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Neal Stanifer
| | Posted on Saturday, December 06, 2003 - 08:05 am: | |
Not long ago, I received an e-mail from Nick, inviting me to open a thread on genre and the work it does in the world. In his e-mail, he mentioned genre as a productive as well as a constraining force. The latter concept has been dealt with on other threads on these boards, sometimes productively in the form of attempts to find ways for writers to reach wider audiences, and sometimes less productively as a sort of generalized "mean ol' market taught me to weep an' moan" malaise. I'd like to deal with both these concepts of genre together, rather than apart. I'd like to take some time to discuss not only what genre does to a writer's work, but also what it does for a writer.
First, let me say I'm not all that concerned with "interstitiality." I'm not even sure it's a useful term. Reading Heinz Insu Fenkl's essay on the topic, I'm troubled by some slippage in terminology and a general conceptual squishiness reminiscent of Homi Bhabha and Gloria Anzaldua, two theorists whose work I find logically and ethically suspect. Put plainly, I disagree with Fenkl's approach and his conclusions, even while I champion anything that can bring writers' works in front of prospective readers. So there's that.
Second, let me clarify very briefly my understanding of "genre." Genre has a number of meanings, but I'm going to confine myself here to the colloquial understanding of genre as (mostly) a set of categories useful in placing a work among its fellow works. Not solely formalist distinctions, but sets of conventions which permit us to distinguish between different works and recognize what's going on in a text. The kind of thing that makes a "space opera" different from a "near-future dystopia," for example, or "urban grotesque" different from "Southern gothic." These elements, both of form and of content, are understood to be in play, by which I mean they are there in the toolbox for any writer bold enough and resourceful enough to make use of them.
Marketing categories take into account some, but not all, of these elements when placing a work, and exist for the purpose of helping readers to find books, and vice versa. Marketing categories also, from time to time, indicate neither form nor content directly, but rather an intended audience -- "Children's Literature," "Boy's Adventure," and so on.
Okay, on we go.
I'll begin with an anecdote from my own field of study. In the late nineteenth century, an African-American author named Charles W. Chesnutt wrote a celebrated series of "conjure woman" stories, a kind of the "local-color" subgenre of the "regional literature" very popular at the time. In this kind of story, we are given a white master who seeks to relieve his ennui by asking a semi-comical black servant to tell him a story of the local region. This black servant then proceeds to reel off a tale filled with superstition, grotesque characters, and local habits, all leading up to some ethical or moral lesson. Then the narrative scepter is handed back to the white master and the tale is concluded, its frame complete. That's the genre, and that's how we recognize it when we read it.
Chesnutt was one of the better writers of this kind of story, and his tales were welcomed warmly into the high-literary magazines of the time. People loved this stuff. But he eventually grew bored with the form. He had worked the vein; it was time to move on. Besides, he thought he could do something better, something truer. He wrote a novel MS dealing not with full-blooded black servants and their crazy stories and bored white masters, but with struggling and alienated mulatto characters trying to make their way in the world, something closer to his own experience. He "wrote what he knew."
No one wanted his MS. He shopped it around for a long time, and it was consistently rejected. Finally, an offer came from one of his editors. If he would just write five or six more "conjure woman" stories, he could have a book deal. Not a book deal for his mulatto realism, but for his comic-grotesque "conjure woman" stories.
Chesnutt was upset. He was imprisoned by his genre. But he didn't want to turn the deal down because Chesnutt had never been an art-for-art's-sake writer. Writing, for him, had always been a means to an end, one of the few ways an educated black man could get his foot in the middle-class door. So he took the deal, and he turned out five more "conjure woman" stories.
In these stories, Chesnutt does what he had done with the "local-color" subgenre from the very beginning -- he foregrounds the generic elements of story. All the things that make the "local-color" story what it is, Chesnutt brought into sharp relief. He made them seem as artificial as they really were. In working completely within his genre, he demonstrated both that genre's shortcomings and its capabilities.
Not that most readers were likely to have picked up on that move, any more than most readers are likely to pick up on Neal Stephenson's jab at plot-driven SF when, in Snow Crash, he short-changes genre expectations at a climactic moment with the line "After that, it's just a chase scene." Nevertheless, Chesnutt did register his protest, and we can read it in his work today if we know what to look for. His disdain is palpable.
My point in all this is that genre, because it insists upon sets of conventions, provides working material for writers who have reason to play around with those conventions, both formal and thematic. Genre offers both a toybox and an armory, and we could list forever the authors who have made use of genre in these ways.
The other point, though, and one which we might overlook if we concentrated solely on Chesnutt's anger and the unfairness of the literary market of his time, is that Chesnutt sold his genre stories! He sold them, and he got paid. His genre writing helped him to get into the middle class, where he wanted to be all along, and to nail down a career as a lawyer.
Wordsworth said of the sonnet form: "In truth the prison, unto which we doom / Ourselves, no prison is..." He wrote this in a sonnet which bends and twists the sonnet form while remaining, finally, just a sonnet. Samuel Beckett made a career of staging a philosophical critique of fiction through fiction, foregrounding and ripping away element after element until he got to Worstward Ho and The Unnameable, and the emptying-out even of authorial presence. Fun stuff, if you have the patience to keep up with it.
Every year, we are presented with genre writing ranging from the mediocre to the outstanding which makes use of generic conventions to its advantage, sometimes fitting itself cozily into those conventions -- Hey, nothing wrong with a good old piece of story-telling -- and sometimes shoving and kicking at genre walls, or dragging the covers off a strange generic bedfellow.
Genre itself is not the bad guy. Maybe the market could be more responsive to changing trends, yes. Maybe publishers could be more conscientious about putting books where they will have the best chance of being purchased, certainly. Maybe readers could be a little less myopic, I don't know. And maybe the disdain some people express for genre literatures could be ameliorated in some way. But doing away with genre is neither possible, nor desirable.
Understand, then, I'm not taking to task those writers who have trouble placing their works, or who find themselves pigeon-holed and their audience restricted by unimaginative marketing. I sympathize with them. This is not some "Y'ain't no artiste, so git over yerself" diatribe. But after reading some of the posts on other threads, and after having read Fenkl's well-meaning but (in my eyes) wrong-headed essay, I felt I had to say something about the positive uses of genre. |
Nick Mamatas
| | Posted on Saturday, December 06, 2003 - 09:03 am: | |
Thanks Neal,
Didn't the tragic mullato/passing story itself become a pretty potent genre later on? And today, isn't it pretty much a curiosity that has to be set in the past to function as a narrative at all, at least in the US (thinking of The Human Stain here). I think what is important here is how history and publishing as a form of commodity production throws up certain marketing categories and then eliminates them.
Honestly, I stopped reading Fenkl's essay closely when I got to this point: "Another idea that emerges from Quantum Theory—which Postmodernists often misapply—is Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, which illustrates the direct relationship between the observer and the thing observed... Extrapolated upwards to higher-level phenomena, this means that we change reality in the act of observing it. "
As anyone who knows anything about QT, or for that matter, the materialist and empiricist critiques of postmodernism knows, that extrapolation Fenkl insists on is exactly how PoMo misapplies QT.
Skimming down after that, I stopped completely at this point:
What the Interstitial does, actually, is transform the reader's consciousness.
This is true, but trivially so. Any word you care to use can be swapped in for 'Interstitial': 'bboard posts" transform consciousness, "ice cream" transforms consciousness, "Dachau" transforms consciousness. If one needed evidence that the academic sector of the economy, far from being an ivory tower, generates papers for their exchange value rather than their use value, this essay would be a great Exhibit A. |
Neal Stanifer
| | Posted on Saturday, December 06, 2003 - 11:16 am: | |
Nick, concerning the tragic mulatto/passing motif in American fiction, yes, it has become a curiosity, but only in itself. What it left behind was a legacy -- a tradition, I should say -- which extends down through American history, touching texts here and there, and not only African-American texts, but other texts as well. To cite just one example, look what Toni Morrison does with the motif in The Bluest Eye, combining traditional anxieties of passing with a psychological Gothic to create something wonderful, but not something unclassifiable.
To be sure, anyone who tried to write an old-fashioned "tragic mulatto" story today would be laughed out the house, as they say. The story would doubtless seem quaint, overly-sentimental, and out-of-step, if not downright racist and sexist. But the generic elements of the "tragic mulatto" story have influenced Jewish fiction, for example, in striking ways. Nor did they spring up from nowhere: there's a strong strain of aristocratic romance (hell-a-popular in the antebellum South) in tragic-mulatto stories. Stories by Scott and Bulwer Lytton were in the air, on the shelves, and being read aloud in parlors all over the South. It's silly to think that an underclass which strove to rise above its condition by learning to read would have scrupled to avoid the very leisure reading the dominant classes were chattering about all over the plantations and towns.
We grab what's in the cultural air, or we write from our influences, or however you feel comfortable phrasing it. No one creates from whole cloth, and no one writes outside his or her conditions, however much our fiction may adopt a critical stance to those conditions. Or to put it another way, no one leaves Plato's cave, though some of us learn to create some pretty cool cave paintings.
As for Fenkl, I don't want to bash anyone in absentia, and I'm not at all averse to what seems to be his primary goal -- selling books -- but I think there are better ways to think about what he describes, ways which don't draw so heavily upon the identity-political and margin-centered academic writings in which his work seems steeped. When we start down the road of identity politics or other politics based paradoxically upon "difference" as a unifying factor, we end up infinitely parsing identity until we trip over the turnstile of what is really just bad personal-essay writing.
<<<rant>>>
Gloria Anzaldua is a prime example of this. Having parsed identity to the point where she is really just promoting herself, she re-expands her grasp to liberate -- what? -- an army of Gloria Anzalduas yearning to breathe free? We are all mestizas, she tells us, walking "continually...out of one culture and into another." Bullshit, first of all. Like Spivak and Bhabha, she claims to speak for a general population while rendering her own personal experiences as normative. And second of all, even more bullshit! If you're constantly between cultures and in motion, what then is the foundation of your ethics, your politics? Where is your center? What is its relation to the things outside itself? Whom do your choices serve? Where do you land? You land in the academy, that's where. And on the tongues of know-nothing college kids who have used you to replace the last generation's Che Guevara. And in the meantime, you've turned a real people's real suffering into temporarily-diverting entertainment for bored, bourgeois, narcissistic college kids. Self-serving, morally-bankrupt bullshit. If you want to effect change, write an open letter, call your congressman, collectivise your workplace, contribute to a charity, work in a soup kitchen, start a leaflet campaign, or hit the fucking streets and handcuff yourself to something dangerous, but don't sit in a chic coffee shop trying to convince yourself you're being held down by The Man. Go take a good, hard look at those who really are held down, who don't have access to academic presses and five-bedroom houses and stipends and honoraria. Go work in Southern California agriculture, for fuck's sake. Sorry, I know this is a tangent, but this shit just gets my blood up. I'm very much an advocate of the teaching of literary theory. All explorations of literature operate from a theory, whether explicit or implicit, and learning how to spot a critic's theoretical methodology is important. But there has to be praxis. There has to be some way to marry the theory with something real in the world. And those interested in finding these avenues seem fewer and fewer, perhaps because bullshit identity-political ravings are so easily comprehended by the narcissistic.
<<<end>>>
Oh, yes, on the subject of physics influencing narrative, I really wish academics in the humanities would just stop it, at least until they've toddled off and spoken with a dozen or so physicists. It seemed clever the first time I heard Chaos Theory, to mention a particularly odious example, used in an exploration of Joseph Heller's Catch-22. But then I spoke with my wife's grandfather, a biologist who was a colleague of Richard Feynmann, and I mentioned the paper I was so taken with. His laugh was gentle, as was his explanation of why the paper was completely riddled with errors both of fact and of theory. He set me straight. Seems Feynmann considered his work a logical outgrowth of classical theory. Seems nonlinear dynamics isn't as revolutionary as all that. Seems, instead, it's more evolutionary. Seems physics, like the humanities, has its boring old traditions you just have to sit there and learn, and these traditions don't suffer quite the number of "paradigm shifts"1 some academics in the humanities and poorly-trained science journalists would like to believe.
Finally, as to academic papers being product in an exchange economy, you'll get no argument from me. Stephen Greenblatt, former president of the MLA, issued a collegial but forceful denunciation of this practice, to his enduring credit. Judge teachers by things other than publishing, he advocated. Get rid of publish-or-perish; it isn't working to improve our knowledge of literature, and it's only clogging up the works. He's absolutely right. Our jobs as teachers is to teach, and yet this aspect of our career has faded into near-insignificance. What we do in the classroom to improve our students' grasp of literature should count more heavily than how many pieces of logical Swiss cheese we can turn out.
1. Fer Chrissakes, people, read Kuhn before you kidnap his terminology and press it into the service of every passing fashion trend, wouldja? "Purple is the new black; it's a fucking PARADIGM SHIFT!" |
Nick Mamatas
| | Posted on Saturday, December 06, 2003 - 01:16 pm: | |
I'm not too worried about the essayist's personal defense if only because the essay was put on the Internet in order to be discussed, I'm sure.
Point well-taken, re: passing/mulatto. Where does this leave the old stories though? Do they get reclaimed? Some of the Harlem stories (Blacker The Berry etc.) have. Others, not so much.
This also leads me to wonder where genres are supposed to be bordered. Some genres are tonal or based on affect rather than setting or content (horror, erotica, romance) and other genres are just transparently marketing categories (lit/fiction contains examples of all popular genres as well as realism/modernism). So, what really falls in the cracks of *genre* rather than simply falling into the cracks of *marketing category* -- the latter's ultimate cause is simply that the unseen hand of the market isn't nearly as efficient as neoclassical economists insist that it is. |
Nick Mamatas
| | Posted on Saturday, December 06, 2003 - 01:24 pm: | |
On the other hand, then you get stuff like this quote, half-inched from the latest Ansible:
Jonathon Keats reviews McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales: `[The editor, Michael Chabon] is mistaken about genre fiction. Even given an opportunity to succeed, genre is, and has always been, antithetical to creativity. It is one thing to romanticise it, quite another to read it, and to be reminded that it is what it says it is -- a formula. The failure of genre writing generally is that it makes a worthy literary technique, such as suspense or horror, the sole purpose of a story.' Conversely, if it's good it's not genre: `Edgar Allan Poe and Henry James may have written stories full of mystery, or situated in the future, or haunted by spectres, but to read The Turn of The Screw as a ghost story makes as much sense as situating Homer's Odyssey in travel fiction.' And so on, and so on. (Prospect magazine, November)
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Neal Stanifer
| | Posted on Saturday, December 06, 2003 - 03:14 pm: | |
Nick, some old stories will come around again. Much depends, I think, on contemporary ideology (god, I hate that word) and what it deems acceptable thought. Ideology changes frequently (though human beings rarely do). As for the tragic-mulatto story, however, I hope it's a long time before we see this kind of thing again, considering its subject matter. More likely, elements of republished and revisioned stories will get syphoned off for the purposes of telling new but allied stories.
Genre borders... I think anything we could declare about them would be so conditional and qualified as to be practically useless. You're right about tonal genre elements sliding back and forth all over fiction. There are also character types once located firmly within now-dead genres which have escaped their boundaries and roamed into new kinds of stories. That's how story-telling works, as we know. Story-tellers, like comedians, will steal anything that isn't nailed down. So yes, I think any discussion about a story falling between the cracks of genre is most likely a product of misunderstanding genre and how it works. Marketing categories, on the other hand, can easily drop a stitch now and again.
And Keats should pull his head out of his ass. First, he could try reading Chabon's introduction, which explains the purpose of the antho and offers up a thinly-veiled indictment of much so-called literary fiction. Second, he could read some really good genre rather than spending his time denying it exists. Hell, I'll loan the fucker a couple books. Third, he can let go the bullshit fantasy that Edgar Allan Poe, a magazinist and sensationalist his entire short fucking life was ever anything other than a genre writer. And Henry James? James was the golden boy of James T. and Annie Fields! He peddled genre to the brand-new high-brow magazines, all the while pontificating about the transcendence of literature. He wrote regional literature, vacation stories, and... yes... ghost stories! Which brings us to... Fourth, "literary" fiction is, always has been, and always will be, genre fiction. It's just made up of several genres and holds itself aloof to the rest of popular literary production. The formulae are often different from those of lower-brow (urgh!) fiction, but they are nevertheless formulae. In the past, literary (or "mainstream") fiction has catered exclusively to the leisure classes and those who identified with them. These days, it's open to just about anyone with the money to pay for a paperback, but some folks still seem to think they're T. S. Fucking Eliot. |
Nick Mamatas
| | Posted on Saturday, December 06, 2003 - 06:22 pm: | |
Another tidbit. The New York Times has its list of Notable Books of the Year on its site. There are eight SF/F titles listed under that category. Altered Carbon, Blind Lake, Changing Planes,Evolution, Grass For His Pillow, The Phoenix Exultant, and The Golden Transcendence (one listing), and The X President.
There are also eight more SF/F titles in the main section of the list. Jennifer Government, Lost In A Good Book, The Minotaur Takes A Cigarette Break, Oryx And Crake, Pattern Recognition, Quicksilver, Set This House In Order, and The Songs Of The Kings.
Also on the main list, a number of imaginative fictions dealing with technologies or fantasy elements, that are on the fringe: All Over Creation, The Bug,
Cosmopolis, Long For This World, and Our Lady Of The Forest.
So, what's the difference between these sets, especially sets one and two?
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GabrielM
| | Posted on Saturday, December 06, 2003 - 10:23 pm: | |
That Gerry Jonas reviewed the books for the first set, most probably. |
Neal Stanifer
| | Posted on Sunday, December 07, 2003 - 06:21 am: | |
Nick, graduate reading has kept me out of the bookstores for a while, except when I get a hot tip from a friend, so I'm unfamiliar with most of the titles you list.
I know Jennifer Government is a near-future dystopia, and those have always been problematic, as witness the never-ending debate over 1984 and Brave New World. Likewise, The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break follows the quotidian doings of a creature from Classical mythology, which lets the novel slip from the net of SF/F. As for Lost in a Good Book, the only thing I can think of is that it's partly metafictional, partly mystery, partly SF, so the publishers/critics/reviewers have a little more flexibility about where to place it than they would have if it followed one generic tradition. The rest of these titles, I know too little about to make comment.
If you're asking, however, what these lists say about the borders of genre, I think the answer is complicated. In part, they seem to point to an urge on the part of some reviewers and others to salvage "good" books from the ghetto of SF/F, which is both troubling and promising -- troubling because it indicates the lower position of genre literature in the hierarchy of "good" literature, and promising because it shows that someone out there wants to rescue what good genre literature he or she can by using generic overlap to pull a Fantasy book over into the safe territory of Mythology, for example. Now if we could do away with the need for this kind of special pleading, we'd have something.
Aside from that, the lists demonstrate the fluidity of genre boundaries, as I'm sure you already noticed. This wouldn't be a bad thing at all, if the hierarchy didn't force a prejudice against books written comfortably within genre boundaries.
Anyway, those are my thoughts on the lists, for what they're worth. |
des
| | Posted on Sunday, December 07, 2003 - 06:39 am: | |
Neil in two separate places above:
"and the emptying-out even of authorial presence."
"the fluidity of genre boundaries..."
**********
I'm not sure of the thrust of this discussion - but the above serendipitous extractions say it all for me.
des
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Neal Stanifer
| | Posted on Monday, December 08, 2003 - 09:25 am: | |
What "all" do they say for for you, des?
Beckett was chasing isolation and solipsism as the logical end products of his philosophical pursuits. This is clear in many of his later works, but especially in The Unnamable and Worstward Ho. Beckett foregrounded the artifice of fiction in a way as opposite that of his mentor, Joyce, as he could find to do. Joyce, in Ullyses, layered on as much pertinent material as he could in a text that spans only a single day, and yet tells the stories of lives. In later Beckett, conversely, we find the stripping away of everything that isn't nailed down, and then holes being popped into whatever is left over. The point is clear: we cannot tell the story of a life, even our own, without resort to variously transparent fictions. Why? Because our lives themselves, as we know them, are fictions. Beckett, at some stage, failed to believe in the possibility even of autobiographical representation, as witness the very first lines of The Unnamable: "Where now? Who now? When now? Unquestioning. I, say I. Unbelieving. Questions, hypotheses, call them that. Keep going, going on, call that going, call that on." Or the similar constructions in Worstward Ho, which (like The Unnamable, serves as a culmination of a logical series of three fictional arguments about fiction: "On. Say on. Be said on. Somehow on. Till nohow on. Said nohow on." The progression may seem confusing, but not if we read it as an attempt at a text which denies its own author, its own authority. "I" is an unbelievable fiction, but so is literary/philosophical progress: "No move and sudden all far...Nohow less. Nohow worse. Nohow naught. Nohow on." So is history, both personal and social: "No once in pastless now...Onceless alone the void...Onceless till no more." What Beckett presents isn't an argument for the art-thrust you mention in other posts; it's an evacuation of Self in the crafting of fictions, including fictions of the Self, which (per Beckett) can only be fictions. It's brilliant work, but I'm not sure what it says for you. Ideals are no more approachable than the Self which dreams them up to comfort itself. It's less Platonic than Berkleyan. You'll have to make your claims for yourself, I fear.
As for the fluidity of genre boundaries, this is something I've been arguing since I first stepped foot on these boards. Genre is not indivisible; it is composed of elements which can be mixed and matched. It is conventional and socially constructed, in part by resort to a formalist tradition, in part by that tradition's adaption to colloquial usage, and in part by market forces which privilege some story-telling techniques above others. It isn't a deterministic cage, but it does condition production of literature. This is not an idea which is available to Platonic applications, as you can see.
You might wish to place the "serendipitous extractions" back into context before taking them as proofs for your own points, whatever those might be in this instance. |
des
| | Posted on Monday, December 08, 2003 - 11:29 am: | |
"Serendipitous extractions" (a lovely phrase - used accidentally) are possibly just as valuable as cognitive ones - or certainly in the world of 'brainstorming' I inhabit - and Jung's synchronicity. There is a quote from Beckett's 'The Unnameable' in Nemonymous~1 (2001), as it happens...but no credit for that. It was meant to be. Can you please glance at my 'Proust' postings, Neil, (the latest about two hours ago) on the Interstitial Boards above - as they seem strangely relevant.
I'm just about to read Bishop Berkeley's Theory of Vision & Other Writings. How did you know?
Sorry, (I do mean sorry), I didn't mean to interrupt or divert your discussion with Nick, but thought Boards such as these give great opportunity for constructive splatter-gun punctuating of a dialogue ... with Proustian 'unseen gargoyles'? Des |
Nick Mamatas
| | Posted on Monday, December 08, 2003 - 01:10 pm: | |
No interruptions here -- this is a free-for-all board! Dive on in, Des, please! |
des
| | Posted on Monday, December 08, 2003 - 01:49 pm: | |
Thanks, Nick.
I don’t know (addressing Neil in the main), I’ve led a very ordinary life – and brought kids up, had a career, but, interstitially (I love that word now that I’ve been introduced to it properly – but not as a word for a movement in art), I’ve had this cazy notion of the serendipitous flow of philosophy as music, poetry, instinct, literature, my own manicstream prose, cycles – a notion that has beset my in-between moments for decades. So interstitially (during those in between moments), I started something called The Zeroist Group at University in the sixties, then dabbled in mock-mythologies (Blakean, Lovecraftian) in the seventies, then in Astrology, then in writing horror stories (with some success in the nineties), then Nemonymity … and it all hangs together – but I must live on another planet, because it makes sense to nobody else. I can’t argue with you logically, Neil – I’m not made that way. I just love ideas, words, images, symbols – and I try to brainstorm and give some grist to the mills of boards and mailing lists (now that the internet has come along and seems to suit my manicstream proclivities). I hasten to add that my ideas (formed interstitially) have been fleshed out into things you can touch and read (if not necessarily appreciate) like editions of Nemonymous, plus, recently, a published book collection of a minute proportion of my past (approx) 1500 printed stories. It’s not all up in the air, floating with the Platonic thermals. So, no, I can’t compete with your philosophy, Neil, your rigorous ratiocination, but I hope to put some spokes into its wheels. ;-)
Back on topic. Genres exist in marketing terms. They always will. Business needs labels. So what is all this Interstitiality (not the lovely word, but the imputed Movement) all about? Just another label? Just another idea-spinner (meant to be a money-spinner?). It takes us no further forward. It has created some ricochets here on these Boards, though, and for that I thank the perpetrators of Interstitiality.
Back to Proust now in his cork-lined, yellow-wallpapered room.
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des
| | Posted on Monday, December 08, 2003 - 01:51 pm: | |
Sorry, Neal, for 'Neil' please read 'Neal'. des |
Neal Stanifer
| | Posted on Monday, December 08, 2003 - 02:22 pm: | |
Des, I don't consider your contribution an interruption, either. But let me make sure I understand your position on literature and meaning.
Let's see...
At one point, in another thread, you maintained that we could obtain a better understanding of a text if we ignored its material contexts: the writer's biography, the historical events of the text's time, and so on. At the time, I took this as being a fairly straightforward application of formalist theory. Outdated and blinkered, but not uncommon.
But now it seems the context with which we can dispense has spiraled down into the text itself. Coincidence and misreading (your serendipitous extractions) are as valuable to us as close reading (cognitive extractions). This truly is serendipitous, especially for folks who enjoy taking lines out of context and applying them to claims the original text will never support. Of course, it's not quite so fortunate for the source text itself, which now becomes the breeding ground for its own unmeaning. Sad, in a way, don't you think?
Do you even see the incongruity in these two views you hold simultaneously? Either meaning inheres in the text, or it doesn't. Which side would you like to come down on? |
Neal Stanifer
| | Posted on Monday, December 08, 2003 - 02:24 pm: | |
Seems we're cross-posting. I'll hold my next response until a bit later. Go ahead. |
des
| | Posted on Monday, December 08, 2003 - 10:49 pm: | |
Off to work now (6.45 a.m), so a longer response, perhaps, later. But there seems no contradiction above, where various cherry-pickings of the text (linear as well as non-linear) can interact to give a hidden meaning (occult meaning, without the superstitious implications - much like astrology being straightforward synchronicity rather than mumbojumbo cause-and-effect). But, however you look at it, the 'response' must inhere in the text itself. We have nothing but the text. And some may draw what you consider 'silly' or 'illogical' pickings and others the opposite. Someone may pick both, at different times, different moods, different truths. Seems to be what the 'ethos' of fiction and art should all be about. If not rigorous philosophy or literary criticism.
Later today, after work, a different angle may present itself to me! |
des
| | Posted on Tuesday, December 09, 2003 - 07:37 am: | |
Just back from work now (3.30 pm). One takes a risk writing off the cuff so early in the morning, as I did above. But I actually see what the poor bleary-eyed guy was trying to say! No new angle has presented itself during the day (despite breaking a tooth and having an emergency dental appointment to stir the waters of thought!), but if Neal replies, perhaps a new angle will be born as a result. That is the beauty of these Boards. Guided (and misguided) missiles of extrapolation and brainstorming, punctuated with rigorous philosophy. The rigorous philosophy often informs and affects the extrapolation and brainstorming: my ambition, meanwhile, is for the filter to work both ways.
But what about genres...? ;-) |
Neal Stanifer
| | Posted on Tuesday, December 09, 2003 - 08:10 am: | |
Okay, Des, I'll begin with your penultimate post.
First, your use of "interstitial" (and its forms) demonstrates why I think it's a poor choice of terms for a rigorous discussion of -- well, anything, at this point. It's possible to use the term without defining what the interstices lie between, and that makes the word dangerous. An interstitial "moment," for example, is just a moment. Interstitial writing is just writing which lies outside or between some other recognized categories, stuff that's hard to market within the current system of marketing categories.
But many on these boards have used the term interchangeably with "cross-genre," to the point that it has become a nifty-sounding buzzword and little more. In one sense, as you say, all art is interstitial. It falls between the creator and the viewer. It's meaning is made there, in that negative space of the human canvas. But the same can be said of meaning itself, human agency, your personality, the Word of God, and a host of other climbers on the ladder of abstraction. In another sense, no art is interstitial. It's Art! It's sculpture, or it's drama, or it's painting, or it's ridiculous stacks of televisions and plastic spoons meant to comment in some smug way yet again on the insanity of consumer culture. Art. So what's it fall between?
These are some reasons I said I wanted to steer clear of the term in my first posting on this thread. It's a swampy word, and it needs to be paved before we get much use out of it. Yet at least a few people are enamored of the word precisely because we can make it mean whatever the hell we want it to mean. My boxers are interstitial because they are neither my legs, nor my trousers, but fall somewhere in between. Let's have a revolution; we'll use my boxers as our flag.
On second thought, let's not. They're just boxers, after all, however important they may be to me.
Moving on... You invoke your "ordinary" life as a kind of disqualification. Not sure why. Raising kids is only "ordinary" in the statistical sense; in the specifics, it's anything but. Feel free to use your personal experiences to add proofs to your arguments, Des. I do. My own perspective on academics, for example, is formed at least in part through the lens of my blue-collar background. I've worked in oilfields, potato sheds, hospital kitchens, and a host of McJobs, and I get very angry, very quickly, with people who try to speak for the working classes without being from the working classes, who feel free to co-opt the experiences of others' lives for their own gain. "Hands off me," I say. These are the specifics, and they influence how we think. That's where life is lived -- in the specifics. Of course, even if you were Dick Van Patten in Eight is Enough, I'd hold you to the same standards of rigor to which I'd hold anyone else. To do otherwise would be patronizing, and I don't like to play that game. Academics aren't smarter than other people; they just know different words. Don't be demure, just stand and shoot.
Moving on again...
Your most recent response is confusing. Cherry-picking out of context reveals the occult meanings of a text? And we can arrive at these occult meanings through resort to Jung's notions of synchronicity? And yet "we have nothing but the text itself"? And some cherry-pickings can be "silly" and still reflect "different truths"?
Do you see what a mess you're making for yourself?
If we can make free with Jung, why not with select and silly cherry-pickings of Jung? A misappropriation of the collective unconscious, for example, to prove some point about ethnic diversity and border-crossing. In other words, why can't we do to our can-opener what we do to our cans? And why stop with Jung? Freud is much more well-received, much more influential, and much more popular in the academy. Why not Marx, since we're talking about markets? Why not Schopenhauer, since we were speaking briefly of Beckett?
In fact, why not use the writers and thinkers our authors themselves read to open up the text those writers and thinkers influenced? Why not take it a step further and talk about how those thoughts (and other things going on in the real world at the time of composition) found their way into the text, and what they did to the text and its contemporary reception?
My point here, Des, is that your Jung reference and your celebration of cherry-picking mark you as someone who could do with a vacation from formalism, if only to explore other waters. Context does make a difference, both within the text (as in the case of your cherry-pickings above, which were taken out of context), and without the text, in the working world of literary production. To ignore them is to practice something other than criticism. Bad exegesis, perhaps?
An example: In one part of his novel, White Noise, Don DeLillo presents us with a satirical snapshot of cultural studies academics in the person of his "New York emigres," teachers who conduct classes on car crash movies and the deep meanings of cereal boxes, and who sit around and rudely berate one another about supposedly critical events in common American culture. We could read this as an oddity in DeLillo, confining our attention to the text itself as the sole repository of meaning, or we could use DeLillo's scene as a tool to open up a conversation about perceptions of the worth of cultural studies in general. We can even do both, staying true to the text while invoking its contexts. This last approach seems to me to represent the best route. What do you think? |
Neal Stanifer
| | Posted on Tuesday, December 09, 2003 - 08:31 am: | |
Cross-posted again.
Sorry to hear about your tooth, Des. Sympathies from a guy who once had a root canal, during which the oral surgeon drilled past a dentin blockage and into live, unanesthetized nerve. I tore a piece of upholstery off the arm of his chair. |
des
| | Posted on Tuesday, December 09, 2003 - 08:49 am: | |
Neal: First, your use of "interstitial" (and its forms) demonstrates why I think it's a poor choice of terms for a rigorous discussion
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Agreed.
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Neal: In one sense, as you say, all art is interstitial. It falls between the creator and the viewer.
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Or between deemed realities. But, yes, agreed.
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Neal: My boxers are interstitial because they are neither my legs, nor my trousers, but fall somewhere in between. Let's have a revolution; we'll use my boxers as our flag.
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LOL!!!
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Neal: To do otherwise would be patronizing, and I don't like to play that game. Academics aren't smarter than other people; they just know different words. Don't be demure, just stand and shoot.
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I found your reference earlier on this thread patronising to me:
"At one point, in another thread, you maintained that we could obtain a better understanding of a text if we ignored its material contexts: the writer's biography, the historical events of the text's time, and so on. At the time, I took this as being a fairly straightforward application of formalist theory. Outdated and blinkered, but not uncommon."
especially as I later came up with my position of "three discrete equations" to which I don't think you have yet responded.
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neal: Do you see what a mess you're making for yourself?
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Yes, but it's a mess that may compost new truths. A mulch towards the barricades of rigorous philosophy.
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Neal: This last approach seems to me to represent the best route. What do you think?
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I've never heard of Delillo nor do I understand the point you are making.
This is an instant response (despite cooking dinner for my wife who has just come in) - many would have agonised for ages before replying. But it's interim.
No cross-posting: thanks for your kind thoughts re my tooth. It seems OK now. Cross-posting with myself is often a problem, though. ;-)
des
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Neal Stanifer
| | Posted on Tuesday, December 09, 2003 - 11:35 am: | |
Des, "outdated and blinkered, but not uncommon" was meant to refer to the use of formalist theory in general. Formalism is outdated because it is blinkered, and yet its use (especially and most troublingly by those who refuse to acknowledge their own use of theory in the first place) is not uncommon. Formalism isn't useless, just incomplete. Newer ideas have come along which have proven quite productive, and any methodology (formalism included) suffers from lacunae -- blind spots -- which newer theories seek to fill in.
Des: "it's a mess that may compost new truths. A mulch towards the barricades of rigorous philosophy."
Nice use of imagery, Des, but it misses the point. My question spoke to the direction of your claims. I'll rephrase: "Do you see how your logic is leading you away from a sense that meaning inheres solely in the text? Do you see how following your current path slams the door on formalism forever? Is this really the road you wish to travel?" I just don't want to see you mired down in the manure of illogic on the off-chance that you might find a buried dime.
Des: "I've never heard of Delillo nor do I understand the point you are making."
You've never heard of Don DeLillo? To hell with my point; read some Don DeLillo.
I think you'll not only enjoy his work (the most important consideration), but also gain a new perspective on how art works in the world. DeLillo's sense of aesthetics is powerful, both in the ways he writes his texts, and in the ways he critiques contemporary movements and thinking in art. Not just literature, but the visual arts, sculpture, performance art, photography, the whole shebang. Also, DeLillo has made a career of re-envisioning literary genres, from the Sports Novel in End Zone to the "nonfiction" novel in Libra to the College Novel in White Noise. His oeuvre is a standing testimony to the fact that "literary"/"mainstream" fiction is genre fiction.
I'll whet your appetite with a passage from Mao II. Bill Gray, the reclusive novelist and protagonist of the story, has just met Brita, a photographer who has come to shoot Gray's portrait, something he rarely permits. In this passage, Gray is trying to work on his interminably-postponed novel as Brita prepares to leave.
"He had coffee and a sandwich at his desk. Then tapped on the keys, hearing an old watery moan deep in the body. How the day's first words set off physical alarms, a pule and fret, the resistance of living systems to racking work. Calls for a cigarette, don't you think? He heard them coming down the stairs and pictured them making an effort not to creak, setting their feet down softly, shoulders hunched. Let's not disturb the family fool in the locked room. He didn't know whether she was leaving right away. He thought it would be awkward to see her again. There was nothing to say, was there? They'd only shared a closeness that felt sorry and cheap the minute she walked out of the room. He couldn't clearly recall what he'd said to her but knew it was all wrong, an effusion, a presumption, all the worse for being mainly true. Who was she anyway? Something strong in her face, the rigor of life choice, of what it takes to make your way, a stripped-down force, a settledness, bare but not unwary. He could easily get up from the desk and go to New York and live with her forever in a terrace apartment overloking the park or the river or both. Staring past the keys. Used to be that time rushed down on him when he started a book, time fell and pressed, then lifted when he finished. Now it wasn't lifting. But then he wasn't finished. Live in a large bright apartment with gray sheets on the bed, reading perfumed magazines. There is the epic and bendable space-time of the theoretical physicist, time detached from human experience, the pure curve of nature, and there is the haunted time of the novelist, intimate, pressing, stale and sad. His teeth felt soft today. He needed to sneak to the bedroom and mix up some pink-and-yellow flouride multivitamins and in the meantime let's concentrate on the page, tap a letter, then another. He wanted to fuck her loudly on a hard bed with rain beating on the windows. Please Jesus let me work. Every book is a bug-eyed race, let's face it. Must finish. Can't die yet. He struck enough keys to make a sentence and thought about going down to say goodbye to her but it would only embarrass them both. Got what she came for, didn't she? I'm a picutre now, flat as birdshit on a Buick. He saw he'd inverted two letters, which he's been doing a lot of lately, one of many signs there's something growing on his brain, and he elevated the page and whited out the mistake, then had to wait while the liquid dried. How he punished himself for repeated errors at the machine, eternal misfingerings, how typing mistakes became despair, meaningless flubs bringing a craze to his eyes, and he stared at the white fluid drying and would not resume work until it faded into the page, which was both the punishment and the escape. Her hand on his face, how surprised he'd been to feel so affected by the gesture, the entireness of simple touch. Want to live like other people eating tricolor pasta in trattorias near the park. Always whiting out and typing in. He looked at the sentence, six disconsolate words, and saw the entire book as it took occasional shape in his mind, a neutered near-human dragging through the house, humpbacked, hydrocephalic, with puckered lips and soft skin, dribbling brain fluid from its mouth. Took him all these years to realize this book was his hated adversary. Locked together in the forbidden room, had him in a chokehold. He examined the immense complexity of changing the ribbon. So many pros and cons, alters and egos. He felt it coming and then sneezed onto the page, nicely, noting blood-spotted matter but thin and sparse. He would not dignify it by calling it snot. She likes my anger. Live at the center of the cubist city, Sunday papers spread everywhere and glossy bagels on a plate. I'm between novels, he used to say, so I don't mind dying. The problem with his second wife. But never mind. Live near the museums and the galleries, stand on movie lines, uncork the wines, redo the rooms, sleep in the gray sheets, loving her, ordering out, let's order out tonight, walk the dogs, speak the words, hear the doormen whistle down the cabs, rain beating on the windows." (53-55) |
des
| | Posted on Tuesday, December 09, 2003 - 12:28 pm: | |
Neal: I just don't want to see you mired down in the manure of illogic on the off-chance that you might find a buried dime.
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I see the tendentious change from 'compost' and 'mulch' to 'mired' in 'manure'! Good job I believe in the Intentional Fallacy. Actually, there is a gold coin at the bottom (the one on the front of Nemonymous~3). What's a dime?
Being 'blinkered' is surely in the eye of the beholder. Seeing others blinkered may be the shadow cast by your own blinkers on their face.
Formalism for me is a key to open new areas, not a suffocating obsession. It is liberating. Not hidebound by a million possible contexts.
New methodologies that you claim have replaced Formalism - well may be, or may be not. Every new theory may be the one we're waiting for. But, in the meantime, readers and writers shouldn't hold their breath. They should *simply* read or write *the* text. The only text. The one they're reading or writing.
I need to take time absorbing that text above you kindly reproduce. The same as people should study that Proust text I posted elsewhere yesterday. Just as difficult to read, but no doubt just as rewarding.
Maybe I've not heard of delillo because I live in UK? Soon be time for bed. Gotta get up early tomorrow.
des
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des
| | Posted on Tuesday, December 09, 2003 - 01:29 pm: | |
Neal: "Do you see how your logic is leading you away from a sense that meaning inheres solely in the text? Do you see how following your current path slams the door on formalism forever? Is this really the road you wish to travel?"
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Sorry, I didn't answer this question, though I think I implied the answer above when I said:
"They should *simply* read or write *the* text. The only text. The one they're reading or writing".
And that Formalism represents an opening for me, not a closure.
A parallel to my admittedly non-linear cherry-picking of your earlier text above is, for example, reading contradictions in a poem which (perhaps unintentionally) throw light on its noumenon, a noumenon we may never reach, *will* never reach, but is there nevertheless. Those contradictions are in the text (for this particular reader), even if they were not in the poet's mind. In the text. Nowhere else. And to remind you of my 'three discrete equations':
1) Fiction/Poem = Original Text placed in the audience arena
(2) What can be taken from or given to the text = reader's 'opinion' or 'reaction' (manifold opinions and reactions, all different).
(3) The nearer one is able to reach towards the noumenon of the text, the more one can shuffle off the variably misleading and unknowable historical, biographical, critical, academic extrapolations from the text = my opinion.
I'd just add a fourth:
(4) Poet/Author of Fiction/Poem in (1) above = Just another reader
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Neal Stanifer
| | Posted on Tuesday, December 09, 2003 - 02:05 pm: | |
Des: "Seeing others blinkered may be the shadow cast by your own blinkers on their face."
Quite so. As I said, all theories have lacunae. That's why it pays to have recourse to more than one way of approaching a text. Formalism is included in that group, but it has been forced in the past...oh...three or four decades to step down from Mount Olympus, remove its mask of tragedy, and take its rightful place in the satyr play. It can "swell a progress, start a scene or two," but it is not "Prince Hamlet," if you take my meaning.
Des: "They should *simply* read or write *the* text. The only text. The one they're reading or writing."
Good to see you come down off that fence, Des; I saw you teetering there, and I began to worry. So we'll just line-out all that Jungian hocus-pocus, then, shall we? After all, the writings of Jung are extratextual to everything but Jung. Even if the writer of our Text was a Jung scholar, we shouldn't go prying into his influences; it might muddy the appreciation of the Text as it exists.
You see the problem with ignoring context? Eventually, I have to begin to ignore much of what I know. Otherwise, I'm making arbitrary exceptions for particular bits of knowledge. Why not instead celebrate knowledge? Why not instead celebrate and explore context?
Contexts are not confining unless we make them so. The beauty of having multiple directions from which to approach a text is that we can escape a linear tradition which might be confining us (and shutting out genre, which is what most people here write in the final analysis). We can talk, if we care to do so, about whether or not a text is designed to speak to a particular class or gender or region. We can talk, if we dare, about the workings-out of psychological patterns in the narrative of a text. We can talk about opportunities for -- and works of -- writers in some way other than simply to say "Good books rise above the dross," because this is patently historically untrue and emerges from a classist understanding of literature which presumes the tastes of those who control the critical presses are the tastes to which we must aspire if we wish to write "good" books. Bollocks and more bollocks.
If my opening example of Charles W. Chesnutt illustrates nothing else, it illustrates the ways in which writers' positions in a literary market are conditioned (though not fully determined) by the way the market works at any given time and in any given place. This is all context, but it matters. It matters because it speaks to the arbitrary standard of "quality," which means more than the formalist handling of prose. It also means subject matter, tone, and character. So you're writing something really good, are you? Says who? Are you writing what people are buying? Who are the people who are doing the buying? This is not theoretical nonsense, but the difference between being published and going unread, between being a writer and being someone who wrote something once.
To look at it in another way, much has been made recently about ethnic literature, literatures of difference, literature which crosses borders, and all that. To listen to the hype with an uncritical ear, one might think the subaltern classes/ethnicities had finally found their voice, that we were finally hearing from a wholly new part of the public. But nothing could be more steeped in rank horseshit. What we are seeing, in most cases, is nearly-standard stories by people who are different only in ways which specifically exclude class. What we are seeing, in some cases, is the kind of border-crossing which amounts to moving from one corner of the literary market to another and then singing out "We have arrived! We have overcome!" to no one in particular. What we are seeing, by and large, is yet more middle-class drama, but with a very slight difference, and that difference being the kind of pandering which permits middle-class audiences to feel good about being open-minded while stepping past the transient on the corner or walking more swiftly past the black man on the street or peeping touristically into a gay bar and boasting about it later. It's a lie, and a dangerous lie. But hey, it really makes us feel good to be so open-minded, doesn't it?
To take this back to my example of Chesnutt, he was formed as a published writer in a publishing environment which lionized a kind of pandering quite similar to that we're seeing today. Like his white fellow writers, he served up diverting tales of "difference," of local settings and habits alien to his mostly northeastern, mostly affluent, mostly white audience. His stories were a substitute for experience, and a welcome substitute at that. After all, reading a description of a sewer is better than stepping in shit, right? He saw this himself, and lashed out, as I've said. He knew the stories he was telling weren't his to tell. He knew he had truer stories to tell. He tried to tell those stories. America didn't stop and listen; it stopped its ears and moved on, and today we find ourselves back in a similar position, celebrating middle-class people who serve up slightly-differenced versions of comfortable fictions.
You will not arrive at these conclusions through formalism, concerned as it is with the end product of a writer's efforts and experiences. You can perform a formalist close reading on a text to arrive at conclusions about how different writers handle (e.g.) issues of setting and dialogue. But to go beyond this, to get into the meat of the work of writing, you need other tools in your toolbox besides formalism.
Enough for now, except to say that yes, your living in the U.K. probably has a lot to do with why you don't recognize Don DeLillo. He writes about American experiences. Nevertheless, you should check him out. I think you'll discover a writer worth your time and attention. And if I can make heads or tails out of Julian Barnes, a Brit aught to be able to handle DeLillo. Also, understand that I am American, born and raised, and am subject to the kinds of false synecdoche to which many Americans are subject. In other words, if I say "the world," it probably means the United States and parts of Canada. I'm working on mending this, but I ask patience while I do so. |
barth
| | Posted on Tuesday, December 09, 2003 - 02:08 pm: | |
>But doing away with genre is neither possible, nor desirable.<
this statement, from neal's first post long ago, has been bugging me for days. and i. can't. ignore. it. any. more...!
this statement puts you in the very same bind, neal, that you accuse interstitality of being in, namely, that anything can be interstitial (most notably, your underpants!). the above statement, and the post as a whole, makes it sound as if Genre were a deterministic entity, that all creative endeavors, using its conventions overtly or otherwise, flow from a given genre's fount. the old testament is magical realism, the new testament is crime fiction, moby dick is a sea romance, frida kahlo is a surrealist. neal's boxers are horror. end of story.
i think part of my problem with your argument is that, in defining genre, you conflate its economic and aesthetic functions. by merging modern capitalist publishing forces with far older traditions as the basis of your argument, it leads you to a kind of naturalistic fallacy: the tools of genre-writing must have originated in the genre, and must consequently inform all writing employing these tools. it doesn't work that way, obviously, and this is where your chestnutt example doesn't quite apply either. his genre was very much a product of his time (right?), without ancient traditions bearing on his creative choices. conversely, because the tools of "fantasy" (magic, ghosts, auras, elves, etc) are far older than the modern-day, economic fantasy market and its concerns, it's quite possible to write a story with ghosts in it without it being a response to the genre-as-market. ask salman rushdie. he would say that the very idea of a fantasy genre that feeds both himself and, say, charles de lint is totally erroneous and that lumping them together is helpful only to lit-crit theorists.
furthermore, this conflation doesn't account for avant-gard writers who do not share chestnutt's economic motives when writing. readers (the providers of a given genre's capital) have certain expectations that avant-gard writers can choose to ignore. by refusing to play by the genre's aesthetic *and* economic concerns, the genre certainly can be done away with on a microcosmic scale, and many writers on these very boards do away with it frequently.
it's not that genre is bad, mean or even disinterested, it's just that a genre discussion of writers like vukcevich, fowler, vandermeer, wexler, even mamatas are ultimately limited and uninteresting, and devolve down roads where cranks sit on their porches with guns and pick off "mainstream" writers who trespass on genre yards.
genre also limits discussing writers who write "genre" style fiction without a whit of concern as to whether genre readers, editors or lit-critics lump them in with a genre or not. louise erdrich. alice walker. toni morrison. you can make the case that the genre's tools are at play in the stories of these writers if you must, but at best its irrelevant to them, and at worst, it's like saying that bats are birds.
now, for my money, this is where interstitiality will eventually find purchase (i agree - it's not an effective word yet and another term/theory may take its place - c'est la vie), because we could use a workable language right now for literature that defies readerly expectations of "genre", and which may not fit into either marketing or critical genre categories. personally, i'm convinced that there's a very accepting readership out there that's willing to read ANY good writing, but that an obsessive taxonomy has made a byzantine language of fantastic/speculative literature (urban fantasy, contemporary fantasy, steampunk, slipstream, etc etc etc), along with a kabuki-like obsession with traditonal genre gestures, making it daunting for the curious and sympathetic reader to find inroads.
some enterprising publisher is going to figure out how to reach this readership, and when that happens, genre labeling will be abandoned in favor of, to quote jeff vandermeer, the word "fiction." |
Neal Stanifer
| | Posted on Tuesday, December 09, 2003 - 02:38 pm: | |
Again. Cross-posted again. I thought you had a dinner to cook or something, or were toddling off to bed. Jeez Louise!
Anyway, to business...
Des: "A parallel to my admittedly non-linear cherry-picking of your earlier text above is, for example, reading contradictions in a poem which (perhaps unintentionally) throw light on its noumenon"
I'll follow your example and number my points. I find it makes them seem more authoritative, don't you?
1. Your cherry-picking was not non-linear, it was out-of-context. Familiarity with the context would have, given some effort, resolved conflicts of meaning for you. Not to say I never contradict myself, but that wasn't the case here.
2. Pending proof of its existence, I reject the "noumenon" on its face as a puffery of mysticism meant to render latter-day Platonism more palatable to those who wish to seem philosophical.
Moving on...
Des: "Fiction/Poem = Original Text placed in the audience arena"
I would never place a text in an arena. I would be afraid the bull would render the text unreadable, and probably wouldn't understand the textual nuances in the first place.
Be that as it may, I'm glad you've emended your thinking to account in some small way for the existence of the audience. The audience is pretty durn important, I find. Now we'll work on getting you to include other terms in your definition of fiction, such as concepts of historicity, interpretation, and so on.
Des: "What can be taken from or given to the text = reader's 'opinion' or 'reaction' (manifold opinions and reactions, all different)."
All argument is opinion supported by evidence. All fictional text argues and gives evidence for a particular view of human nature, or the nature of reality, or both. All arguments are compelling to the degree that they convince us of their validity and truth. One opinion is not as good as another; some opinions are patently bullshit, and some opinions change our lives. Readers' opinions must be backed with textual and contextual evidence to prove compelling, as must the writer's text. Vroom! Now we're getting somewhere.
Des: "The nearer one is able to reach towards the noumenon of the text, the more one can shuffle off the variably misleading and unknowable historical, biographical, critical, academic extrapolations from the text = my opinion."
Again, until some evidence of this "noumenon" can be produced, or until your reason can make a strong case for its existence, I am forced to discount this on its face. If we were both idealists, things might be different. But I believe that context makes a difference, and that the noumenon is a polite elitist fantasy.
Des: "Poet/Author of Fiction/Poem in (1) above = Just another reader"
Nonsense. The writer is not merely the vessel of some mythic art-urge, some Platonic coming-into-being of a thing which is always-already perfected. This idea falls flat the moment we get down to particular cases, as you can surely see. Some stories read better to us than others. Some writers must work harder than others. Some stories never find their market. To take seriously this notion of an artistic urge forcing itself through the writer is to discount writer, work, market, and all. It's candy-cane fantasy-land with a toga draped over it for show. More than that, it's plain insulting to anyone who's ever sweated over a text, whether it's been accepted or not. Try harder, Des. |
Neal Stanifer
| | Posted on Tuesday, December 09, 2003 - 02:41 pm: | |
barth, welcome aboard. I'm going to take some time to consider what you've said, and I'll get back to you. Time to eat food now. |
Neal Stanifer
| | Posted on Tuesday, December 09, 2003 - 04:24 pm: | |
Barth: "the above statement, and the post as a whole, makes it sound as if Genre were a deterministic entity."
I've said several times on this thread and others that genre (in its guise as marketing categories) is a conditioning, not a deterministic, consideration. The idea of what stories may be told is "conditioned," not "determined," by genre. The notion that doing away with genre is neither possible nor desirable reflects first the fact that genre (in its academic application) is an after-the-fact collection of various narratives under a single heading within generic parameters, and also (in its print-culture sense) that genre expectations are generative, that they provide a roadmap for those who would serve a reading public with product which meets that public's expectations. I know this isn't fashionable, but it's one way money is made by writers. Agreed?
And my objection to "interstitiality" resides in that term's ambiguity, not its range of application. "Genre" is a bit ambiguous, but it is hardly so variously available -- and thus so meaningless -- as "interstitiality." And by the way, my boxers are hardly horror; they are erotic romance.
As for conflating genre's aesthetic and economic functions, I've tried not to do that. I've confined my examinations of the economic workings of genre to historical periods in which generic identities emerged and were carried on in a capitalist economy of printed product. I've done this because I'm less concerned with the deep roots of genre than with how those roots feed into trees that affect all of us, readers and writers together. So the naturalistic fallacy is not organic to my argument. Rather, I've pointed to precedents of generic identity which might have influenced mass-market publications (Scott possibly influencing Chesnutt, for example), but left such phenomena as circulated manuscripts, closet drama, and ecclesiastical transcription alone.
Chesnutt's genre, by the way, was hardly solely a product of his time. It had antecedants, as do all genres, and it had descendants, as do all genres fortunate enough to survive. It's a continuum. Genre changes more often by evolution than by revolution.
The case of Salman Rushdie is a good point to bring up. Of course, it would be foolish to argue an identical precedent between him and Charles de Lint. That's why I tried on other threads (of which this is an outgrowth) to distinguish between genre and marketing category. You've hit upon the best reason for keeping the two distinct. Rushdie's generic influences might not be the same as Charles de Lint's, but a strong case could be made that they should share a marketing category.
Your point about writers choosing to ignore readers' generic expectations oversimplifies readers' expectations in the same ways marketing categories do. Readers expect a lot of things. If we choose to ignore one set of generic expectations, what does that mean? That we're ignoring them all? Then where are our forms and images coming from? From which traditions are we drawing? Are we starting a new tradition from whole cloth? I'm not sure I go along with this. Then again, I don't require revolutions to get excited about text. A good story is enough for me, and nice handling of prose is icing on the cake.
In reference to your point that locating Toni Morrison, Louise Erdrich, and Alice Walker within a genre is irrelevant, I would ask, simply, "Irrelevant to whom?" To Toni Morrison, the author of Playing in the Dark? Hardly. I'm not sure exactly whom you're speaking for when you use the word "irrelevant," or what application of genre you're addressing.
Finally, as to your last paragraph, I'm not sure what to do with it. You say you think "interstitial" might find purchase, yet you acknowledge it isn't an effective word. You argue that it could defy readerly expectations of genre. I confess I don't see how that's possible. It's a weak word. Most people don't know what it means, even if they have ready access to a dictionary. And it seems to be angling toward some exceptionalist privileging of what is essentially genre writing.
Wouldn't it be much better to browbeat the living crap out of reviewers, make them shit in their pants, and carve a space in the papers of record for genre literature? I think it would be more productive than giving the halfwits yet another reason to dismiss genre writing on its face.
I know I haven't answered all your objections here, but I'm short on time. If you'd like me to go more deeply into something I've said, or something I've left out, let me know. |
Nick Mamatas
| | Posted on Tuesday, December 09, 2003 - 06:01 pm: | |
Rushdie's generic influences might not be the same as Charles de Lint's, but a strong case could be made that they should share a marketing category.
I'd put this upside down. Rushdie's marketing category isn't the same as de Lint's at all. Only one gets his pictures in the paper, for instance, or is considered a public intellectual of sorts. Only one has little Rolling Rock faries on his book covers. Only one rather transparently has developed a pseudo-bohemian setting (an aging hippie's ghost dance) that his "fans" are invited to "feel comfortable" in.
They're certainly not on the same shelf, aren't sold in the same numbers, aren't reviewed in the same venues, etc.
Their genres, one the other hand, seem to be more similar to me.
|
des
| | Posted on Tuesday, December 09, 2003 - 10:49 pm: | |
Neal said: it's plain insulting to anyone who's ever sweated over a text, whether it's been accepted or not. Try harder, Des.
***********
You miss my point, Neal. No comment was made on the skill or othewise of the writer. Or trying hard or not. Merely, I meant that once the work is finished and placed in the arena, the writer has no more right to describe, interpret, evaluate the text than any other reader.
And everybody's opininon is valuable to me. I don't initially assume that some are 'bullshit'.
I'll talk about genres later.
Des (in haste)
|
Neal Stanifer
| | Posted on Wednesday, December 10, 2003 - 05:29 am: | |
Nick -- Point taken. If genre were the same as marketing category, De Lint and Rushdie would be kept apart only by the exigencies of the alphabet. Genre is not the same as marketing category.
Des --Gotcha. We're back to intentional fallacy again, then. The writer cannot govern our interpretation of his or her text once it has become a commodity. I agree. But the way you posted your points made it sound to me as though the Text was going to get written, will we or nill we, and that the writer was just some sort of channeler of the art-thrust. Glad to hear you don't endorse that notion.
And I didn't suggest that we should "initially assume" some opinions are bullshit. I stated that some opinions ARE bullshit. This is the case regardless what we initially assume, or how polite, egalitarian, and open-minded we are pleased to make ourselves appear. Those who find enjoyment in entertaining the ravings of idiots are welcome to fritter away their hours; I don't find it productive. |
Neal Stanifer
| | Posted on Wednesday, December 10, 2003 - 09:05 am: | |
Barth, I've been thinking over some of the things you said in your post. You understood me to be saying that "the tools of genre-writing must have originated in the genre, and must consequently inform all writing employing these tools."
Not exactly. The tools of genre writing are exemplified in works located within a genre, sure. But those tools don't necessarily originate with the genre. In fact, in many (though not all) cases, a genre is just an arbitrary name for works which employ a certain arrangement of elements, many of which have their origins somewhere in the dim past or in other genres altogether. Furthermore, generic nomenclature is deliberative in that it is (or should be) always open to revision, so what constitutes (e.g.) the Gothic can change over time, sometimes because a writer such as Toni Morrison writes something which argues for its own inclusion in the genre, and sometimes because a theorist or critic convincingly argues for a reconstituted set of generic parameters. Genre is in play, as are its elements.
Then, too, genre is scalable, ranging from broad classifications such as Fiction, to mid-level terms such as Romance, down to picky distinctions such as Magic Realism. Magic Realism is a genre which draws upon a Romance tradition of presenting the unreal as lived reality. But then, so is the Gothic. So is Sword-and-Sorcery. So is Science Fiction, whether "hard" or skiffy. These are not the same genres, though they share a similar link to the Romance tradition and can easily overlap.
You point out that "it's quite possible to write a story with ghosts in it without it being a response to the genre-as-market." If you mean, without the author intending to tackle generic-identity issues, sure, I'll agree with that. But a story with ghosts in it is going to be viewed alongside other stories with ghosts in them regardless what the writer is or is not responding to. Thus, the story itself, by its inclusion of a ghost, is going to constitute a response of some kind.
Concerning your "very accepting readership" which consumes "good" fiction regardless of its genre, I think you're absolutely right. They're out there. I'm one of them, and I know several others. As for the "enterprising publishers" who are likely to find them, I think we're seeing some productive approaches to that already with all-story magazines like Argosy coming back into vogue and anthos like McSweeney's hitting the stands. Seems to me both the readership and the entrepreneurial machinery are in place; the task remains to bring them together. If the IAF can do that, more power to them.
As for Jeff's favoring of the term "fiction" as a replacement for marketing categories, I think that's a bit Utopian. It would probably do all kinds of good things for genre writers looking to break away from unfortunate associations with their less-talented and less-original shelfmates, or to rid themselves of unjust prejudices associated with genre. I just don't see the publishers and booksellers ridding their lexicons of what are really useful marketing categories. Some people shop by section. These people are not always looking for a particular book, but any book which fits their current desire for reasonably predictable printed entertainment. These people spend a lot of money. These people will probably ensure the continued existence of the marketing categories they patronize. |
barth
| | Posted on Wednesday, December 10, 2003 - 09:19 am: | |
nick said:
>Rushdie's marketing category isn't the same as de Lint's at all.<
and
>Their genres, one the other hand, seem to be more similar to me.<
then neal was forced to relent:
>Genre is not the same as marketing category.<
i think this is the trap that the dialog on "interstitiality" is falling into: here and elsewhere, people are confusing these two uses of the word "genre." to many writers, genre refers to "market," whereas to neal and many others, genre means something broader, historical, and retrospective in scope. for example, when i say that i write outside genre, to me it means, i write fiction that's hard to place in the available markets. to neal, that sounds like absurd arrogance, that i would say i write anything totally new of "whole cloth."
for me, i don't mind using the word "interstitial." i share your problems with the term, but as a writer who frequently gets reviews like "i don't know how to describe this story," i need some damn short-hand to describe both difficult-to-categorize fiction and my desire to write outside the box.
neal also said:
"genre expectations are generative...they provide a roadmap for those who would serve a reading public with product which meets that public's expectations. I know this isn't fashionable, but it's one way money is made by writers. Agreed?"
it's a good description, yes, and i think we're getting close to an avalanche of agreement. but let me jeopardize that by asking you this. if genre expectations are a map for those who would "serve a reading public with product," then how do you classify writers who *don't* serve up the expected product? are they writing outside the genre? if they deliberately use genre tropes and gestures, but still don't serve up what the readership expects, how are we to talk about these writers and their fiction? from a lit-critical vantage, i agree, we should lump these writers in the same "genre" as the one they're riffing on. but how are reviewers, readers, buyers to spread the word about such strange stories without describing the entire publishing landscape and its recent history in order to place the fiction in some sort of context?
(aside: erotic romance. huh boy!) |
barth
| | Posted on Wednesday, December 10, 2003 - 09:22 am: | |
we cross-posted. i agree practically everything you said in that last post. |
Nick Mamatas
| | Posted on Wednesday, December 10, 2003 - 10:39 am: | |
Okay, here's my issue, Barth.
From my reading of both texts said to be interstitial and related material trying to explain interstitial, I don't buy the claims.
I don't buy that the majority of the stuff declared interstitial is so far outside of genre boundaries as to fall in between them. I think that majority of the stuff listed so far fits within genre very neatly, as a matter of fact. I don't think a fantasy with a love story in it is just that friggin' amazing. I don't think a Raymond Carver story where the frumpy housewife flies away at the end is something I should shit myself in pure awe over.
I think the majority of the related material shows that to be true as well. For example:
1. lists of markets for interstitial work compiled on another board includes Asimov's for Christ's sake. The second one points to the hardcore of the genre as a good place to find the fringe, one has demonstrated that one's map is fucked up.
2. The list of interstitial authors includes regular award- nominees. The list of interstital books includes books published by Big 6 publishers that have sold well enough to keep their writers publishing. If this stuff is falling into cracks, it is falling into cracks that happen to be full of readers with money in their pockets.
3. The interest in interstitiality and market-jumping is decidedly one-sided. SF people want to be in the bigger magazines and published by the more prestigious imprints of whatever Kulturebeast they've indentured themselves to. And yet, the people who are already doing this -- the Rushdies, Saunderses, Selfs, etc., don't seem to be tossing and turning in their sleep over the fact that they'll never be the Guest of Honor at Beaniecon.
This leads to my ultimate heresy: by my eyes the SFnal stuff published in Asimov's is not as entertaining and interesting a read as the SFnal stuff occasionally published in the New Yorker. The eight SFnal books that appeared in the mainstream section of the Times Notables Books section are more entertaining and interesting to me than the eight that appeared in the SF section. I'm not saying that the market is always an arbiter of quality, I'm just saying that in my reading, Will Self is a better writer than Nick Mamatas, which explains why he has a broader choice of markets than I do more handily than anything else.
Ultimately, much of the noise being made by the interstitialists sounds to me like the 92nd percentile fuming over not being in the 99th percentile. "Vassar? But Daddy, I wanted to go to Brown!"
Well, did they even apply to Brown in the first place? |
Neal Stanifer
| | Posted on Wednesday, December 10, 2003 - 10:49 am: | |
Barth: "here and elsewhere, people are confusing these two uses of the word 'genre.'"
Right. I've tried to avoid this from the beginning, and to argue for clarity of terms. Far from "relenting," I was simply repeating an assertion which seems to have become a rather monotonous refrain in my postings.
Three meanings of Genre (so far):
Genre = formalist set of parameters and elements of storytelling useful in discussions and comparisons of extant works of literature.
Genre = marketing classification designed to subdivide literature into separate markets, the better to unite printed product with prospective consumers.
Genre = a general term refering to any literature not considered Literary or Mainstream, often with the sense that "genre" literature is formulaic.
Barth: "to neal, that sounds like absurd arrogance, that i would say i write anything totally new of 'whole cloth.'"
Writing something new and difficult to market is not creating from whole cloth; it's writing something new and difficult to market. We all write something new, to one degree or another, unless we're inveterate plagiarists. What I'm wary of, though, are claims about the "interstitiality" of fictional works, which by Fenkl's usage means fiction which is explicitly not cross-genre, but utterly uncategorizable. Thing is, if it's got fantastical elements, it will probably end up in the SF/F section, and if it doesn't, well, there are other places to put it. I know that's overly simplistic, but to me, "interstitiality" is unnecessarily complex.
Barth: "if genre expectations are a map for those who would "serve a reading public with product," then how do you classify writers who *don't* serve up the expected product?"
I call them writers. It's the business of writers to offer something surprising, and most readers expect to encounter the unexpected. In this sense, those who DON'T serve up the expected product ARE serving up the expected product. And as I've insisted from the beginning, the tools are just that -- tools. As to whether your hypothetical writers are writing outside genre, my first impulse is to say "no," though they could be writing something which is damned hard to market. But give me an example so I'll have something to base my judgment on.
Barth: "from a lit-critical vantage, i agree, we should lump these writers in the same "genre" as the one they're riffing on. but how are reviewers, readers, buyers to spread the word about such strange stories without describing the entire publishing landscape and its recent history in order to place the fiction in some sort of context?"
This is hard to answer without concrete examples. But surely there are ways to describe a text without resorting to high-concept constructions. This is one instance in which "interstitial" would seem to me counter-productive. If I were a reviewer who received a text described as "interstitial," I'd first think "How pompous that sounds," and I'd next ask, "Interstitial between what and what?"
One last thing. You imply there is some difference between writers who write comfortably within a genre, and writers who "riff" on a genre. I agree, though I'm not sure the "riffer" deserves to escape scot-free. Then again, I think I have less tolerance for an exceptional view of "metaphoric" or "ironic" uses of genre elements than do my hipper friends. The way I see it, if you want to go slumming in SF/F, be prepared to be awarded citizenship. |
David Moles
| | Posted on Wednesday, December 10, 2003 - 01:52 pm: | |
It's ten years since my brief dalliance with genre theory, but it seems to me like there's a couple of things going on here.
One is the perennial SF complaint that Vintage publishes ghosts and soldiers and detectives and lovesick housewives, but not elves or spaceships. I think that's less true than it used to be, but there's still some validity to it -- I think there's still a line that lit/fic won't cross, though it's a lot farther into SF territory than it used to be. (And, too, the territory's more multidimensional than it used to be.) Whether pushing "interstitial" is going to fix that problem or just provide another distraction from it I don't know; my guess is that SF writers will just continue to quietly slip over into the lit/fic section one at a time, in the manner of Lethem and Fowler -- at the same time their books become less and less overtly SFnal.
The other is the issue of reader perception, the dysfunctional relationship between reader expectations and marketing categories and the relationship (more interesting to me, personally, but probably less relevant in the long run) between genre markings and reading protocols. From a reader's point of view, there are times when it would be nice to be able to walk into a bookstore and know where to go to find more stuff like -- say -- Bakis, Borges, Calvino, Eco, Fowler, Lethem, Link and McHugh. (I just came up with that hypothetical genre off the top of my head, so don't dig too deeply into it, but that's kinda-sorta what comes into my head when someone says "interstitial". Minneapolis School urban fantasy, on the other hand, for me is clearly in the fantasy genre.)
Try to construct that new marketing category, though, and you run into the problem of where to draw the line; especially difficult when all your friends want to join.
|
Trent
| | Posted on Thursday, December 11, 2003 - 01:37 am: | |
Great topic, guys.
Neal,
I'm fascinated by your posts--eloquent and well reasoned. I can, however, think of one instance where des has a slight edge: this "noumenon." I believe this is the territory that John Ashbery was trying to map: the unconscious, I suppose (as opposed to subconscious, which I believe most literary writers--in or out of the genre--already work in). You can never quite put you finger on it, but you can feel it means... something. His more accessible poems I actually prefer as they become raised into the subconscious. But there's always a foggy pane between the words and their accumulated meaning.
Nick,
Interesting points. However, Raymond Carver's frumpy housewives are another matter. I can't really think of a more important writer in the last twenty years or so. You don't have to like Carver, but he's probably someone like Hemingway: someone you should be familiar with for his achievement, familiar enough to almost shit your pants, if not quite.
New and wonderful events aren't what's important. You could sit a thousand excellent writers down to watch the same event and come up with a thousand completely wonderful stories.
First off, he (along with Gordon Lish) redefined the way we think with a bold new style: minimalism--a style that flies in the face of bland wisdom. He was one of the few who actually made it new. How many writers actually change the way people think with their style? Damned few.
Second, there's an intellectual depth that goes beyond the prose: layers missing in much genre fiction, layers that SHOULD and COULD be in genre.
For example (from "So Much Water So Close To Home," a frumpy housewife story):
" 'I give up,' he says and raises his hands. He pushes his chair away from the table, takes his cigarettes and goes out to the patio with a can of beer. He walks back and forth for a minute and then sits in a lawn chair and picks up the paper once more. His name is there on the first page along with the names of his friends, the other men who made the 'grisly find.' "
Flat prose? Bullshit knee-jerk wisdom from the kind of people who have ossified rules of the game. If you have ossified rules, that means you're a fossil. Carver no doubt got rejected numerous times until some genius recognized what he was up to. No matter. We've got him now.
1. The actions reflect a man who is nervous as hell, whose mind is preoccupied, who "gives up" verbally but still cannot let it go as much as he'd like to by saying the words.
2. This is the frumpy housewife's perspective, not the man's. She's the one picking out the details. This becomes more and more important as the story moves along.
Aw, crap. Looks like I shat my pants. |
barth
| | Posted on Thursday, December 11, 2003 - 05:48 am: | |
sorry about the delay in responding. snow. shoveling. my house is on a corner lot and the damn ploughs filled in my drive. you get the picture.
nick,
the IAF's biggest misstep has been serving their dinner before the soup was ready, i.e., creating the discussion board here without first defining their own goals to the public at large. as a result, the boards themselves seem to be what the IAF is about, and that's become a mess of tangled opinions and arguments. asimov's as an interstital market? yeah, that's certainly confusing. i wonder if that was said by an IAF member or a random poster? anyway, once the final IAF website goes up, i really hope people will get a clearer picture of what the IAF envisions for itself.
as for your other points, sure there are award winners and out-and-out fantasy writers on the IAF's who's who. so what? if it matters to you that only interstitial writers push interstitial fiction and art, then yeah, the IAF isn't your organization. for me, i don't see irony in anyone promoting art, except maybe, republicans. what's more, the IAF has approached the ratbastards to join their efforts, and while i'm not entirely sure what we'll do for them or they'll do for us, it's a match that makes sense to me, since we promote the work of difficult to classify artwork too. promotion. marketing. reviewing. these are words used by the IAF that matter to me, so for now, i'm willing to ride this bus to the end of the line and see what happens.
anyhoo. more shoveling looms. plus i feel like i'm preaching to a crowd that's already made up its mind on this topic, so i think i'm going to shake hands and bow out now. thanks for the discussion, gentlemen. it's helped hone my own arguments, and i appreciate that. |
Nick Mamatas
| | Posted on Thursday, December 11, 2003 - 08:43 am: | |
Trent, I find your commentary utterly perplexing. You seem to think that I either have no knowledge of or no appreciation for Carver based on a comment I made about another sort of story together. If you just wanted to hold forth on how neat minimalism is, that's great. This thread is designed to be a free-for-all, so feel free to do what you like on it.
But, it sounds to me like you made a series of assumptions about me and what I like that you shouldn't have. What I'm saying is that a story written in the minimalist mode with a fantastic conclusion isn't some stellar achievement. It is a fairly cheap trick. Hell, it's a cheap trick I've performed for a cool grand from a slick earlier this year.
Barth, the Asimov's comment wasn't made by an IAF member, but it also wasn't made by a "random poster" -- we should give people generally more credit than that, especially since IAF has claimed that they want their board to generate ideas (whether they administrate their boards or intervene on others in a way that makes such a thing likely is another story).
Regardless of the poster, it seems to be a true statement, regardless of who said it, given the bibliographies of members of the IAF working group and what they've published in Asimov's. And certainly once we include the Rushdies and the Selfs, we see that the hardcore of the literary mainstream also showcases interstitial works fairly frequently. So, what's to get hepped up about?
if it matters to you that only interstitial writers push interstitial fiction and art, then yeah, the IAF isn't your organization.
On the contrary, it is that only certain interstitial writers (as the IAF seems to be using the term) are promoting their own interstitial works and those of their pals. The claim they seem to be making is that their work fell through the cracks because of the interstitiality of those works. The problem is that many works we can label interstitial have succeeded greatly, and have done far better than the usual genre work in gaining a large audience. Naturally, once one has Rushdie-levels of success, one may not care so much about improper marketing...it's working for him just fine after all.
So, this tells me that interstitiality isn't necessarily the reason why the books IAF claims as market failures have failed -- and failure is defined here as only getting into Vassar and not Brown. We're not talking the vocational course of self-published chapbooks anymore.
What could these reasons be then?
1. Markets fail generally and often. Exhibit A: a billion malnourished people on the same planet where millions of tons of food is destroyed, stored, or never grown at all each year in order to keep prices high and agribusiness profitable. In our local teapot, a similar tempest has kept Memories of My Ghost Brother from becoming as popular as The Bonesetter's Daughter. Oddly enough, I can still sleep at night.
2. The authors failed in career positioning somehow. A failure of seller information rather than a market failure. Can an academic foundation be the way to sell books in a for-profit market and reclaim a career? Eh, there's a first time for everything...
3. An attribute other than interstitialty intrinsic to the stories has led to the disgrace of being accepted to Vassar and not Brown. Perhaps the stories were not interstitial enough, or wrongly interstitial and thus fell into the cracks between two discordonant genres (historical romance and fantasy are read for different reasons, I'd contend). Perhaps they'll simply end up being the literary equivalent of the Velvet Underground: almost nobody bought their records but everyone who did started a band, some of which became very popular. There are worse fates.
4. Pure middle-class entitlement gone haywire. Shirtless drunks aren't the only ones who find themselves punching the night air and howling "YA'LL THINK YER BETTER 'N ME? WELL YA AIN'T! YA AIN'T!" to a brace of bored police officers before falling into a pool of their own vomit and going to sleep. Perhaps markets work quite well after all and our interstitial writers got into Vassar but not Brown simply because their stuff wasn't as good as the stuff that did get into Brown.
I'm sure it's a mix of all four reasons above, plus instances of work really falling in between cracks. But who can tell? With the theoretical tools at hand (in inappropriate word, a self-contradictory theory) and the practical tools (an SF-only cadre, a notional webpage, a discussion board whose policies seem designed to stymie discussion), I don't think anyone is capable of coming up with useful answers. This isn't a problem of the gap between theory and practice, but a failure of both theory and practice. A preliminary assessment? Sure. But I've chewed the roast and found it wanting, so the soup course is going to have to be the best soup ever to make up for it.
|
Neal Stanifer
| | Posted on Thursday, December 11, 2003 - 01:23 pm: | |
Barth: "promotion. marketing. reviewing. these are words used by the IAF that matter to me, so for now, i'm willing to ride this bus to the end of the line and see what happens."
Me too. I want more fiction at my fingertips, and if the IAF can provide that, and if it can open more markets to the kinds of stories I like to read and write, or show me new kinds I haven't read before, that's all well and good.
I'm leery, however, of the theoretical side of this issue, for reasons I've already discussed. Not just the problems I have with terminology and categorical slippage, but practical reasons as well. I've said I see genre as partly generative. A Next Big Thing doesn't just passively collect and distribute work; it does work. It conditions production. Not in a deterministic way. Not all the time, and certainly not with every writer, but it does create change in a market. If it didn't, we wouldn't have literary trends. We wouldn't suffer through periods of Soul-Healing-Unicorn-Sister high fantasy or Mercenary Survivalist SF or Serial Killer crime novels or Maudlin Vampire chronicles. We wouldn't have had the New Wave or Cyberpunk, either, so new trends aren't always bad, but they're always trends. They're also natural.
I know I'm going to take flak for this, but I don't think most writers are any more independent-minded than the general populace. That's a conceit that just doesn't hold up under examination. Hell, people are still turning out millions of pages of bad Tolkein impersonations, for God's sake. Wasn't Terry Brooks enough? So when I see a movement of independent-minded people uniting for the purpose of doing their own thing, I get nervous. It feels like the International Nonconformists Society.
I don't want just to be a nay-sayer, though. I'm willing to see what good IAF can do, and if it yields dividends, I'll grab my pom-poms and bounce up and down with everyone else. But I think there might be other approaches to take in the meantime. Forrest Aguirre has been trying to light a fire under people's asses on the Interstitial threads, just something to help all this noble gas congeal into solid matter. You can read for yourself what's come of that. For myself, I've advocated taking to task reviewers who malign genre categorically, and I stick by that, though I'm open to suggestions on how best to go about it.
Trent: "You can never quite put you finger on it, but you can feel it means... something."
Agreed. This is why the intentional fallacy is a good thing to keep in mind. Even the writer is never fully in conscious charge of what he or she writes. My difficulty with noumenal interpretations of fictional production, however, is that they seek to foreclose phenomenal interpretations. They shut out context. As a materialist, I can't go that route; it smacks to me of idealism, and it has no place in my world-view. At best, the noumenon is a place-holder until a better explanation comes along (and I would argue that this better explanation is already available in other theories). At worst, it's the breeding ground for hocus-pocus ideas of Art having a volition all its own independent of the artist and his or her audience. Nope. Art is a convenient abstraction, like Love and Life and Justice. The material product is produced through material means. Books are paper, glue, ink, and thread. By calling the product Art, we are assigning it cultural meanings, but it does not change the product itself in any substantive way. To put it another way, Text produces meaning the way Chair produces sitting; it can't do it on its own, folks. I agree with you that there is a "foggy pane" between the words and their "accumulated meanings." However, while some people form Cults of Condensation, I prefer to try harder to see through the window. |
des
| | Posted on Thursday, December 11, 2003 - 02:09 pm: | |
Neal says: "At worst, it's the breeding ground for hocus-pocus ideas of Art having a volition all its own independent of the artist and his or her audience."
**********
Or 'at best'. It's merely a concept, one that might (just might) make a good workable plot conceit in a work of fiction. Fiction becoming its own fiction? A 'brainstorm' concept for a writer later to try out and expand on when faced with the blank page.
One can then draw back from that 'brainstorming' (rather than Neal's 'hocus pocus') concept (back towards an acceptable reality or common sense realm with which that person drawing back from the concept can feel comfortable) and new (hopefully more acceptable) concepts (at different stages of acceptability or non-acceptability) may emerge as radiating from that process of drawing back from the original 'brainstorm' concept.
Those stages of drawing back might (just might) even make the original 'brainstorm' concept more acceptable (in retrospect) within the realm of reality than was ever thought possible originally.
des |
Jed Hartman
| | Posted on Thursday, December 11, 2003 - 05:50 pm: | |
All sorts of fascinating and smart stuff going on in this conversation, and I don't have time or a strong enough background to be able to really wade into the fray. Or, I admit, to read everything that's been posted in detail, and so I apologize profusely if I'm repeating something that's been said, or saying something that's really obvious.
But I wanted to toss in something on a fairly superficial level, connected to what Barth and Neal in particular have been discussing:
My impression has been that what the Interstitial folks are reacting to is primarily the opinions of those who are adamantly opposed to reading outside of a genre. And I do mean genre (in the sense of Neal's original "sets of conventions to place a work among its fellow works" definition), not marketing category.
I'm not sure whether I was the one who brought up Asimov's in the discussion you're referring to, but I did bring it up in some discussion or other. And I stand by it: Asimov's has been publishing a fair bit of fiction lately that some hardcore devotees of Science Fiction are very unhappy with. On the Asimov's message boards, I've seen people complain that they're being forced to read that awful "fantasy" stuff; they want Real Science Fiction. Others (see the Tangent Online newsgroup) have argued at length that what's being published in the best-known print magazines (always excepting Analog) is moving further and further away from the genre. Elsewhere, I keep running into the idea that magic realism doesn't count as Real Fantasy. And so on.
So on the one hand, the people who are devoted to a particular genre feel unhappy and under attack from the forces of Literary Fiction and others who would destroy the boundaries that keep our genres where they belong. (This starts to blur into genre-as-marketing-category, because of course part of the objection stems from the feeling that something marketed as Science Fiction or as Fantasy should fit into the boundaries of those genres as defined by hardcore fans of the genres; in other words, many single-genre readers don't want the brand name to be applied to works that don't match their genre expectations.)
And on the other hand, some of the people who aren't devoted to a particular genre feel that they're under attack for wanting to stray outside the conventions that are allowed by the strict-definitionalists.
In summary, although a lot of people who don't draw strict genre boundaries see it as self-evident that genre-crossing work can be good, I think there are a lot of other people out there who really loathe work they see as genre-crossing.
(I suspect the main counterargument would be that the allegedly core genre work actually crosses genres. Fair enough, but the point remains that there's strong opposition to work that appears to single-genre fans to cross boundaries.) |
Nick Mamatas
| | Posted on Thursday, December 11, 2003 - 06:04 pm: | |
And I stand by it: Asimov's has been publishing a fair bit of fiction lately that some hardcore devotees of Science Fiction are very unhappy with. On the Asimov's message boards, I've seen people complain that they're being forced to read that awful "fantasy" stuff; they want Real Science Fiction. Others (see the Tangent Online newsgroup) have argued at length that what's being published in the best-known print magazines (always excepting Analog) is moving further and further away from the genre.
Of course. My point was that by definition Asmiov's is the hardcore of the genre. It is the tastemaker, often gains the plurality of nominations for the Hugos and Nebulas, and the editor of the magazine also edits the influential Years Best SF antho.
Yes, some people complain about it. However, they're not complaining about Asimov's moving away from SF (even if they think they are), they're complaining about expansion of the genre boundaries.
(Aside: the number of complainers is small, their volume is loud. And for all their balloon juice, they didn't stop buying the magazine. The marketplace can't tell the difference between an ethusiastic consumer and a contrite one until the contrite one stops. As they ain't cancelling their subs, their comments are fundamentally meaningless.)
As the work Asimov's publishes is within SF, that work is not interstitial between SF and something else. It's not falling through the cracks if it appears on the surface.
|
Trent
| | Posted on Friday, December 12, 2003 - 04:47 am: | |
Neal,
Academics no doubt already have written on Ashbery's poems. Perhaps they were able to find a clear path through the pane. But to do so would be to destroy Ashbery's originality (bear with me--I'm not suggesting that academics destory literary works. I personally believe it's quite the contrary: at their best, they illumine the text for deeper understanding). The originality is destroyed because this is the very effect Ashbery sought after. He doesn't want his text raised to consciousness but sensed. If an academic can do to his texts what is done to other texts, Ashbery's stature shrinks since he is working in the same domain as all other poetic figures and not, as Pound exhorts, making it new. So I'm not committing any Intentional fallacy that the text has to mean what the author intended. I'm saying if the text means in any direct sense, the author has failed.
I don't think you can translate this effect directly to fiction, however (personally, I think it's cool for one guy to do it, but it's a dead end for anyone else because they're not making it new, which will not affect their stature as good poets but will leave them relatively unimportant in the grand scheme, just as Matthew Arnold as a poet is overshadowed by his predecessors).
I'm with you on the effect of accepting texts as noumenal. It doesn't leave you anything to talk about except as a means or methodology [to no tangible end]. Just imagine if another field attempted to do this:
SCIENTIST: So what does your invention do?
INVENTOR: It is. It suggests something you will never be able to access in the conscious mind.
SCIENTIST: Fascinating.... So how does it advance science?
INVENTOR: My machine will emit its essence among us.
SCIENTIST: So it's a perfume bottle?
INVENTOR: Of course not. What blasphemy! How dare you label what my product does? Just sense it.
SCIENTIST: Have you been able to sense who will fund the your magic 8-ball--I mean, invention?
I do believe that Ashbery has done interesting work, but if it refuses to allow further discussion, then there's little point in discussing it except as an interesting methodology.
I'm not sure if fiction can achieve the same and still remain fiction. If you have an arc, you have an end and a point of further discussion. An Ashbery "fiction" would resolve into a prose poem.
***
Nick,
Pardon my misunderstanding or pedantics. Personally, I love to discuss specifics. However, when you did not specify a story, I could not know you did not mean to speak in generalities. When you intimate that an effect of a story relies on an event, it sounded like you might not know what the author was up to. For instance, I could sum up Hemingway's THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA as "An old man loses a fish" and chalk it up as, therefore, trivial. Lest we make the wrong assumptions again, we should probably deal more in specifics.
Besides, there's no shame in not picking up what an author does. I was bored by Proust and would love to hear what des had to say.
Harold Bloom and others love Proust, but I find him a bore. His first novels lack both drama and plot. He gains a sense of drama as he goes along, but never seems to pick up plot. Bloom talks about his wondrous themes, but I imagine that Anne Rice or Anne McCaffrey or Robert Jordan would all revisit themes in their epics, too. It just comes with writing a lot. I'm not negating all that Proust has done, for he does have nice moments but they're distanced by a drudgery of drab plotlessness. Thematically, I like his discussions of memory and how he revisits earlier moments, but even these he evokes dully on the surface level and they can also be few and far between, especially if you read as slowly as I do. I wish he could afford a continuous entertainment on one level or another. (If I remember correctly, he may have had to self-publish the first volume or two and gave away the copies. I do know he wined and dined the French judges the year he won France's most prestigious award, whatever it was--I forget. The blessings of being rich...?) One might be able to appreciate Proust best if one could speed-read as I cannot. So I'd love to see what others have to say about him. I may have missed something.
***
Des,
I could not find your comments about Proust. Where did you put them?
***
Re: Interstitiality,
I agree with Jed that it works best, presently, as getting people to read outside their genre. But it seems to have most of it's focus centered at the genre, many readers of which already do read in and out of genre. Nick has a good point that it isn't falling between the cracks if they appear in SciFiction and Asimov's, but is that because it's had attention focused on it?
Here's how different literati view the matter of speculation: One group says it isn't real and dismisses it out of hand. Another group (may I call them the interstitials?) says it's okay if it's not really real but a psychological dimension (dementia) of a character. But often the psychological dimension is rather irrelevant to the story, anyway. Take ALICE IN WONDERLAND. Who cares if it's only a dream? The added dimension adds nothing. This just allows Carroll to bypass nineteenth century reality censors.
But even literati interstials won't cross the line into pure speculation. I may be wrong, but I believe Interstitiality is supposed to be an open door between the two. I'm not convinced that anyone outside the genre will now buy speculation (i.e. Nick's quoting from Prospect magazine).
Missouri Review and TriQuarterly did speculative issues back in the eighties, I believe. I'm not sure how much interest it actually drummed up for speculation.
Anyway, the line between fantasy and reality has never troubled me. I love purely literary, purely speculative and the lines blurred between. But I'm not sure how new the blurring is. Barnard Malamud explored this territory, as have Gogol and many others since the dawning of time when people might have actually had difficulty distinguishing the two.
I realize people refer to more than the above distinctions in Interstitiality but that seems to me the most important crux to surrmount as people have been mixing all genres anyway, SF mysteries, SF romances, etc. (which would make even Analog Interstitial, would it not?).
At the same time, I understand Truesdale's fear of the genre's diluted essence. I see no difference between what Truesdale advocates and when others advocate preserving cultural heritage, for SF is a cultural phenomenon that happens to bridge country borders. I wouldn't be surprised if some of those into SF have more in common with other nations than their own nationality.
(As the world becomes more connected, I suspect we will see new intangible borders of the mind arise that no interstitiality will ever bridge.) |
Neal Stanifer
| | Posted on Friday, December 12, 2003 - 07:24 am: | |
Trent,
Re: Ashberry/noumenon/foggy pane. Point taken, and I can see how you'd get the impression you got from my glib extension of your metaphor. Perhaps instead of saying what I said, I should have said "I prefer first to recognize the existence of the window." I was making a plea, after all, for the importance of context.
I haven't read much Ashberry, but in a similar vein, it would be tragic to pick up a copy of Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, only to set it down and read the Cliff's Notes instead. That's not how F.W. wants to be read. The prose itself argues for a different treatment. It has its own ethos, if you will, which is not to anthropomorphize the text or to impart volition to art or its works, but to recognize that we need the right tools for the task, and interpretation is a set of tools.
So any exploration of meaning in a text must first take the text at face value and ask, How are we best to understand this text? I don't deny this, which is why I said to Des that the context matters, both within and without the text. Texts themselves make pleas for different readings based on how they're written. We ignore those pleas at the peril of our understanding.
An example from my own work-in-progress: Currently, I'm agonizing over the rewrite of a story I wrote and circulated some time ago with no success. The original story itself had a high degree of disguised polemical content, and recently I asked myself, What would happen if I ramped that element up, rather than resorting to the rather coy and artificial device of hiding it in the events of the story? After all, I'm not really telling an SF satire/love story here; I'm staging an argument against a political trend. Why not drop the mask? What I'm seeing emerge is a sparer version of the story, a lot of direct address, and fewer events left to the reader's imagination. Parts of the story read like a political harangue, bubbles of rhetoric bursting on the surface of the narrative here and there, pointing bony fingers at scenes and actions, deliberately foregrounding the artifice of the story. My aim at the outset was purposely to render the story brittle, to wrench the reader out of the comfort of what I hope is an engaging narrative, so that what is being told, in the final analysis, is the story of the meaning of a certain kind of narrative. And in the meantime, the interruptions serve to bracket the story, and that creates suspense. The idea intrigues the hell out of me. Will readers understand what I'm up to? Who knows? Will they like what I've done, if they do understand it? Who knows? Fire and forget. |
des
| | Posted on Friday, December 12, 2003 - 07:29 am: | |
Trent says: Des, I could not find your comments about Proust. Where did you put them?
***********
http://www.nightshadebooks.com/discus/messages/1466/1455.html
best, des |
des
| | Posted on Friday, December 12, 2003 - 08:21 am: | |
Neal, we still only have the text - nothing else but the text. It is up to the reader to give to or take from the text. Some will give no exterior context to the text and still understand it. Others will give a lot of exterior (always unreliable) context and fail to understand it.
Nobody can possibly attain the correct context.
And your last para, Neal, I shall completely ignore - because if I have the pleasure of reading the text in question, this would spoil it. You feel you have these intentions about the text but it is the text you leave in the audience arena that is the complete arbiter. Not an arbiter with its own 'hocus pocus volition' (as you put it). The latter would imply that the text might actually change in front of your eyes as you read it. I'm going to write a story about that phenomenon - in line with what I said yesterday about brainstorming concepts - but put these words out of your mind, since I might send you a copy to read! ;-)
Des |
Trent
| | Posted on Friday, December 12, 2003 - 08:51 am: | |
Des,
Thanks for the link. I'll read it carefully over the weekend although I guess you were interested in discussing another aspect. I'd love to discuss Proust with you sometime (if only there weren't so much land and water between us...).
Neal,
Your story's philosophy sounds interesting. My only worry about a text of politics would be how it comes across. I do think a kind of obvious politics has been done in a few different hands: Ayn Rand and Robert Heinlein have explored it to mediocre effect in their "stories," stopping storytime to elaborate at length. Margaret Atwood's "Rape Fantasies" works a little better though it's still pretty much an essay (It's short so you may want to check it out to compare what you're interested in and how she accomplished it). My favorite examples of politics in fiction are Chinua Achebe and Milan Kundera. For them, it's 50% politics--but it is put in action, i.e. plot. These are the guys at the top of the political fiction food-chain, the guys we have to struggle to improve upon (no, they're better than we are, but you nay-sayers can be defeatists if you want. For my money I quote Michael Cunningham: "Of course, you had a greater book in mind than you could write. You have to. You have to. You have to be reaching beyond what you can do. If you have a sort of command of mental health in some form, you'll be able to cut your losses and think, 'Well, this book didn't turn out quite right, but the next one will....'")...
...unless you can think of a way to make Rand and Heinlein art. Perhaps a good mix would be Rand and Achebe? Whoda think it, mixing low art and high? |
Trent
| | Posted on Friday, December 12, 2003 - 09:09 am: | |
p.s. I may be one of the few academic-friendly person in the world who doesn't hate Cliff notes. They're just another interpretation. I see it no different than consulting someone's general thoughts on the matter (after all, they are general summations made by an academic in the field). However, I hardly think it's the last word--or an exceptionally good one. It's just a word that may spare you floundering time. I floundered a long while on Ashbery before I came up with my own ideas--time that might have been spared had I read his interviews and other poets' views of his work first.
(I believe Saul Bellow made a similar comment about Cliff notes in his last novel--just so you know I'm not the only one with this crazy idea.)
I'm a little like Des, too, in wanting a text to speak for itself. Eliot comes close to going too far with outside contexts. I wrote fifteen pages (double spaced, Courier) on the first section of the Wasteland and was frankly tired of going on. I still admire the hell out of it, and maybe one day I'll go back to complete the analysis, but for now, I'll let the text sit in my unconscious.
Thankfully, Eliot gave us the keys to the kingdom, so to speak, so that we may pick it apart.
My personal opinion: I think it's way cool to put all these whacked-out shits inside, but it would be nice to have the keys inside the text (at least the difficult and more obscure ones). I know it would put a lot of academics out of a job, but for those of us who aren't academics, we don't have the time to spare.
Best,
Trent |
Nick Mamatas
| | Posted on Friday, December 12, 2003 - 10:32 am: | |
The Prospect quote was interesting to me because it
a) of course was picked up by Ansible in the manner of a grown child recounting some minor humiliation ("I wanted a Red Ryder BB gun for Christmas, but all I got was a football, and that's why I'm impotent today!")
b) was so obviously wrong, as Neal (and indeed, as any junior high student could have) pointed out, especially as regards Poe. To the extent that he is right about formula fiction, he is right about this formula as well: "nothing happens to a middle class protagonist, who then has an epiphany."
Sure, the attitudes reflected in the quote are common enough. However, it seems obvious to me that they are not nearly as hegemonic as SF sorts with inferiority complexes would like to claim. If it were, we wouldn't see eight SFnal books in the mainstream section of the Times' Notable Books section. If it were, Saunders, Chabon, etc., would have been exiled for their dalliances with the fantastic, not generally lauded for them. If it were, Plume wouldn't be publishing werewolf romances like Kelley Armstrong's Bitten rather than leaving it to one of the mmpb imprints. How many people here read Prospect? Or know that critic at all?? Not too many, I imagine, but the quote has talismanic power.
Genre strikes me as less of a ghetto and more of a bantustan. It's an artificial market homeland with homegrown warlords who, in conjunction with the reactionary program of the outside world, keep the rabble in line. I don't see interstitialism as a libertory project either, but as the bantustan's middle class making a poor attempt to "pass" as white.
And one of the problems with the middle class generally is that it sections of it, generally the sections closest to the ruling elite, see its own privileges as signs of oppression. Time and again, for instance, I've heard people complain of being "attacked" by non-entities like Dave Trusdale. This boggles my mind. Dave Trusdale is a fan with a website and a little-read newsgroup. Has a Tangent review ever sold even ten extra copies of an anthology or collection, or talked ten people out of buying the same? I seriously doubt it. Therefore, he's an irrelevancy; for him to attack you actually shows that you have a fairly high status within the bantustan, nothing more. The end.
Same with the "fans" who grouse and complain but keep up their subscriptions to a magazine. This is just a manifestation of Fannish Sociability Disorder's most famous coping mechanism: the ability to "talk shop" about trivia with other social cripples. It has no bearing on the market, on sales, or on the status of genre material in the outside world.
There are some important things to be concerned about, notably how the increase number of books published is exceeding the increase in the number of readers, andwhat a high-risk endeavor it is to start a magazine given collapse of distribution networks. We can certainly add problems particular to SF: difficulties in getting reviews in mainstream venues, the relative lack of academic appointments in writing programs, and how few high-end advances for novels land in genre laps (unless one if writing an epic fantasy series).
Can "interstitial" solve these problems? Almost certainly not, except for the fact that it can make writing the literature review section of a thesis a bit easier once the big website goes up. Can more clever career positioning solve these problems? I suspect so. Is a non-profit foundation and a nonsense word the best way to position or reposition one's career? Jury's out, but it doesn't look good.
PS: Yes, I realize that I'm explicitly not dealing with "interstitial" as anything other than a marketing phrase, but that is simply because it hasn't been shown to exist as anything else yet. Interstitiality is an extraordinary claim, so the claimant has to provide extraordinary evidence of its existence. |
des
| | Posted on Friday, December 12, 2003 - 10:55 am: | |
I'm going to write a story about that phenomenon - in line with what I said yesterday about brainstorming concepts - but put these words out of your mind, since I might send you a copy to read! ;-)
*************
I've suddenly realised that Jeffrey Ford has already written this story! Sorry, story!
des
|
Neal Stanifer
| | Posted on Friday, December 12, 2003 - 11:01 am: | |
Des: "Neal, we still only have the text - nothing else but the text."
You keep asserting this gratuitously, and I keep trying to explain why you're mistaken, and then you come back and assert it again. Repetition does not increase the truth-value of a claim. Evidence does that.
You assert that exterior context is "always unreliable." This is very bold. How are you using "unreliable"? If a biography of the author is to be shunned, what about an examination of the market for which the writer wrote? What about the format and generic expectations which accompanied the text into publication? What about a knowledge of the author's complete oeuvre? What about a handy dictionary to look up the words in the text we don't understand? Is that "unreliable" too? Where do you draw a line, Des, between what helps us to understand a story, and what interferes with our understanding? And when you've found that line, will you please explain to me why you don't consider it an arbitrary threshold?
Perhaps this will help: I don't doubt that reading a book is the first and most important step to understanding what the text means. But texts can mean in many ways, and a lot of those ways involve context. Henry James's The Turn of the Screw means something in a narrative sense. It means something else in a generic sense, when set beside other ghost stories. It means a third thing when considered as part of the high-brow revolution in letters of the late nineteenth-century. Do you see what I'm saying, Des? I'm not denying the importance of text, or saying that a text is dumb until some scholar comes along and prods it with his inky fingers. I'm saying there's more than one way to skin a text.
Des: "I'm going to write a story about that phenomenon"
Hmm... Is there such a thing as a priori intentional fallacy?
Trent: "My only worry about a text of politics would be how it comes across."
You ain't the only one, pal.
Des, don't read this...
I've already written three drafts of the original story. One was politely and helpfully rejected by Ellen Datlow. When I returned to the text and decided to try this new thing with it, I didn't want it to come off like a rant or a lecture; I wanted it to tell a good story, with engaging characters and a solid plot, but also to tell a story about why that story has to be there to sell the message. I'm still trying to find that balance between being inventive/provocative, and being a smug shit-head. Oddly, the thing I keep coming back to in the drafting of this is that there is no escape from the exigencies of fiction, even when the text foregrounds fiction's...um...fictionalness. So I've started to incorporate that phenomenon into the text, and the story is beginning to look like its own reductio ad absurdam, or at best a hall of mirrors reflecting mirrors. As the story progresses, the metafiction begins to crowd out the fiction. Not sure yet how I feel about this; I like my characters, and I like the fictiveness of the story. Wish me luck. |
Neal Stanifer
| | Posted on Friday, December 12, 2003 - 11:07 am: | |
Nick: "nothing happens to a middle class protagonist, who then has an epiphany."
LOL! Sound like the poetry of Robert Hass, except for the epiphany part. |
David Moles
| | Posted on Friday, December 12, 2003 - 11:58 am: | |
Nick, I'm starting to get a feeling for what you're against, but what are you =for=? |
des
| | Posted on Friday, December 12, 2003 - 12:34 pm: | |
Neal says to me: You keep asserting this gratuitously, and I keep trying to explain why you're mistaken, and then you come back and assert it again. Repetition does not increase the truth-value of a claim.
**********
I really don't know why you say that, Neal. The only point with which you seem to be disagreeing in my separate contentions below is point 3 (which I call an opinion of mine, anyway, and thus contestable). Nothing gratuitous.
1) Fiction/Poem = Original Text placed in the audience arena, and nothing but that text.
(2) What can be taken from or given to the text = reader's 'opinion' or 'reaction' (manifold opinions and reactions, all different).
(3) The nearer one is able to reach towards the noumenon of the text, the more one can shuffle off the variably misleading and unknowable historical, biographical, critical, academic extrapolations from the text = my opinion.
(4) Poet/Author of text already placed in audience arena = No more than just another reader inasfar as explaining, judging, interpereting that text.
Des
|
Nick Mamatas
| | Posted on Friday, December 12, 2003 - 01:08 pm: | |
Nick, I'm starting to get a feeling for what you're against, but what are you =for=?
I am for writing whatever the hell one likes and publishing it wherever one is able, and selling it to people who wouldn't ordinarily pick up such a book through not just original guerilla marketing techniques but because is cleverer and interesting to ever greater numbers of people.
I am for genre people kicking down the fences of the bantustans in their minds. People complain and complain, and based on what? As far as I can tell, it is based on a fantasy estimation of what other parts of the market think, rather than any real experimentation with other parts of the market.
It's not surprising to me that if you publish with an SF imprint that uses SF covers, SF publicity, and sells to SF bookbuyers who stock the book in the SF section, that your sales will be largely drawn from the SF audience.
So, if one wants a broader audience, what should one do? Publish with an imprint that appeals to a broader audience, get a cover with broader appeal, generate broad publicity, have your book sold as part of the mainstream catalog, get into the more prominent of bookstore shelves, and perhaps your sales will be broader as well.
Is it hard to do? Well, people do it all the time. Hell, I've done it, and I'm nobody's up and comer.
|
Neal Stanifer
| | Posted on Friday, December 12, 2003 - 09:27 pm: | |
Des: "I really don't know why you say that, Neal... Fiction/Poem = Original Text placed in the audience arena, and nothing but that text."
That's why I keep saying that. I've given you evidence that context counts. You have failed to respond to the evidence, and yet you insist on coming back to this dogmatic assertion. I don't understand your recalcitrance, Des. Are you swinging a censer when you type this? Until I get from you some kind of evidence for the noumenal nature of Text, I don't think I can conscientiously bore the rest of the lurkers and posters on this board. Let me know when you've come up with something. I dont' want to be the only one coming forth with evidence. |
Neal Stanifer
| | Posted on Friday, December 12, 2003 - 09:44 pm: | |
Nick: "So, if one wants a broader audience, what should one do? Publish with an imprint that appeals to a broader audience."
Here's a question that emerged from a conversation I had with Nathan Ballingrud, and one which should have occurred to me long ago. "Why would a genre artist WISH a broader audience?" Think about it. If some of my texts are in the SF/F section, and some are in the Fic/Lit section, how am I helping my sales? Am I not just diluting my audience for the sake of ego? Am I not diluting my writerly capital in an attempt to grab laurels that don't pay dividends? It seems to me I'm screwing myself, book by book. I mean, if audience recognition moves toward a critical mass, as I feel it does, then what am I doing when I split my submissions between (e.g.) F&SF and Missouri Review?
I'd love to hear some responses to this from people who've been through it. |
Nick Mamatas
| | Posted on Saturday, December 13, 2003 - 12:19 am: | |
Seeking a broader audience is a strategy. Like any strategy, it can succeed wonderfully or fail gloriously depending on what precisely the writer does (and writes) and how the market reacts.
The weakness of the strategy is of course dilution and confusion, as you mention. The strength of it is this: SF readers can provide a core audience from which one can branch out, while retaining the core. Fiction/lit shelf? SF shelf? If you have a broad audience, you're on the "New Books" shelf right up front or in dumps and endcaps.
The weakness of genre-only positioning is this: SF/F is maybe 8% of the book marketplace and the ratio of growth in the number of would-be producers to the the growth in the number of readers doesn't look good. Add Clarions East and West, Odyssey, and Viable Paradise classes together alone. Can the genre support 45 new writers a year? Now add the people who don't do the workshops. How quickly are old writers dropping dead and older works going out of print? How quickly are new SF writers being generated by nerdy childhoods and goofy movies?
The risk of genre-only positioning is being a a competitor in a genre with a growing number of entrants and shrinking share of the total entertainment marketplace.
My own strategy is different: indie publishers and big magazines. My agent is under orders not to submit my stuff to any imprint of Bertelsmann, von Holtzbrinck, AOL/TW, or News Corp. Partially for political reasons (both my politics and the sensitivities of my readers), partially because I write short and contracts with minimum word counts annoy me, and partially because I like the personal interaction independent presses can offer. At the same time, I want a lot of readers, so I write primarily for slicks and alt. weeklies rather than pulps.
I've only been selling since 1999 so who knows how I'll end up, but I make a small living from writing. I think my strategy serves me better than a genre-only strategy would. Some numbers:
Northern Gothic was a novella and thus necessarily a small press affair. Punk publisher Soft Skull published it in late 2001. Tale of the tape: Advance of $300. Print run of 2500. Typically awful small press copy edit. Distribution by PGW.
Results: PGW placed 1200 copies to the trade instantly, including the chains. Shelved in Fic/Lit in indie bookstores, SF/F at B&N, Horror in Borders.
Positive notices in genre venues (F&SF, Infinity Plus -- combined readership of ~60,000).
Positive notices in mainstream venues (Chicago Reader, Pages -- combined readership of ~325,000).
Readings at genre venues (Dark Carnival in Berkeley, Jersey Devil Con).
Readings at mainstream venues (City Lights in SF, Rocky Sullivan's in NY).
Bram Stoker Award nomination.
Compare this to an analogous small horror press experience: No advance. Run of 500 or POD. No distro outside of an Ingram db entry. No real sales to national chains. No reviews outside of genre, no readings outside of genre. Certainly no plane ticket to California. Given the state of small horror presses over the past couple years, throw in an even chance that the company would implode and take my book with it without me seeing dime one or reaching an audience at all.
Magazines. Never been in any of the big SF magazines, but we should compare anyway. Tale of the tape between them and the non-genre places where I've sold short SF stories:
Big SF Mags: 25,000-40,000 readers. 5-20c a word, with only one offering 20 to beginners.
Razor: 250,000 readers. Flat rate of $1000.
Chicago Reader Fiction Issue: 130,000 readers. Flate rate of $500.
Wide Angle NY: 50,000 readers. Flat rate of $400.
Sure, not a lot of Hugo voters read Razor, where I sold three stories in the past 14 months, but on the whole I'd rather have the money. There's also the possibility of running the first chapter of Move Under Ground in their June 2004 issue as an excerpt.
MUG is worth looking at too. I was very mercenary with it. I said to myself, "Self, you know there is a huge audience for associational material about Kerouac. Ditto Lovecraft. So let's write a book that will appeal to both groups, even if they buy it just to fume over how we fucked with their heroes." It's a self-conscious, contrived cult novel designed to appeal to both a literary cult and a fantasy cult. And it's 59,000 words, about the same length as the short novels of K&L, but too short for the Publishing Octopi.
How's it doing so far? Well, Night Shade opened for pre-orders on Sunday evening. The publicity has been limited to my livejournal entries. By tonight, 40 of the 100 copies of the expensive limited edition were accounted for, a dozen of them sold directly to readers by Night Shade. For the first week, that's "pretty fucking good" Jason tells me.
It's a strategy. It may be a winning strategy, it may be a losing strategy, but I'll bet that it is a better strategy than wanking about genre ghettos on genre ghetto bboards. |
des
| | Posted on Saturday, December 13, 2003 - 12:37 am: | |
Neal, you have to read all my 4 numbered points -- and the context on which you insist is in the 'give to' in (2). We only differ on (3). Nobody can disagree with (1) because disagreeing with that point defies logic.
des |
des
| | Posted on Saturday, December 13, 2003 - 01:04 am: | |
I do not understand all this fuss about genre labels. It's horses for courses. I loathe genre demarcation myself, but can understand, in commercial terms, the need at the mass market end for bookshops (and thus publishers) to use them.
I can see no need for the 'Small Press' to use them. The 'Small Press' tends only to appeal to other writers seeking outlets anyway. I am very proud of the 'Small Press', having been involved in it since 1986. des |
Nick Mamatas
| | Posted on Saturday, December 13, 2003 - 08:27 am: | |
I can see no need for the 'Small Press' to use them. The 'Small Press' tends only to appeal to other writers seeking outlets anyway. I am very proud of the 'Small Press', having been involved in it since 1986. des
You don't sound very proud of it, Des. And what do you mean by "Small Press"? Since conglomeratization, small presses have frequently filled in the gaps left behind by the increasing demands for higher margins on the part of the owners of the remaining large presses. Would you consider Serpent's Tail or Codex small presses? Cannongate? They certainly aren't huge, but nor are they of only interest to writers seeking a market. How about Night Shade?
|
des
| | Posted on Saturday, December 13, 2003 - 08:37 am: | |
I don't include those latter names as Small Press, as I define Small Press as outfits without Corporate Needs. Those names you mention, Nick, are more the Independent Press where need for market genre-labelling may be more pressing. I consider Nemonymous to be Small Press. Des |
Nick Mamatas
| | Posted on Saturday, December 13, 2003 - 02:09 pm: | |
Gotcha. Thanks for the clarification. I didn't know whether you were responding to my comments on independent presses or to something that I missed. |
Neal Stanifer
| | Posted on Saturday, December 13, 2003 - 02:45 pm: | |
Okay, Des, let's see if we can work some knots out together. You want me to take all four of your points together. Here I go...
Des ses:
1) Fiction/Poem = Original Text placed in the audience arena, and nothing but that text.
This is true only if we permit a material object -- the Original Text (a concept which itself introduces textual-critical problems) -- to stand in synechdocally for a more complex social construct (Fiction). It can't. Even if viewed as being of the same category of existence, the subset (Text) is not coextensive with the set (Fiction). The Text can only stand in for itself. So what we have left is not Fiction = Text, but Text = Text. This is true, but tautological and uninteresting, and certainly no valid basis for a theory of textual criticism (I cannot found a theory of human mobility on the tautology, "The Shoe is the Shoe and nothing but the Shoe").
Besides all this, your introduction of "placed in the audience arena" is logically meaningless as you apply it; following it as you do with "and only the text," you've cast "audience arena" as a passive environment, a mere by-blow of the fact of publication. You deny again and again in your posts the importance of the audience arena and the work it does to condition textual production/reception. If you are truly willing to accept that the audience has meaning, you'll have to incorporate it more strongly into your definition. But then you'd have a phenomenal reading of literature, and that's what you're so desperately trying to avoid.
(2) What can be taken from or given to the text = reader's 'opinion' or 'reaction' (manifold opinions and reactions, all different).
Interpretation is always based upon opinion, sometimes well-grounded with evidence both intrinsic and extrinsic. And because Text cannot mean without human interpretation, opinion is an integral part of textual meaning. Text without opinion is paper, glue, ink, and thread, and nothing more. When manifold opinions and reactions collide and coalesce, we call it a discussion or a conversation or an argument. That's part of what Literature is. Text may be Text, but Literature is a conversation, and Fiction is a product of that conversation.
(3) The nearer one is able to reach towards the noumenon of the text, the more one can shuffle off the variably misleading and unknowable historical, biographical, critical, academic extrapolations from the text = my opinion.
Even if I didn't reject a noumenal approach to literature on its face, I would still be forced to ask whence comes this magical process by which we are stripping away extraneous considerations? Is it not itself an extraneous consideration, an idea from outside the text itself which grants imprimatur to a formalist/Platonist approach to text, based on the unsupported assumption that there is an Ideal Text, an immanent vessel of perfectly lucid meaning? Whence, too, comes this confidence in the unknowability of historical and biographical data?
(4) Poet/Author of text already placed in audience arena = No more than just another reader inasfar as explaining, judging, interpereting that text.
This is merely a rephrasing of the intentional fallacy, redundant in the face of your #1 point above.
So you see I have examined your list, and I've responded to those parts I thought merited response. I've done this before, but you must have been blinking. My contention is, and has been from the beginning, that the text is but one part of the constellation of factors which produce literature, that text cannot mean anything on its own, and that textual meaning is always opened up with the aid of context.
But let's put your ideas to the test, shall we? Below, I've given a short list of... call them Items, for want of a better word. I'd like you to tell me how your theoretical approach accounts for each, if you don't mind.
1. Simultaneous extant editions from a single source manuscript, differing from one another in both substantives and accidentals.
2. A novel previously serialized over four installments in a monthly magazine, and surrounded by advertisements, editorials, news items, and cartoons; later reprinted in a three-volume set of yellowbacks, hitting the stands at two-month intervals; then later reprinted with a new foreword and emendations, and with an abridged and altered final chapter, as a single hardcover volume. Unofficial and contaminated translation into French and German. Finally goes completely out of print, is picked up as an object of scholarly study, and is re-edited, reprinted as a trade paperback, and released with emendations of accidentals, merging elements of all three previous editions, with well-known source material as facsimile in appendices, as well as a critical Introduction, biographical notes, author bibliography, timeline, excerpts from plagiarized foreign editions (translated back into English), contemporary reviews, and articles by six leading critics of the author.
3. The editorship of H. L. Gold.
4. Richard Wright's Uncle Tom's Children, John Gardner's Grendel, and Tom Stoppard's Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.
5. Graphic novels compiled from monthly comic books.
6. The Preface to Leaves of Grass.
7. Shakespeare's foul papers.
8. The poetry of Jorge Luis Borges, Dante Alleghieri, and Charles Baudelaire.
9. This quote: "The study of the works of the ancients is certainly most fruitful when one concentrates not so much on the works themselves as on the authors and the periods from which the works come. Only this method can lead to a true philosophic knowlede of human beings, for this method obliges us to search out the character and the entire context of a nation, and to grasp all aspects of the subject in their comprehensive interrelationships. The struggle to gain this kind of knowledge (for no one alone can hope to see its fulfillment) must be called absolutely necessary for every human being." -- Wilhelm von Humboldt (qtd. in F. A. Wolf, Darstellung der Alterthums-Wissenschaft, 1807).
10. A Clockwork Orange and Get Off the Unicorn
11. Blogs.
12. The compositional habits of W. H. Auden, Byron's "Windsor Poetics," and problems of final authorial intention.
I'll stop there for now. I'm interested to see how your theory permits you to approach each of these. If some are unclear, I'll gladly clarify. I'm hoping you'll give these problems a go. |
Neal Stanifer
| | Posted on Saturday, December 13, 2003 - 03:27 pm: | |
Nick, thanks for the breakdown and rationale behind a split-market strategy. I'm going to take this up with Nathan again and see if he's got a rebutal, but this sounds like pretty solid reasoning to me.
The only objection I can anticipate -- and it's probably not the only one possible -- is that market positioning for genre material depends in part on the writer's handling of genre. If I am comfortable writing straightforward science fiction and fantasy (however we interpret that at the time I'm writing), I'm probably best to stick with SF/F venues where such treatments are more likely to be tolerated and even sought out. |
Nick Mamatas
| | Posted on Saturday, December 13, 2003 - 05:18 pm: | |
The thing to keep in mind regarding any strategy is that its success rate is in part dependent on the number of people following it. Too few, the market doesn't have enough info to find/make an audience the new writers, too many and the market is overburdened.
Right now, it seems that the leading strategy for new SF writers is the "I'm goin' to Clarion and I'm gettin' pally with Big Name Authors online and I wear khakis and button-up shirts to cons and I'm drinkin' milk and one day I'm gonna grow up and be a beeeeg pro!" strategy.
Does it work? Sure. Will it work as well if everyone is suddenly wearing khakis and drinking their milk? Nope.
But I generally agree that someone writing in the current Lakotian hardcore of a genre is best served by working in the hardcore publication venues of that genre. |
des
| | Posted on Sunday, December 14, 2003 - 01:38 am: | |
Neal says: Okay, Des, let's see if we can work some knots out together. You want me to take all four of your points together. Here I go...
**********
Thanks, Neal for all the trouble you’ve gone to in trying to counter my humble four equations, though some may say it is a sledgehammer to crack a nut!
These Boards, as I said before, are for trying out ideas and brainstorming and discussion and dissemination, not necessarily rigorous philosophy – because to do full justice to ideas thus rigorously one would need a book, I guess. But I think my points have borne fruit -- and I’ve found your postings very thought-provoking and they have gradually changed some of the finer points of my equations.
You say that my equation (1) is tantamount to saying text = text. I disagree. I think the deep structure transformationally of the equation is essentially logical and irrefutable. It’s just the words that may be wrong or misleading. Perhaps replace ‘Fiction/Poem’ with ‘Art Form’ because it happens to be in that setting or 'arena' (see, I used that word before deliberately). It’s then (equation 2) up to the reader or observer to do what he will with it. He can misapply it, as I earlier did with one of your texts. He may just look at it like a sculpture and gain meaning that way. He may use it as an incantation to ward off dark spirits. He may even give it the context (unknowably intended by the ‘artist’) and treat it as a fiction/poem about the Dreyfus case.
**********
Neal says: You deny again and again in your posts the importance of the audience arena and the work it does to condition textual production/reception.
*******
If I did, I didn’t intend to do so! Obviously, there is no backward cause-and-effect from the arena to the work, unless, say, persuasve reviews within that arena misapply their power by transmogrifying the nature of that arena so that some members of the audience see the work differently from what they would otherwise have done.
But without the potential arena itself, the artist *probably* would not have produced the work at all.
My ‘chasing the noumenon’ (a brand of Nemonymity called Noumenymity) is a symptom of my Platonic Idealism (as I think I have said before), and thus cannot be discussed really in any logical fashion. More like a faith, and should not ‘backwardly’ affect my more logical arguments above although it stems from them.
OK, my point (4) is an echo of point (1) but was needed to re-emphaise the logical underpinning for the sake of those unschooled in thinking such thoughts, as they go about their daily business. And I don’t mean that patronisingly!
*********
Neal says: My contention is, and has been from the beginning, that the text is but one part of the constellation of factors which produce literature,
***********
Yes, but a constellation with logical interstices (or outer and inner spaces) – hence my separating equation (1) from equation (2). The text is not a genre that overlaps with other genres. It is what it is, ever untouched. Which brings me to your long list of examples for me to go through. Thanks for thinking them up and I am grateful for being given this opportuinity eventually to follow them up. I feel very guilty in *currently* brushing these off glibly, but I see no option – for two reasons. Although I know of and have read some on this list (but not all of them), their relevance to this discussion defeats me. Unless, (my second point) they are all meant to prove how text overlaps and is indivisible from imputed contexts because of factors of translation, exegesis, later revision etc. And I’d say, that the ‘arena’ could indeed be recipient of various varying discrete forms of the same work and, if so, then each time a new equation (1) is triggered. Followed separately by the workings of equation (2) and then (again separately), perhaps in my case alone, a disvestment of the boxers in (2) with the relative nudity of (3).
Although I’ve made a little joke at the end, the reasoning behind it is seriously meant (or so I intend).
Nones fret not...
Thanks again.
Des |
Neal Stanifer
| | Posted on Sunday, December 14, 2003 - 06:45 am: | |
Des: "though some may say it is a sledgehammer to crack a nut!"
Well, when you keep tossing the same nut at me and the ballpeen hasn't worked...
Des: "These Boards...are for trying out ideas and brainstorming and discussion and dissemination, not necessarily rigorous philosophy – because to do full justice to ideas thus rigorously one would need a book, I guess"
(1) I thought we were discussing and disseminating. I've said before I'm not the kind of person for whom all ideas and opinions have equivalent truth-value. I believe discussion should have a telos, and that telos should be the resolution or clarification of some matter in contention. Otherwise, its just a kaffeeklatch.
(2) You don't need a book. The concepts are fairly straightforward. You just need to read closely and encounter your own assumptions, putting them through their paces.
Des: "I think the deep structure transformationally of the equation is essentially logical and irrefutable. It’s just the words that may be wrong or misleading."
(1) Sounds fancy, but it's still just a gratuitous assertion using Chomskian jargon to impart false heft. Your equation is neither logical nor irrefutable. I've pointed out the flaws in your logic -- flaws which mistake a material object for an abstract concept; flaws which mistake a subset as encompassing its set -- and I've refuted it.
(2) If it's just the words in a logical sequence which are misleading, I really have to ask what there is left of that logical sequence which is worth keeping. "Words. They're all we have to go on."
Des: "there is no backward cause-and-effect from the arena to the work, unless, say, persuasve reviews within that arena misapply their power by transmogrifying the nature of that arena so that some members of the audience see the work differently from what they would otherwise have done."
(1) The relationship between the audience and the production of text is reciprocal and complex, with some texts being produced to satisfy audience desire, and audience desire being altered by new text, and so on. But this addresses the process of textual production, obviously, not the extant material text, which just sort of sits there until we interpret it. But because the text cannot mean without interpretation, this is no small matter. Can the opinions of an audience alter the material form of an extant text? Of course not. Can they force a change of views in what that text means? They sure can, and have, and will again and again.
(2) We are best here to distinguish between the extant material text and the abstract concept of Literature, which is very much backwardly affected by audience. And because a material text is formed through processes which involve an abstract concept of Literature, the backward-causation you speak of has already taken place when the material text enters our hands.
(3) Your statement about "persuasive reviews" is puzzling. Persuasion is, by definition, an attempt to alter the opinions and/or actions of others. Thus, a reviewer who writes a persuasive review is seeking to alter opinions and actions. This is no misapplication of the powers of the reviewer, but the proper application of those powers. It's what he or she is paid to do. Without some attempt to affect the reader's understanding of a text, or the audience's tastes, reviews would be quite dull and useless.
Enough of that...
I understand my little exam is daunting. I guess I didn't really expect you to work through it all, but I was hoping you might cherry-pick a couple of the easier problems so I could see how your understanding of literature works in practice. I also wanted to show you that this isn't all theoretical philosophizing. There are real and practical things which call upon us to exercise some kind of theoretical understanding of how a text exists in the world. There are real-world decisions which can be made either well or poorly, depending upon the theory which conditions our choices.
By way of hint, let me say that some of the problems on the list speak to problems of copy-text, problems of determining an authoritative or definitive (as opposed to your "Original") text when we come to design a new edition. Other items on the list reflect problems of authorship, such as the H. L. Gold problem. Others speak to the known presence of now-vanished "Originals." The problem of Shakespeare's foul papers speaks to several problems at once: vanished originals, text-production as interrupted process, and performative circumstances. His plays were not written to be read by codex-worshipping moderns, but to be viewed on a stage, and more likely than not, to be altered on the fly when some character or action did not meet with audience approval. Here is your example of an audience actually affecting directly the production of text.
Des: "I’d say, that the ‘arena’ could indeed be recipient of various varying discrete forms of the same work and, if so, then each time a new equation (1) is triggered."
I thought you might say that. Here's an example from the list above which illustrates one problem with that line of thinking. Let's say I've been handed an English-language edition of Dante's Inferno, the Mendelbaum edition, for the sake of argument. Mendelbaum's Introduction tells me that he has tried to preserve the sense of Dante's Florentine usage. Well, that's nice of Mendelbaum, I tell myself, but what about the music of the Florentine verse? John Ciardi tried to capture that in another edition. Other translators are concerned more with modernizing the old Florentine, always keeping in mind generic expectations of their (not Dante's) audience when it comes to matters of poetry. So if, as you say, this Mendelbaum edition can be taken by me to be a new instance of "the Text, and only the Text," then how do I account for its translator's methodology, his motives for translating the text as he did? I can't, because that would be to introduce into my equation context: the extant text's variance from its original; the intentions of the translator; the gulf between the translator's cultural circumstances and those of the poet himself. These are all important considerations which we are forced to ignore when we screw in our jeweler's loupe and narrow our universe down to the extant text.
Take another example, that of the graphic novel compiled from monthly comic books. Can we say that the graphic novel is in any way an "original text"? Sure we can. But shouldn't we also recognize that the experience of reading a graphic novel is different from the experience of reading monthly comics? The graphic novel is a different format. In almost every case, it lacks internal advertisement. It lacks the slick covers of the monthlies. It is contiguous and uninterrupted. It is sold differently from a monthly. The format offers new possibilities to comics writers and illustrators. It does away with the need to fragment a narrative into six or twelve chunks with their own discrete arcs. So there may very well be narrative differences between one graphic novel (compiled from monthlies) and another (written as a graphic novel), differences which can be explained only by an appeal to the format and its generic expectations. Again, context which addresses the extant text, its reception, and its conditions of material production.
If you'd rather not tackle any of the problems on the list above, please at least think about them privately. And understand I'm not trying to shoot you down or trick you, but to give you something more concrete to chew on. If, as you say, your pursuit of the noumenon is an article of faith, then I suppose there's no way I can lure you into apostasy. But I'm hoping you'll play with some of these ideas and concrete examples, and see the value in a broader and more complex phenomenal understanding of literature. |
Neal Stanifer
| | Posted on Sunday, December 14, 2003 - 06:58 am: | |
Nick, I still think your split-market rationale appears quite sound, but a conversation last night with Nathan got me thinking about something else.
A couple years ago, I had an opportunity to chat with Robert Asprin. I was teaching a course centered around SF/F, and my students were reading an essay lambasting shared-world series as a poison pill for creative writing. Since Asprin lives here in New Orleans, I figured I would look him up and get his side of the story. He was very happy to speak on the subject, and what came out of our interview were anecdotes which pointed to a strong and vibrant sense of community among the writers on the Thieves World projects.
I see the same kind of thing going on here (with Vandermeer's "87 Cabinets" project being only the latest example), and I wonder how this sense of cameraderie or community contributes to sales (and even production of text). In broader sense, I have always had the feeling that SF/F communities (of both readers and writers/editors) are much tighter than anything in the lit/fic world, though I don't know the truth of this.
The point here is that one argument for staying firmly in the genre ghetto might be that sense of community. It may not produce the numbers you cite, but it does produce literary capital in a small way (as you pointed out already), and arguably offers other dividends which might not be forthcoming in the lit/fic world.
Any thoughts?
|
des
| | Posted on Sunday, December 14, 2003 - 07:52 am: | |
Neal Says: I've pointed out the flaws in your logic -- flaws which mistake a material object for an abstract concept; flaws which mistake a subset as encompassing its set -- and I've refuted it.
**************
With a poem, for example, the text is all we have got, and nothing but the text, and that is logical and irrefutable. Constellations of context are what each of us may or may not subsequently give to the text in varying degrees.
The rest of your arguments are interesting and thought-provoking and often arguable. We’re here back to words dressing up the noumena again. We shall never reach the nub of our differences, but I believe what I say above is irrefutable (in essence) even if you keep saying you’ve refuted it. And it is possible to be ‘mistakenly persuasisve’ which I should have said instead of ‘persuasive’. Nothing wrong with attempting to be ‘persuasive’ when post-text or intra-text, however, I agree.
+++++++++++
Neal says patronisingly: I understand my little exam is daunting.
+++++++++
Not daunting, but I maintain still irrelevant to the discussion. Your example choices are interesting and something I promised to follow up.
A Shakespeare play was indeed intended to be performed on stage. But if I’m reading it as a long poem, then that’s the way I read it. If I take into account Plutarch or any other imputed influence on Shakespeare, that’s my choice or instinct. I still only have the situation of an “equation (1)” on each occasion I encounter that play. I may address several “equation (1)”s of the same work at various times throughout my lifetime. And *I* will have changed each time and so will my response. But the text will have remained the same (usually).
If the text has slightly changed or dramatically changed (as in your examples), I don’t know what your problem is in allowing me to apply my “equation (1)” each time, and then apply the then current baggage of myself to reading, enjoying, interpreting and, if possible, noumenising it accordingly. (Baggage = personal knowledge, mood, Aesthetic taste etc.)
I repeat: I thank you for all this trouble you’ve gone to. And I at least have found the experience rewarding. And I will continue to find it rewarding as and when I dwell further on your examples, no doubt. Who knows - I may change. I don't think you will.
des
|
Nick Mamatas
| | Posted on Sunday, December 14, 2003 - 08:15 am: | |
I don't think writing a bunch of different things necessarily means that one can't experience community, or for that matter several communities. When I was at the KGB reading this October, I didn't notice Peter Straub and Jack Ketchum scowling at Stewart O'Nan. The 87 cabinets thing doesn't seem to have devolved into sullen glares and foot-stomping, not even after my cabinet sent up all the previous cabinets.
I'm sure many people are capable of being friendly with one another without having the same exact job. |
des
| | Posted on Sunday, December 14, 2003 - 09:49 am: | |
I think there is a lot of mileage in shared worlds etc in fiction - and readily fits the philosophy of Nemonymous. Indeed, at one stage (until I made a blunder about agreeing things first!), nemonymous ~4 was to be the beginning of various shared worlds stemming from earlier Nemo stories. I shall do it right, perhaps, in nemo~5!
des |
David Moles
| | Posted on Sunday, December 14, 2003 - 11:03 pm: | |
I am for writing whatever the hell one likes and publishing it wherever one is able, and selling it to people who wouldn't ordinarily pick up such a book through not just original guerilla marketing techniques but because is cleverer and interesting to ever greater numbers of people.
Thanks for the answer, Nick. Me, too.
I'm happy to admit the primary reason I'm following the tradtional (and increasingly unrealistsic) SF career path is that I'm lazy. Always have been. Submitting to the SF digests and publishing a 100,000-word SF novel with a big New York house is the upwardly-mobile petty-bourgeois approach; the artistic equivalent of getting good SATs and a BA from a state university.
Eventually one of two things will probably happen: either I'll beat the odds and be one of the ever-shrinking number of writers who's actually successful on that path, or I'll get stir-crazy enough to be motivated to expand my horizons. Until then, as long as I've got a day job, the traditional path is easier than doing the work to figure out who's actually still reading short fiction and what they want to read.
In the mean time, I like the people I've been drinking with at conventions. It could be worse. |
Neal Stanifer
| | Posted on Monday, December 15, 2003 - 07:02 am: | |
Des: "Neal says patronisingly: I understand my little exam is daunting."
It wasn't meant to be patronising, Des. It was an observation. The list WAS tough, especially as I had given no hints how to approach each item, or what kind of analysis I expected, and because some of the items on the list were quite obscure. The "little exam" bit was a jab at myself for being too pedagogical in my approach. The list was meant to be what it was: some things to mull over. Sorry you took it the wrong way.
Des: "I repeat: I thank you for all this trouble you’ve gone to."
No trouble at all, Des. It's helped me to sharpen my own points and recall evidence I haven't had occasion to work with in a couple years, and to make some new connections in the meanwhile.
Des: "Who knows - I may change. I don't think you will."
Not for the sake of accomodation, no. But if you should come up with some compelling evidence and reasoning, lay it on me. Until then...
Cheers. |
Neal Stanifer
| | Posted on Monday, December 15, 2003 - 07:11 am: | |
Nick: "I don't think writing a bunch of different things necessarily means that one can't experience community, or for that matter several communities."
Okay. That's something I hadn't considered, probably because despite your points, I was still approaching this strategy as an either/or, rather than an and/and, proposition. As I said, I don't know what it's like for writers in the mainstream looking for community and support. But as you point out, we don't have to spit out the mouth with the mouthwash.
This leads me to a question which might take us back into the work of genre in textual production. I know you've only been doing this since '99, but how have you found publishing outside genre markets to affect your conception of your own writing? Have you given much thought to this? Maybe this isn't as clear as it could be. What I'm asking for is some kind of counterfactual evidence, and if it's mere speculation, that's okay. Has knowing you can publish in the slicks caused any kind of change in the subject matter and treatments in your writing? |
des
| | Posted on Monday, December 15, 2003 - 11:21 am: | |
Thanks, Neal. And thanks, Nick, for the airtime. des |
Nick Mamatas
| | Posted on Monday, December 15, 2003 - 11:08 pm: | |
Has knowing you can publish in the slicks caused any kind of change in the subject matter and treatments in your writing?
Nope. It's just that I started reading fringe SF before I started reading core SF, so when I started writing the stuff I wanted to read I put myself on the fringe.
But this question does remind me of something that has been annoying me. About a year ago, a bunch of us kids -- folks without novels yet but with a bunch of short sales and some award nods -- got all hepped up on movementism. I floated the term Amorphous Blob to describe what was going on, but people didn't like it because it wasn't sexy. Also, it reminded many of us of our physiques.
What was interesting about blobism were people were just doing their own zine. Prozine? Sure. Xerox stuff for fun? You betcha. Blog? Natch. Alt history, hard SF, horror, realism (often referred to as "mainstream"), pile it all on like a greasy Vegas buffet.
Now though, as people have started getting bookish, a mass blind-on-blind leadership has set in. More than once I've heard comments like "X told me that Y said that this Big Name had trouble selling her latest novel to Tor because they all hate kazoos there so I have to rewrite My Great Big Space Kazoo so it will be accepted to Tor, after I revise it again and show it to my crit group and fix all the mistakes and make sure not one kazoo remains!" Half-understood, semi-attributed nonsense has become a stumbling block-cum-excuse for people to stop doing interesting things and start pouring themselves into molds.
The other extreme is self-conscious schtickiness. As if someone who has only published ten stories or twenty and only five pro sales can now start coasting on previously developed themes and tropes. But it sells, right? A Big Name wrote a sudden fiction for every drink in the Bartender's Bible, so I'll try something just like it. And one day a great metal bird will land on my bamboo runway and bring great riches to the village again.
It's tedious, really.
|
Neal Stanifer
| | Posted on Tuesday, December 16, 2003 - 07:54 am: | |
Nick, thanks for the thoughts. I agree with you in the main concerning movements. From what I've seen, they tend to begin with good intentions, then degenerate quickly into a series of templates for the less-talented. This is partly why I don't mourn the death of Steampunk, however much I loved its freshness when it was still in the cradle. The best movements, to my mind, would be those programmed to self-destruct upon reaching critical mass. Tap the vein, then blow the mine.
But movements (and bandwagonesque thinking in general) do offer benefits. Besides a cheaply-won sense of community, I mean. They can, at their best, demonstrate the variety still to be found in a genre. Paradoxical, I know: a bunch of "me-too" writers demonstrating variety. But I think there's something to it.
You're right, though, that too much depends on naming a movement. It's a masking technique, sometimes. It's so much more satisfying to say "I work mainly in the New Dada" than it is to say "I haven't got shit to say about anything, so I just fling odd images on a page in pale imitation of some dead French guys who, unlike me, had a point to make."
All this talk of movements within genre, however, brings up a question which has been plaguing me for a while, but which I haven't been able to organize properly in my head until now. To what extent do radically-innovative (or radically-retrograde) movements suffer from an unwillingness to encounter the constant subtle changes going on within a genre all the time? In other words, by cheering on the New Old and the New New, to what extent are we abandoning a very profitable source of less-radical variations closer to the generic core? Is the fringe really the place where generic change takes place? Or is it (at best) the starting point for new generic cores which will tap themselves out quickly and leave a curious legacy, and (at worst) the refuge of people who can't think of new ways to tell old stories? And is the generic core really as same-old-same-old as we so often paint it? I have my doubts.
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des
| | Posted on Tuesday, April 13, 2004 - 11:03 am: | |
Re much of the discussion above, I've bought an amazing book which sheds both light and darkness on some of these knotty problems:
STYLE IN FICTION by Geoffrey Leech and Michael Short (Longman 1981). Recommend it to all.
Des |
neil a
| | Posted on Wednesday, April 14, 2004 - 06:32 am: | |
I just read through this whole conversation after seeing a post of Des' blog. Now I have a rather bad headache.
Des, I'll definitely check that book out if I can get hold of a copy.
Thanks to everyone for hurting my head. |
Nick Mamatas
| | Posted on Wednesday, April 14, 2004 - 09:17 am: | |
Your welcome! |
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