Gandalf Needs YOU! Join the War on Literary Fiction!

My sisters and brothers, like you I have been watching with interest the flame war in print and blog over genre fiction and literary fiction for the past years. It has erupted over questions such as “Is Stephen King a literary author?” and “Can genre fiction be considered literature?”

The literati have told us no, genre fiction can no more be literature than a pig could write Hamlet. A representative statement comes from Arthur Krystal of The New Yorker:

“Make no mistake: good commercial fiction is inferior to good literary fiction in the same way that Santa Claus is inferior to Wotan. One brings us fun or frightening gifts, the other requires—and repays—observance.”  http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/10/its-genre-fiction-not-that-theres-anything-wrong-with-it.html

And so brothers and sisters, we are banished to our ghettos and garrets to read shameful, dog-eared novels of dubious provenance in which robots save the day, detectives find the killer, the girl kisses the guy, and the dragon’s head falls under the warrior’s blade. And as we turn page after furtive page, each sentence compounds a guilt which not even confession can absolve us of, that of being base and ignorant and low and profoundly uncool.

Yet our champions have gone forth. The position of the genre-ista has been most succinctly defended by Ursula K. LeGuin who wrote that literature is “The extant body of written art. All novels belong to it.”

Her argument is obvious and common sense, though I would add one simple appendix. All novels are literature, but there are indeed two kinds of novels, good ones and bad ones, and they can be found in what its partisans would call “literary fiction”, but which I shall henceforth call “high fiction.”

And for the past year I have waited for LeGuin’s argument to prevail, thinking in my simplicity that what she said was right and true, and therefore it would outlast all the rockets and bombasts of the literati.

I was wrong. The war has gone on.

The literati sit in the cafeteria telling us we can’t read those books at their table. They stand in the door of the school like George Wallace, telling us that the walls between high fiction and genre fiction will last now and forever. We must read our books in another place.

And the ultimate reason for their disapprobation is that our books just aren’t as good as theirs.

Brothers and sisters, for too long we have brooked their disrespect. For too long we have sweated in shame under the haze of their judgment. For too long we have tolerated their bullying.

And now I cry to you “No more!”

If the literati fail to see the absurdity of their own argument, we shall steal it from them that they might see their own absurdity. We shall become a mirror which allows them to face an ugly truth within themselves. They are segregationists. The literati make into two that which should be one, an act which all sages in all times have decried as leading to chaos and disorder. For too long they have said, “Our books are better than your books,” and for too long our reply has been “All books are equal!”

No more will our line be that of the accomidationists, those who simply wish to see genre seated at the table of literature beside high fiction. No no!

Instead brothers and sisters, our line shall now be: “Genre fiction is superior to literary fiction!”

And in truth we are wrong as they are wrong. But in being wrong, we will demonstrate their own wrongness to them.

And the literati will first laugh at us, saying they believed us fools before for enjoying Dennis Lehane, and we have now proved it. But as all who went before them who wished to make into two what was in fact one, from the antebellum slave power to the lawmakers of Jim Crow, they have not a logical leg to stand on. And we will demonstrate it with the brashness and boldness of our evidence.

Genre fiction is democratic. We write for the people, not the ivory tower. They would raise up works so erudite and impenetrable and plotless that only graduate students and professors have the time or desire to read them. People, I would add, with advantages of race and class which we in the Genre Army could only fantasize about being born with. The works they choose are walls thrown up by the establishment to keep the common man out of their classrooms, lectures, and away from them. Heavens know, a person without a master’s degree may smell a little of sweat, and that would be most unpleasant.

Genre fiction is vigorous. It is the way of the future. It is why partisans of high fiction are put in the awkward position of defending a type of literature so absent ideas that its most talented practitioners have turned to writing genre fiction! Micheal Chabon, Cormac McCarthy, Margaret Atwood, Philip Roth, and the list goes on. These authors demonstrate that talents are attracted to the healthy climate of genre, and the freedom it allows.

Freedom! Genre writers are free in ways literary writers are not. Cannot circumscribes the space of the writer of high fiction. A writer of high fiction cannot write sincerely of God or religion, cannot write a story that takes place anywhere but Earth, cannot write of exceptional men and women, cannot write a story set in the future or in the past, cannot write a story with a happy ending, and should wrap their shoulders in sackcloth for penance if they write a story with a page-turning plot. Like monks and their vows, the road of the writer of high fiction is one of abstinence and denial, for only in self-abnegation can our literary sins be forgiven. The writer and reader of high fiction is suspicious of any book, which may be- Joyce forbid! enjoyable.  

Imagination, which is finite but unbounded, is the only limit of the genre writer. And the matters which high fiction is so fond of discussing can be folded into genre stories. Because genre fiction is capable of containing the stories of high fiction, but high fiction cannot abide to tell genre stories, genre fiction is clearly superior to high fiction. In the same way that the shark is higher on the food than the seal it consumes, genre fiction shall rend to pieces and feed on the corpse of high fiction before moving on to find some fiercer, more worthy, prey.

And the literati will listen to all you say, and appear unruffled as a turkey in the yard the day after Thanksgiving. But in the bitter watches of the night, when they stare up at the ceiling unable to sleep and wonder if Don DeLillo is built for eternity, they will fear that we are right. And their fear will drive them to agree with the position that is the truth: That there is but one literature.  

As we genre-istas are the bearers of a greater teaching, I submit that we must no longer bear the bullying of the literati with patience. I take their segregationary and exclusionary policies and black-shirt tactics as a crime against culture.

Brothers and sisters, no more moving to the back of the bus!

No more hiding at the corner table!

Remember, genre fiction is superior to their “literature”! We must fight until the halls of academia ring with Elvish!   

Burn your unread copy of Infinite Jest!

Use Jonathon Franzen for toilet paper!

Genre fiction is better than literary fiction!

Why Won't You Take My Money?

The internet is a disruptive technology, and no one has yet fully grasped what its implications will be.

It gutted the recording industry, and its corpse has lain on the roadside, a warning and prophecy to others. And the ravenous eyes of the internet lolled next lolled at publishing.

Like the recording industry, recent technologies have made the sharing of digital books insanely easy, and the line between “sharing” and stealing/piracy is a thin one.

Digital sharing technologies sliced open the neck of the recording industry. CD sales went from 750 million units in the early 90s to just over 200 million this past year.

And while it is easy to see that the recording industries attempts to stop this bleed out (lawsuits, digital rights management technology, etc.) failed utterly, still publishers are trying these same tactics against the monster internet, hoping for a different result.

Technology always wins in the end. 

Unless the publishing industry finds a different model, its corpse will litter the road beside that of the recording industry.

The model of the Catholic Church comes to mind here. The Catholic Church had in the middle ages proven itself quite adept at crushing local heresies when they popped up in Europe. Send in some knights, kill everyone, let God sort them out, etc. And when the heresy of Lutheranism sprang up, they trotted out the same old playbook, but this time if failed. And why? Because of the disruptive technology of the printing press. Killing heretics is only effective when they are isolated geographically and small in number. The printing press allowed protestant ideas to spread so widely and quickly that the Catholic Church could not keep up, and its religious monopoly on power in Europe was forever shattered.

Now publishing industry, if the Catholic Church could not rollback the changes of the printing press by burning people at the stake, what do you think you can do against the internet by pretending it does not exist? Technology always wins in the end.

Which brings me, really, to my point. Yesterday I wanted to buy a PDF of a classic Dungeons and Dragons module from the 80s, Ravenloft. I went to Amazon and DriveThruRPG, and while there are numerous PDFs of books from that time period available for purchase, this one was not. Likely because the module was so popular that it was expanded in the early aughts into a longer, more expensive book which is available for PDF sale. I already own said book in print, and wanted the original to compare the two.

I suspect that the cheaper, earlier, and possibly better module was unavailable for sale, lest its purchases cannibalize those of its more recent and expensive counterpart.

The company that runs Dungeons and Dragons, Wizards of the Coast, took all PDFs off the market six years ago in response to piracy. Just year, they began selling PDFs again, but Ravenloft is not among them.

But when I go to Google and type in Ravenloft PDF, the second item that pops up is of course an illegal and free download of the book. So much for combatting piracy.

Now I am not interested in stealing the book. The company deserves money for their product. Furthermore, I want to give the company my money in return for their product but they won’t sell it to me!

The situation is absurd, and like a beer-lover during Prohibition, I am forced into the quandary of abstaining or going outside the law. 

A Card From a Student

One of the perks of being a teacher is end-of-year gifts. It doesn't happen at every school, but it happens at mine, and it gets real. For a small example, I think I have $85 in Barnes & Nobles gift cards waiting to be tapped thanks to my students and their parents.

But as an 8th grade teacher, I also get out-of-this-world goodbye cards from graduates. I got one this year which is absolutely fantastic:

"Dear Mr. Riggs

     I still remember the very first class I had with you and how you showed us a power point on your adventurous past. Honestly, at that time, I really didn't know what to think of you. I didn't know if you would be a really cool teacher or a teacher that just cared about teaching. Throughout the last two years though, I've come to a conclusion: You are an amazingly cool teacher and you absolutely love teaching. I can see that you just get so excited when you teach students. I see it in your face. You like look down and then you gradually flex your nostrils so they become bigger, and trust me I will always remember that look.

     [The student then goes on to talk about how I helped develop them into a 'mature and romantic writer.']

     By the way I think you have really good taste in music.

     Thank you,

     No Name Sue"

The Novel and the Future

What is happening to humanity, and what has the novel got to do with it? 

Anyone over the age of thirty has witnessed a technological invasion of their homes. The machines, which first sent spies of refrigerators, radios, televisions, and heaters, followed with legions of Ataris, VCRs, PCs, microwaves, Nintendos, CD players, and cell phones. Even our bodies have fallen to the invaders. And who would complain about high blood pressure medication, insulin, or Viagra? Who would complain about iPads, Playstation, Netflix, or MP3s?  

But still.

This has all been a bit much a bit quickly, and change is only speeding up. What will the world look like in 30 years? What will it look like in 90? As we gaze at our blackening skies, back cautiously away from our coastlines, hide in bolt holes from tornadoes the size of whole towns, and gaze in horror at middle and lower classes growing thinner, paler, hungrier and more impoverished by disruptive technologies and an unresponsive political system, we are right to wonder. We are right to be afraid.

Who knows the path forward? Who has walked this way before? Has anyone? No. Scientists and engineers can predict the paths of stars and the workings of nanobots, but none can say what our technology will do to us, or what we will do with our technology.

And so the task of making sense of what has happened and what is to come falls to writers, that half-mad clan crouching in solitude and darkness to bang away at keyboards like obsessive-compulsives washing their hands until they crack and ooze blood.

And we read what they write because their words order the world. Their books are maps pointing the way we have come, pinpointing where we are, and scouting the road of the future. One of the most powerful tools in the writer’s garage is the novel.  

The novel, like God, has been pronounced dead. Its murderers, we are told, video games, movies, TV, and the internet, run rampant in the halls of culture. Who can bring them to justice?

But the truth is more nuanced. Yes, sales are down. Since the creation of moveable type, there may never have been a harder time to be a writer, or make a living at it, than this historical moment. And while the novel has had to make room for others on the stage of culture, that does not mean the novel has been slain, for the novel has a number of unique features which guarantee not only that it will continue to exist, but that it may be a vital tool for understanding whatever new world is waiting for its line to come on stage.

First, stories, and even modernists and theorists will concede with horror that a novel does tell a story, are powerful. Stories, beyond being enjoyable, add experiences to the life of a reader. This is not just metaphorical or wishful thinking. Researchers have demonstrated that reading does not just stimulate the brain’s language center. It goes beyond to engage other parts of the brain. A passage about movement will stimulate a reader’s motor cortex. A paragraph describing the interaction of Jim and Huck will activate centers of the brain devoted to socialization.

In other words, the brain of a person reading a novel acts as though the reader is experiencing what they read. 

A reader of Elie Wiesel’s Night does not just hear a story and learn about the Holocaust. It is deeper than that. Her brain behaves as though she lived through the horrors of Auschwitz. A reader of To Kill a Mockingbird’s brain behaves as though she was a witness to prejudice and racism.

How do we quantify the benefits to society and civilization bestowed of the novel by making all of us into survivors and witnesses? 

Secondly, a good novel should engage its reader emotionally. We fly through chapters because we care about characters, and want to know what will happen to them. We stay up so late that getting up will be a chore because we care.

Emotion is regulated in the brain by the limbic system. There are more neural fibers going from the limbic system into the brain’s rational centers than vice-versa, which is why appeals to emotion are often more effective than appeals to rationality. The novel makes just these sorts of appeals to a reader.

Furthermore, memories made when emotionally engaged are more persistent. It is why a reader can remember all the reversals and horrors that have befallen the Stark family in A Song of Ice and Fire but would struggle recall similar material from a textbook on the War of the Roses.

So the lives we live when we read a novel can be as memorable, or even more memorable, than the events of our own daily lives.

Third, the engagement generated by a story and the emotional involvement of the reader allow for the length of the novel. Adults with no interest in so much as a short essay on the difficulties of adolescence will ravenously consume The Hunger Games and Harry Potter. And we are right to wonder what fruit The Hunger Games will produce when a generation of 12 year-olds taught to be suspicious of tyrannical, over-powerful governments reach voting age.

These same 12 year-olds would not be interested in reading Rousseau or Locke, but they consume lengthy novels on similar topics with avidity. Novels spread ideas in ways and to people who would not encounter them otherwise, and these same people will consider these ideas at length because they are in the form of a story.       

Fourth, writers are allowed to experiment in ways which creators of other media are not. Movies are expensive, and their failure leads the sacking of their creators. Ditto for video games and television shows. But a writer? If she chases some bee of a thought back to its hive to discover it was a wasp and there is no honey, all she has lost is her time. A writer can spend two years writing a novel, decide it’s all drek, and toss it. Writers can go for walk, kick an idea around, show it to their spouses, hide it in some obscure word file, and if they decide the idea is not up to snuff, no one else ever need know about it. Writers can try out a thousand ideas, and only publicize the three brilliant ones. Writers have the time and the space for failure. 

And failure is important for creative innovation.

The lessons of Pixar come here to mind. Toy Story 3 director Lee Unkrich said, “Screw-ups are an essential part of making something good. That’s why our goal is to screw up as fast as possible.” Knowing this, Pixar’s movie-making process involves lots and lots and lots of drafts and revision, a process strikingly similar to making a good novel. They are not afraid to take an idea back to the drawing board, schedules and deadlines be damned. For example, Toy Story 2 was initially conceived as a direct-to-video release, but when Disney liked the storyboards, it was made into a feature release. When director John Lasseter saw the existing storyboards, he decided the entire movie had to be reworked. With Disney insistent on its release date, the entire movie had to be re-done in nine months even though most Pixar features take years to produce.

Consider for a moment the cojones required of Lasseter in this decision. Disney already liked the movie they saw in the storyboards! Even though he was dissatisfied, he could have bit his tongue, and made the movie, avoiding a rush or time crunch which might have proved ruinous. Instead, Lasseter risked a massive failure with only himself to blame to create one of the best sequels of all time.

Yes, successful writers do become subject to the kind of review and cookie-cutter critique as film-makers do. It has a pernicious effect on the writer as an artist, and is why the sophomore slump is a literary as well as musical phenomenon. (Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets anyone?)  

Despite this, experience has shown that because of the cushion for failure provided by the writing life, novelists can create more innovative and culturally enduring ideas than other media-makers. To demonstrate the point, successful novels will generate plays, musicals, television shows, video games, and movies, yet after all those different, raucous, glowing, humming media formats have been unleashed upon the novel’s plot and characters, the cliché still stands that “The book was better.” A look at the top grossing movies of 2012 is instructive. Of the ten highest grossing films, six of them are based on novels or comic books, which I would argue are serialized novels with a visual component. The ideas and stories birthed in novels are so puissant that they are keeping the American film industry alive.  

Consider that for decades, the novelizations of films have cluttered bookstores and landfills. Pity the poor tree that gave its life to print the novelization of Rollerball. These books rarely become bestsellers. They certainly don’t win prizes. Because everyone understands, universally, that they will suck because they take a 10,000 word story and force it into 100,000 words.

Yet novels can be put into countless different media, and their story, ideas, and characters will translate. Witness the success of The Lord of the Rings movies, and soundtracks, and video games, and table-top role-playing games. The novel possesses a vitality and robustness for translation which other media lack, and which I lay upon their length, and aforementioned tolerance for early and private failures.

A novel must be planned or it will never be finished. It must be cogent and engaging or it will never be read. Unless your name is James Joyce, in which case your novels will be inflicted upon undergraduates by professors insisting like a doctor administering a shot, that it is for their own good.   

The experience of reading a novel is like living a whole other life. This makes novels engaging. Memories created while emotionally engaged are more persistent than other memories, which allows novels to be long without losing the attention of the reader. Because the art of writing has more room for failure than more high-stakes media, novelists can produce vigorous, robust, and innovative ideas. This is demonstrated by their success when translated into other formats, and the failure of stories generated in other formats to succeed as novels.

It has been said that all art is perfectly useless, an assertion which every artist has known to reject on its face but in the darkest watches of the night has secretly feared to be true. Science, research, and experience now shows us that not only is the novel useful, I would argue it is necessary. We need to understand ourselves and our world now more than ever because we have more power over both than at any other time in history. We need ideas for dealing with the challenges that lay before us, and for democracy to have a hope in hell, we must bring an understanding of the world to masses of people. Novels can help us because novels can change us.   

Bibliography

http://www.empireonline.com/features/secret-of-pixars-success/p4

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/opinion/sunday/the-neuroscience-of-your-brain-on-fiction.html?

pagewanted=all&_r=0

http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/oct94/vol52/num02/How-Emotions-Affect-Learning.aspx