YES.

[rj_anderson]

Thanks to thegameiam for linking to a splendid essay by Dave Wolverton that explains the difference between literary and genre fiction, and reveals the little-known origins of the modern literary novel. It also does a very good job of explaining why I read very little so-called literary fiction, and don't feel a bit embarrassed about not writing it either:

On Writing as a Fantasist.

Comments

[yunitsa.livejournal.com]

It's an interesting essay that diagnoses some trends, and before reading it I thought that I would feel the same way you do, but I find myself disagreeing with it - possibly because I haven't encountered the full unpleasantness of the mainstream market yet, or because I'm all about the Joyce and Eliot and elitism and opacity (even in my genre reading, actually), but mostly I think that for every literary magazine full of "Manhattan Angst" stories, there is a bookshelf full of badly-written (but well-selling and -marketed) Tolkien-lite fantasy with a scantily-clad woman on the cover, and one shouldn't judge any category by its worst and least-original examples. Also, I'd argue with what his definition of "postmodern" seems to be, which is "just like modern but more so".

My own view is that it's not that "literary" or "genre" fiction is inherently better or more original, it's the way the distinction is managed (by trolls. with sledgehammers.). And I love that there are writers (postmodern writers!) now who are set on blurring those boundaries.

[penwiper26.livejournal.com]

Yes. Wolverton strikes me as having perceived it as a distinction managment issue -- and that's the problem I have with canon formation(s) of the present. But even though I've said some of the exact same things, I loved my time in graduate school in English, and I appreciate what it taught me, though I learned it more or less in an oppositional way.

Also, what I don't think Wolverton quite appreciates is the fact that "political correctness" is not a specific morality. In America right now, "political correctness" is no longer what it was in the 90s; it's still used as a term of abuse for anything representable by the face of Hillary Clinton, but what's actually "correct" right now is a diffuse jingoism and a distaste for people who rock the authoritative boat. Wolverton would have done better to leave the terms "political agenda" and "political correctness" out of the discourse and say that those who hate "moralism" in literature actually hate either a) didacticism or b) moral stances that oppose their own. And, well, yeah. I hate reading stories whose moral stances oppose my own, whether lots of other people like them or not.

[yunitsa.livejournal.com]

Good point about current "political correctness" - it all seems a bit dated, to be honest.

I'm taking a course in the Politics of the Canon this year, though I really wanted to switch to 20th Century Crime Fiction (case in point, hee), so maybe I'll have more to say on this topic after that. But yes, I do share the frustration with the way the canon is constructed around dull things, especially in schools. (And I think there's a related false link between things that are "good" and things that are "worthy of analysis", and also the idea that something can become - be redeemed as? - a "Classic" just by being more than a hundred years old - Dumas and Conan Doyle are genre, dammit.)

And now I am going to bed, honest.

[rj-anderson.livejournal.com]

I don't agree with every point Wolverton makes, and I do agree with you that he overstates his case in some respects. But I think that his explanation of how the current standard of what constitutes "literary" came into being, and how arbitrary and unfair and even silly that standard really is, makes the essay worth reading.

I didn't get the impression he was saying "all genre fiction is great and all literary fiction is terrible", either, or even that he was deliberately choosing the worst examples of literary fiction. He chose a work of literary fiction (Il Postino) which was widely praised by people who value literary fiction, and the "Manhattan Angst" stories were but one extreme example among several less extreme.

So yes, by no means a perfect essay -- but I felt that its sound and well-made points considerably outnumbered the exaggerated or spurious ones.