Writing Dies, Too

Writers die. So does their work.

Yes, some work achieves a kind of immortality that lasts at least as long as the culture that produced it. And it’s not always the best or most deserving or most representative work, either. James Fennimore Cooper and L. Ron Hubbard prove that, for differing reasons.

Yes, popularity plays into it. Partly that may be due to sheer numbers. There are so many Stephen King books in print that they have a better chance of being discovered by second and subsequent readers, and generations.

Popularity can lead to discussion, too. Critic chat is not as influential as academic regard, simply because works chosen as school texts are kept in print longer. This doesn’t endear works, though. Catcher In the Rye by J. D. Salinger is forced down the throats of high school kids and this only makes them gag the stronger, both on Holden Caulfield’s whining and on reading as enjoyable entertainment. Another bizarre choice, no doubt approved by Cotton Mather’s horny ghost, is The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel paid-by-the-word-and-bonus-for-convoluted-sentences Hawthorne.

No child left to its own devices, in short.

And no book approved by Mark Twain or Kurt Vonnegut, either, apparently. Or only books they kicked, chosen as torture.

Some of us were allowed to find our own reading. Most of that group ended up liking to read. Many of us even came down with writing joneses.

Damn.

Rather than pity the afflicted, enable them by buying some of their stuff, wouldja?

Some prominent writers have died lately, and not just Vonnegut. Michael Crichton, Studs Terkel, Janwillem van de Wetering, Gregory Mcdonald, James Crumley, and Tony Hillerman, to name a few offhand, in no order and for no collective reason.

We note their passing often by grabbing up their work. Freshly dead writers often experience a sales surge. Would’ve done them a lot more good had it come before they left, but their estates are appreciative, not to mention their publishers, who can then start the perennial exploitation dance.

Will their work last?

Some will, yes. For reasons touched upon. Some won’t, for unfathomable reasons.

Some work goes away, then comes back.

Tolkien did that. His work was obscure in my lifetime. He published most of it in the 1930s. Thirty years later it experienced a resurgence that saw it, in another decade, become hugely popular and influential. In part this was due to Lester del Rey coming up with the Fantasy Trilogy gimmick, to feed the Tolkien jones once people had read him. A sales trick became a sub-genre and it prevails to this day. Why sell one book when you can hook readers into at least three?

Much talk has wasted air over whether this “trilogy” nonsense has ruined fiction or stretched storytelling to some logical limit. Maybe it’s just reader patience being stretched.

It seems, now, that Tolkien’s work will last as part of Western Culture. We would not have guessed this in his lifetime.

Which brings us to the rub. That’s the narrow part you have to squeeze through. The part the fat can’t do, be they fat-headed or otherwise burdened and slow.

The rub? We can’t know what writing will last.

A quick and dirty scan tells us to bet on storytelling over style. A good story well told has more chance of lasting, people being generally the same through history. Style changes in a way similar to fashion. Many factors come to bear on style, so that one generation prefers indirection and discretion, another demands the harsh and the blunt.

All that falls away, though, when a story proves robust enough to jump languages and cultures. That is when the story itself, and, often, how it’s told matter most. Basics count in writing as in all things. And story is the basis of writing.

And of course often the books we might choose as ones to last are themselves recapitulations of classic stories. Retelling a standard well, or in a new voice, is the same as singing a standard song. If a new version, take, interpretation, or voice appeals, it is likely to work.

The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman comes to mind, it being a new take on The Jungle Books by Rudyard Kipling, themselves in part based on Indian folk tales absorbed by Kipling. Patterns repeat.

Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier was, as were many books since, a retelling of The Odyssey by Homer. Homer is a mysterious figure whose tales were not even written down for centuries, so who knows how many refinements and alterations came and went during its oral tradition phase. And yet the basics remain intact. They are recognizable even in American Civil War guise.

Beowulf, oldest known tale in English, is a monster of a horror story, a heroic adventure with lots of violence, action, and drama. It is pulp. It is penny dreadful. It is genre. It is baseline appealing to humanoid primates.

Fiction delivery systems tend to remain true to the human voice. Someone tells a story, others listen. If it’s got certain elements it fascinates. Listeners are hooked and come back for more as the camp fire dies low and shadows move in the dark around us.

Writing dies along with writers, sometimes, but fiction is along for the ride with us. As long as we’re hear to receive it, to crave and need and rely upon it, then fiction will sustain us.

Our stories are our lives.

That is what will last, maybe even longer than we do.

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Rising Above Miscegenation

Ursula K. LeGuin spoke of miscegenation between genre and mainstream fiction. She discussed briefly how the two are distinct in approach and form. She thought the mainstream benefitted but wasn’t too sure genre gained from such exchanges and mergers.

What mainstream fiction tends to get from genre is imaginative elements. Magic realism for the mainstream critics was what genre critics called fantasy all along, for instance. Such elements can enliven basics seen too many times before.

Genre fiction tends to take realism from mainstream fiction. A grittier sense of presence, a more realistic depiction of behavior or setting results. This can refresh tired ideas and threadbare executions.

In genre fiction, plot counts most. So do ideas. In mainstream fiction, character and setting are emphasized. This simple shift of emphasis has created a gap in American fiction that does not exist as strongly elsewhere in the world. Elsewhere -- Britain for example -- the differences are seen as valid variants, rather than distinctions. Genre and mainstream exist there intermingled. A writer can be considered serious while writing mystery or science fiction, there. Anthony Burgess is an example. In Britain, a genre writer can win serious literary awards for work that crosses or blurs genre lines. Martin Amis comes to mind.

Stateside, fen are upset by writers perceived generally as literary who “pilfer” genre elements and end up being recognized for innovation. Fen grouse about Margaret Atwood for swooping down from her literary heights to scarf up some science fictional insight in The Handmaid’s Tale, which went on to glean much acclaim and, incidentally, became a best-seller and major movie. Fen sneer at mystery writer P. D. James for using science fictional tricks in Children of Men, a book that also won acclaim, sold hugely well, and became a big movie. Mostly the fen resent all the attention the genre elements in such works receive from the mainstream critics, as if such things had never existed before, let alone been pioneered by pre-WW II pulp writers and their literary offspring.

Where, fen whine, is the mainstream or academic praise for Frank Herbert’s Dune or for Johanna Russ’s The Female Man?

Oh, but when Ursula K. LeGuin manages to jump the gap from a start in genre fiction to mainstream literary respectability, some fen wonder if she’s sold out, or if she’s even written “real” science fiction all along?

They pulled the same on Ray Bradbury. “He never really wrote science fiction or fantasy, it was always mainstream fabulism,” fen say, when the quality of his prose and the purity of his voice prompts mainstream recognition.

Of course, they skip over the work of Philip K. Dick, which has become a favorite of academics and has, oddly, been made into many movies since PKD’s death. Hell, it’s even been chosen for the Library of America fancy book gimmick, considered prestigious by collectors.

Suffice it to say that, stateside at least, the standards to which fiction are held vary between genre and mainstream. What are valid variations elsewhere are distinctions keeping groups separate here.

Miscegenation means interbreeding between distinct races. It is an ugly term. It implies purity contaminated. It leads to terms like maroon and mulatto

And sure enough, as fen eagerly point out, genre fiction, particularly science fiction, has been singled out stateside for prejudicial treatment. It’s been the victim of unwarranted slurs, scurrilous lies, and mean spirited analysis. It’s been held in contempt and used as a reason for automatic and universal dismissal from serious contention for major literary prizes.

The very term genre fiction carries a stigma of cookie-cutter lack of quality. Unfairly, all examples are judged by the worst among them. Pulp fiction from 50 years ago continues to define academic response to genre fiction today.

This despite many mainstream writers pilfering genre tropes, fen complain. How come it’s okay when they do it?

It’s how they do it, comes the response from the snob side of the divide. Learn to write better, the mainstream critics sneer.

By whose standards? That should be the question. If it is acknowledged that different standards apply, then it must also be acknowledged that a given work may simultaneously be excellent and terrible, depending on what critic is making the assessment.

Can the standards merge?

In the 1970s, a New Wave hit genre fiction, especially science fiction. Writers brought many new tricks, from mainstream literary writing classes. Purists balked. Pulp standards of writing developed by scientists and engineers, who concentrated on idea and plot, became Golden, while the New Wave stuff was viewed as effete, affected, and ineffectual. Who wanted all those characters cluttering things up; genre fiction required only cardboard cut-outs as place markers for ideas.

And so the debate devolved at once into name calling and posturing. It remains acrimonious to this day, despite decades of excellent work meshing the competing standards.

Which brings us back to Ursula K. LeGuin’s remark about miscegenation. She’s not sure genre benefits from an influx of mainstream elements?

First, consider the source of this comment; the latest issue of LOCUS, the newspaper of science fiction and fantasy publishing. She was speaking to a select audience and perhaps playing to its perceived prejudices.

Second, consider that LeGuin’s work itself represents some of the finest merging -- miscegenation -- available. She has always written pure science fiction with high mainstream standards of prose and character, setting and theme. Her work is neither white nor black but bronze and brown, a burnished alloy combining the best of both.

Third, consider that miscegenation is an old-fashioned, outdated word, long overdue for an overhaul. Perhaps that is what we can learn from her comment, that the new mix, as with hybrids everywhere, is stronger and healthier than either of its parents.

Of the New Wave herself, LeGuin may be looking forward to a time when the only consideration is not genre versus mainstream, but quality of writing. A good story well told is all that matters, in the end. Categorical thinking should be a thing of the past, an embarrassment like racism or any other kind of prejudice and bigotry.

Sure, some of us will always prefer stories with certain types of elements in them; that’s a matter of taste and education. But excluding work, not even giving it a chance, simply because it emphasizes one set of standards over another, or contains one set of elements and not another, is absurd.

It simply does not matter what percentage of what kind of “blood” one carries from one’s ancestry, and it simply does not matter what percentage of what arbitrary literary grouping a story contains.

We need to be better than that, like the best of today’s fiction.


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