What About Genre, What About Horror?

Essays
March 9, 2010 | 1 book mentioned 50 6 min read

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Genre, genre, genre, whole days go by when I am asked of nothing else, especially those moronic questions about horror that should have been swept out of civilized discourse at least thirty years ago: Tell us now, if you can, for we are really terribly curious about this, why is it, do you think, that reasonable people should pay good money to be, well, frightened? What, you know, can the appeal of such… unpleasantness… actually be? And on a more personal note, please, we’re all so curious… if you wouldn’t mind… what scares you? Okay, in reverse order, then: pretty much the same kind of thing that frightens you, what did you think I’d say, giant lizards? And, moving on to the first question: What are you trying to suggest, that you are not, have never been, implicated in this particular transaction? How certain are you, anyhow, that what you call “unpleasantness” is not a necessary, even crucial, part of our experience? Maybe you should lock yourself up in your heart long enough to work out your actual relationship to matters like shame, loss, envy, panic, brutality, greed, insecurity, loneliness, failure, whatever you find particularly unpleasant. Because that, dimwit, is where you live, especially if you really hate the whole idea of familiarity with such crappy, low-rent feeling states.

Let’s be honest, down there in the gutter is where most of us live better than half the time anyhow, probably a lot more than half. And if we are talking about those states of consciousness kept on back-burner low-simmer, we have to jack the figure up to maybe ninety per cent of the time, maybe ninety-eight. At this point, some impolite character like me comes along and says, It’s too bad you find this stuff so unacceptable when it takes up so much of your life, hmmm, couldn’t you maybe revise your category stances and define all this prime-time, tight-focus actuality in a different way? Because let’s face it, you don’t spend your life hang-gliding from one emotional peak to another, do you. The only way you recognize an emotional peak when you are fortunate enough to experience one is that it feels so different from the rest of your life, hmmm, let’s make that little noise again, hmmm, it’s so expressive of almost unwilling mentation. Why, we could say, it’s almost as though we were designed to be struggling and limping our way through the lowlands and gutterscapes, it’s like, you know, that’s the point, the struggling and limping, the gutterscapes so foul so fragrant. The point. The more you take in, the more you see. Shame shock blood pain grief suffering… you might even say, that’s the good part.

Oh, not really. Please. If that weren’t so perverse, it’d just be silly.

Um. Well, yes, perverse, I agree, but not at all silly. Yes, really: the good part. Meaning, the room where you and your life sit opposite each other in the dark, blinking and squinting, hoping the grimace on the blood-smeared face across the room is a brave grin. Or “plucky,” if that’s the way you think.

Well now, come on, that’s completely ridiculous. That’s just… genre, is what that is. And you accuse us of thinking in clichés!

Okay: genre genre genre, here we go. Crime novels and horror stories huddle down here in the gutter, right?, while real literature lives in the fragrant uplands and on the radiant peaks where plotting is at most secondary and life proceeds by instinct and intelligence, by fine intuition and a lively moral consciousness, owing nothing to formulae and the requirement to gratify the lazy reader’s expectations of suspenseful suspense and exciting excitement. One is disposable, the other immortal. However… well, just for beginners, let’s admit that literary fiction is a genre, too, shall we? Expectations guide its readers, that of respect for consensus reality and the poignancy of seemingly ordinary lives, of sensitive character-drawing and vivid scene-painting, of the reversals and conflicts characteristic of the several sub-genres of literary fiction: the academic novel, the comic novel, the adultery novel, the comic academic adultery-novel,  the experimental novel, the novel of foreign travel or inward journey, of unexpected encounter, of breakdown, of alcoholism, of youth, of middle age, of a hundred different things so well-known and encoded that the fonts used for the titles and the authors’ names tell you as much as the flap copy.

You know what else those fonts can tell you? This isn’t an exact science, let me admit, but they suggest how many copies the publisher thinks he is going to sell. It’s all there, right on the jacket: this book is a challenging yet comforting work of fiction in which the sensitive and ironic young protagonist experiences painful yet comic difficulties writing his first novel in a French fishing village. Soon, pages of his manuscript disappear from his desk and begin to turn up in the locations they describe. We hope to unload at least ten thousand copies of this well-written, pallid piece of post-modern, post-Jamesian crapola, but five is about what we expect. Title and author’s name “charming” in crumbling white letters, sans serif, all lower case, title just below jacket center and to the left, author’s name two lines down, tabbed farther left and irregularly spaced, some letters slightly askew. That says: five is about what we expect. The author will soon find that he no longer has a two-book contract.

Which is to note that publishing companies tend to signal complex decisions about marketing in ways both deliberate and inadvertent. Bookstores organize their inventory by sorting them into categories, and publishers try to make it easy for them. Genre jackets feature bright colors and embossed lettering, the author’s name in immense fonts bannered across the jacket bottom underneath some thematic kabuki. That’s how you know they are crime novels, all that vulgar hoopla on the jacket, even the “good taste” crime jackets look crass and shiny. In bookstores, you spot them right away, and that’s the point. Genre fiction came into being because publishers discovered from the pulps that there was a market for it, and it stays viable because it’s like food, people keep buying books by Robert B. Parker and Michael Connolly to get the same delightful taste in their mouths over and over, as if the books were made of maple walnut ice cream. (I’d say that people bought three decades’ worth of John Updike and Philip Roth novels for the same reason, and that a completely different set of readers have kept returning to William Gaddis and Thomas Bernhardt for an earned anticipated nourishment that cannot really be compared to ice cream.)

cover Now, as fantastically reliable as he was in delivering the desired goods, Robert B. Parker grew awfully soft in his later years, but Michael Connelly has remained true to his original impulses, to put on display the underbelly of L.A. while tracking an idiosyncratic detective’s solution of a complex crime or series of crimes. While remaining a very reliable and pleasurable crime writer, however, Connelly never rises above that category. Because Connolly is both wholly serious and honest about what he does, he would find the idea of “rising above his “category” risible. He should, anyhow—he’s earned that much, the right to an absolute respect for his own work. It is worth noting that both Parker and Connelly are rooted in Raymond Chandler, who may be the only American crime writer ever really to turn genre crime fiction into art, and he managed to do it only once, in The Long Goodbye.  He knew he’d done it, too: you can feel it in his letters, the evolution from an earlier edgy, wary defensiveness into, late in his life, a self-doubting, self-questioning master’s sense of accomplishment. Though Ross Macdonald came very close a couple of times, none of the writers who followed along after Chandler ever wrote anything as resonant, complex and sad as The Long Goodbye. None of them, not even Macdonald, ever could, in large part because they were all using a borrowed template that grew thinner and thinner with every generation.

Macdonald, Parker, and Connelly worked or work in a genre that provides convenient situation-patterns, a condition that is made possible because the designations  “crime” and “mystery” identify and to some extent predetermine the content of the fiction they cover. Crime writers and academics of genre fiction like to denigrate horror by pointing out that unlike “mystery,” “western” or “romance,” “horror” specifies no content beyond the emotion it is intended to arouse. I think this absence of specificity is not at all a limitation but the reverse, a great enhancement. That no situational templates are built into horror grants it an inherent boundlessness, an inexhaustible unlimitedness. If the “horror” part is not stressed all that overtly and the author spares us zombies, vampires, ghosts, haunted houses, hideous things in bandages, etc., what results is fiction indistinguishable, except in one element alone,  from literary fiction. That crucial element could be called point of view, or angle of vision. It is whatever dictates the way in which everything is seen. For further details, return to my first paragraph. Consult your heart, go on, lock yourself in and think about loss and loneliness, about grief, these hard, necessary facts. Where do you live, really, in what kind of world? The question can never be answered in a way that is not unsettling.

Image Credit: Flickr/naixn.

, who won a Grand Master award in 1998, is the author of many novels. They have been translated into nearly every existing language. His new book, A Dark Matter, is available now from Doubleday.

Essays

Chasing the Whale: Banksy, Obsession, and the Sea

Essays
April 23, 2010 | 1 book mentioned 6 7 min read

1.
There is nothing positive about the dictionary definition of “obsession” – it haunts, is abnormal and persistent, like a bad rash. Tossing the word into a conversation typically indicates some form of criticism about a person and that person’s particular pursuit. Obsessions can lead to stalkers, delusion and great creations (the last two are not mutually exclusive); they can limit and restrict you to minutia or endow a unique vision that changes how you and others view the world at large. People indulge obsession in different ways – live it like a lifestyle or stir it into a creation like a minor but crucial recipe ingredient where it doesn’t overpower anything and complements everything.

Ideas of obsession had been needling me after reading James Hamilton-Paterson’s Seven Tenths and Peter Handke’s Slow Homecoming. Both books obsess over their loosely shared theme – the natural world’s mystifying grandeur – and after reading them back-to-back it was impossible not to link them. While thinking about these two titles I was lucky enough to attend a screening of Exit Through the Gift Shop, a feature-length film directed by stencil-art maverick Banksy. The film’s real lynchpin is Thierry Guetta a.k.a. Mr. Brainwash, the ultimate knock-off artist. But before he became an overnight art world sensation his obsession was filming everything he did. The cousin of French street artist Space Invader, during a vacation to France Guetta got his first exhilarating taste for joining, and filming, street artists on their illicit missions. Over time, Guetta infiltrated the graffiti and street art scene in Los Angeles, befriending Shepard Fairey and other prominent figures. He and his camera became fixtures and his desire to document the scene, in his own words, became more of an obsession than just filming the boring details of everyday life. He met everyone and went everywhere, but like Captain Ahab chasing his White Whale, Guetta would not be satisfied until he achieved his ultimate goal: filming the notoriously anonymous Banksy.

2.
Of course, no greater tale of obsession exists in American letters than Captain Ahab’s in Moby-Dick. Ahab’s epic ego-driven quest to recover the impossible has inspired and influenced countless artists who tap into as many ideas as the ones explored in the novel: myth, America, commerce, astronomy, conquest, sexuality. As part of a series of multimedia responses to American novels, the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco assembled “Moby-Dick,” a show and accompanying catalogue. Designed as homage to the vaunted 1930 Rockwell Kent illustrated Lakeside Press three-volume deluxe edition (later released as a Modern Library edition), this lovely book glosses Melville’s novel and features the thirty-two artists whose works was on view from September 22, 2009, until last December.

Interestingly, it was Kent’s black ink illustrations, reproduced here in a dark, brooding sea-blue, that helped resurrect the novel from obscurity (the edition did not even include Melville’s name on the cover). In this catalogue, pieces like Richard Serra’s lithograph study for his sculpture “Call Me Ishmael” or Brian Jungen’s iPod scrimshaw, connect directly to the narrative; the inclusion of Hiroshi Sugimoto’s large-scale ocean view photographic prints, which a book of this size cannot do justice, is fitting since they express boundless uncertainty. But many of the pieces strike more abstract poses, like Angela Bulloch’s algorithm-simulated celestial views that use “technology to expand our perception of space and the possibilities of perception.”

At first blush, connecting contemporary art to the heyday of seafaring might seem incongruous, but sailors were the eyes of the world for landlubbers, returning home with tales of what mystical, depraved and wondrous sites and cultures existed just beyond the horizon. Of course, for all of the spoils these men brought back with them, their stories were filled by imagination and hearsay, changing like the seas. “Melville’s book,” writes the catalogue’s editor Jens Hoffman, “is like the living ocean: vast, potent, and hugely indifferent to human troubles and ambitions.”

2.
James Hamilton-Paterson has a very similar view about the ocean, and with good reason. He has lived on desolate islands in the Philippines; accompanied deep-sea salvage missions, scientific expeditions, commercial fishers and sea scavenging locals; encountered murderous pirates; gone for many a solitary midnight swims; and read countless historic oceanic travelogues and scientific treatises. When it comes down to channeling philosophy, economics, politics, history, ecology and art through salt water, Hamilton-Paterson gives Melville a run for his money.

The updated Europa Editions release of Seven Tenths, a collection of Hamilton-Paterson’s writings about the sea, is the passionate result of a poet’s eye making sense of rigorous research and humanity’s impossibility. Running through the essays divided into thematic chapters is the tale of a free diver who has lost his boat, the cord he had tied around his ankle loosed from the tiny vessel’s prow. Resurfacing, the boat is nowhere to be found, and the swimmer considers being stranded in a “conspiracy of waves.” The umbilical connection between salt water and our lives is literal and figurative. But when the ocean claims a ship or a person or even disproves earlier scientific findings it does so by shutting off that object from what Paterson-Hamilton calls the “continuity of vision.” For him this is a sublime quality.

The author’s obsessing over oceans and seas is fueled by the fact that we know so little about them, especially beneath the surface. Of course, throughout time the curious have ventured. Alexander the Great had a special glass cage made so he could be lowered into the Mediterranean; salvage missions attempted to resurrect sunken valuables; and Scandinavians tried to correlate fish supplies with tidal currents. But, according to Hamilton-Paterson, “until the late eighteenth century the average European’s mental image of the sea was literally superficial, of a navigable surface above an abyss.”

Today we have a sense of the depth but very little experience of it. Seven Tenths is not so concerned with reasons and answers, but a greater more profound unity that resides in the unknown depths, and not even sonar, electrically belching through cold, lightless water, can give us a real sense of what is down there, and this has been realized for time immemorial: “The Greeks’ idealisation of a static universe full of fixed entities, faithfully reflected in their mathematics, underpinned all that could be thought. The sea was a positive insult to this metaphysics, a naked opposition to it… How did one represent an absence of topography?”

One solution was to name these places with colonial and imperial pageantry, and familiar names like Mount Mozart and Beethoven Ridge in the Musicians Seamounts north of Hawaii. They exist on a map, and in theories of science, surveyed down to the centimeter. What we know is something we have hardly explored, hardly experienced. This wanting for the impossible is why it compels obsession, at least as Hamilton-Paterson sees it: “[B]ut the seething waters of the middle distance have something wordless and unpitying to say to the dullest minds. It is as if the ocean, in certain lights and weathers, were the lair not of monsters or malevolent downward-dragging spirits, but of the fat blank which squats beneath all happiness, flicking out its tongue.”

3.
Nature’s taunting evasiveness is the conundrum at the heart of Peter Handke’s Slow Homecoming. The novel consists of three parts, a middle section in which Handke interjects a first-person rhapsody about his process bookended by third-person narratives of wandering and wondering. All three parts obsess over what I think of as the intimate pattern, the visual echoes that reverberate and ping between our whorling fingerprints, the way light playfully daubs a riparian setting and the brittle and broken elements of decay.

Here again, the natural world prompts all of the questions and holds all of the answers but reveals nothing, which propels the obsession. Hamilton-Paterson offers a primer for how to look at the ocean, how to appreciate and cherish it for how it resolutely resists humanity. But Handke’s characters are like a collective Captain Ahab afloat in the world, searching. Their focus is singular, all others – wives, lovers, children – seem to exist only by virtue of these men determining how these others exist in proximity to them.

Benjamin Kunkel, in his introduction to Slow Homecoming, informs us that in German the surname of the first part’s subject, Sorger, means “one who takes care or has cares.” In an Alaskan-like wilderness, Sorger, a foreigner and outsider, studies the landscape and its inhabitants at such detail that everything becomes a likeness of his creation. There is not much naming, but that’s because Sorger’s dedication, certainly the book’s dedication, is to the propensity for naming because all such names are a function of these intimate patterns: “They were unmistakable signs implicit in nature itself . . . and had the power, regardless of who the observer might be, to convert themselves into great and diversified happenings in space – delusions only at first glance, then welcome as metamorphoses in the deeper area of vision.”

The novel’s final section reunites an unnamed father with his young daughter, raising her for periods of time in different countries, separated from her at times when the daughter stays with her mother. He sees her as a component, a piece of the puzzle that when completed will symbolize truth, something he chases: “Still the wayfarer makes his way across the high plateau toward the blue-veiled mountain chain, still busy with the thought that can never be carried to a conclusion: I am working on the secret of the world.”

4.
All of these obsession-driven projects blur fiction and nonfiction. Melville’s pedantic descriptions of whaling can remove readers from the plot, making the novel feel like a manual. Hamilton-Paterson concedes that certain of his details might only be true to him and Handke’s narrative conceit intentionally calls into question where to draw the line between fiction and nonfiction. In a statement, Banksy declared that everything in Exit Through the Gift Shop is true, except that parts that aren’t.

Like Ahab, Thierry Guetta indeed found his White Whale, and while not fatal it was significant. Guetta and Banksy became friends. But the obsessive filming, it turns out, was not part of any great vision. Banksy ends up making the movie everyone had assumed Guetta was working on; Guetta begins to focus on art, churning out painfully derivative work, its boring qualities enhanced by his delusional ego and the fact that he sold a million dollars worth in a few days. In this transition, Guetta’s obsession comes into question – he simply does what people expect him to do, as if by rote. The actual extent of his obsessions is what makes for a biting portrait of the consumer environment that turns Guetta into a hot-shot artist, as opposed to a documentary about street artists and their critical and commercial success. It’s this sly self-awareness – Banksy, Shepard Fairey, et al are in on the joke – that makes Exit Through the Gift Shop brilliant, calling into question what validates certain obsessions. Whether a forever linking double helix of associations and patterns, a tidal ebb and flow or the marketplace, obsessive activities strive to unlock an answer or bring closure to the issue that has caused the obsession, or in the case of Guetta provide an illusion that the activity serves a purpose. This might be the greatest message of them all: obsessions are illusions.

Hamilton-Paterson appreciates the ocean’s indifference as its greatest virtue, the reality check that human ego needs and should pay heed. Handke’s characters want to find a place within the indifference, but only because they think it their duty to do so. The daughter in Slow Homecoming, simply by being in the right place at the right time, at last drives home to her father that the ultimate secret is perhaps one kept forever, that these obsessions make us human and we should be happy to leave it at that. Or as Ishmael says: “It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.”

Essays
| 1 book mentioned 6 7 min read
Essays Reviews

White Lives Matter: On Nancy Isenberg’s ‘White Trash’

Essays Reviews
July 18, 2016 | 1 book mentioned 9 7 min read

Danville, Va., the gritty Southern mill town where my parents were born and raised, is a city born out of slavery. Before the Civil War, tobacco planters living upstream along the Dan River sent their field slaves on flatboats laden with freshly harvested tobacco to Danville where slaves from many plantations cleaned and dried the tobacco for shipment. After the war, the emancipated slaves and their descendants, excluded by law and custom from most other work, worked in Danville during tobacco season for the next 120 years, well into my own lifetime.

This naturally boosted the city’s black population, and in the early-1880s, Danville had a majority-black city council, along with black policemen and justices of the peace. Shortly before a bloody race riot in 1883, in which four black people were killed, put an end to this brief period of black rule, local white investors founded a cotton mill that, by adhering to a strict policy of hiring only white workers, made Danville once again a majority-white city government by often ruthless segregationists.

This history, and my own observation of its aftermath, is the lens through which I read Nancy Isenberg’s provocative new history White Trash, and it’s the reason I found Isenberg’s book by turns fascinating and exasperating. The Danville I knew as a child was really three cities. One, where my grandparents lived, was a Mayberry-like Southern town of tree-lined streets where children set up lemonade stands and frolicked in backyard swimming pools. A mile away was the old mill village where thousands of white mill workers lived in tiny whitewashed homes that had once been owned by the mill, which rented them at reduced rates to its workers. A mile or so from the mill village, across the tracks of the Southern Railroad, was black Danville, where the poorest of the migrant tobacco workers lived in mud-floored shacks standing in the flood plain of the Dan River.

Danville’s rigidly enforced social geography lasted into the late-1970s when globalization began eating into the profits of Dan River Mills, which at its height had employed some 14,000 people, the great majority of them white. From the time of its founding in the 1880s, Dan River Mills made an implicit deal with its white work force: work in its mills would be arduous, hot, and poorly paid, but white workers could count on having food for their families, a roof over their heads, and freedom from having to compete with black workers, who, quite obviously, would have worked the same job for less pay.

When this social compact crumbled, undone first by the Civil Rights Movement, which forced a greater integration of the work force, and later by the global economy, which bled the mill dry, it left thousands of white Danvillians, many of whose parents and grandparents had worked in the mill, without a way to make a living. A generation later, those white Danvillians, along with millions of other disaffected working-class white people across the South and the Rust Belt, are lining up for Donald Trump, who is running for president on a promise to bring back an America that existed before globalization, immigration, and racial integration destroyed the world I knew as a boy in Danville.

This was the history I was hoping to find explicated in Isenberg’s study of working-class white society, which appeared in bookstores last month eerily well-timed to help Americans understand the social and economic forces propelling Trump’s rise. What I found instead was half that story. In White Trash, Isenberg sets herself the task of puncturing the myth of American exceptionalism when it comes to social class. “Above all,” she writes, “we must stop declaring what is patently untrue, that Americans, through some rare good fortune, escaped the burden of class that prevailed in the mother country of England.”

This case Isenberg makes convincingly. The early — and best — chapters of White Trash detail how 17th-century British elites saw the American colonies as a vast dumping ground for England’s lower classes in order “to drayne away the filth” from the homeland. Each succeeding generation of colonial elite further distanced itself from these lower caste British settlers, many of whom arrived in America as indentured servants, until they formed an essentially permanent white underclass known variously as “squatters,” “crackers,” “clay-eaters,” “mudsills,” and more recently, “rednecks,” “hillbillies,” and “trailer trash.”

But even as Isenberg debunks one politically convenient fiction, she perpetuates an equally pernicious one, that of the special victimization of the white poor. Time and again, Isenberg soft-pedals the long and ugly history of white-on-black violence and minimizes the myriad ways — legal, economic, social, and cultural — the poorest of poor whites have been privileged over black and brown Americans.

Perhaps the most glaring example of this is Isenberg’s handling of the Civil Rights Era, which in White Trash all but boils down to a single, curiously framed discussion of the standoff between poor white Arkansans and black students trying to integrate Little Rock’s Central High in 1957. Isenberg builds this brief section around a famous news photo of a 15-year-old white Central High student named Hazel Bryan hurling epithets at Elizabeth Eckford, a black student making her way through an angry white crowd on the first day of school.

“Eckford looked calm, was dressed modestly, and appeared earnest,” Isenberg writes of the photo. “Her white adversary [Bryan] wore a dress that was too tight, and as she propelled herself forward, menacingly, mouth agape, she projected the crude callousness of the recognized white trash type. That contrast was precisely what the photographers intended to record.” In images sent out over the news wires, Isenberg writes, Bryan appeared as “the face of white trash. Ignorant. Unrepentant. Congenitally cruel. Only capable of replicating the pathetic life into which she was born.”

This framing is just plain odd. In her discussion of Civil Rights Era, surely a crucial period in any account of the role of poor white people in American history, Isenberg says nothing of the lynching of Emmett Till, the vicious mob attacks on the Freedom Riders in 1961, Bull Connor’s dogs, or the four little girls blown up in the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., in 1963. The Ku Klux Klan, that 150-year-old force of white violence and intimidation, rates just four glancing mentions in the entire book, most noting in passing that this or that historical figure had once been a member or said something nice about the organization. Instead, Isenberg’s lone substantive discussion of the Civil Rights Era focuses on how one white teenager was stereotyped as “the face of white trash,” effectively turning the aggressor into a victim, a mere pawn of a manipulative national media eager dismiss poor whites as somehow less than human.

Of course, in an important way, the Hazel Bryans of the world were pawns of a white Southern elite that happily left to poor whites the dirty work of enforcing segregation. As Isenberg notes, Bryan’s school, Central High, the students of which were poor and white, was scheduled for integration, while another high school on the city’s tonier west side was to remain all-white. And Bryan needed, desperately, the advantages that Central High offered. Bryan’s parents were high school dropouts who had moved the family from rural Arkansas where their home had no indoor plumbing. Her father, a disabled veteran, didn’t work, and her mother worked at a Westinghouse plant in Little Rock. “Permeable racial boundaries would pull down people like her even further,” Isenberg writes of Bryan.

Still, Bryan was hardly a victim. Isenberg doesn’t record it, but as the famous photograph was being shot, Bryan was shouting, “Go home, nigger! Go back to Africa!” Around her, other white Central High students were shouting at Eckford, who had mistakenly arrived at school alone that day, “Lynch her! Lynch her! No nigger bitch is going to get into our school!” Will Counts, the photographer who caught Hazel Bryan on film, took an equally famous picture that same day of a black reporter being kicked and beaten by the angry mob.

But it’s just as important to understand why those white kids outside Central High were calling for the lynching of a defenseless black girl and beating a black newsman bloody in front of the national press corps. They were defending a centuries-old system of laws and cultural practices that privileged poor white people over black Americans of all social classes. If the Westinghouse plant where Bryan’s mother worked was anything like most factories in the South, it was every bit as segregated as the local schools, and if the loan on her family’s home in Little Rock was anything like those on most homes in America at the time, it was guaranteed by the Federal Housing Administration, which systematically discriminated against black homeowners for decades.

This is the half of the story White Trash leaves out. In the Danville I knew as a child, and in the America one finds in pioneering works of history like C. Vann Woodward’s The Strange Career of Jim Crow and W.J. Cash’s The Mind of the South, white elites rigged the system so poor whites got slightly better schools, slightly better jobs, and slightly better homes, and then were expected to defend those privileges against people of color, often violently. Poor whites ended up with the short end of the stick, but they fought in the knowledge that they were at least better off than their black counterparts who got nothing.

Isenberg occasionally says things in White Trash that are simply untrue, such as this head-scratcher regarding race and law enforcement: “Poor whites were inexpensive and expendable, and found their lot comparable to suffering African Americans when it came to the justice system.” Far more often, she is merely selective in her facts, playing up the suffering of the white working class while skirting history that might paint them in a bad light. Thus, in her chapter on the Reconstruction Era, Isenberg spends several pages on “scalawags,” the poor white dissenters from white supremacist ideology who tried to build a more racially equitable South after the Civil War, while never mentioning the Klan and its infamous night riders. In a similar vein, in her discussion of the 20th-century pseudo-science of eugenics, Isenberg focuses on the forced sterilization of poor white women judged “feebleminded” while downplaying the fact that much of eugenic theory was openly racist (see “Nazi Germany, influence on”) and that many forced sterilization programs targeted black women.

This all matters because perhaps more than at any time in recent memory, we are in desperate need of a fair-minded accounting of the history of white America. The 2016 presidential campaign is about many things, but one of its running themes is white America and its opposite, be it Mexican immigrants, Muslim militants, or black Americans. Are the working-class white voters at Trump rallies right that political correctness has gone too far and the liberal elite’s coddling of minorities and immigrants has left hard-working white Americans vulnerable? Is the recent spate of shootings of black motorists by white police officers a tragic aberration or the latest twist in a long history of white police brutality toward black men? Is it racist to say “All Lives Matter”? If so, why?

Americans searching for answers to these questions are thrown headlong into a clangorous scrum of cable-news shouters, hashtag revolutionaries, and online conspiracy theorists. Nancy Isenberg is none of these things. She is a tenured professor of history at Louisiana State University and the author of Fallen Founder, a respected biography of Aaron Burr, our third vice president. So it is profoundly dispiriting to find her history of poor white America leaving out such a crucial thread of the story.

This strikes me less a failure of scholarship than a failure of imagination. Isenberg appears to have decided to write a history of poor white America and then persuaded herself that poor black America was only tangential to her story. This frightens me almost as much as news that Trump ranks within the margin of error in national polls. If America’s historians, who have dedicated their lives to understanding our past, who have spent years digging through the archives, can be so blind to the meaning of their own history, what hope is there for the rest of us to confront this very real and present crisis we are facing?

Essays Reviews
| 1 book mentioned 9 7 min read
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Essays

Freezing White Men for Posterity

Essays
September 14, 2016 | 1 book mentioned 8 8 min read

When I heard that there was another book by Don DeLillo, I thought, here we go again, another book that is going to be praised by my peers and betters, another book I’ll find pretentious and hard to get into, another book about which I’ll have to reserve judgment. “Visionary,” said one blurb. “Prophetic,” said another. The reviews also revealed that DeLillo was covering ground I had been writing about for the past year, in its reincarnation in Michel Houellebecq’s novels: terrors of the ailing white male body, a resurrection cult, a clandestine headquarters, a narrator that feels at once pulled and repelled by the idea of preserving his body forever. This sounded so much like Houellebecq’s The Possibility of an Island that I felt compelled to read Zero K to see just how much DeLillo and Houellebecq’s respective obsessions with death and resurrection converged.

On the fourth page of Zero K, the narrator’s father is taking his sick wife to an embalmment and rebirth facility so as to freeze her until a time that her illness might be cured. His son asks, “This is not a new idea. Am I right?” The line is a sly comment on the conception of the book. It is actually almost disconcerting how similar these novels are — two sides of the same coin.

In both books, death becomes yet another experience to be fully curated for the wealthy. Would you like your current body destroyed and and your DNA resurrected in some other human form (The Possibility of an Island), or would you like your organs taken apart and be embalmed in a pod? (Zero K). (You’re probably better off in Houellebecq’s world because he provides us with some news from the future: some of the book is narrated by the clones of the first Daniel to try this technology. We know it has worked.) The narrative switches between the experiences of the first Daniel, and his future clones’ commentary on the life he has lived. He is reincarnated up to the 25th Daniel, when that clone decides to sample the “wilding” way of life — the life of the descendants of people who have continued to breed in the atavistic manner. We are gently warned that your skin color may determine how well you do in Houellebecq’s future: the wild humans who have resisted cloning and look for food just outside the protective fences are “of Spanish or North African origin.”

In these tales of the contemporary malaise of the global north, it is women whose bodies are the first to malfunction — take this verb as broadly as possible — and through them the central male narrators face their own mortality. In both novels, men continue to be desirable much longer than women do, and the female body suffers for the central male(s) in a sort of ersatz Passion, carrying the cross of aging. “Her body, despite the swimming, despite the classical dance was beginning to suffer the first blows of age […] I recognized the look she wore afterwards: it was that humble, sad look of the sick animal that steps away from the pack,” Daniel says of his partner Isabelle, who decides to take her chances with the cloning cult before he does. In the DeLillo-Houellebecq universe, the women do the work of accepting the end of the white body (and hence, of history).

In Zero K, not long after they go to the facility called Convergence, the father (Ross) of the narrator (Jeffrey) decides to join his wife in the freezer; he doesn’t want to live a life without her, and adds he can only be the man he is with her. I.e., an older man who can get the attention of a younger, attractive woman. In his obsession with his younger wife, Ross is very much like the original Daniel in The Possibility of an Island, who feels death’s shadow upon him not because his body is falling apart with hemorrhoids and the like, but because his young girlfriend (Is she the second or third woman he’s been with in the novel? Who’s counting? Definitely the youngest and the supplest.) decides to leave him. It is then that Daniel takes up the offer of the Elohimite cult, who are offering to preserve the DNA of their members, to be cloned for use in a better future.

Right after he is abandoned by the young girlfriend, Daniel takes a plane, not to Central Asia, where DeLillo’s Convergence is headquartered, but to much nearer Lanzarote in the Canary Islands. The headquarters of both these quasi-scientology cults seem to be “off stage,” extra murs, outside the city limits. For Houellebecq, it’s enough that this non-space is outside the Mediterranean. For the American DeLillo, the stakes seem to be higher, and the non-place is somewhere beyond the Caucasus, beyond the habitat of whiteness: word play allows him to insert a definition of “Caucasian” in his explorations of geography. The Convergence is “somewhere” in the steppes of Central Asia, a place the coordinates of which Jeffrey gives by saying, if I may paraphrase, neither Kyrgyzstan nor Kazakhstan. Somewhere not far from where the Soviets tested their nuclear bombs, “beyond the limits of believability and law,” the very realm of the homo sacer.

Both novels are full of screens showing disasters and human ineptitude. Houellebecq’s narrative of teleology is mostly sustained with distaste for what Europeans have done to their culture. They have become too liberal (by allowing women to put careers before service to their husbands) and, oddly, at the same time they have let the occidental way of life be adulterated by the barbarians (letting Islam push Europeans towards “moral austerity”). This is expressed with that very French degout: “It’s sad, the shipwreck of a civilization, it’s sad to see its most beautiful minds sink without a trace — one begins to feel slightly ill at ease in life, and one ends up wanting to establish an Islamic republic,”Daniel says to Isabelle after she has decided to commit suicide and leave her DNA with the Elohimites.

Earlier, talking about his career as a comedian, Daniel explains: “I had built the whole of my career and fortune on the commercial exploitation of bad instincts, of the West’s absurd attraction to cynicism and evil,” and gives an account of his offensive brand of humor that we know well from Charlie Hebdo — bodies washed up on the Mediterranean coast, women reduced to their sex: “Do you know what they call the fat stuff around the vagina? A Woman.” For all this, he says, he was called “a cutting observer of contemporary life,” a term that Houellebecq might well have borrowed from either his own or DeLillo’s dust jackets. “I looked like an Arab, which helps,” he says. “One had to wonder: had my mother always been scrupulously faithful? Or had I been engendered by some Mustapha? Or even — another hypothesis — by a Jew?” Daniel fears that not only the culture, but even his own European body has been adulterated by oriental elements.

DeLillo’s narrative, on the other hand, seems to proceed with a more inward-facing melancholy, and a friendlier, more romantic form of Orientalizing.

Jeffrey’s father’s new beard is heralded as a ritual of entering a new dimension of belief and there are several loaded signifiers that don’t quite add up. By the second page there’s a chador, and a woman’s headscarf is described as “her flag of independence.”  In his exoticness scales, Slavic and Turkic languages vie with one another, and the Turkic ones come on top: “In bed I wanted to hear her speak to me in her language, Uzbek, Kazakh, whatever it was, but I understood that this was an intimacy not suited to the occasion.” He feels trapped in his father’s language and looks for a way out. “I wanted a non-Roman alphabet,” he says. Luckily, in the Convergence philologists are designing an advanced language pared down to its mathematical basics. They plan to get rid of metaphor and simile for the future when the bodies in the pods will be resuscitated.

The book is filled with musings on what it means to be a son to a wealthy, famous father who has left him and his mother for a younger woman. Clearly very suggestible, Jeffrey feels absorbed and awed by the Convergence, while Houellebecq’s narrator Daniel maintains his ironic distance and detachment at the Elohimite headquarters for a long time. So whereas Houellebecq’s tone is sarcastic, in many places Zero K is sermonizing (in addition to its many Biblical allusions); it reads like one of those religious pamphlets that passed through my hands as a teenager, a genre I grew to recognize and stay well clear from. The eschatology becomes extremely familiar when Jeffrey wonders what age his father and stepmother will be when they are revived — the number, certain Muslim esotericists (and Jesus) will tell you, is 33.

The book asks too many metaphysical questions we are used to hearing from clerics lusty for new followers: what is the essence of time, is there an afterlife, where does your soul go, when does the person become the body? It’s difficult to tell whether DeLillo is asking these questions in earnest or whether he is trying to mimic the atmosphere of the Convergence in the voice of his narrator.

On his first visit, Jeffrey looks at the naked mannequins lining the corridors of the Convergence: “I imagined placing a hand on a breast. This seemed required, particularly if you are me.” We are not given a reason why particularly he should be expected to molest lifeless bodies, maybe because, as he keeps reminding us, “he is his father’s son.” Jeffrey’s optimism that we will all live to be 100 makes him describe the bodies in the pods as “rendered dead” well before their time — any dead white body is too young to die. As Jeffrey inspects these “patients” one question that comes to his mind is whether these pod peas get erections; he later later imagines his stepmother in “a state of virgin solitude.” In The Possibility of an Island, the 24th clone of Daniel contemplates the bodily degradation of what to him are “primitive” humans and says of the male body: “Subject to aesthetic and functional degradations as much as, if not more than the female, he nevertheless managed to overcome them for as long as the erectile capacities…were maintained.”

In Houellebecq’s Submission, the protagonist obsesses about how the Muslim Brotherhood’s reign has caused women to give up wearing skirts, reducing his opportunities at leering ; in The Possibility of an Island, Daniel likewise seems to experience changes in the weather as a function of how they will affect the length of skirts. In DeLillo, it must be said, there is little leering, but it isn’t absent. Jeff’s last vision of the Convergence is again to do with the female body — an impression of a woman’s skirt “lifting in the breeze, the way the wind tenses the skirt, giving shape to the legs, making the skirt dip between the legs, revealing knees and thighs. Were these my father’s thoughts or mine?”

Having been seasoned by Houellebecq, I expected Jeffrey to give into the temptation and get into a pod on his second visit to the Convergence, but he desists. What does all this worrying about death and what waits for us afterwards amount to? A grotesque form of nostalgia, Jeffrey says. Nostalgia, possibly, for a time when there was more room for the dead and the dying in our worlds, when the business of death didn’t have to be done off stage, in the bowels of a volcanic island or a wasteland of radioactive fallout. The nostalgia for a more enlightened Occident that was full of purpose, that produced great works of art, that was able to keep itself young and relevant without having to, albeit begrudgingly, let in immigrants from the Orient to quicken itself. Like so many nostalgias working their way across the globe today, it is nostalgia for a perceived golden age, the benefits of which extended only to the chosen few.

The rich seem to inhabit an ethereal form of reality in which the day of reckoning can be averted, in which they can transcend both their bodies and histories, whereas other classes seem more tied to their corporeality and finite lives. “In their prime” the men need women to reassure themselves of their libido; in death they need strangers who speak in “different alphabets” to prepare them for the ultimate alienation. Apres moi…not deluge, but — in Houellbecq’s novel — a drying up: just as the white body has shriveled up, so has the earth, and time has come for humans 2.0., sans hunger, sans passion, sans bodily fluids. Houellebecq seems convinced that by the time his own body stops there won’t be any proper human lifestyle left worth living. DeLillo, however, is more optimistic: the last image he leaves us is an alignment of the sunset and the New York City grid, the wonder of which is reflected on the face of a boy. Though the old guard may be paralyzed by a sense of narcissistic impending doom, DeLillo, at least, allows for a future that will still have moments of transcending beauty and meaning, reflected on the face of tomorrow’s man.

Essays
| 1 book mentioned 8 8 min read
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50 comments:

  1. Nice essay, but the definition of literary fiction is far too narrow and far too self-serving. Much literary fiction, for instance, is just as plot-oriented and just as visceral as genre fiction, and I have no idea what Straub means by saying that literary fiction concentrates on things like “consensus reality.” Certainly Lolita or The Great Gatsby or As I Lay Dying or Invisible Man or Earthly Powers or The God of Small Things or White Teeth or The Robber Bride or A Suitable Boy or We Need to Talk About Kevin, to take some obvious examples by some very different literary writers, carry us quite a long ways off from the definition of the “literary genre” that Straub offers. I agree with Straub that there’s a weird resistance to taking the best horror writing as seriously as, say, the best detective writing is taken. Still, Straub doesn’t help anyone take horror fiction more seriously by trying to lock literary fiction into a little box of his own devising. He shouldn’t imitate the very narrow-mindedness he’s attempting to break while making his argument for, say, Stephen King or Shirley Jackson or Straub himself. If the best horror writers are as good as the best writers of the literary genre (a genre that doesn’t exist, or at least not in the terms that Straub describes), it’s because good writing can show up almost anywhere, by any kind of writer using any kind of approach.

  2. I agree that literary fiction is really another genre much like horror, crime, or romance. The trouble with any fiction writing is exactly what the last paragraph highlights. A reliance on prescribed elements that define a genre.
    Literary fiction enjoys a better reputation in terms of surface quality. The infallible reputation of the literary genre doesn’t mean it is infallible though. Literary grade fiction doesn’t suffer from an overuse of zombies, mummies or the odd rabid dog. Is does suffer on occasion from over wordiness, pretension and the shot gun blast of consciousness. The differences seem to be the amount of scrap in the heap.

  3. “Literary fiction” is a genre like “sci-fi” or “horror.” In “literary fiction” as in all genres, there are works that transcend and works that do not. Or: most of every type of thing is garbage, but some is really great. Walk the shelves of any bookstore and on any given shelf there are probably one or two books that you would like and a whole lot that are just cheap imitaitons of other works.

    It is easy to hold up “As I Lay Dying” and say, “See literary fiction doesn’t follow any rules”–but this isn’t a fair test. It is like when someone says the 60s are better than the 90s because Dylan is better than Creed. We can all pick great works and put them against terrible works to prove our point.

    The fact of the matter is that there are great works on every shelf in a bookstore. Often those works that transcend our traditional notion of genre are plucked out of it and placed in the “literary fiction” section anyway. Etc. Etc. Etc.

    I’m not defending genre, I’m just saying don’t be blind to the garbage all around you.

  4. My take on why horror is more denigrated than crime fiction (to say nothing of literary fiction) is simpler than Straub’s: because it specifically defies what he describes as “consensus reality.” Crime fiction, on the other hand–and even some sci-fi–can (and does) claim to represent the world we all live in, essentially unchanged, just seen from a different, darker, dirtier, more vulnerable point of view. It’s escapism that pretends it’s not. Horror, on the other hand, begins with the premise that the reality we’re all agreed upon is not the only reality–the parameters our materialist consensus has set out for it leave out many, many scary and important aspects.

    It’s easier for a crime writer to tell himself, or a crime reader to tell himself, that, even as he’s working within genre conventions, what he’s really doing is taking a hard look at reality; a horror writer doesn’t have that luxury, and his prestige will always, I think, suffer for it.

  5. DN, I think you should maybe read a little more carefully what I actually wrote. I never said or suggested that literary fiction is in bulk better than genre fiction. I think the opposite is true: precisely because genre fiction has some clear rules, the writers who do well in genre fiction tend to be good at following those rules, and deserve to be praised for that. I certainly didn’t suggest that literary fiction is better than genre fiction just because As I Lay Dying is a great novel. (Under your reasoning, by the way, Straub should have been disqualified from mentioning Raymond Chandler and forced to defend Tom Clancy.) All I said is that the definition of literary fiction offered by Straub is false, because he has given a definition that doesn’t begin to recognize the range of literary fiction out there. If you like, I’m happy to pick an example of bad literary writing that doesn’t fit Straub’s definition: for instance, almost everything by Joyce Carol Oates. This isn’t a very interesting game anyway, trying to define what is and isn’t literary writing or what is and isn’t genre writing. If you read the last line of what I originally wrote, you’ll see that you and I are mainly in agreement, and that you’re fighting with someone who’s on your side.

  6. First, God Bless you, Mr. Straub.

    People need to stop worrying about what categories things fit into and just enjoy them. Does it matter if you are frightened by Flannery O’Connor or Stephen King? William Gay or Peter Straub? If it works, it works. SO many universities are down on “genre” fiction, wanting to make us all into these literary giants. How many writers can make a living writing ANYTHING? Look at the best seller lists – what’s on top? Mystery, detective, horror, pulp, and yes, some lit too.

    People like Peter Straub fight to elevate dark fiction to a higher place, along with writers like Benjamin Percy, the aforementioned Gay, Stephen Graham Jones, Brian Evenson, Blake Butler, Mark Gaitskill, AM Homes, so many. It’s a fight we wage every day.

    In the end, I think all of “us” need to get along, lit and genre, high-brow and low-brow, and everything in between. Less exclusion and more inclusion. There is nothing wrong with reading Cormac followed by King followed by Pynchon followed by Grisham by Bradbury by Saunders by whoever the hell you enjoy.

    Read fiction in The New Yorker and Playboy and The Paris Review and Esquire. Just read, and turn other people on to whatever it is you’re really digging.

    My two cents, anyway. :-)

  7. Robin, you are right. I’m sorry. I wasn’t really respoonding to you, or anyone, so I shouldn’t have mentioned your comment. I apologize. I am an alright guy, I promise–just got carried away in my own bubble.

  8. You’ll have to count me on the side of people who don’t think it makes much sense to call “literary fiction” a genre akin to sci-fi or horror or anything else. All those other genres you can sum up pretty quickly and accurately and people will know what you are talking about. There is no way to sum up literary fiction that would include everyone from Borges to Kafka to O’Connor to Sorrentino to Barthelme to Bolano to Bernhard to (I could go on and on).

    This is not, I don’t think, a question of people “transcending” their genre, as DN suggests. It is more that the sub-genres of literary fiction do not fit together. There is really nothing that links a Borges story to a traditional domestic realism novel or a Oulipo literary game to a southern gothic story.

    Straub’s definition, which hinges around the idea that the work centers on “ordinary lives” automatically makes you think of a billion examples of literary works that aren’t about ordinary people.

    It makes more sense to say that “literary fiction” is a problematic term with multiple and perhaps conflicting definitions. Because what literary fiction really means is artistic fiction. So a work of fiction can be BOTH genre fiction and literary fiction in many people’s eyes. Raymond Chandler is often listed as a literary author or in the literary section of bookstores, but we would still call his work detective fiction.

  10. Lincoln, I think where we differ is that I would not class those authors you list as being in the genre of “literary fiction.” What I was trying to express was that there are tropes and expectations for popular, literary fiction just as there are with crime fiction and fantasy. That is what I was failing to say in my first post.

    You say you can’t sum up “literary fiction” as a genre that includes Kafka and Bolano, etc, but I think you would have just as hard a time classifying, say, “sci-fi” as a genre when comparing Gene Wolfe, Samuel Delaney, Octavia Butler, Isaac Asimov, etc.

    There is good and bad of everything and the bad, or mediocre, ossify what was great about the good into cliches. All fiction, music, film, etc., does this. “Literary fiction” isn’t exempted just because Nabokov was awesome.

    Now, I recognize that maybe I am changing the meaning of some terms here, but when I hear the term “literary fiction” I do not think of Thomas Pynchon or Kathryn Davis or Lydia Davis. I think of the type of earnest, well-written book that does well as a movie. I’m sorry if I am being dismissive here.

    I guess the problem is that we would agree that writing within the tropes and confines of any genre is bad, but whenever a work exceeds those, it gets plucked out of the confines of that genre and not counted with its rank. It is like this:

    “Pickles don’t taste good,”
    “This pickle tastes good.”
    “Then it isn’t a pickle.”

    I don’t know why I am carrying on so–I don’t even read “sci-fi” or “horror” or any other “genre” fiction.

  12. dn:

    By what standard would you not classify them as such? Those authors (or contemporary authors like them) blurb each other, are studied together in classes, sit side by side on the literary fiction shelf of a book store, are published side by side in the same literary magazines, etc. If I read a genre fiction magazine I’m going to get that genre’s fiction and it will be fairly similar, but if I open a copy of McSweeney’s or Tin House I’ll find a wide range of writing akin to what I listed. Even the New Yorker, which has a (I think unjustified) reputation for being narrow and boring in its fiction still publishes people like George Saunders, Roberto Bolano and so on.

    I certainly don’t disagree that most of what is published as literary fiction or in literary magazines is crap though. Most of everything is.

  14. Well, DN you need to change that.

    Start with William Gay’s story “The Paperhanger” if that eases you in. Or just about any short by Mary Gaitskill. I’m sure you’ve read Flannery O’Connor (any short), and maybe Cormac McCarthy (The Road, Outer Dark, etc.)? If not, read them, they’re certainly dark and horrific. Brian Evenson (anything), Stephen Graham Jones (All the Beautiful Sinners), Blake Butler (Scorch Atlas), that’s a great mix of contemporary genre-benders there. Of course I’d personally suggest Straub’s Ghost Story, King’s The Stand or It (both very long) or The Long Walk (very short), Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho. So many great books, no need to avoid them.

  15. A wonderful essay. For me there are often no clear lines between genres. In many ways genres are illusions. And what wonderful illusions they can be.

    Greg Gutierrez
    Zen and the Art of Surfing

  16. If I read a genre fiction magazine I’m going to get that genre’s fiction and it will be fairly similar, but if I open a copy of McSweeney’s or Tin House I’ll find a wide range of writing akin to what I listed.

    Not necessarily the case—for one thing, you may find a Borges story in a mystery magazine (say, Ellery Queen’s, back in 1948), and that issue of Tin House you pick up might have a story by genre writer Kelly Link (as did TH’s 2007 Fantastic Women issue).

    You’re just playing the usual game of pointing to the best of “literary” fiction—McSweeney’s and Tin House—and comparing them to some notional middle-of-the-road genre magazine, and then, shocker!, the best of A is better than some imaginary average example of B. And this rather leaves aside the fact that both the magazines you name do publish genre pieces as well.

  17. Nick:

    No, that is really not the game I’m playing. As I said above:

    This is not, I don’t think, a question of people “transcending” their genre, as DN suggests. It is more that the sub-genres of literary fiction do not fit together. There is really nothing that links a Borges story to a traditional domestic realism novel or a Oulipo literary game to a southern gothic story.

    My only point here is the term “literary fiction” is not used in the same way as the term “Sci-Fi” or “Romance” or whatever. What I’m saying is we are comparing apples to oranges. It is just a different kind of term.

    When Straub lists his definition for literary fiction he simply defines domestic realism. His definition doesn’t include magic realism, avant-garde fiction, southern gothic or any of the other styles that are grouped under the term literary fiction.

    I only used Tin House and McSweeney’s because they are famous and people would be familiar with them. I could name a ton of lower tier journals that would make the same point too.

  18. And just to clarify, I’m certainly not saying that this makes literary fiction automatically better than genre fiction. I’m saying the terms dont’ really compare and if anything the term literary fiction might be unfair and problematic, since great genre works (Raymond Chandler, Kurt Vonnegut, Cormac McCarthy, etc.) get snatched up and called literary.

  19. It would be nice if we could move beyond the tired idea that literary fiction is by definition all but plotless. As Robin notes, it’s just not accurate.

    Now if you’ll all excuse me, I need to go analyze the fonts on my dust jackets.

  20. Lincoln,

    I would suggest that those ton of lower-tier literary journals in fact do NOT publish stuff along the lines of Borges and stuff along the lines of domestic realism and Oulipo-based material and Kafkasque material, etc. Most of the journals I’ve ever seen have fairly strict aesthetic agendas, at least within particular issues. (Some, like Conjunctions, an issue of with Straub edited, have narrow agendas but at least alter those agendas on an issue-by-issue basis.) Not only are Mc and TH among the best and most popular, they are among the most adventurous—there’s probably a relation between those three attributes, of course.

    You are correct, of course, that literary fiction is a rather large umbrella of sometimes competing and sometimes parallel traditions. But so too is something people often call “speculative fiction”—which would also include some Borges, and some naked propaganda for the space program, and Robert Aickman, and Vonnegutesque satires, and Joyce Carol Oates (who publishes seemingly at whim, of course) etc.

    Heck, we can just narrow is down to “fantasy”: what do Lovecraft and Tolkien really have in common, traditionally or aesthetically? And they’re hardly the opposite ends of the fantastical spectrum either.

    Now, of course, there are genre magazines with narrow focuses, but there are also literary magazines with focuses just as narrow. That was my objection: you picked the magazines with the broadest “literary” focus and compared them to some notional genre magazine that would only publish a fairly narrow range. Actually existing literary magazines are almost all narrower in focus than mcSweeney’s; actually existing genre magazines are almost all at least somewhat broader in focus than what you give them credit for.

  22. Richard, thanks for the suggestions. I’ve read most of that stuff, or at least the obvious (Ghost Story, O’Connor, Gaitskill). I love Stephen King and think that the Dead Zone is one of the best novels ever written, period. I don’t know that I’ll ever be able to read Cormac McCarthy, but that’s just my own thing. The other suggestions, I will check out. With horror fiction, my disappointment is that I can never find horror novels as satisfying as horror films, but maybe I am trying the wrong works. It seems that maybe one issue with horro fiction, at least in execution, is that there is a drive toward resolution or revelation that detracts. An in ability to leave ambiguous or unresolved. The beginning is alwasy so much more satisfying and horrific than the end. I would love for a horror novel to be able to not bring the plot to a conclusion, but leave it open. I don’t think this is a failing of horror as a genre but just a fact of execution. I imagine that publishers frown upon unresolved plots.

  23. I don’t think Straub is talking about just domestic literary fiction. He says “the several sub-genres of literary fiction,” and includes in that list “the experimental novel.” And while it’s true that it’s hard to draw a line between Borges and O’Connor and Fitzgerald, it’s also true that it’s quite easy to see in many experimental stories just how the author is nodding to the experimental styles of, say, Barthelme, Borges, or someone else. Even though the fiction I read is almost entirely what Straub would call “literary fiction,” I take his point — it has its conventions. And so do its sub-genres. Just because someone truly singular may come along and explode them every once in a while, that doesn’t make the general point less true.

  24. Lincoln, I think you are both very accurate in your comment and very inaccurate.
    You say:

    “Those authors (or contemporary authors like them) blurb each other, are studied together in classes, sit side by side on the literary fiction shelf of a book store, are published side by side in the same literary magazines, etc.”

    And this is precisely right. These are all indicators of a “genre” , specifically “literary fiction”. But, you might say, what are the tropes of literary fiction as a genre, such that Borges and Updike can be classified together? The truth is there aren’t any. Or, there are, but only such that can be stretched wide enough to be meaningless. Literary fiction is a genre because of marketing and nothing more. It is the same with mystery, horror, romance, etc. If I like x and y books sitting on the “Literature” shelf, then I might like z. The only thing that ties x, y, and z together is that their publishers think I will buy the other if I like the one.

    Look at it this way, how is Michael Moorcock’s Behold the Man a science fiction novel? Well, you might say, it has time travel in it. But, so does Slaughterhouse-5. As well as The Time Traveler’s Wife. Are the last two science-fiction? Some people say yes, some people say no. But if I go to a bookstore, where am I going to find them? Time travel is a trope most associated with science fiction. But it does not define the genre. While science-fiction might have spaceships, ray guns, and aliens, etc., these things no more define the genre than a private eye and femme fatale define film noir. I mean, where’s the private eye in Sunset Blvd.? Where’s the femme fatale in The Night of the Hunter?

    The problem comes when, to take the film noir example, you try to redefine these films based on quality. That is, the only metric that would separate Sunset Blvd. and Night of the Hunter from Gun Crazy or Crimewave, is that the former are “great” films that transcend the genre and thus can no longer belong, while the latter are merely good examples of such genre. However, “great” isn’t a genre. The problem, though, is that it has been associated with literary fiction, such that quality is a defining feature of the genre. Which makes no sense, because quality (and shit) can be found in any genre.

    For example, what makes Cormac McCarthy’s The Road not a science-fiction book? The only thing is that it was marketed as literary fiction, and shelved in that section. That’s it. “Post-apocalypse” is a trope associated with science-fiction. There are good examples (Riddley Walker) and bad examples (Brin’s The Postman). But they’re all science-fiction, except when they’re not marketed as such.

    These pointless genre battles often crop up, I suspect, not so much as the defensiveness of genre fans (be it mystery, science-fiction, horror) to be taken seriously (which I do think forms a part), but more often literary fiction fans defensiveness to admit that their taste is more defined by marketing than by quality. That is, all genres have great examples and shit examples, but “literary fiction” is the only genre that defines itself solely as the former. But the truth is, its just marketing.

  25. Southern literature comes to mind as literary fiction that is incredibly narrow in scope, or at least as it is collected and marketed. I remember being very frustrated in college with Southern Lit–that is, you weren’t writing Southern Lit unless you had some folks in a station wagon dwelling on the blood of the earth and the history of a family’s fortunes after the Civil War. Reading lit journals that focus on Southern Lit (at the time) often felt like reading the same cliches over and over.

  26. Ryan, I think we are actually in total agreement here:

    And this is precisely right. These are all indicators of a “genre” , specifically “literary fiction”. But, you might say, what are the tropes of literary fiction as a genre, such that Borges and Updike can be classified together? The truth is there aren’t any. Or, there are, but only such that can be stretched wide enough to be meaningless.

    My point is that literary fiction is not a term like “horror” or “detective fiction.” It isn’t a genre term. Maybe it doesn’t mean anything really, but if it does it means something other than genre, namely a certain level of artistry. Again, I’m saying that it is problematic, but I don’t think claiming that “literary fiction” = domestic realism makes much sense.

  27. Nick: You are of course correct that there are literary magazines both big and small that have strict aesthetics. There are also literary magazines both small and big with very broad aesthetics. But the aesthetics are not merely domestic realism, there are journals dedicated to other styles. And in addition, literary authors will target there submissions by aesthetic so that their domestic realist story goes into journal X and their Saunderish satire goes into Y and their Barthelmeish experimentation goes in Z, etc.

    My question do dn and anyone else, is that if all the authors and journals we are discussing are not “literary fiction” then what are they?

  28. Lincoln, you say: “Again, I’m saying that it is problematic, but I don’t think claiming that “literary fiction” = domestic realism makes much sense.”

    I agree completely. Saying that is like saying science-fiction = aliens, horror = monsters, mystery = detectives. However, these latter views have often become the dominant and stereotyped view, such that, if I recommended Evenson’s The Open Curtain to friend saying that it’s one of the best horror novels I’ve ever read, they might reply that they don’t like zombies or Stephen King. Clearly, it’s their loss for not being an open-minded reader, but you can hardly blame them when “Horror” as such is always marketed as zombies and vampires and the Saw movies.

    The problem is that treating “literary fiction” as something different in kind to other genres reinforces the stereotypical, popularly received opinion that “genre x means y and z” while “literary fiction means good”. I think that “literary fiction” is a marketing classification and nothing more. But I also think that “horror” is a marketing classification and nothing more. Treating them as something else, the former is “quality” the latter is “genre” often prevents readers from reading great works that they wouldn’t normally.

  29. And in addition, literary authors will target there submissions by aesthetic so that their domestic realist story goes into journal X and their Saunderish satire goes into Y and their Barthelmeish experimentation goes in Z, etc.

    I can’t say that I’ve noticed too many authors who write domestic realism and satire and experimental fiction and and and…I’d love some names. Not being sarcastic here; I am always eager to find ambitious authors, especially of short stories.


    My question do dn and anyone else, is that if all the authors and journals we are discussing are not “literary fiction” then what are they?

    It is literary fiction, in the same way hard science fiction by Hal Clement and avant-horror by Thomas Ligotti are both, broadly, “the fantastic.” Yet, one could not predict that a Hal Clement fan would also groove to the short stories and weird prose poems and fictional essays and tales-as-instructional-guides of Thomas Ligotti simply because both are “fantastical.”

    In the same way one might use “sci-fi” to only mean stories with spaceships in a conversation, Straub used “literary fiction” in one of the paragraphs in his essay to mean contemporary American realism. That he ably made a distinction between the “ice cream” of Roth and Updike on the one hand, and the not-at-all-ice-cream of William Gaddis and Thomas Bernhardt on the other, tells me that Straub knows that there is more to literary fiction than domestic realism and isn’t conflating the two except for momentary comic effect.

  30. You know, it’s funny, as I was reading this, and the comments that have followed, I was thinking of something entirely else, Freud’s theory of heterosexual development. Freud posits homosexuality (and all the other sexual “deviancies”) as forms of developmental ‘non-realisation’ – stuck in the prior stages – whilst heterosexual development winds up as the culmination of said development, enclosing all those prior stages within it. Two things, first off: I’m seriously truncating the actual inner complexity of Freud’s own ideas about “deviancies” (my account, as it is, is more to do with ‘Freudianism’ than Freud proper) and I’m also not intending to make some point by point comparison between sexuality and the novel. However, as the comparison makes clear, that privilege of heterosexuality as that which encloses the deviancies as immature phase of itself, non-realisations, is something I wish to work with in this different context. What strikes me as resonant here is the notion that literary fiction is writing in its fullest developmental phase, with ‘genre’ relegated to that which is stuck in the prior stages. This is partially why I’ve always found the praises that certain writers, like Hammett or Ligotti, get in which they ‘transcend’ the genre is, at the very least, gentrifying. I do think Lincoln makes a quite excellent point when he argues that the sub-genres of literary fiction do not fit together but I think I’d argue that this is quite the same state of affairs with genre itself. Ryan has made the point already really fantastically above, so I’m going to cite him:

    “Look at it this way, how is Michael Moorcock’s Behold the Man a science fiction novel? Well, you might say, it has time travel in it. But, so does Slaughterhouse-5. As well as The Time Traveler’s Wife. Are the last two science-fiction? Some people say yes, some people say no. But if I go to a bookstore, where am I going to find them? Time travel is a trope most associated with science fiction. But it does not define the genre. While science-fiction might have spaceships, ray guns, and aliens, etc., these things no more define the genre than a private eye and femme fatale define film noir. I mean, where’s the private eye in Sunset Blvd.? Where’s the femme fatale in The Night of the Hunter?”

    Exactly. The supposedly syntactical ‘elements’ that compose a genre’s discreteness break down upon any close inspection. However, what I suspect is that what the literary withholds from genre is precisely ‘artistry’ and I don’t think the distinction between pulp and genre quite resolves this, only repackages the bogus distinction. The art claim for literary fiction, for one thing, imports some concept of a maturity in writing. But genre reacts to the word quite distinctly, though no less maturely, from what we call literary fiction. Genre uses language with immense dexterity, I believe, but not so much in a sort of ‘well wrought urn’ mode. Rather, its brilliance is in its mobilisation of language movement and in the creation through arrangements of scenarios, a syntax of them, powerful styles. If, despite the acres of difference between them, such that there’s much passionate antipathy between adherents of each writer, there does seem a greater kinship between Hammett and Chandler than O’Connor and Borges, then I’d argue that this is due not to literary fiction’s greater diversity but is due (along with the misimpressions of marketing, another great point Ryan makes) to the commitment we still have, despite the apparent obliteration of high and low cultures under postmoderism, to relegating the un-urnlike to less than literary rather than what is truer to say of it: that it is anti-literary, another vector altogether. Which is why many of those cross-over books that are deemed literary actually often avoid what’s most profound about them: namely, how they fuck with the literary. Indeed, literary fiction may be able to offer a string of names to show its vast differences but despite everyone from Borges to Kafka to O’Connor to Sorrentino to Barthelme to Bolano to Bernhard do belong together, as their list-ability demonstrates, in terms of the argument that their linguistic acts are the apotheosis of writing. Of course, this is not to say that the language text itself is somehow normative but I do believe our response to the language text as the deepest layer of the literary is definitely normative, not least in terms of the inspirations which inform those texts attentions to style and structure (Alain Robbe-Grillet was deeply influenced by Hammett, for instance, and he veritably invented the notion of the ‘new novel’). Also, too, genre writing can be quite languagey itself. Take, for instance, this passage from King’s latest, Under the Dome, where a light aircraft runs into the ‘dome’ which inexplicably appears out of nowhere:

    “The Seneca exploded over Route 119 and rained fire down on the countryside. It also rained body parts. A smoking forearm – Claudette’s – landed with a thump beside the neatly divided woodchuck.
    It was October twenty-first.”

    What’s quite wonderful about this in terms of the way it’s written is the quite conscious corruption of its own metaphor: where fire raining has a distinct dramatic unity, this is crudened immediately by the rain being turned into a rain of body parts, which in its lumpy thingness is likened to the grotesquery of the ‘neatly divided’ woodchuck, which could double here as a metaphor for the writing of genre itself, cleanly sliced critter. Capped with the disquietingly aerating, the inexpressive yet watchful eye of the date. This is what ‘genre’ does quite constantly on the level of language, corrupts the liquidity of writing, lumps, stirs, jumps, cuts, designs cleanly sliced critter, to achieve all kinds of uncanny effects. Given all this, I really think that there is a deep sense in which we need to do away with the developmental supremacy we hand automatically to literary fiction, even when we say genre works ‘can’ be ‘as’ good as that fiction. It really binds in not just genre but also the sources and pursuits of writing itself.

  31. As a horror writer myself, I have also often heard the phrase, “You’re such a good writer — why do you waste your time with horror?” As if the genre (which is defined, as Straub points out, by emotional viewpoint, not by specific content) is inherently invalid.

    I think “literary fiction” is a genre, at least as bookstores treat it.

    Of course, one could easily say that many well-respected “literary” works are horror. Take Toni Morrison’s Beloved, for example. If the overwhelming emotion of that novel isn’t horror, then I must not understand what horror is. (Beloved even has a strong supernatural element to it, moving it even further into that genre category, if I dare say so.)

    I believe that writers with integrity tell the stories that interest and move them. Its the marketing side of things that insists on labels and pigeonholing, which then gives some people the opportunity to dismiss whole “categories” of work on the basis of arbitrarily defined “genres.”

  32. Book marketing is like a fashion show, everything on parade is stuffed into a size two, even if it requires starvation. We all know real people, real writers, are rounder than that, no matter which peg you cram them into, there will always be that overflow poking out of the top. You can’t use old rusty pipes to lasso a piece of art; you have to use something flexible. There is nothing flexible about labels. Quite frankly the word genre and straight-jacket have a lot in common, in my humble opinion. Meh, what do I know, I’m a no name poet.

  33. I’d say Straub is wrong that Chandler was the last person to elevate genre crime fiction to an art. James Ellroy has done that several times in his still-ongoing career, starting with LA Confidential, and continuing through stylist experiments like White Jazz to his latest, Blood’s a Rover. But crime fiction does have some restraints that most writers haven’t been able to overcome — if they even want to try.

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  39. Good for you, Peter Straub. I made pretty much the same argument in an article for PopMatters (“Airplane Books, Junk Literature, and the Western Canon: All Novels Are Lies, Some Lies Are Better”). With very few exceptions, I find contemporary literary fiction intolerably self-absorbed, gimmicky, and just plain unreadable. Give me horror or sci-fi any day of the week. And I’m so glad Straub talks about Chandler’s “The Long Goodbye”, one of the greatest American novels ever written.

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Essays

The Millions Conversation: M.T. Anderson’s Octavian Nothing (Part Two)

Essays
March 4, 2009 | 1 book mentioned 1 5 min read

This winter, Millions contributors Emily Colette Wilkinson and Garth Risk Hallberg both happened to pick up the M.T. Anderson’s The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation. Via email, we conducted a bicoastal conversation about Octavian Nothing, Volume I: The Pox Party, which we’re sharing with you this week in three installments. Part 1 focused on Form and Style. Part 3 will focus on Audience, Character, and Conclusion. Please note that today’s installment contains plot spoilers.Part 2: Geographic and Historical SettingGarth: The setting of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation reminds me of one of George Saunders’ theme parks, CivilWarLand or Pastoralia. It could be real, but everything is slightly exaggerated or off in the way of good science-fiction. The rational philosophers of the College of Lucidity refer to themselves by number rather than name, for example, which works both as a cool detail and as a commentary on the humanistic blind-spots of the Enlightenment, which we discussed earlier. M.T. Anderson does the set piece very well, and in his capable hands, historical footnotes like the titular “pox party” become hallucinatory visions that work perfectly to dramatize the book’s central concerns.Emily: And one historical footnote in particular gets a lot of attention. Although the removal of Thomas Jefferson’s anti-slavery clause from the list of grievances against King George in the Declaration of Independence is hardly a historical revelation at this late date, I couldn’t help thinking that it is a crucial hovering presence in Anderson’s miscellany. Here’s the clause:He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of INFIDEL powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce. And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he also obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed against the LIBERTIES of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the LIVES of an other.In the end, it was cut because the Southern states wouldn’t sign a Declaration with a condemnation of slavery (thereby laying the groundwork for the Civil War).Garth: This is totally fascinating, Emily. And it is a revelation, to me at least: I had no idea this was ever in the Declaration of Independence. I can see quite clearly now that much of the plot of the second half of Octavian, which is driven by a rumored alliance between American slaves and the English crown, is drawn not from the airy realms of authorial fancy, but, like so many other of Octavian’s seemingly absurd details, from Anderson’s research. Octavian would have been familiar with Horace’s poetics, wherein dramas were supposed to “instruct and entertain.” I think Anderson’s most effective instructional tool is letting us discover that the story’s seemingly science-fictiony details, which “shock the conscience,” are quite real. I want to flag, too, for future discussion, the sensibility Jefferson reveals in that deleted clause. Is he a rank hypocrite? Or is he – rather more appallingly – quite like us (although a much better writer, unless “us” includes M.T. Anderson)? Jefferson’s commitment to the sanctity of “life and liberty” strikes me as deeply felt, the contempt for “this execrable commerce” not merely rhetorical. And yet the force of Jefferson’s sentences is: Get off our back, George, and stop meddling with our slaves.Emily: Yes – the idea of “profit and delight” (to use an 18th-Century phrase often invoked with specific reference to miscellanies) is, I think, at the core of Anderson’s poetics. Octavian’s life as Anderson tells it is absolutely engrossing – entertaining – and it gives appalling force to the profound contradiction inherent in the American Revolution and the founding of the American Republic: A nation that upheld itself as particularly invested in personal freedom and liberty was also a nation of slave-holders. Octavian is less “Traitor to the Nation” than betrayed by it. In one of the most intellectually frightening scenes of the book, Octavian’s captors – rationalists to the end, even as they are hypocrites – explain to him that there is no contradiction between their commitments to “the cause of Liberty” and to keeping slaves. They explain that the freedom the revolution seeks to ensure is the freedom of exchange (capitalism), rather than some more abstract, philosophical freedom that would require the freeing of slaves. The scene is on par with Orwell or Kafka – the rational irrationality, the rational cruelty, the commitment to cold, abstract principals when the hideous inhumanity those principals inflict screams out for recognition.Garth: As a scholar of the 18th Century, you know a lot more about this than I do. Do you think this explicit argument about “freedom of exchange” is as historically accurate as the other elements of the book? Of course it’s implicit in “no taxation without representation,” but were pluralities of revolutionaries making it the fundament of their concept of natural rights? (If so, I shudder to think what the “strict constructionists” on the Supreme Court would do with this.) Because it really does seem like Jefferson’s “liberty,” enshrined in the Declaration and even the deleted clause above, is much more expansive than that. My bleeding-heart sense of the thing is that Jeffersonian “liberty” is like Hegel’s “spirit” or like divine love in The Bible – a universal principle that, as history progresses, comes closer and closer to being realized in the world. Until heaven is at hand, we struggle and contradict ourselves and do our best to explain away our blind spots. This is going to tie in to some things I want to say about character in the third part of our discussion, but I wanted to give you a chance to jump in and comment here.Emily: Freedom of exchange was definitely a part of the impetus for the revolution. As with so many other revolutions of this age (the English Civil War, the French Revolution) and others after it, the American Revolution began in practical, material grievances – issues like the stamp tax and England’s refusal to allow colonists to appoint their own governors. But this is not to deny a genuine intellectual and emotional commitment to the abstract ideal of freedom among the revolutionaries, or the reality that some believed the revolution would bring an end to slavery, and that there was a Christian imperative to end slavery. We see this view represented in Anderson’s book by Evidence Goring, a young American soldier who befriends Octavian. Goring believes that “slavery and subjugation shall soon fall away” and offers a gruesome vision of the fate that awaits slaveholders:And God shall curse those who hold their fellow Men as Slaves; and in the Last Day, they shall know Weeping, when Christ comes striding from the Skies, Hands drizzling His Blood, Eyes filled with a Sorrow at what He must do: For then they shall remain enchained to this Flesh, hobbled with Bone, when the Rest are released from their Gross Bodies into the hallowed Air.In this vision of Goring’s, which borrows the language and tone of Revelations, there are, perhaps, intimations of your ideas about Hegel? This vision also censures the kind of materialism that Octavian’s owners defend, the kind of materialism that puts property, particularly human property over liberty in the famous Revolutionary slogan “liberty and property.” Those who value material property, human property, bodies, above liberty, will never achieve transcendence.

Essays
| 1 book mentioned 1 5 min read
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