Miklos@YALE.ARPA (06/08/84)
From: Stephen Miklos <Miklos@YALE.ARPA> This is in response to Jeff Duntemann's crusade on behalf of sf. SF is not sui generis. It is a genre of literature. Occasionally an sf book will be so well-written that it appeals to readers (and critics) who generally are not willing to put up with sf. This happens with other genres as well, for example Raymond Chandler's detective novels or Graham Greene's spy books. Are these books no longer genre books, because they have been accepted by mainstream critics? It is hard to say. Perhaps it is a meaningless question. It seems to me that most of the popular sub-genres of fiction have one thing in common: adventure. There is the voyeuristic thrill of reading about people who do things you don't do. Solving murders, spying on the Russians, travelling in outer space, having epic love affairs, or handling huge amounts of money (usually while having epic love affairs). The difference between a genre novel and a "mainstream" or serious novel has to do with the quality of writing, but more to do with the quality of conceptualization, and with a shift in empahasis from the spying or detecting or space travel or what-have-you over to the relationships of real characters to each other and to a real world. The best sf (as well as the best fiction of other genres) that I know of has very little to do with the genre fetish, and a whole lot to do with the people in the book. There is nothing wrong with genre fiction, just as there is nothing wrong with rock and roll or hamburgers; but genre fiction is not generally in the same league with literary fiction. The best of rock and roll shows the same inventiveness and musical sophistication as the best art songs, and is therefore "as good as" the art songs, just as the best sf is "as good as" the best literary fiction. But there remains a core of "fans" who enjoy the mysteries, romances, sf tales, and so on mainly for the things that make them genre books, regardless of the "literary" value of the books. I happen to enjoy sf in this way, but I don't kid myself that any but a very few sf books have any literary value at all. The quality that Mr. Duntemann attributes to sf to set it apart from "mainstream" fiction, optimism, is available in all the other genre books. He just happens to be a fan of sf instead of mysteries, romances, or spy stories. I have a hard time swallowing his contention that it is not also the main theme of modern serious fiction. I just don't see alll this despair that Mr. Duntemann is wailing about. If there is one thread that has persisted throughout literature it is the notion of the nobility of the human spirit and a sense of delight at the variety of human life. This has persisted past the Victorians. Who can ignore the thundering "yes" of Joyce's Ulysses or the sublime optimism of Alice Walker's "The Color Purple", to take an example from each end of the modern era. If Jeff's instructor thought that Camus was all about whether or not to commit suicide, then he should have had a more perceptive teacher. The man was talking about freedom--which includes the freedom to commit suicide--and committing yourself to something in spite of the fact that you are absolutely free. Though there is no meaning given to life from above, our choices make it meaningful. Despair? Think about the doctor in The Plague and then talk to me about despair. The work of any writer you can get me to agree is any good (and that includes most of the ones most critics think are good--I'm not trying to pick out an unrepresentative subset), in this century or any other, is primarily about the worth of human beings and not about despair, except when despair is shown as a bad option. A very abbreviated list would include, among authors active since WWII, John Gardner (not the spy-story guy, but "The Sunlight Dialogues" et al.), Thomas Pynchon, John Updike, I. B. Singer, Saul Bellow, John Kennedy Toole, Thornton Wilder, Walker Percy, Athol Fugard, and Graham Greene, to name only some of my favorites. This list includes some heavy- and some light-weights, but no pap. And no despair. Will sf take over "mainstream"? Indubitably, literature will be more concerned with technology as real people become more concerned with technology. When was the last time you read a modern novel in which a phone call or a car trip did not have an impact on the plot? This is not, however, what most of us would call sf. It is possible that the next big theme in serious literature is technology (or the next + n), but that literature will be different in quality from most of what we call sf. I could go on for days; in fact, I have. Ignore all of this if what Mr. Duntemann meant by "mainstream" is the best-seller list. It doesn't much matter whether all the best-sellers next year are sf--it won't have anything to do with literature. Btw--this is not an elitist attitude; "literary" fiction is just as much a genre as sf. Some like plot, some like style. +++>> stephen <<+++ -------