On genre vs fiction
Ok, I wasn’t going to post anything anymore, but I pulled down the boingboing tab in my firefox live rss feeds and found the link to this little gem by Ursula K. Le Guin’s response (in the latest Ansible) to this moronic quote from Slate:
`Michael Chabon has spent considerable energy trying to drag the decaying corpse of genre fiction out of the shallow grave where writers of serious literature abandoned it.’ Ruth Franklin (Slate, 8 May 2007)
Let’s ignore the elitism surrounding this quote and the blatant insult to the many great genre writers. Here’s my real pet peeve, lets accept as a given the critic’s criteria for “good” writing. How would it be possible for genre (sci-fi, fantasy, etc…) to gain acceptance in the mainstream when any writer who passes the critic’s muster is defined to no longer be genre? That is, Neil Gaiman, Neal Stephenson, Jonathan Carroll, Haruki Murakami and many, many others (even William Gibson, for crying out loud) in who’s writing things that are well outside the possible are not on a sci-fi/fantasy imprint. Some of these even get their own special name “Magic Realists”, umm.. yeah, not fantasy, not sci-fi, obviously not.
So these critics simply have defined any sf/f writers that they would give a good review to as not sf/f writers, perpetuating their love of condemning the genre. Argh, sorry, just a peeve of mine.
UPDATE: Some interesting discussion happening over at So Many Books!
July 4th, 2007 at 1:00 pm
Damn the critics. Stupid snobs the lot of them.
July 11th, 2007 at 5:22 pm
I came here via So Many Books.
That is a stupid quote from Slate. Chabon (I’m talking pre-Pulitzer, too) has always been about plot — that doesn’t necessarily translate into “genre,” for starters. He was trying to head a movement of “new writing” that moved away from the sort of disembodied, naval-gazing “I” that had overtaken a lot of contemporary lit. A noble effort, I might add. I don’t think Chabon would look down his nose on “genre” books or writers.
July 11th, 2007 at 7:46 pm
The deacying corpse of genre fiction? I think it has never been more alive. Shows the ignorance and prejudices of the critic. I laugh at magical realism too. Because people like Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Isabel Allende among many others, emply it liberally, means it is something other than fantasy? I’ve never quite understood that.
July 11th, 2007 at 8:31 pm
LK - yes, I hate that quote. I would think the same thing about Chabon, but I think that quote reflects more of the mainstream lit world’s view of genre. You know? Whether or not Chabon feels that way, I suspect it was mostly the writer’s projecting his own opinions. Drives me nuts.
Stefanie - I completely know what you’re talking about. The literary world had to invent a whole new category that is synonymous with fantasy but you know wasn’t actually called fantasy. Sigh.
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