Overture
For more than a century, filmmakers have been plundering world literature for source material. Countless works by ancient, medieval, renaissance, enlightenment, Elizabethan, Victorian, modern, post-modern, and futuristic writers, working in every imaginable form and genre, have been transported from page to screen. Every once in a long while an ingenious writer upends this time-tested formula and uses a movie as a springboard for a book. Recently I came upon instances of three very different writers drawing on three very different movies to produce three odd and wondrous little books. The writers are
Geoff Dyer,
Don DeLillo, and
Jonathan Lethem, who, for all their differences, have one thing in common. Each became bewitched by a movie that spoke so forcefully to him that he watched it again and again until it revealed all of its secrets and meanings, until he grasped what might be called the movie's deep tissues. Here are three case studies of the fruits of their obsessions:
Case Study #1: Geoff Dyer on Andrei Tarkovsky
Last summer I got to
interview one of my favorite writers, the English novelist and essayist Geoff Dyer. The occasion was the American publication of
The Missing of the Somme, Dyer's intricate meditation on the ways the dead of the First World War are memorialized and remembered. As our conversation was winding down, I asked Dyer the obligatory parting question: "Do you have a new book in the works?"
"I have a book coming out in January or February," he replied. "It's a very detailed study of
Andrei Tarkovsky's film
Stalker, which is the film that I've seen more than any other. It has really stayed with me for the thirty years since I first saw it. This book is an unbelievably detailed study of that film...(and) hopefully people will buy it because it's by me, irrespective of the fact that they've not seen the film, or perhaps not even heard of it."
Well, my ignorance of Russian cinema is so immaculate that I had not heard of
Stalker and, yes, I'm one of those people who will read a book simply because it was written by Geoff Dyer. So I took Dyer at his word and read his new book before I watched the movie that inspired it. The book is called
Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room, and from its very first line we're inside Tarkovksy's 1979 film, seeing what the camera sees and listening to what Dyer was thinking as he watched the movie, again and again, over the course of three decades. Dyer describes the book as "an account of watchings, rememberings, misrememberings, and forgettings; it is not the record of a dissection."
Fair enough, and yet the book does take the movie apart, all 142 shots of it, with some sharp instruments. As always, Dyer brings ferocious curiosity and intelligence to the job, guiding us through Tarkovsky's strange world by bouncing his own thoughts off writers of literature and criticism, cinema and psychology, including
Flaubert,
Wordsworth,
Camus,
Barthes,
Bresson,
DeLillo,
Tony Judt, Stanislaw Lem,
Rilke,
Heidegger,
Jung,
Slavoj Zizek, and, of course, Tarkovsky himself.
If you like your movies with a plot synopsis, here goes: A guide (Stalker) takes two men (Writer and Professor) into a forbidden and mysterious area called the Zone, at the heart of which is the Room, where your deepest wish will come true. Period. How, you might ask, can anyone spin a 228-page book out of remembering and misremembering
that? The simple answer is that Dyer, much like Tarkovsky, recalibrates our sense of time. He doesn't merely slow things down, he sometimes freezes them, the better to examine them under his microscope. Instructively, Dyer quotes Tarkovsky here: "If the regular length of a shot is increased, one becomes bored, but if you keep on making it longer, it piques your interest, and if you make it even longer, a new quality emerges, a special intensity of attention."
"This," Dyer writes, "is Tarkovsky's aesthetiic in a nutshell. At first there can be a friction between our expectations of time and Tarkovsky-time and this friction is increasing in the twenty-first century as we move further and further away from Tarkovsky-time towards moron-time in which nothing can last – and no one can concentrate on anything – for more than about two seconds.... Tarkovsky is saying to the audience: Forget about previous ideas of time. Stop looking at your watches."
Dyer makes the case that every work of art – like life itself? – is best appreciated by those who have the patience to look, look again, and keep looking: "The Zone is a place – a state – of heightened alertness to everything."
The film's script was written by
Arkady and
Boris Strugatsky, adapted from their short science-fiction novel,
Roadside Picnic. (So, yet another movie that sprang from a work of literature.) It was shot in Estonia, in and around an abandoned hydroelectric power station that possesses an ethereal beauty similar to what you witness while passing through the petrochemical badlands on the New Jersey Turnpike, those same toxic fogs, sludgy waters, and dripping pipes, minus the methane spurts. An early caption informs us that the Zone might (or might not) be the result of some kind of meteorite or alien invasion, and Dyer duly notes that the setting foreshadows the Chernobyl nuclear plant meltdown in the Ukraine in 1986 (he calls Tarkovsky "a prophet"), and that the Zone also echoes
Stalin's gulags. Citing Wordsworth, he addresses the importance of such man-made landscapes: "It is when there is some kind of human interaction with landscape, when the landscape, having been manufactured or altered, is in the process of being reclaimed by nature – a source of abiding fascination for Tarkovsky – that its 'inward meaning' is most powerfully felt."
By the end of their journey, Stalker, Writer, and Professor have learned that the Zone "is not a place of hope so much as a place where hope turns in on itself, resigns itself to the way things are." Not exactly a heart-warming takeaway, but as soon as I finished Dyer's book, I watched the movie for the first time. I suppose only two questions remain: 1.) Is
Stalker, as Dyer contends, "the reason cinema was invented"? And, 2.) How did Dyer's book affect my experience of watching Tarkovsky's movie?
My answers are, 1.) No, I would go with the much more conventional view that the reason cinema was invented is
Citizen Kane. Beyond that, I'll man up and admit that Tarkovsky-time got a little boring in spots. Even Dyer confesses that "it was not a case of love at first sight: the first time I saw
Stalker I was slightly bored and unmoved." Which might just mean that I need to see the movie a few dozen more times. And, 2.) Dyer's book enriched the experience of watching the movie in ways I can't count, but most basically because it reminded me that we will always be repaid for a heightened alertness to everything – the sounds of birdsong, the changing of light, the smoky nature of our hopes, the riches that are spread out before our eyes if only we have the patience to see.
Cormac McCarthy once said, "The ugly fact is, books are made out of books." Well, no and yes, you'll conclude after reading this astonishing book about a film about a book about a journey to a room.
Case Study #2: Don DeLillo on Douglas Gordon on Alfred Hitchcock
In 2010
Don DeLillo published
Point Omega, a novel that begins with a short overture and ends with a short coda, titled, respectively, "Anonymity" and "Anonymity 2." Both tell the story of an unnamed man who has come to New York's Museum of Modern Art in the summer of 2006 to watch a video by the Scottish artist
Douglas Gordon. It's called
24 Hour Psycho and that's precisely what it is –
Alfred Hitchcock's classic slowed down from its original 109 minutes and turned into a crawling, day-long taffy pull.
Like many people who visited MoMA to see Gordon's movie, I came away thinking that a little bit of this sort of thing goes a long way. (Ditto
Andy Warhol's 1964 movie,
Empire, which consists of a fixed camera gazing out a window at the Empire State Building for eight unblinking hours.) Indeed, most of the museum-goers in
Point Omega watch Gordon's slowed-down movie for a few minutes and then flee, looking at the museum guard on their way out the door hoping for eye contact that will validate their "bafflement."
DeLillo's nameless moviegoer is no such impatient dilettante. He spends countless hours on six successive days absorbed by the movie, going deeper and deeper in search of its meanings. What he discovers would resonate with Dyer and Tarkovsky:
The nature of the film permitted total concentration and also depended on it. The film's merciless pacing had no meaning without a corresponding watchfulness, the individual whose absolute alertness did not betray what was demanded. He stood and looked. In the time it took for Anthony Perkins to turn his head, there seemed to flow an array of ideas involving science and philosophy and nameless other things, or maybe he was seeing too much. But it was impossible to see too much. The less there was to see, the harder he looked, the more he saw. This was the point. To see what's here, finally to look and to know you're looking, to feel time passing, to be alive to what is happening in the smallest registers of motion... It takes close attention to see what's happening in front of you. It takes work, pious effort, to see what you are looking at.
This, it seems to me, is the mission of all true art – to enrich our lives by making us alive to what is happening
as it is happening to us. We're back to Tarkovsky's "special intensity of attention" and Dyer's "heightened alertness to everything."
Between DeLillo's cinematic overture and coda lies a thin novel about an encounter between two men at a remote house "somewhere south of nowhere" in the Sonoran desert. These two men, we'll learn, were among the people who came to see
24 Hour Psycho in New York but fled after a few minutes. One is Richard Elster, an academic, a "defense intellectual" (perfect DeLillo job title!), who was involved in the preparations for the invasion of Iraq. He has come to the desert to detox from the experience. With him is the novel's narrator, Jim Finley, a filmmaker who is trying to persuade Elster to be the subject of a documentary. (So, a novel that springs from a movie about a movie and wants to produce yet another movie.) Finley's documentary will consist of one unblinking shot (think of
Empire, or the single-take
Russian Ark): Elster standing in front of a blank wall talking about what he did inside the Pentagon. Finley wants Elster to reveal "what you know that no one knows." Elster has already confided, vaguely, that his job was "to conceptualize...to apply overarching ideas and principles to such matters as deployment and counter-insurgency." This, he admits without shame, involved a certain amount of lying. "Lying is necessary. The state has to lie. There is no lie in war or in preparation for war that can't be defended. We went beyond this. We tried to create new realities overnight, careful sets of words that resemble advertising slogans in memorability and repeatability...I wanted a haiku war. I wanted a war in three lines."
Presumably he came up with this lethal lie:
W.
M.
D.
We are deep in DeLillo country here, the land of smoky operators who work the barely visible levers that control the two great engines driving contemporary American life: anxiety and dread. Geoff Dyer summed up DeLillo's achievement in his superb collection of essays and reviews from 2011,
Otherwise Known As the Human Condition. DeLillo, Dyer wrote, "has reconfigured things, or our perception of them, to such an extent that DeLillo is now implied in the things themselves... Like
Hemingway, DeLillo has imprinted his syntax on reality..."
True, but the thing that stuck with me about this slight novel – slight, at least, compared to such meatier DeLillo masterworks as
White Noise,
Libra, and
Underworld – was not Richard Elster's contribution to the lies that brought on our nation's longest war. What stuck with me was that nameless man in the museum watching the slowed-down movie and reminding me of the pious effort that's required to see, to truly see, what's happening in front of us every minute of our lives.
Case Study #3: Jonathan Lethem on John Carpenter
In 2010 Jonathan Lethem published a monograph,
They Live, about a most unlikely subject. Or maybe it wasn't so unlikely, given the yin-yang mashup of Lethem's influences, high and low, including DeLillo and
Philip K. Dick,
Mailer and
J.G. Ballard, comics, the movies of
John Cassavetes. So in a way it makes perfect sense that Lethem devoted a whole book to a close analysis of
John Carpenter's They Live, a low-budget genre movie by a director the Hollywood establishment barely gives a B rating.
Like Dyer and DeLillo, Lethem brings a sharp intellect and vast tool kit to his chosen movie. And, like them, he argues persuasively that what we see is far less important than how we see it. Taking this a step further, everything can be interesting, including the marginal,
especially the marginal, if we're willing to make a pious effort and bring to bear a frame of reference, informed tastes, education (preferably self-education, in the view of this autodidact), and imagination. And so, like Dyer, Lethem calls on an encyclopedic knowledge of film history and the works of diverse thinkers, including the artists
Jenny Holzer and
Robert Smithson, the writers and philosophers
H.F. Saint,
David Thomson,
G.K. Chesterton,
Poe,
Lovecraft,
Bret Easton Ellis,
George W.S. Trow,
Greil Marcus,
Darko Suvin, Barthes, Slavoj Zizek, and Stanislaw Lem. Note the overlaps with Dyer's reading list.
Might as well get the plot summary out of the way: A down-on-his-luck construction worker named Nada (the pro wrestler Rowdy Roddy Piper) wanders into a Los Angeles homeless encampment called Justiceville. After the cops raze the camp, Nada discovers a cache of magic sunglasses that enable him to see that many "normal" people are actually hideous alien ghouls who have mounted a sophisticated mind-control campaign to keep humans complicit and subdued. This includes subliminal billboards and televised commands to OBEY, MARRY AND REPRODUCE, WATCH TV, BUY, STAY ASLEEP. Nada realizes he needs to set this shit straight. And so, strolling into a bank wearing shades and armed with an automatic rifle, he states his mission: "I've come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I'm all out of bubblegum."
Lethem leads us on a delirious tour of this "self-conscious B movie," with time codes serving as mile markers. It's a close, highly informed reading that never feels precious or claustrophobic because Lethem admits that the movie is "howlingly blatant on many levels," and yet "it grows marvelously slippery and paradoxical at its depths. Watch something enough times and all you see are the holes, much like a word whose meaning dissolves because you've said it aloud too many times in a row... Out of holes, a whole."
Carpenter comes in for high praise from Lethem for shunning Hollywood's compromising cash and going the noble low-budget route. "
They Live," Lethem writes approvingly, "ignores the presence of the film industry" and instead mounts a critique of television and consumerism as brain-killing propaganda tools. Carpenter has even less use for the local dream factory than it has for him. He's proud of the fact that his budget requires him to cut every corner he comes to. This ranges from the movie's blue-collar leading man, with his acne scars, mullet hairdo, and oak-tree neck, to the cheapo props, droning musical score, and skeezy (Lethem's word) ghoul make-up and wigs. A friend watching the movie with Lethem was delighted to see that a garbage truck was filled with confetti: "They couldn't afford real garbage!" Even the magic sunglasses, Lethem notes with approval, look like $2 Ray Ban knockoffs. When the movie flirts with porn scenarios (something Carpenter did more than flirt with earlier in his screenwriting career), there are no winks and nods. Carpenter has moved way beyond post-modern irony, all the way to unapologetic self-awareness. He knows that his film is, on one level, a protracted joke, but he doesn't bother to acknowledge that he's in on it. "Carpenter really doesn't care whether or not you get that he gets it," Lethem writes. "He'd far sooner be mistaken for an audience-laughing-at-you-not-with-you artist than slow the pace of his film, or wreck its tone, by underlining the jokes."
They Live was based on a short story called "Eight o'clock in the Morning" by
Ray Nelson, a minor science fiction writer who had the distinction of being one of just two authors ever to collaborate with Lethem's hero, Philip K. Dick. (So, this time we have a book about a movie about a short story.) The movie was released in November 1988, just as
Ronald Reagan was passing the decade's greed-is-good baton to
George H.W. Bush. The previous summer, Tompkins Square Park in New York's East Village had erupted in riots when police forcibly removed homeless squatters, a la Justiceville, a dustup that gave birth to the invective
Die, Yuppie Scum! It's not hard to see the link between "Yuppie Scum" and the wealthiest "1 percent" reviled by Occupy Wall Street protesters who were recently cleared from their campsite in lower Manhattan, a la Tompkins Square Park. But Lethem, to his credit, points out a crucial difference between Tompkins Square (and, by extension, Zuccotti Park) on the one hand, and Justiceville on the other: the squatters in Tompkins Square included defiant drug users, anti-gentrification protesters, and "interested witnesses from the ranks of the middle-bohemian class" (including
Allen Ginsberg), while the homeless in Justiceville are for the most part "sheepish, demoralized, obedient" losers content to "zone out and ponder television." In other words, feel free to read
They Live as an indictment of Reaganomics, as many have done, but be careful about turning it into an endorsement of Tompkins Square or a prophecy of Occupy Wall Street.
I had seen
They Live years ago, and I watched it a second time after finishing Lethem's book. The second viewing was definitely better, richer, thanks to the way Lethem opened my eyes to the liberation that comes with doing things on the cheap – and not apologizing for it.
They Live, both the movie and the book, are examples of what
Manny Farber called "termite" art, as opposed to overblown, ostentatious "white elephant" art. "A peculiar fact about termite-tapeworm-fungus-moss art," Farber wrote, "is that it goes always forward eating its own boundaries, and, likely as not, leaves nothing in its path other than the signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity."
And that kind of activity, as Carpenter and his great advocate Lethem have proven, is everything a tuned-in moviegoer or book lover can ask for.
Coda
It wasn't until I'd finished digesting these three books that I was able to see what ties them together. It is, for lack of a better word, their anti-Kaelishness. In his new biography of the celebrated
New Yorker movie critic,
Brian Kellow notes that
Pauline Kael watched a movie just once before reviewing it because "she felt the need to write in the flush of her initial, immediate response.... If she waited too long, and pondered the film over repeated viewings, she felt she might be in danger of coming up with something that wouldn't be her truest response."
Lethem, who seems to be aware of everything, is aware of his own anti-Kaelishness: "I'm Pauline Kael's ultimate opposite here: I've watched the entirety of my subject film a dozen times at least, and many individual scenes countless times more (Kael used to brag of seeing each film only once)." It could be argued that a weekly magazine deadline robbed Kael of the luxury of watching a movie a dozen times before writing about it, but she made a conscious choice to see each movie just once. She trusted her instincts over her intellect. Her gut over her brain. And she
bragged about it.
Kael, to borrow a
Malcolm Gladwell-ism, went with
blink. Dyer, DeLillo, and Lethem, to their credit and their readers' unending benefit, go the opposite route: they look closely, they keep looking, and then they
think,
think,
think.
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.
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..