Guilt by Socialization
by rsbakker
Aphorism of the Day: A snob is someone who looks down on his own reflection – and takes a long piss.
Two posts in one day, I know, but that Eco thing was just too rich, and I wanted to get this out while the article in question was still relatively fresh.
Fantasy has garnered quite a bit of attention in the mainstream press lately, thanks to the success of HBO’s A Game of Thrones. Roger recently sent me a link to this article by Lev Grossman in The Wall Street Journal. Rather than dwell on the piece, however, I want to consider two critical comments that were posted in response, simply because they strike me as fairly representative. (With any luck, this will be picked up on the blogosphere: if there was ever a time for a social legitimacy food-fight, now is it).
First, there’s Jason Stuart:
This article has failed in every case to adequately combat the criticisms it mentions. It has, in fact, only served to reinforce any negative stereotypes associated with the genre, but, more importantly, it reinforces the lack of respect held not so much for the overall genre, but for the large mass of cult-like readers of said genre.
The obvious yet almost always ignored example of how “fantasy” can still be “literature” is Gabriel Garcia-Marquez and the rest of the Magical-Realists. But, since they aren’t writing about epic multi-generational global wars (focusing only on the richest, most elite members) that threaten fictional worlds populated mostly with dragons and trolls, they are dismissed outright be the faithful.
The question is not one of adherence to the tropes of “reality” but one of RELEVANCE to reality.
So far, no argument has been made to convince me that the bulk of fantasy pulp is relevant in the least to any average man’s real life.
Escapism, to be precise.
The one thing I like about this response is it’s honesty: Stuart isn’t afraid to acknowledge that the lack of respect for the genre translates into a lack of respect for the audience. This makes it clear that the authority gradient at issue isn’t simply aesthetic but social as well. There’s Respectable readers who read respectable things and there’s Unrespectable readers. As I’ve argued ad nauseum here and elsewhere, you can’t separate the genre from the readers. Impugn the one, and you impugn the other.
Gabriel Garcia-Marquez only serves to highlight the degree to which this distinction is social: the reason Magic Realists are not considered fantasy authors is simply that they don’t write for fantasy readers. Instead, they write for the Genre-that-dares-not-speak-its-name, which is to say, they write for so-called ‘literary readers.’ The ‘fantastic’ can either denote a formal commitment or a social one. Since Magic Realists generally buy into the authority gradient that Stuart references, they sure as hell are going to go the formal route: to write for the Unrespectable is to risk losing the respect of the Respectable.
Now simply calling readers Unrespectable smacks of chauvinism, which is why I think Stuart feels compelled to further rationalize his distinction. The problem, he suggests, is one of ‘RELEVANCE.’ He has encountered no argument to convince him that fantasy is relevant to “any average man’s life.”
Unfortunately he fails to provide any argument to convince anyone of the contrary: that it is irrelevant. For people like me, people who think the precise opposite, that so-called literary fiction has become all but culturally irrelevant (in any positive sense), and that genre is pretty much the only socially relevant fictional form available to writers who want to make an actual difference in actual lives, an argument would be nice, because heaven knows I’ve looked for one! Alas, he simply asserts this is the case. But I’ll get back to this issue below.
Perhaps the following commentator, Harry Schwartz, has an argument:
You summed it up perfectly: “The question is not one of adherence to the tropes of “reality” but one of RELEVANCE to reality” Hilarious to claim that Harry Potter isn’t wish-fulfillment fantasy (scrawny orphan boy discovers he has incredible powers and belongs to an elite secret society, where he’s a famous hero), or that fantasy’s focus on pure unadulterated good-vs-evil doesn’t detract from its relevance as literature (Austen and Tolstoy wrote extensively about morality, but they did so via believably complex, flawed, and relatable characters, not larger-than-life heroes and villains. That’s why thinking people have been enjoying their work for over a century). Fantasy is an escapist pulp genre like thrillers or romance novels. Fantasy writers talk about “world-building”, meaning shoveling in tons of detail to make the story’s universe seem huge and sweeping, like a place you could actually escape to (though some people seem to struggle with the fact that they don’t actually live there, as the recent Harry Potter phenomenon has shown). That this world building is often hilariously flawed (frequently depicting a world that’s been stuck at a Medieval level of technology for millennia) may not make it less entertaining, but definitely makes it inferior to true literature. Shakespeare may have used ghosts and witches on occasion, but he never built any worlds. Still, that’s not to say the fantasy genre can’t be executed competently and entertainingly, or that a skillful author doesn’t deserve respect (James Clavell wrote historical fiction pulp extremely well, and he’s one of my favorite authors). But it’s no more a mark of distinction to read it any more than playing video games is, in fact it’s probably a good sign if an adult is hesitant to share their enthusiasm for either one. That’s why they’re called guilty pleasures. Just because it’s more acceptable now for adults to enjoy adolescent entertainments (not a great trend, in my opinion) doesn’t mean those entertainments will ever be taken seriously as artistic achievements. One hopes.
Once again, we find a number of loaded social references, which seem to boil down into the binary, Thinkers against Adolescents. Once again, though, I’m not sure I see any argument. A bunch of assertions, a whole bunch of loaded language begging the same old, we-cool-you-losers authority gradient, but nothing you can really point to in the way of rational justification.
You could say he ends with an argument: Why isn’t reading fantasy not a “mark of distinction”? Because we call them “guilty pleasures.” But this isn’t really an argument so much as a question begging conjunction of assertions.
So we are left with: fantasy isn’t literary because it’s escapist, and it’s escapist because it isn’t relevant to life, and it isn’t relevant to life because… well, we don’t know.
We could be charitable, and construct an argument for them using several value-judgements they make in passing. Secondary worlds are hyperbolic. The characterization is unbelievable. The action is unrealistic.
So we could say that the argument they would make is that fantasy isn’t relevant because it isn’t believable or realistic. In other words, fantasy isn’t relevant because it’s fantastic…
But wait a tick… Hmm.
I guess they don’t have an argument after all.
Let me make a suggestion: the social RELEVANCE of fantasy lies in its audience, the fact that it reaches millions upon millions of people. All you have to do is look at fandom to realize that fantasy moves people far, far more profoundly than so-called ‘literary fiction’ (which, as you all know, I think has devolved into a spectacular in-group exercise, like-minded authors writing for like-minded readers, pretending to challenge all those out-group ‘adolescents’ (who never read them) with books literally designed to alienate readers without any specialized training. Popcorn, in other words, masquerading as salad.)
Make no mistake: the difference between fiction in general and literature is moral. The latter is supposed to be good for you in a way the former isn’t. This means the difference between fiction in general and literature has to do with real world consequences – whether or not it ‘resembles’ what counted as literature in ages gone by is pretty much meaningless once those forms cease to have real literary consequences for real readers.
These guys are simply doing what everybody does: making moral yardsticks out of their aesthetic tastes. They literally think their bookshelves make them less ‘guilty.’
Three Pound Brain 
Have you read Lev Grossman’s “The Magicians”? I have, unfortunately. I’m going to pull a Theo here and attack what I don’t understand: the first 2/3rds of the book were great, deep stuff… exploring a side of fantasy I’d never seen anyone try. Then it turns sour. The entire last third of the book is the narrator pretty much playing World of Warcraft in a makeshift Narnia.
You might want to give his book a try if only to see what it looks like when an author tries to walk the tightrope act between the literary and genre worlds, only to fall into a putrid abyss.
What I’m saying here I guess is that if you have to err between making your books more ‘literary’ or more ‘genre’… go with 100 Years of Solitude and not with Dragonlance. (I met Tracy Hickman this weekend… nice guy… but I couldn’t get past Dragons of Autumn Twilight)
The Magician’s is sitting in my Nook waiting for me to read it. I was initially excited by about the book, then I read that Donna Tartt’s The Secrect History was an influence. I did not like Donna Tartt’s novel. Now, I am no hurry to read the Magicians.
I always found the “relevance” critique amusing as well. If a book only sells a handful of copies to a handful of atypical readers, then how relevant is it to the greater part of humanity?
Well, allow me to try a counter-argument for once.
Sure, initially all that literary work is confined to a small group of like-minded thinkers etc. But eventually, these same people get put in charge or asked about what should be on school curricula. So, after a decade or so, you might see a Lit Fic book moving from a small circle of readers to a larger audience by way of mandated school reading.
And isn’t that great? The educated ‘critical thinkers’ at the highest level eventually do manage to force some literature down the collective gullet of the average rubes offspring.
Hmmm, but really that’d be in an effort to make more of themselves?
With fantasy, it seems lots of demographics (even those who don’t get on with each other) read it. So you get to alot of people, instead of expanding your own particular cult.
I think there is a built-in immunity to your position in the Thinkers vs Adolescents mindset, Scott.
They say that only Adolescents seeking escapism read fantasy. While you or I might take the genre’s ability to not only reach a WIDE audience, but one consisting of people not actively seeking to be challenged (and thus be most in-need of challenging) as a great strength, the Thinkers only roll their eyes.
After all, should the Adolescents accidentally read literature, or subversive pulp, they wouldn’t get it anyway. And even if they did, what would it matter, besides giving them something to frown about while they push their brooms?
The argument as I see it is thus: fantasy isn’t literary because it’s escapist, and it’s escapist because it isn’t relevant to life, and it isn’t relevant to life because it’s fodder for Adolescents, and Adolescents don’t contribute to Real Life.
Elitism at its most pure.
Jorge, there’s one major work of genre fiction that that has happened with in high schools in the last five-ten years (although it took 15-20 years for the phenonmena to take place not 10): Ender’s Game. Shame that Card is cuckoo as they come.
However, it’s interesting to note that the book hasn’t penetrated higher ed to the same extent. Probably a combination of factors, one is the rise of the young adult industry, which has co-opted EG into the genre, although it was previously considered scifi. Being YA scifi makes the book less appealing to the university level. The other is that profs might tend to be older than HS teachers and thus it takes longer for ‘personal favorites’ of the profs to work in because there’s less turnover and a greater age of initial entry.
My post was referring to a process something more akin to:
University Professor reads Beloved by Toni Morrison.
Enjoys it. Decides it is ‘literary’.
When talking to colleagues and discussing it they decide they should convince high school teachers to prepare students for college using books like it.
The high schools, wanting their students to be prepared for college, assign it.
Therefore, a book that was tailor-made to be digested and re-excreted among a highly closed-off group of academics is passed down to the students, thereby circumventing the whole ‘echo chamber’ argument that Scott is making.
This is where my posterity argument kicks in… First off, it’s simply absurd to assume that anything you write will end up on a high school curriculum. Second, it’s unlikely, given the accelerating pace of technological change, that the exotericism of contemporary literary works will be redeemed by history.
I must say that when I read all these attacks on “fantasy” what people are really talking about is the kind of work that people are wont to sneer at in the “higher brow” fantasy literature forums on the internet- I think that when the average joe thinks of the fantasy genre, he does not think of works like The Prince of Nothing, or even someone like Mieville or M. John Harrison. To most people, games like World of Warcraft is basically what fantasy amounts to, and believe you me this faire most certainly leans towards the “escapist”. This isn’t to say that WoW’s massive popularity doesn’t amount to relevence in itself, but you can see why people form the opinions they have.
Similarly, the sheer fact that there is so much sex in the genre has always been a bit frustrating to me, if only because the sex that happens in fantasy is never really believable. Sometimes it’d be nice to have a “heavyweight” that depicted sex as infrequent, awkward and dull – this would certainly be a refreshing change to all the torn bodices and weird perversions. Is no one average?
i take the unexamined snobbery of the self-circumscribed literati as proof of their own increasing literary irrelevance. they are choosing to NOT participate in the greater literary ecosystem, so they’ve consigned themselves to a whimpering intellectual death. the squawking of dodos who have no frame of reference for what they decry — or for what they exalt, for that matter — is something to note only as a matter of historical interest; an item to recall lest you find yourself flightless among the eagles. 😉
As someone who reads about equal amounts of Russian 17th century literature and modern fantasy, the argument from people as presented in this post is false because it’s built on a false image of what modern fantasy amounts to.
The whole white-and-black morality system rarely shows up anymore. Ironically, the series that made the discussion pop up, the A Song Of Fire And Ice series by George R R Martin (as the books for A Game Of Thrones is based on) is some of the most morally ambiguos storys I’ve read. Compare that to Anna Karenina, this work usually held in regard as one of the greatest works of all time, which in the end amounts to nothing but a christian moral lesson.
But I guess the snobs would rather sit around and circlejerk to Holden Caufield rather than actually know what they are talking about.
“So far, no argument has been made to convince me that the bulk of fantasy pulp is relevant in the least to any average man’s real life.”
Huh? Wait…there’s something wrong here: Why does it have to be relevant?
For lack of a stronger word, the average man’s real life is BORING (all capital letters totally intendend).
Yes, there is merit in reading about real life struggle against feelings, circumstances, wars, famine, slavery, social situations, parents, kids, alcohol, drugs, spouses – whatever cliche you wanna choose. But in its essence, this is something that most of us experience in one way or another almost every day. And for me personally, it’s … boring.
What I care about, what excites me, is following someone like Drusas, reading about the way he feels, thinks, behaves in a variety of social circumstances. Think about it: You have a guy that can flatten a mountain with a few “impossible” words. How does he behave in polite company? What does he do when pissed off? Even more importantly, what does he do when he is overpowered (by circumstance or by other people)?
I’ve read over 750 Sci-Fi and Fantasy books over the last 15 years. Admittedly, only about 10% of them (Mr Bakker your works are included :)) have meaningful characters that – feel – true. I don’t really care whether their trials are relevant to my life, even remotely. What I really care about is that reading about them makes me feel a fantastical (pun intended) sense of wonder 🙂
The relevance of relevance would be an important issue, if what they were saying made any sense in the first place!
For me, the sense of wonder you mention is what distinguishes fantasy. It is the literature of awe, the spectacular sublime, something that humans seem to have a hardwired appreciation for (and very RELEVANT as a result). If you want to make yourself feel exclusive, exceptional, disparage and ridicule it. Fantasy becomes a great proxy, a way to be aristocratic without being obviously so. Making fun of genres for arbitrary, self-aggrandizing reasons is more tricksy than ridiculing a group directly.
The thing to remember is that we all do this all the time. I’ve been pretty hard on Monster Truck Rallies myself.
“I’ve been pretty hard on Monster Truck Rallies myself.”
As a kid, I remember that my favorite part of summer was attending the St. Louis County Fair in Hibbing, MN. My favorite part of the fair was the tractor pull and the monster trucks.
That attitude changed when I moved to the Twin Cities. I guess I must have figured that that typ of thing was only for country yokels and I wasn’t a yokel anymore, I was a sophisticated urbanite now.
My attitude remained like that for years. Then a friend invited me to go to a monster truck show, to which I begrudgingly went. I had a blast.
“The question is not one of adherence to the tropes of “reality” but one of RELEVANCE to reality.
So far, no argument has been made to convince me that the bulk of fantasy pulp is relevant in the least to any average man’s real life.
Escapism, to be precise.”
My step-dad takes this attitude one step further and applies it to all of fiction. He doesn’t read fiction at all because he feels that made up stories are irrelevant and distract people from what he believes are the real issues.
did you explain to him that *all* stories are made up — that the difference between “fiction” and “non-fiction” is the conceit of the latter toward adopting familiar names, dates, locations, and events?
put it this way: if i took the story of napoleon’s life, changed his name to grifnaf the conqueror, and set it in a country called flanderia that seemed remarkably similar to western europe, it sudenly becomes fiction — even if the lessons and observations provided by this biography remain completely unchanged. if i write about the conflict between two faiths across the centuries, why does it matter that i refer to these faiths as “islam” and “christdendom” instead of, say, “intrithism” and “fanimry”? in fact, i’d argue that the latter provides MORE profound and educational observations, since the story can be tailored to specific insights, instead of being forced by some sort of false sense of unattainable accuracy to hew to mere interpretation.
the problem with fantasy/science fiction/speculative literature is that the much of the seminal efforts in the last century — or at least those that achieved mass market success — have been BAD. they’ve been shallow, poorly penned drek of the pulp variety. but pulp exists in ALL genres, ESPECIALLY modern literary fiction; it’s just that many advanced readers of fantasy and whatnot, ironically, don’t harbor any illusions — that there are robert jordans and david eddingses on one end of the spectrum, and steven eriksons and r.s. bakkers on the other, and they usually share the same shelf at barnes and noble — whereas most public readers of “literary” fiction (and non-fiction) have long since divorced themselves from the pulp, and thus lost all perspective. perhaps we should start sneering at don delillo because james patterson exists, or at roberto bolano because man, that michael crichton keeps on knockin’ ’em out. or maybe they should just start jumbling up the shelves at b&n.
I tell him that what I am interested in is ideas and not necessarily facts/figures and that for me, fiction is a better vehicle for exploring ideas.
I really do not understand the need of some people to turn aesthetic preferences into moral judgments. I have seen people literally and physically fill with pure raw hate when referring to fantasy and science fiction. I have actually asked them to be more specific on the roots of their hatred, and after a little psychological drilling it boils down to fantasy and science fiction dealing with things that are not real. Their hate has nothing to do with relevance, as they claim, but with the genre dealing with artifacts and entities that exist only in the mind. I’ve been told “I only deal with real things.” They view fantastical thinking as children’s work; adults have no business thinking of made up things. They usually fail to understand that science fiction has inspired the greatest 20th scientist, science itself requires imaginative creative thought play (without our species ability to participate in the fantastical there would be no science, we would be still living in caves) I often view fantasy as a way to placate intellectual anxiety, people with no taste for fantasy are usually quite dull and boring. Almost any human trait is found in all other animals; language, culture, tools, planning, intelligence. But we are probably the only species that can conjure up entire world in our minds. The only species that can tell each other stories of places and times that never were. So yeah, I think fantasy and science fiction is what make us human.
This discussion reminded me of a couple quotes I used to have on facebook.
“History is fiction, but people seem to think otherwise. The thing I like about fantasy and science fiction is that you can take issues, pull them out of their cultural straitjackets, and talk about them without bringing in folk artifacts that make people get closed minded.”
—- George Lucas, Wired 13.05
“By a curious confusion, many modern critics have passed from the proposition that a masterpiece may be unpopular to the other proposition that unless it is unpopular it cannot be a masterpiece.” – GK Chesterton, “On Detective Novels,” Generally Speaking
Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.
— Paulo Friere
“I’ve wrestled with reality for some thirty-five years, and I’m proud to report I’ve finally won out over it.”
“my mother used to say to me, ‘Elwood,’ she always called me Elwood, ‘Elwood,’ she’d say, ‘in this world you can be oh so smart or oh so pleasant.’ Now for years I was smart, I recommend pleasant.”
—-Elwood P. Dowd (Jimmy Stewart) in Harvey
Something scratching at me here – my own charitable reading of Jason Stuart is that he’s looking at how things have been done and in that past, not seeing relevance. But he might not have noticed newer authors who are using fantasy to turn their very difficult to read essay archive (teasing!) into interesting things for lots of people to consider through a fun medium.
He might have a point about the past, atleast?
“Fantasy, of course, starts out with an advantage: arresting strangeness. But that advantage has been turned against it, and has contributed to its disrepute. Many people dislike being ‘arrested.’ They dislike any meddling with the Primary World, or such small glimpses of it as are familiar to them. They, therefore, stupidly and even maliciously confound Fantasy with Dreaming, in which there is no Art; and with mental disorders, in which there is not even control.” – J.R.R. Tolkien, ‘On Fairy Stories’
Any fan of fantasy (or good fiction in general!) should read Dr. Tolkien’s excellent lecture ‘On Fairy Stories’.
Click to access fairystories-tolkien.pdf
Hi Scott! Stumbled on this. This was very interesting. If they want to judge all fantasy literature on the perception that it’s all World of Warcraft, that’s as ridiculous as judging all of ‘literary fiction’ on Danielle Steele.
I especially enjoyed that one guy’s whittling world-building down to making up pseudo-medieval environments. Like his ass wouldn’t have to world build if he was writing about China and he never set foot there.
Welcome Karin! It’s a kind of literary positivism, isn’t it? “Write what you know,” is the slogan I encounter the second most with these guys. They use ‘honesty’ as their rationale, but it seems to be an eminently disposable one, as magic realism and postmodernism show. This is what I found so interesting about those two comments: the social motivation was front and centre. It had far more to do with the company you keep than with any identifiable aesthetic scruple.
That is really what it comes down to, in my experience, with people who have that attitude. You can see it on their faces. They don’t want to be considered ‘nerds.’ And I always didn’t like that literary positivism. I prefer “know what you write.” That implies research, not relying on your 3 pound brain’s contents for everything.
I’ve never understood why ‘adherence to reality’ is something that makes a piece of fiction automatically closer to the ‘literary.’ And what does ‘relevance to life’ have to do with superior storytelling? Why do people base quality upon these arbitrary measures (yes, I realise that most things in human existence are arbitrary)?
We should not overlook the fact that creativity is not necessarily based upon the genre or conventions that we use (for who can escape convention in some form or another?)–it’s the way we work within these frameworks. It’s the way one structures a sentence, the way one employs imagery, poetry, meaning. It’s the way one integrates these factors into the story without obstruction and makes it flow. The way one paces the plot. The way one constructs a fictive reality. Everything else is essentially embellishment (I’m probably simplifying way too much here, but whatever). We should not judge a story upon what a critic considers superior, we should judge a story upon the totality of its disparate qualities after experiencing and analysing it ourselves.
But what the hell do I know.
I’d think you just judge it always with the qualification that your looking at it from your own preferences. And provide empirical samples from the work (like quotes, etc). Atleast in terms of video games reviews I used to read, fairly often a reviewer didn’t like a game, but because he actually described what was there, I could read through the lines and think “Hey, I like the sound of that”. And indeed I did like them when buying.
And sometimes you can tell what the reviewer doesn’t like, you do. Which can mean ‘glowing’ review, at times 🙂
I’m immensely amused by the fact that the very people who make these arguments are also people who don’t know anything about literary history. When we talk about Shakespeare and works that have since been formed into the canon, we’re not talking about works that were *always* the great “literary examples or literary greatness.” We’re talking about works that, in their day, were considered irrelevant, morally depraved, pointless, stupid, pulpy garbage, etc. etc. etc. So when someone tells me that *insert popular genre here* is garbage, I take a quick detour into old time literary history, think about all those writers and literary forms which were treated in the same light, and smile. In 100 years, maybe all we’ll be reading are fantasy novels…
And for the record: I don’t subscribe to the idea that literary fiction is irrelevant or an in-game. Some of it certainly is, but lit fic, whatever it is, still makes waves, if not on the bestseller’s list, then elsewhere. I think using sales a barometer for influence is sort of like using McDonald’s as a barometer for how sophisticated the American palate has become…
First of all they should read ursula le guin’s introduction to the left hand of darkness in which you use what you feel appropriate for you to tell a story or convey an idea. If it is fantasy who gives a shit.
I feel that many characters in fantasy books are as relevant to my life ( achamian included sir ) as characters of other literary genres. For example in Stephen Donaldson’s books, the question of forgiveness for one self and others is very strong and I remember that when i read the gap series I had an epiphany I never had in before then ( someone in my life is an alcoholic and it was very important for me at the time and it still is ) so there is your relevance. It is always about the character no matter what medium. By the way the story can be the main character.
Another thing: if it has to be real to be relevant why do I like Beethoven’s 9th if it is only abstract sound put together? why is it relevant to me in a very profound way?
Thank you.
Thank you very much