Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions (49 page)

Uptown in the Bistro de Critique, they talk of prose concerns in terms of a work’s “level of engagement with its medium.” Downtown in the SF Café, we scorn this as an interest in style over substance. Ultimately, the disjunction here is structural: they’re talking about engaging with the low-level structure of
prose
as craft (sentential structure, semantic sets, syntax, rhythm, etc.), while we’re talking about engaging with the high-level structure of
narrative
as craft (scene structure, character dynamics, plot, pacing, etc.). In reality, prose or narrative, it is all structure, and recognising this opens up a line of defence…and of attack. Down in the SF Café we might talk of (superficial) surface execution and (substantial) internal content, but if we want to argue in the Bistro de Critique, it will be much easier if we talk their language, talk of engagement with the medium, with the craft of fiction, with
narrative
.

The failures of low-level craft in pulp fiction are undeniable. The countless examples of appalling prose may well be contrasted with the importance placed on plot, idea and world. Characterisation is liable to be shallow where the narrative grammar of horror / thriller / mystery / adventure / epic calls for engagement with a largely external conflict. And this is hardly the place to look for epiphanies of the ephemeral. But conversely, prose that is not well-heeled may nonetheless be well-turned, characters that are backgrounded r
ather than made psychological studies of are demonstrably
not the point
of the narrative, and the absence of a trite epiphany, more sophomoric wank than true satori, is no bad thing.

To say that even the purest pulp is not engaging with the medium in its f
ocus on narrative over these features is like saying that a punk band are not engaging with the medium when, with a simple line-up of singer, guitar, bass and drums, they deliberately set out to make rock songs in the classic three-minute format of verse, chorus, verse, chorus, middle-eight, verse, chorus. They may well be less concerned with intricate guitar licks, syncopation in the drum beats, the melodic skills or clever lyrics of the singer. That doesn’t mean they’re not concerned with the craft of the rock song. Actually, they’re deeply concerned. The purity of structure, the raw and visceral drive achieved by disregarding executional polish and focusing on simple, tight
songs
—that’s what they’re concerned with.

Here’s a thought experiment. Take a short story outline and get two diffe
rent writers to flesh it out, a
Literary Fiction
writer and a
Genre Fiction
writer. What you
might
end up with is two different piles of words, yet the same plot and characters. But another scenario is equally likely

The
Literary Fiction
writer works straight from your outline, focusing on the polish of the prose, the social and domestic documentary detail, the effects of voice in creating plausible character(s), the reflexive comment, the tone; they end it with a moment of profound melancholy as the protagonist gazes at a blue flower crushed underfoot on the sidewalk.

The
Genre Fiction
writer says that your plot is thin, your setting is irrelevant, your first quarter is throat-clearing, your characters are dull, their interactions are uninvolving, your structure of action is saggy in the middle, there’s no narrative drive and no sense of climax and resolution. In their story, that blue flower sparks a thought leading the protagonist to solve a problem.

In the end, the changes each writer makes so that this outline works as a st
ory for them, by their aesthetics, are so substantial that even the plot and characters in those two piles of words are radically different. Assuming those two writers are entirely unconcerned with the other’s views, they are nevertheless equally engaged with the medium.

The priorities of each may lead them to neglect the qualities prioritised by the other, and where readers subscribe to one aesthetic and reject another they will be responsive to one version and dismissive of the other. This dichotomy was historically and culturally self-evident in English literature’s divide into
Novel
and
Romance
, and there are still remnants of it in the divide between Literature and Genre.

But that divide between
Literary Fiction
and
Genre Fiction
is born of a sleight-of-hand redefinition of both terms—a conflation of markets and modes.
Genre
means a specific aesthetic form of fiction (of whatever quality), but it has also come to mean any fiction aimed at a particular set of markets.
Literary
means high-quality fiction (of whatever aesthetic form), but it has also come to mean any fiction
not
aimed at that particular set of markets. We only have to smear the two meanings of each term and—
voilà!
—by definition
Literary Fiction
and
Genre Fiction
are a mutually exclusive taxonomy and any particular work must be considered one or the other. This is really just a circular definition of any fiction aimed at a particular set of markets as of a lower quality than fiction not so aimed.

Strip it down to the underlying politics of these aesthetic territories and we find a flat assertion, a judgemental privileging of the values underpinning one set of fictions over those underpinning another: the valorisation of Story by
Genre Fiction
is
wrong
because it leads to “non-literary” fiction, while the valorisation of Style by
Literary Fiction
is
right
because it leads to “literary” fiction; to value Story is
bad
taste because those are the standards of
Genre Fiction
, while to value Style is
good
taste because those are the standards of
Literary Fiction
.

This is no more and no less than a petit-bourgeois exercise of privilege in order to reinforce privilege, the application of literary aesthetics
to
literary aesthetics as a self-validating signal of social status, a demonstration of the power to judge, in which the judgement is itself an assertion of its own legitimacy.

Fuck that shit.

Scouring away this High Art / Low Art Culture Wars crap, the question of Style versus Story remains, the question of to what extent these generalisations might be fair and to what extent each type of fiction,
Genre Fiction
or
Literary Fiction
, might neglect the values of the other. Answer: both Style and Story are masks for the reality that words are the only substance: prose is narrative is prose is narrative; the only difference is structural focus, on the concrete or abstract levels of effect, on internal and/or external action.

If
Genre Fiction
focuses on Story at the expense of Style, does
Literary Fiction
focus on Style at the expense of Story? The dichotomy is meaningless. A pulp narrative of shoddy prose conjures a shoddy narrative, only succeeds because the skimreader bounces from benchmark to benchmark, constructing the story for themself. Meanwhile, a well-heeled sentence that is slick but shallow is as bad as prose as it is as narrative, for all that a good grasp of tone allows the writer to craft a passable sense of inner conflict and resolution, a similitude of plot in the shifting of emotional tensions, all wrapped up neatly with the faux-resolution of a moment of epiphany.

A plague, I say, on both these houses, but
doubled
on the mediocrity of the middlebrow. Cock save us from the skimwritten formulaic trash but, by the Good Lord Cock Almighty,
damn
the banality of well-crafted but insipid prose delving deep, but without drive or direction, into a conjuring of the tedious, neurotic, facile angsts of the straight white middle-class male, reaching for some slightest scrap of inspiration to end it on with a limp and maundering pseudo-apophenia. Have we lived and fucked in vain that our wild literature of the aeons, from the first furry faggot giantkiller through to the wounding of an autumnal city and beyond, should be spin-doctored as such an anodyne creation as the
literary
?

Even if living in the ghetto of Genre did mean being lost among the
Untermenschen
of narrative junkies and subsisting only on the hackwork prose handed out in the soup kitchens, having not a single eatery serving more than kippleburgers, the alternative might well be seen as a cocktail party of self-styled
Übermenschen
, snorting prose and nibbling on the flimsy narrative hors d’oeuvres handed out by obsequious serving staff, the sort of fiction Michael Chabon refers to as “the contemporary, quotidian, plotless, moment-of-truth revelatory story.”

To return to the music metaphor, preferring prose over narrative the
Literary Fiction
fan extolls the literary equivalent of prog-rock epics, bloated and pompous, albeit expertly played by skilled musicians. They praise twiddly guitar wank and widdly synth shite, recoiling from the three-chord, three-minute blasts of energy that are
Genre Fiction
because some of the more popular musicians can’t play their instruments for peanuts—have good songs but lack polish. At least The Stooges are not sterile.

And to recoil from
Genre Fiction
, of course, is to miss out on those who
can
play, and to fancy one’s ignorance an actual absence. At its extreme, these musos become advocates of an idea that this lack of polish is systemic, that the best punk band could
never
be as good as a prog band, because punk (with a few rare exceptions) will always be hamstrung by its intrinsic faults, whereas prog, being the standard against which all rock should be measured, is a higher art form.

Not only is this nonsense, but the impoverishment of
Literary Fiction
will be far more extreme than any lack of prosaic polish in
Genre
as long as this is ultimately what is meant by
literary
as opposed to
genre
: where the former insists upon a purely mimetic approach, a fiction of
representation
, the latter is identified by a distinctly semiotic approach, a fiction of
figuration
. Where the realists inherit from Rationalism a focus on observation and articulation, a focus on the low-level structuring of language (Style) as a medium through which an insightful study of some situation in the world may be developed and offered to a reader, writers of the category fiction abjected depart from this precisely in the dynamics they inherit from Romanticism, their supposed focus on the high-level structures of language (Story) unpacking to a low-level vitality of pataphoric prose, a medium in which the semiocosm is re-engineered directly.

On a superficial level, it should not be difficult to understand the trope-sets of character, plot and worldscape that are found in
Space Opera
,
Epic Fantasy
,
Crime
,
Western
or
Romance
as symbols within a supersystem of semiotic systems, a lexis of spaceships, dragons, detectives or bodice-ripped heroines for which the narrative is syntax. It should not be hard to see in these metaphors with their iconic vehicle unmoored from tenor, the capacity of a conceit like Heller’s Catch-22, the infinite capacity of the sum of every and any potential such conceit.

Ultimately, all generic tropes can be analysed as quirks, not as copied co
nventions but as disruptions of suspension-of-disbelief, or of affective equilibrium; as objects and individuals, events and settings charged with wonder, awe, horror, desire,
whatever
; as fictive elements that are sensationalist, a strain on credibility or whatever, precisely because that power is their purpose, and that purpose at the heart of art.

Insofar as
any
fictive element can be so invested, made a quirk by context, it is not simply that these genres utilise these semiotic systems as trope-sets. It is not simply that the genres create meaning by combining these tropes into a narrative. It is that they
generate
quirks through the dynamics of narrative and in so doing reconstruct the semiocosm that lives in us and in which we live, our filter on reality, our language for making sense of it.

It is in this respect that
Genre Fiction
takes a semiotic approach anathema to the realists of
Literary Fiction
, in this respect that it exhibits semiosis as a process, in the same way that realist fiction exhibits mimesis. We can only ask then: if the semiotic fiction of Genre allows the mimesis associated with Literature, while the mimetic fiction of Literature
absolutely
rejects the semiosis associated with Genre, which is the more aesthetically limited and limiting form?