by Duncan, Hal
The failures of low-level craft in pulp fiction are undeniable. The countless examples of appalling prose may well be contrasted with the importance placed on plot, idea and world. Characterisation is liable to be shallow where the narrative grammar of horror / thriller / mystery / adventure / epic calls for engagement with a largely external conflict. And this is hardly the place to look for epiphanies of the ephemeral. But conversely, prose that is not well-heeled may nonetheless be well-turned, characters that are backgrounded rather than made psychological studies of are demonstrably not the point of the narrative, and the absence of a trite epiphany, more sophomoric wank than true satori, is no bad thing.
To say that even the purest pulp is not engaging with the medium in its focus on narrative over these features is like saying that a punk band are not engaging with the medium when, with a simple line-up of singer, guitar, bass and drums, they deliberately set out to make rock songs in the classic three-minute format of verse, chorus, verse, chorus, middle-eight, verse, chorus. They may well be less concerned with intricate guitar licks, syncopation in the drum beats, the melodic skills or clever lyrics of the singer. That doesn’t mean they’re not concerned with the craft of the rock song. Actually, they’re deeply concerned. The purity of structure, the raw and visceral drive achieved by disregarding executional polish and focusing on simple, tight songs—that’s what they’re concerned with.
Here’s a thought experiment. Take a short story outline and get two different writers to flesh it out, a Literary Fiction writer and a Genre Fiction writer. What you might end up with is two different piles of words, yet the same plot and characters. But another scenario is equally likely
The Literary Fiction writer works straight from your outline, focusing on the polish of the prose, the social and domestic documentary detail, the effects of voice in creating plausible character(s), the reflexive comment, the tone; they end it with a moment of profound melancholy as the protagonist gazes at a blue flower crushed underfoot on the sidewalk.
The Genre Fiction writer says that your plot is thin, your setting is irrelevant, your first quarter is throat-clearing, your characters are dull, their interactions are uninvolving, your structure of action is saggy in the middle, there’s no narrative drive and no sense of climax and resolution. In their story, that blue flower sparks a thought leading the protagonist to solve a problem.
In the end, the changes each writer makes so that this outline works as a story for them, by their aesthetics, are so substantial that even the plot and characters in those two piles of words are radically different. Assuming those two writers are entirely unconcerned with the other’s views, they are nevertheless equally engaged with the medium.
The priorities of each may lead them to neglect the qualities prioritised by the other, and where readers subscribe to one aesthetic and reject another they will be responsive to one version and dismissive of the other. This dichotomy was historically and culturally self-evident in English literature’s divide into Novel and Romance, and there are still remnants of it in the divide between Literature and Genre.
But that divide between Literary Fiction and Genre Fiction is born of a sleight-of-hand redefinition of both terms—a conflation of markets and modes. Genre means a specific aesthetic form of fiction (of whatever quality), but it has also come to mean any fiction aimed at a particular set of markets. Literary means high-quality fiction (of whatever aesthetic form), but it has also come to mean any fiction not aimed at that particular set of markets. We only have to smear the two meanings of each term and—voilà!—by definition Literary Fiction and Genre Fiction are a mutually exclusive taxonomy and any particular work must be considered one or the other. This is really just a circular definition of any fiction aimed at a particular set of markets as of a lower quality than fiction not so aimed.
Strip it down to the underlying politics of these aesthetic territories and we find a flat assertion, a judgemental privileging of the values underpinning one set of fictions over those underpinning another: the valorisation of Story by Genre Fiction is wrong because it leads to “non-literary” fiction, while the valorisation of Style by Literary Fiction is right because it leads to “literary” fiction; to value Story is bad taste because those are the standards of Genre Fiction, while to value Style is good taste because those are the standards of Literary Fiction.
This is no more and no less than a petit-bourgeois exercise of privilege in order to reinforce privilege, the application of literary aesthetics to literary aesthetics as a self-validating signal of social status, a demonstration of the power to judge, in which the judgement is itself an assertion of its own legitimacy.
Fuck that shit.
A Semiotic Approach
Scouring away this High Art / Low Art Culture Wars crap, the question of Style versus Story remains, the question of to what extent these generalisations might be fair and to what extent each type of fiction, Genre Fiction or Literary Fiction, might neglect the values of the other. Answer: both Style and Story are masks for the reality that words are the only substance: prose is narrative is prose is narrative; the only difference is structural focus, on the concrete or abstract levels of effect, on internal and/or external action.
If Genre Fiction focuses on Story at the expense of Style, does Literary Fiction focus on Style at the expense of Story? The dichotomy is meaningless. A pulp narrative of shoddy prose conjures a shoddy narrative, only succeeds because the skimreader bounces from benchmark to benchmark, constructing the story for themself. Meanwhile, a well-heeled sentence that is slick but shallow is as bad as prose as it is as narrative, for all that a good grasp of tone allows the writer to craft a passable sense of inner conflict and resolution, a similitude of plot in the shifting of emotional tensions, all wrapped up neatly with the faux-resolution of a moment of epiphany.
A plague, I say, on both these houses, but doubled on the mediocrity of the middlebrow. Cock save us from the skimwritten formulaic trash but, by the Good Lord Cock Almighty, damn the banality of well-crafted but insipid prose delving deep, but without drive or direction, into a conjuring of the tedious, neurotic, facile angsts of the straight white middle-class male, reaching for some slightest scrap of inspiration to end it on with a limp and maundering pseudo-apophenia. Have we lived and fucked in vain that our wild literature of the aeons, from the first furry faggot giantkiller through to the wounding of an autumnal city and beyond, should be spin-doctored as such an anodyne creation as the literary?
Even if living in the ghetto of Genre did mean being lost among the Untermenschen of narrative junkies and subsisting only on the hackwork prose handed out in the soup kitchens, having not a single eatery serving more than kippleburgers, the alternative might well be seen as a cocktail party of self-styled Übermenschen, snorting prose and nibbling on the flimsy narrative hors d’oeuvres handed out by obsequious serving staff, the sort of fiction Michael Chabon refers to as “the contemporary, quotidian, plotless, moment-of-truth revelatory story.”
To return to the music metaphor, preferring prose over narrative the Literary Fiction fan extolls the literary equivalent of prog-rock epics, bloated and pompous, albeit expertly played by skilled musicians. They praise twiddly guitar wank and widdly synth shite, recoiling from the three-chord, three-minute blasts of energy that are Genre Fiction because some of the more popular musicians can’t play their instruments for peanuts—have good songs but lack polish. At least The Stooges are not sterile.
And to recoil from Genre Fiction, of course, is to miss out on those who can play, and to fancy one’s ignorance an actual absence. At its extreme, these musos become advocates of an idea that this lack of polish is systemic, that the best punk band could never be as good as a prog band, because punk (with a few rare exceptions) will always be hamstrung by its intrinsic faults, whereas prog, being the standard against which all rock should be measured, is a higher art form.
Not only is this nonsense, but the impoverishment of Literary Fiction will be
far more extreme than any lack of prosaic polish in Genre as long as this is ultimately what is meant by literary as opposed to genre: where the former insists upon a purely mimetic approach, a fiction of representation, the latter is identified by a distinctly semiotic approach, a fiction of figuration. Where the realists inherit from Rationalism a focus on observation and articulation, a focus on the low-level structuring of language (Style) as a medium through which an insightful study of some situation in the world may be developed and offered to a reader, writers of the category fiction abjected depart from this precisely in the dynamics they inherit from Romanticism, their supposed focus on the high-level structures of language (Story) unpacking to a low-level vitality of pataphoric prose, a medium in which the semiocosm is re-engineered directly.
On a superficial level, it should not be difficult to understand the trope-sets of character, plot and worldscape that are found in Space Opera, Epic Fantasy, Crime, Western or Romance as symbols within a supersystem of semiotic systems, a lexis of spaceships, dragons, detectives or bodice-ripped heroines for which the narrative is syntax. It should not be hard to see in these metaphors with their iconic vehicle unmoored from tenor, the capacity of a conceit like Heller’s Catch-22, the infinite capacity of the sum of every and any potential such conceit.
Ultimately, all generic tropes can be analysed as quirks, not as copied conventions but as disruptions of suspension-of-disbelief, or of affective equilibrium; as objects and individuals, events and settings charged with wonder, awe, horror, desire, whatever; as fictive elements that are sensationalist, a strain on credibility or whatever, precisely because that power is their purpose, and that purpose at the heart of art.
Insofar as any fictive element can be so invested, made a quirk by context, it is not simply that these genres utilise these semiotic systems as trope-sets. It is not simply that the genres create meaning by combining these tropes into a narrative. It is that they generate quirks through the dynamics of narrative and in so doing reconstruct the semiocosm that lives in us and in which we live, our filter on reality, our language for making sense of it.
It is in this respect that Genre Fiction takes a semiotic approach anathema to the realists of Literary Fiction, in this respect that it exhibits semiosis as a process, in the same way that realist fiction exhibits mimesis. We can only ask then: if the semiotic fiction of Genre allows the mimesis associated with Literature, while the mimetic fiction of Literature absolutely rejects the semiosis associated with Genre, which is the more aesthetically limited and limiting form?
Incisors, Canines or Molars
But it is not so simple; it never is. There are Genre Fiction writers who are deeply concerned with Style, just as there are Literary Fiction writers who are deeply concerned with Story. The same goes for readers. Just as there are Genre Fiction readers who find it hard to read a work without at least serviceable prose, there are Literary Fiction readers who find it hard to read a work without at least serviceable narrative. The big difference is that where one subset of self-identifying genre kids who don’t much care for prose are largely notable by their over-zealous positivity as regards their own tastes (and a vacuous inverse snobbery about “style over substance”), that small subset of incognoscenti who don’t much care for narrative are made notable by their over-zealous negativity as regards the tastes of others and by the privileging of their position.
If the former are harmful, their patronage allowing mediocre prose to survive and flourish in the ghetto of Genre, the latter are worse, their patronage allowing mediocre narrative to survive and flourish in the district of Literature and consistently devaluing narrative as they devalue the semiotic approach so as to inflate the value of mimesis. In their abjection of these fundamental aspects of writing they do more harm to themselves than anyone else though.
A grand ivory tower dominates the uptown district of Literature, the Tower of Mimeticists’ Bicuspids, built of teeth pliered out of the mouths of Literary Fiction writers by their own hands. Originally, as the name suggests, the teeth were only meant to be bicuspids—those sort of in-between teeth, the ones that aren’t incisors, canines or molars, that aren’t particularly good at cutting, penetrating or grinding, that seem, in fact, to lack any real purpose of their own—but once the Literary Fiction writers started ridding themselves of those seemingly pointless outgrowths of enamel, well, it seems they found it hard to stop.
—The tooth is not the truth, they muttered sagely. We need to strip the mouth of all this meaningless decoration, the glamorous artifice of the lying smile, the deceit of dental gleaming. So they stripped themselves down to the bare essentials needed to mumble the nasalised bilabial mmm and the sibilant hissing ssss of mimesis.
The tower has risen over the decades till it’s fifty years tall or more now, but it’s looking increasingly unstable. In the Bistro de Critique this instability is sometimes viewed as a corrosion of the foundations, blamed on the proles of Genre naturally, on the dumbing-down of culture, every YA book bought by an adult, every Genre Fiction novel sold for airplane reading, every comic book and DVD another brilliant-white brick of lost bite kicked from the bottom of the structure. In truth, that ivory tower is mainly crumbling under the weight of the egos sat at the top, spitting at the peasants down below who want hard ground more than hot air. Well…I say “spitting”; it’s more the inevitable drooling slabber of those with only gums and lips between their saliva and the outside world.
This is why some Literary Fiction writers of actual ambition, like David Mitchell or Glen David Gold, have adopted the methods and modes of Genre Fiction, why Genre Fiction writers like Michael Chabon or Jonathan Lethem have broken out of the ghetto and become mainstream, why all manner of works with their aesthetic homeland in the ghetto of Genre (the SF of The Time Traveler’s Wife, the YA of Harry Potter) are ignoring that ghetto for the much wider market of the city of New Sodom as a whole. There’s a demand for something, something that is not being supplied by Literary fiction, something that these types of writing do supply.
It is not happy endings they want; it is simply endings, period, rather than the pseudo-ending of epiphany. Beginnings, middles and endings, and maybe not in that order, but at least discernible as structure. They want narrative, the sort of tight, focused, dynamic drive you get in genre, and not at the expense of polished, interesting prose, but with it. Where the aesthetic of the ephemeral once gave us a breathless yes whispered under a Moorish wall, now the epiphany is formulated. And as with any such formulation, “more of the same” only goes so far, and there comes a time people start looking for “something different.”
When the audience is turning to Genre Fiction for more dynamic narrative, what does this say of its availability outside these sections? When kids are suddenly reading again because of series like Harry Potter, what does this say about keeping the reader’s attention? When adults are picking up these books after not having read a novel in years, what does that say about the dismal state of a Literature that’s been driving readers away in boredom over the last few decades? When new writers are increasingly bringing Genre Fiction qualities over into works sold as general fiction, and finding an eager market, what does this tell you about the vacuum they’re filling? In the Bistro de Critique (and even, in truth, in the more gentrified corners of the SF Café), some see this as a dumbing-down, but what’s happening is not a lowering of the bar, rather a heightening, an increased demand for greater craft in terms of narrative.
And if there’s anything to be learned in the Tower of Mimeticists’ Bicuspids, fuck it, we’ve got no qualms about dropping by now and then just to see what’s new. Hell, we’re thieving gypos and uppity niggers, cheap whores and predatory faggots, scum who like to ramraid the kitchens of that ivory tower at every opportunity. We gate-crash the parties, steal the hors-d’oeuvres narratives, snort more than our fair share of prose, check out what’s hot and what’s not, noise up the nobs when they start sounding off about the yobs, and head back home
with new recipes for the SF Café. Some of us do anyway. Many are happy just to flip their patties and serve up the same old burger plots and beery sentences, but there’s a vibrant subculture devoted to the druggy delights of prose and the gastronomic glories of narrative, and those of us in that scene, we’ve tasted the best fixes and food of both worlds, learned from it, and set out to better it.
If the toothless mimeticists don’t know the best the ghetto has to offer—either because they never thought to look, or because a few bum steers led to a hasty retreat and a firm distrust—fuck ’em. Let them hang and let them fall. It’ll be peachy keen to see what blue flowers bloom in the rubble and what weird new forms are built out of the wreckage of the Tower of Mimeticists’ Bicuspids by the generation of mutants who’ve been hanging in the ghetto of Genre for the last fifty years, partying and watching that structure sway in the breeze.
Okay, okay, let’s be honest. We do kind of like to take a kick at that edifice whenever we’re passing. Our librarian is there right now, in fact, chipping away at its base, planting some C-4 charges in the holes. All she has to do to set them off, as a librarian, is recommend the right work of the right genre to the right person, open up their eyes to the power of semiosis.
—The Yiddish Policeman’s Union?
BOOM!
—The Time Traveler’s Wife?
BOOM!
—The Borribles!
BOOM!
Steel Dreams of a New Daedalus
In the Bistro de Critique, an old orthodoxy of “mundane good, outré bad” is already crumbling, with writers like Chabon and Lethem making their mark while pointedly refusing to forsake their roots, the seats they still occupy in the SF Café. Despite our best efforts to shirk respectability and maintain our freakish status as outsiders, the literati are starting to nose around the ghetto, interest piqued in what’s happening down here, where the harlots and harlequins hang out. The cocktail parties are getting stale now, maybe, and, darling, I hear Miéville’s monster shows actually have ideas in them. How quaint! And this VanderMeer chap’s apparently dancing the Nabokov of all things. What are they calling this stuff? The New Weird? New Wave Fabulism?
