1. “Two Paths for the Novel”
It was late October, 2008, and Robert Silvers had earned a victory lap. The New York Review of Books, which he’d co-founded with the late Barbara Epstein during the New York printers’ strike of 1963, was about to observe its 45th anniversary. And equally improbably, after the tumultuous reign of Bush fils, the country seemed poised to elect a president aligned with the social-democratic politics for which the New York Review had provided life support. Interviewed by a reporter at a San Francisco restaurant, though, Silvers, 78, sounded less like an eminence grise dining out on past accomplishments than a hungry young editor on the make…or maybe the cat who ate the canary. The end of the conversation found him talking up “‘an ambitious essay’” slated to appear in the Review’s anniversary edition, “‘a daring and original piece by a brilliant mind’”—a “dismantl[ing]” (in the reporter’s paraphrase) of the literary “status quo.” “‘Some people will be slightly shaken,’ Silvers said with delight,” before “grabbing a handful of smoked almonds and making a dash for the door.”
The mind in question was the English novelist Zadie Smith‘s, and the dismantling turned out to be a 9,000-word essay on two well-received recent novels: Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland and Tom McCarthy’s Remainder. Or perhaps “essay” isn’t the right word; as the title “Two Paths for the Novel” suggested, it was closer in spirit to a polemic. The rhetorical embroidery was dazzlingly multiform, but the gravamen ultimately rested on that old workhorse, compare/contrast. As Smith saw it, Netherland—at that point well on its way to bestsellerdom and President Obama’s nightstand—represented the excesses, the exhaustion, of “a breed of lyrical Realism [that] has had freedom of the highway for some time now.” McCarthy’s Remainder, meanwhile, was “one of the great English novels of the past ten years,” “an avant-garde challenge” meant to
shake the novel out of its present complacency. It clears away a little of the dead wood, offering a glimpse of an alternate road down which the novel might, with difficulty, travel forward.
In the event, I’m not sure anyone apart from Joseph O’Neill was actually “shaken.” Manifestos are a dime a dozen these days—to borrow a line from Dale Peck’s manifesto-infected Hatchet Jobs, “that and $2.50 . . . will buy you a skinny mochaccino” (with adjustment for inflation)—and even before David Shields’ Reality Hunger, obsequies for “lyrical Realism” had been performed at length by Ben Marcus, the editors of N+1, David Foster Wallace, William T. Vollmann…not to mention a whole host of Continental theoreticians.
Then again, to measure the success of a literary manifesto by whether or not the status quo stays mantled is fundamentally to misapprehend the genre. Its prime object and beneficiary is not “the novel” but the critic herself, and in this sense “Two Paths for the Novel” was a triumph. To other polemically minded reviewers (particularly the vicar of capital-R Realism whose name Smith had worked into an uncharacteristically juvenile pun (see above)), the essay served notice: Your boy’s club’s been breached. “Two Paths for the Novel” (with a slight adjustment of title) would constitute the longest piece but one in Smith’s first essay collection, Changing My Mind, published in 2009.
Now ascended (or condemned) to the post of New Books columnist at Harper’s, Zadie Smith will no doubt have discovered the limited and erratic scope of the authority to which she’s laid claim. On one hand, her elegant dressing-down of Netherland seems to have had approximately zero effect on the novel’s reception, aside from giving people who didn’t like it something to point to. On the other, “Two Paths for the Novel” does appear, several years out, to have shifted the literary landscape in one very particular way: it’s positioned Tom McCarthy, who as late as 2005 couldn’t find a publisher for Remainder, as the English language’s leading avant-gardist. Indeed, so subtle were its powers of persuasion that no one seems to remember he was ever anything but.
This was most visible last summer, when Knopf published with great fanfare McCarthy’s third novel, C. Jonathan Dee, writing in Harper’s, adjudged it “an avant-garde epic” (adding, somewhat bewilderingly: “the first I can think of since Ulysses.”) “An avant-garde masterpiece,” proclaimed Meehan Crist, in The Los Angeles Times. The redoubtable Adam Kirsch went so far as to borrow Smith’s technique, putting C. in conversation with Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom. “[McCarthy] is the standard-bearer of the avant-garde novel,” he decided, “of fiction consumed by its own status as fiction, and of the avant-garde writer as an unassailable provocateur.” Aside from eagle-eyed Scott Esposito, who posted a sharp take on these reviews at Conversational Reading, no one seemed to question the idea of McCarthy as the keeper of the avant-garde flame.
The “Two Paths” effect even persists, albeit subtly, in the long McCarthy retrospect Amanda Claybaugh, an English professor at Harvard, published last month in N+1. Claybaugh seeks explicitly to engage with “the claims made on behalf of McCarthy: that the problem facing the contemporary novel is the persistence of realism, and that the solution is to be found, with McCarthy, among the avant-garde.” As that last phrase suggests, though, Claybaugh leaves mostly intact the claim that underpins the others: that McCarthy himself is to be found among the avant-garde. This hints at both the brilliance and the weakness of “Two Paths for the Novel”: several of its conclusions are actually smuggled in as premises, which become ours as well. Accepting “the violence of the rejection Remainder represents to a novel like Netherland” is the price of admission.
This is probably the place to declare for the record that I’m half in love with Zadie Smith’s critical voice. Also that I think Remainder is a terrific novel. But, thanks in no small part to Smith’s advocacy, what’s at stake in assessing McCarthy’s burgeoning reputation is something much more than that: “the future of the avant-garde novel.” The artistic avant-garde is, Adorno would remind us, one of the few free spaces we’ve got left. (That’s assuming there is one.) And because its future is so important—and because, if we’re lucky, we’re going to be reading Smith’s criticism for a long time to come—I think it’s worth revisiting her premises and treating them as open questions. How, specifically, is Remainder avant-garde? And also: how avant is it?
2. Language + Matter = Death…Or Something.
To the first question—how is it avant?—Smith offers one clear answer. Remainder challenges “the essential fullness and continuity of the self” that is the soul of Realism. McCarthy’s unnamed protagonist is literally discontinuous; he awakens at midlife from an unspecified accident unsure of who he’s been. This might, in run-of-the-mill amnesia fiction, inaugurate a quest: Hero Seeks to Recover Past. Remainder’s “hero,” though, mostly shrugs off concerns about identity, to subversive comic effect. Here, the comparison with Netherland is illuminating. Joseph O’Neill, too, knows better than to present his hero as a unitary psyche; one of his chief effects is the subtle altering and re-altering of perception that attend the passage of time, and the narrator, Hans van den Broek, seems troubled by a nagging lack of “fullness” in his character. Still, the debt is more to Fitzgerald and Hemingway than to Deleuze & Guattari, and so the difference between the two novels’ approach to the “self” is one more of kind than of degree. Hans van den Broek seeks communion; Remainder’s “Enactor” (as Smith calls him) seeks to secure for himself, through industry and cash on the barrelhead, those depthless sensations Frederic Jameson calls “intensities.”
Here we encounter a wrinkle, though. Jameson’s essay “Postmodernism” dates to 1984, and even then, the deposition of the Realist self was well underway. Smith’s essay is liberally sprinkled with examples from the field of literature. Just the B’s: Blanchot, Bataille, Ballard, Burroughs…. In the “Two Paths” schematic, they populate a “skewed side road.” But think of another B: Beckett. Hasn’t the postwar period more or less widened the side-road of “self”-sabotage to a superhighway?
Two novelists in particular, Alain Robbe-Grillet (whom Smith names) and Peter Handke (whom she doesn’t), seem to have anticipated Remainder’s characteristic “intensities.” Even decades on, though, each seems more genuinely “violent” in his rejection of the Realist “self” than does McCarthy. Robbe-Grillet is willing, unlike Remainder, to sacrifice the continuity and escalation of plot on the altar of a philosophical apprehension. And The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick finds Handke strategically discarding the continuity of language for the same reason. Of course, Handke himself has umlaut-ed antecedents in Döblin and Büchner, and I wouldn’t want to define “avant-gardism” as “that child which has no parents.” Instead, it might help to think of the avant-garde as what still has the power to disturb the settled order of things. At which point it becomes apparent that the schizoid depthlessness of postmodernism ain’t it. Think of Bret Easton Ellis. Play it as it Lays. Tao Lin. As with the Realist plenitude Netherland draws on, “our receptive pathways” for the discontinuous self “are solidly established.”
There’s another way in which Smith believes Remainder to be avant-garde. It’s apparent in the word “trace,” which is to “Two Paths for the Novel” what descriptions of clouds are to Netherland: almost a nervous tic. In short, Smith feels McCarthy to have assimilated the destabilizing linguistic insights of Jacques Derrida in a way O’Neill hasn’t. (Isn’t “remainder” just a synonym for “trace?”) But whenever she turns to theory as such, Smith’s native lucidity gives way to an undergraduate overeagerness. Critiques of Realism, we are told,
blossomed out into a phenomenology skeptical of Realism’s metaphysical tendencies, demanding, with Husserl, that we eschew the transcendental, the metaphorical, and go “back to the things themselves!”; they peaked in that radical deconstructive doubt which questions the capacity of language itself to describe the world with accuracy.
Then again:
The novel is made out of language, the smallest units of which still convey meaning, and so they will always carry the trace of the real.
But:
Remainder’s way turns out to be an extreme form of dialectical materialism—it’s a book about a man who builds in order to feel.
And:
[Remainder] tries always to acknowledge the void that is not ours, the messy remainder we can’t understand or control—the ultimate marker of which is Death itself. We need not ever read a word of Heidegger to step in these murky waters.
Smith seems to be following the pronouncements McCarthy has promulgated as General Secretary of a “semi-fictitious” avant-garde network, the International Necronautical Society (INS). She offers an excerpt:
“If form…is perfection itself, then how does one explain the obvious imperfection of the world, for the world is not perfect, n’est-ce pas? This is where matter—our undoing—enters the picture. For the Greeks, the principle of imperfection was matter, hyle. Matter was the source of the corruption of form…. In short, against idealism in philosophy and idealist or transcendent conceptions of art, of art as pure and perfect form, we set a doctrine of…materialism.”
The syntax of these sentences is easy enough to follow, but, in their mingling of metaphysics, materialism, and aesthetics, these are, I think, far murkier waters than Smith realizes. I confess to being on shaky ground with Derrida; the failure to find rigor in Smith’s use of the “trace” may well be my own. But the materialism here is “dialectical” in only the loosest sense, and Smith’s gloss on being-towards-death seems reductive, even hedged. At any rate, we’d do well to read more than a word of Heidegger, for whom the kind of being “the things” have – especially in the broken, obtrusive, or useless state Remainder finds them in (e.g., the “gnarled, dirty and irregular” carrot) is most important in adumbrating the kind of Being we have…which is precisely where the Necronauts are at their glibbest.
Moreover, it’s difficult, reading Remainder’s handling of things qua things, to find anything more disruptive than what Viktor Shklovsky was doing in 1925, or William Carlos Williams in 1935, or Georges Perec, quite differently, in 1975. In fact, the hospitality of Remainder to allegorical readings might just as easily be read as a failure of its ability to resist metaphor, or to foreground language’s inability to do so—to capture materiality in the sense of “thingness.” And again, notwithstanding the artful stammerings, elisions, and self-corrections of the first-person narrator, the linguistic subject these objects encounter is still a consistent, confessional, Cartesian (if unusually estranged) “I.”
In general, then, Remainder’s formal choices seem less troubled by its theoretical convictions than Smith makes them out to be. The novel’s ideas may be novel enough, but McCarthy dramatizes them the way Cervantes did it: embody them in a character, launch him into a plot (albeit one that ends in a Borgesian loop). We might, if so inclined, read this as a conscious rejection of another of Realism’s credos: “the transcendent importance of form.” More likely, though, Remainder, like Netherland, is simply drawing on the formal vocabulary of Realism to “enact” the philosophical agenda Smith can’t quite pin down. (C. may well be another matter. I haven’t yet read it, but in Claybaugh’s account, it seems to go a step further toward assimilating theory into language and, especially, structure, with mixed results.)
That philosophical agenda may itself be somewhat incoherent; even Claybaugh doesn’t entirely clarify it. I’m struck by the possibility, which Smith only glances at, that the garbled quality of the INS’ transmissions is intentional—that the avant-garde to which McCarthy is authentically the heir is not Existentio-Deconstructo-Dialectico-Materialism, but the Situationism of Guy DeBord. As I’ve got it from Lipstick Traces, the Situationists (who their mark on the near-revolution in France in 1968) sought to expose the gaps in the seemingly solid bourgeois political and aesthetic order through acts of play and imposture—of “détournement.” You can see their legacy in attenuated form in flash mobs and Improv Everywhere and Exit Through the Gift Shop.
I don’t want to suggest that McCarthy isn’t thinking in earnest about “the melancholy impasse out of which the…novel has yet to work its way”; this weekend’s New York Times Book Review cover story on The Pale King was lucid and engaged, and, notably, offered no answers. But the iron-fisted theorizing of the General Secretary may be less a way forward for the novel than a way of having us on for the baggage we bring to it—and for the ease with which even the messiest “remainder” gets assimilated into the cultural order (Remainder the novel having been picked up for a movie deal by the U.K.’s Film4.) McCarthy alluded to these slippery possibilities in a recent essay on the Belgian novelist Jean-Philippe Toussaint: “Will he turn out, ultimately, to have been deconstructing literary sentimentalism or sentimentalizing literary deconstruction?” It’s likewise possible to see Remainder‘s avant-gardism as purposefully “semi-fictitious.” By positioning his novel as a work of violent rejection, rather than of pop accomplishment, McCarthy may have insinuated into the bookshop a kind of Trojan-cum-Morse horse—a container that encodes something quite different from what it is.
3. I’ll Be Your Mirror
Internally, though, Remainder is less the “antipode” of Netherland than its photo-negative. That is, each stands in exactly the same relation to its respective tradition as does the other. This is not to accuse either of mannerism, exactly, but in each case, “the obvious imperfection of the world” is brought under the government of a familiar aesthetic reflex. In Netherland’s case, the potentially meaningless gets redeemed by fine writing, in the mode of Richard Ford’s The Sportswriter. In Remainder, the potentially meaningful gets reduced to the narcotic flatness we enjoyed in the nouveau roman. Each is exactly as “aestheticized” as the other; it’s just that Smith likes one aesthetic better.
Borrowing her own key terms, “identity,” “authenticity,” and “anxiety,” it’s possible to reconstruct why this might be so. The “identity” reading points to the evident seduction Continental Philosophy holds for a Cambridge alum. In the heady world of literary theorizing, Derrida opens doors. But Smith thinks like a novelist, not like a philosopher. (Indeed, she may think more purely like a novelist than any other writer we have.) Consequently, her keen attunement to the nuances of Forster and Woolf, the playfulness with which she approaches Kafka and Hurston, go rigid whenever her thoughts tend toward academe. The false notes in Changing My Mind—I’m thinking here of the essay on Nabokov and Barthes, and parts of the essay on Brief Interviews with Hideous Men—are almost always a product of her desire to force the play of her intelligence into some theoretical scheme.
The “anxiety” reading points elsewhere. Smith’s shadowboxing with a certain unnamed “lapsed high Anglican,” and the NYRB’s positioning of her essay hard on the heels of a review of How Fiction Works, would seem to suggest that “Two Paths” grows out of what one blogger has called “the James Wood neurosis.” Certainly, Smith is entitled to feel that she acceded too quickly and too publicly to Wood’s criticisms from the pulpit of Realism of her own first book, the multiethnic social novel White Teeth. And it was Wood whose rapt review launched Netherland, unbothered by the considerably more conventional uses to which it put its multiethnic milieu.
But the “authenticity” reading is the most revealing. In her mid-30s, Smith is still “changing her mind,” working through what kind of novelist she wants to—and can authentically—be. As she herself has suggested, here and elsewhere, her considerable gifts for characterization, irony, description, and dialogue fall squarely within the Realist tradition. But perhaps she feels, rightly or wrongly, that even her most accomplished novel, On Beauty, sits too tidily on the bourgeois bookshelf. She channels E.M. Forster, but wants to be David Foster Wallace. “Anything, anything at all, that doesn’t sound like me,” she wrote in her response to Wood’s “Hysterical Realism.” “Sick of sound of own voice. Sick of trying to make own voice appear on that white screen. Sick of trying to pretend, for sake of agent and family, that idea of putting words on blank page feels important.” It’s as though the “existential crisis” or “nervous breakdown” she sees O’Neill’s “perfectly done” novel inflicting on “what we have been taught to value in fiction” is her own.
Fortunately for her and for us, Smith labors under a misapprehension about what it means to be avant-garde. To borrow a metaphor, she can’t quite see the forest for the “dead wood.” Here are the rhetorical questions she throws at the feet of Netherland:
Is this really what having a self feels like? Do selves always seek their good, in the end? Are they never perverse? Do they always want meaning? Do they not sometimes want its opposite? And is this how memory works? Do our childhoods often return to us in the form of coherent lyrical reveries? Is this how time feels? Do the things of the world really come to us like this, embroidered in the verbal fancy of times past?
These are, of course, the very mimetic questions that animate canonical Realism, from Austen to Dostoevsky to Proust. Smith’s avant-garde is a gradual convergence on what she insists doesn’t exist: the one true and transcendent Real. But look at the “disturb and disrupt” mandate I sketched above—hell, look at Smith’s essay—and you’ll instantly see that avant-gardism, like its dark twin kitsch, is always situational. In the mid-Nineteenth Century, Wagner’s innovations are disruptive; by the mid-Twentieth, they’re the soundtrack for Triumph of the Will.
The enemy to be rebelled against today is hardly “the transcendent importance of form, the incantatory power of language to reveal truth, the essential fullness and continuity of the self.” Rather, it is a world order that reduces form, language, and selfhood to mere options in the supermarket of aesthetic choices. And insofar as it presents an aesthetic binary—write like this tradition, rather than this other tradition, and you’re on the right path—Smith’s conception of the avant-garde is woefully insufficient. Coke or Pepsi? Mac or PC? It amounts to a game of Distinction, whose logical end is to deny that the kind of avant-garde Adorno champions is even possible.
Then again, in a less theoretical mood, Smith once wrote these sentences: “We can only be who we are…. Writers do not write what they want, they write what they can.” What we need, as readers and writers, is not to side with some particular “team,” and thus to be liberated from the burden of further thinking. Rather, we need ways of evaluating a novel’s form and language and ideas in light of, for lack of a more precise term, the novelist’s own burning. We need to look beyond the superfices and cultural hoopla that mark books as mainstream as Netherland and Remainder as “violent rejections” of each other, and to examine the deep places where private sensibility and the world as we find it collide. A true path forward for the novel—Zadie Smith’s or Tom McCarthy’s or anyone else’s—will run through those trackless spaces, and we must follow it there. Otherwise, we give the status quo the victory, no matter how ardently we might wish to dismantle it.
Vive la différance.
From Our Archives:
“Obsession, Obsessively Told: A Review of Tom McCarthy’s Remainder.”
“The Great New York Novel?: A Review of Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland.”
“Bulletin: Interview with Tom McCarthy, General Secretary, INS.”
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.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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. :-)
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.
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.
I tend to think the problem is that there is a conflation between what is pulp and what is genre.
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.
Giant lizards ARE pretty scary.
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.
Including most of my comments.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
of WHICH Straub edited. I wish The Millions allowed comments to be previewed.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
Uh, should be “stylistic” experiments, not stylist. Yep, a preview option would be nice.
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.
well,for me it’s quiet interesting to watch.. such movies,brings the creativeness
of the writer.
to be able to give what it should give..