Are Stieg Larsson and Dan Brown a match for literary fiction?

Via The Observer, a long piece by Edward Docx: Are Stieg Larsson and Dan Brown a match for literary fiction? His answer: No. Excerpt:

With Larsson now dead and so decent a chap, how dare I go up on deck and start explaining – amid the storms of publicity and howl of Hollywood and the relentless sluicing of the sales – that his work is not very good even by the standards of his genre? 

Well because, in my view, we need urgently to remind ourselves of – for want of better terminology – the difference between literary and genre fiction; because, to misquote the literary essayist Isaac D'Israeli, "it seems to me a wretched national compulsion to be gratified by mediocrity when the excellent lies before us". 

We need to be clear-eyed here because although there is much written about this subject, there is also much theatricality to the debate. And this serves to hide (on both sides) a fundamental dishonesty. 

The proponents of genre fiction are not sincere about the limitations even of the best of what they do while being scathing and disingenuous about literary fiction (there's no story, nothing happens etc). 

Meanwhile, the (equally insincere) literary proponents say either: "Oh, don't blame us, it's the publisher's fault – they label the books and we really don't see the distinction"; or, worse, they adopt the posture and tone of bad actors delivering Shakespeare and talk of poetry and profundity without meaning a great deal or convincing anyone. 

Both positions are bogus and indicative of something (also interesting) about the way we talk of literature and culture more widely.

It's an entertaining polemic, but a bit beside the point. Dismissing a literary form as "genre" simply begs the question of whether it's got "literary" merit. It's like dismissing haiku as "genre" poetry when "literary" poetry is the Shakespearean sonnet: An expression of personal taste and not much else.

Every work of fiction will follow some conventions and ignore others. When certain clusters of conventions keep turning up, we have a genre—whether it's the thriller or the romance or the Bildungsroman. 

Eventually the conventions become so, um, conventional that they bore us. If they don't, we're stuck at some infantile level with a need for predictable stimuli, like a toddler wanting the same bedtime story every night. Or a folk-music audience booing Dylan for going electric.

At that point, a lucky genre attracts the attention of writers willing to stretch the conventions beyond their breaking points. They oblige us to think differently, especially about the genre itself and why it appeals to us. In the process, our perception of the world and our self-understanding grow wider and deeper.

This is as true of "literary" genres as of mass-market genres. All fiction is a conversation with earlier fiction, assuming some familiarity with old conventions. We can't go on writing novels about obsessive whale-hunters or people in TB sanatoriums, but we can comment on them, riffing on their themes and images. 

We may do so in homage to the masters, or with the affectionate malice of Cervantes trashing medieval romance. Either way, the audience should get more out of the experience than they expected: They see the old work in a new light, see the new work as more than it appeared to be, and see themselves differently as well.

Literature, said Ezra Pound, is news that stays news. That's as true of genre fiction as of "literary" fiction. Plenty of mainstream novels are touted as major literature when they appear, but most of them—like most paperback romances and spy novels—are soon forgotten as old news. Even the most desperate Ph.D. candidates can't find enough in them to warrant a dissertation.

So the conclusion I draw is that we should write about what concerns us, in whatever genre that seems to express our concerns well, and hope for the best. If it's crap, Sturgeon's Law reminds us that 90 percent of everything is crap. If it's not, future generations of readers—not current literary critics—will say we've written literature. 

Comments

[Tim Chambers]

If they don't, we're stuck at some infantile level with a need for predictable stimuli, like a toddler wanting the same bedtime story every night.

You have posed the problem in a very precise and explicit way. Which is that genre fiction readers are exactly as you describe. It doesn't mean that all "literary" fiction will provide a graduate student with material for a dissertation, 90% of it is still crap, but it nonetheless strives to be something more than the same old genre story with different character names filled in at the blanks.