there are millions of exceptions to the rules you just made up.  So I think it was wrong-headed of this fellow in general to even talk about 'genre' versus 'literature', as though the two were somehow mutually exclusive.  I guess by his definition they are, but then it's just semantics, and then there's no point in discussing it.


----------



## sunandshadow (Nov 2, 2012)

M. LeRenard said:


> So what you're saying you disagree with is the premise that some writing is quantifiably 'better' than other forms of writing.


Yes.  I think that from any individual person's point of view some books are going to be better or worse for them, but that there isn't objective qualitative difference between two competent novels, or for that matter a competent novel and a competent short story.  (By competent I mean it has sentences, paragraphs, spelling, punctuation, etc.  That would be equivalent to playing a piece of music with no sour notes or messed-up timing.)  I personally don't like short stories, but that doesn't mean they are a qualitatively worse form of writing than novels.  I personally don't like horror, but that doesn't mean a scary, gross novel is qualitatively worse than one that isn't.  I personally don't like present tense, I personally don't like books with only female characters, I personally don't like second person, etc., but none of those make a book bad in any subjective sense.




> 'Literature', I think, is what you get when you write a story well and also give it another point, something that chips away a bit at those notions we all hold dear in a convincing way.


But why would chipping away at those notions be better than supporting them?  One of the reasons I love the romance genre is that a skillfully-written romance novel shores up in my mind ideas like "love conquers all" which reality has been chipping away at in between reads.



> Where I disagree with this author is that he claims this can be done effectively without a plot--at that point, I'd just call that a really confusing essay rather than a story--and the way he categorizes 'genre' fiction versus 'literature', as though literature can't have a genre or it magically becomes base and rehashed.  It smacks of that old irritating sentiment that mystery, horror, sci-fi, fantasy, and so on are all just written for the dumb slobbering masses who are too dumb to process new ideas.  Like it wasn't possible to write a thought-provoking science fiction novel.  I mean, really?  You'd have to really lack imagination to think that, or worse yet, you'd have to have not read hardly any science fiction novels.  But I said it was hard to tell if that's what he meant, because he wrote the thing on the defensive (as he should have!), so there was a lot of waffling around and not making any concrete conclusions.  What I think that reveals is that once you start making broad statements about vaguely-defined categories of art, you run into the old problem that in art, as in many things, there are millions of exceptions to the rules you just made up.  So I think it was wrong-headed of this fellow in general to even talk about 'genre' versus 'literature', as though the two were somehow mutually exclusive.  I guess by his definition they are, but then it's just semantics, and then there's no point in discussing it.


All of that, I agree with.  I think you can't have a story without a plot, though some stories have a higher ratio of plot or more complex plot than others.  And the genre vs. literature contrast is just nonsensical, because it's perfectly possible to have genre literature.


----------



## M. LeRenard (Nov 2, 2012)

sunandshadow said:
			
		

> But why would chipping away at those notions be better than supporting them?


In a nutshell, because they might be wrong, and you won't ever find that out if you keep walking back and forth over the same old worn path.  Unless you just want to feel good; then the whole 'search for truth' thing isn't even on your radar, in which case you'd want to read some good ol' rehashed genre fiction instead of literature.
In other words, you can't make progress by thinking you've already got it completely right.


----------



## sunandshadow (Nov 2, 2012)

M. LeRenard said:


> In a nutshell, because they might be wrong, and you won't ever find that out if you keep walking back and forth over the same old worn path.  Unless you just want to feel good; then the whole 'search for truth' thing isn't even on your radar, in which case you'd want to read some good ol' rehashed genre fiction instead of literature.
> In other words, you can't make progress by thinking you've already got it completely right.


Even truths are something you need to regularly reinforce your beliefs in.  Feeling good is also important, though.  A mental environment where everything is just torn down all the time would be a terribly depressing place to live, and you wouldn't get anything done either; can't have goals and drive to achieve them without a rationale supporting that.  That would be like trying to do city planning with nothing but a wrecking ball and a bulldozer; sure you need to get rid of condemned buildings, but you also need to repair useful ones and build new ones.


----------



## M. LeRenard (Nov 3, 2012)

sunandshadow said:


> That would be like trying to do city planning with nothing but a wrecking ball and a bulldozer; sure you need to get rid of condemned buildings, but you also need to repair useful ones and build new ones.


This is just a matter of philosophy, but I think you're missing the point.  I'm not talking about pure destruction of ideas only; I'm talking about critique.  It's more like you have a building that people have been living in contentedly, but no one bothered to check for weak spots since it was erected.  So if you investigate your building and you find a few holes here and there, maybe a crack in the ceiling or a drafty window, you know the building is still okay but could use a little work, and so now you can get right onto fixing those specific problems you found.  Or you might find that the foundation is terribly flawed and you need to evacuate before the whole thing collapses.  Point is, you won't know either way unless you look.  So to reiterate what you said, you need to repair useful ones and build new ones, but how do you know which ones to repair?

I wonder how many other metaphors for this we can come up with.  Anyway, this whole discussion is kind of proving my point; we're arguing, and in so doing we keep having to think of new ways to support our own arguments, which (hopefully) makes our arguments stronger.  But that wouldn't have happened if we hadn't have tried to poke holes in each other's way of thinking.


----------



## sunandshadow (Nov 4, 2012)

I dunno, I just don't think critique is a privileged activity compared to creation or repair.  If anything, critique is easier and thus less valuable than creation due to being in more abundant supply.  That's why it's so common to see group critique sessions, but so rare to see group creation sessions.  (Repair is probably the easiest though, that's why writing fanfiction is easier than writing original fiction, fanfiction is partly a repair activity.)  Arguing can't result in cultural or philosophical progress all by itself, it's only one part of the thesis, antithesis, synthesis process.


----------



## M. LeRenard (Nov 5, 2012)

An update: here's a blog post I ran into the other day at Discovery Blogs regarding this issue, which was prompted by this article from Slate about Ursula K. LeGuin.  I guess this whole thing is taking the literary world by storm!  Or something.

I haven't had a chance yet to read the Slate article, but I did read Mr. Khan's post, and thought that this made a lot of sense:


> In other words, it is not that literary fiction is elitist, it is that it isnâ€™t often a good story. Perhaps an analogy might be nouveau cuisine which utilizes the latest molecular gastronomy to produce incredibly novel presentationâ€¦but just doesnâ€™t taste very interesting in regards to flavor.


In the context that he doesn't feel most literature deemed 'literary fiction' today will have any kind of lasting power (which is absolutely true, as I know I promptly forget 98% of what I've read after reading stories in the New Yorker).  So that kind of speaks to what you were saying, sunandshadow, about creation being more important than repair.


----------



## sunandshadow (Nov 5, 2012)

Yeah, I looked at both of those, and they are both pretty agreeable to me.  I'm not sure that I want to get on board with calling any fiction "the literary equivalent of junk food" since I think junk food itself is a catch-all category defined more by politics than nutritional science, nor do I want to agree that stories which have been forgotten can be assumed to not have been worth remembering.  But, certainly some stories have more of a point than others.  I've in the past been baffled to encounter authors who wanted to create writing that was "a fun romp without any point or message" - I don't personally understand why anyone would want to do that or see it as a good thing.  I do particularly enjoy reading a story that seems to say something profound.


----------



## M. LeRenard (Nov 5, 2012)

Got around to reading the LeGuin one.  I think maybe the author of that was a little infatuated with LeGuin, but I agreed with the general premise.  Obviously going a little over the top in poking fun at 'MFA-toting writers' who tend to write 'literary' fiction, but it is true that there's a great deal of nonsense being perpetuated as 'literary' fiction simply because it's written in a particular style.  I actually think 'literary', in that sense, could be called another genre, honestly.  That being the genre of non-stories that attempt but mostly fail to make profound statements about things.  It fits into the paradigm pretty well, actually; in this way, there's crap in every genre, and there are gems in every genre as well, so it excludes the nonsensical criterion that 'literature' can't have dragons or spaceships in it.


----------

