Mike Carey on Genre vs Literary Fiction

Continuing with the recent theme of authors defending genre fiction from literary snobs (see my posts on ), a couple of weeks ago I noticed a post by Mike Carey, author of the Felix Castor novels, works for comics publishers Marvel and DC, as well as the “literary zombie” novel The Girl With All the Gifts. The article posted at The Norwich Radical was entitled Literature vs Genre---Seconds Out (Part 1).

Recently, Part 2 of this article was published and so I thought it opportune to review the arguments raised.

Carey starts by noticing that this ongoing debate is pretty one-sided:

One thing you tend to notice after a while, though: it’s almost never writers of genre fiction who are picking the fight. To be fair, it’s often not “literary” writers either – it’s academics taking up the cudgels on their behalf; considerately telling us which stories are worth serious consideration and which aren’t. And I guess we appreciate the help, right? Because it’s a bewildering fictional landscape out there and an innocent young seeker after truth could easily go astray.

He then goes on to illustrate this with the example of Jonathan Jones attach on Terry Pratchett in The Guardian, which we have talked about recently. He then talks about an example from last year:

Last year it was Oliver Burkeman’s turn to tell us – I’m assuming with a straight face – that one way to “be a smarter reader” and “get more from what you read” is to stick to literary fictions. Why? Because a “well-designed study” at a US social research think tank (it’s Kidd & Castano if you want to look it up) found that literary fiction produces more powerful emotional identification with its more fully rounded characters and has a lasting effect on your ability to empathise with others.

The relevant section of Burkeman’s little how-to guide is called “Keep it Literary” – building on the most tendentious of Kidd & Castano’s five linked experiments, in which subjects read selected passages from either literary or genre fictions and then performed a range of tests designed to measure their empathy. The smoking gun here is “selected passages”. The experimenters hand-picked texts which they felt exemplified the differences between the two kinds of text, which is a little like marking the deck before you do a random shuffle. Six passages in all, by the way – three from genre fictions and three from the world’s canonically great literature – so this generalisation about all literary fiction and all genre fiction is based on about a millionth of a per cent of each. And despite being able to skew their sample in this bespoke way, Kidd & Castano reported differences between test and control groups that were barely larger than the margin of error. Mark Liberman dissected these procedural inadequacies very thoroughly in the Annals of Overgeneralisation on Language Log, and he was far from the only one.

So a spurious claim is being worked up out of a flawed study that seriously over-sold the significance of its findings. You can’t help but feel that there’s an agenda here, or at least a presumption – that literature has merit and that what has merit is by that same circular definition literature.

He has some other examples:

Other writers have been less coy about saying exactly this. Here’s Arthur Krystal, writing in the New Yorker in 2012:

“Genre” is not a bad word, although perhaps the better word for novels that taxonomically register as genre is simply “commercial.” Born to sell, these novels stick to the trite-and-true, relying on stock characters whose thoughts spool out in Lifetime platitudes. There will be exceptions, as there are in every field, but, for the most part, the standard genre or commercial novel isn’t going to break the sea frozen inside us. If this sounds condescending, so be it.

and

I hate to rake up ancient history, but here’s another example from a little further back – dredged up because in this case it is a writer of literary novels (Edward Docx, in the Observer in 2010) who’s saying this, so the agenda is maybe a little more naked.

Even good genre… is by definition a constrained form of writing. There are conventions and these limit the material. That’s the way writing works and lots of people who don’t write novels don’t seem to get this: if you need a detective, if you need your hero to shoot the badass CIA chief, if you need faux-feminist shopping jokes, then great; but the correlative of these decisions is a curtailment in other areas. If you are following conventions, then a significant percentage of the thinking and imagining has been taken out of the exercise. Lots of decisions are already made.

Carey begins his rebuttal with the last of these:

Yes, of course there are constraints when you write genre fiction. There are also constraints when you write literary fiction. Totally unconstrained writing would be (to paraphrase Kurt Vonnegut) gibberish interspersed with exclamation marks. When you write – when you write anything at all – you write on the end of a tether. But it’s a flexible tether, and it’s all about the dance you perform on the end of that thing and how you work with it or strain against it or in some cases tie it into knots that were never seen before.

And then, referring to his own novel, The Girl With All the Gifts

If Docx’s thesis is right, the fact that I was working in a space that had been partially defined for me should have robbed whatever I produced of all or most of its potential value. I think the opposite was the case: being coaxed out of my comfort zone made me take creative pathways I’d never noticed or thought about before, and the results were unexpected and exciting. I realised almost as soon as I’d sent the story in that I couldn’t part company with Melanie so soon. I’d inadvertently written the first few scenes of a much larger narrative. There were events that hadn’t eventuated, other characters waiting in the wings, and a box (Pandora’s) that had finally to be opened.

The constraints were liberating, and believe me when I say that I speak as someone who has no interest in bondage.

Carey then revisits the debate on why some classic works are not considered "genre" pieces despite having all their trappings, as with Hamlet and Macbeth, despite having ghosts and witches in them. aren’t genre fictions, and both were unapologetically designed to get the crowds into the theater.

Lastly, he ends up quoting on of my favorite writers:

If I’m honest, I tend to see the entire “literature versus genre” debate as a dead horse so cruelly and relentlessly flogged that it isn’t even vaguely horse-shaped any more. It lies in a neglected corner of the academic meadow close to the intentional fallacy and the vast midden of post-modernism. But since Mr Burkeman has tried to put a saddle on it, I felt it was probably worth offering an opinion (“It is an ex-horse. It has ceased to be…”). And on top of that, to slip in a reference to one of my favourite writers and her eloquent rebuttal of this whole daft non-argument. I’m referring to Ursula LeGuin, who in the introduction to The Left Hand Of Darkness laments the tendency of people who don’t like or get science fiction to pronounce (ham-fistedly) on what science fiction is and does. Along the way, she has this to say about the relevance and importance of her chosen genre:

All fiction is metaphor. Science fiction is metaphor. What sets it apart from older forms of fiction seems to be its use of new metaphors, drawn from certain great dominants of our contemporary life – science, all the sciences, and technology, and the relativistic and the historical outlook, among them. Space travel is one of these metaphors; so is an alternative society, an alternative biology; the future is another. The future, in fiction, is a metaphor.

A metaphor for what?

If I could have said it non-metaphorically, I would not have written all these words.

I like this formulation very much. I seldom write pure sci-fi, but LeGuin’s words apply just as well to horror and dark fantasy and probably to serious-minded works in any genre. I also like T.S.Eliot’s famous dictum about everything you write being “a raid on the inarticulate”. A genre is a tool you pack and carry along when you go on one of these raids. It takes it place – its honourable, earned place – among the other tools of the writer’s trade.

All-in-all, another well argued response to the dismissal of genre fiction. But also a reminder that many writers working in SFF have a (well deserved) chip on their shoulder.