Sunday, September 16, 2007
Picture or no picture?
I am a fan of detective stories, crime novels, mysteries. Indeed, I enjoy various kinds of "genre fiction" and am at a loss to see why some critics (see Camille Paglia's interview with Margaret Wente in the GLOBE AND MAIL for interesting comment on the state of the art) consider these kinds of writing not quite literature. Ergo, magic realism is in, while speculative fiction is out. (If you don't know the difference, go check your theory book!) Happily, in the hands of writers like Nalo Hopkinson, those boundaries are already giving. I have just read, in pretty quick succession, THE DARLING by Russell Banks (real literature) and Philip Kerr's THE ONE FROM THE OTHER, a detective story, described, not as a Bernie Gunther mystery, Bernie being the protagonist, but as "A Bernie Gunther novel", Mr Kerr's editors being clearly familiar with the runnings. I'm not sure how Kerr, or, say, Mosley, or Simenon end up not being writers of plain old literature – not that they care, for any writers making a living out of scribbling can afford to thumb their noses at the critics. (Stephen King's book, ON WRITING is standard fare in many a writing course. QED) I find the approaches taken by Banks and Kerr by no means dissimilar. Both tales are set in recent historical time, Kerr's novel in Germany, Austria, Palestine and Egypt of the Second World War and the immediate post-war years, and Banks's in the radical underground of the 60s and 70s in the US, and in Liberia in the period of the civil war – "real times" of extraordinary violence. Both tales include characters who are historical figures, central characters who perpetrate the violence. Though Banks is telling Hannah Musgrave's story straightforwardly, so to speak, and Kerr is concerned to have us follow Bernie Gunther as he unravels sinister webs-within-webs, there is considerable converegence in their purposes. Identifying each writer's goal, and considering how successfully each story achieves that goal, and the extent to which these goals overlap, would make for interesting discussion – as literature, in my humble opinion.
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One suggestion I've heard lately is that genre literature (mystery, science fiction, fantasy) has to have a defined conclusion, but literary writing does not. The literary novel can have a non-conclusive ending, or can be relentlessly dark, and this is seen as more sophisticated and superior.
I know, I know, Fragano, though Miss Austen wraps her stories up and makes the cut regardless. It's both the writer and the teacher in me that are (?) bothered by the hard boundaries, for they retard discussion as well as discourage audience. For my money, the best genre fiction is literature, and the worst literature has none of the lifelines of good genre fiction to rescue it – no mystery, no blood and gore, no twists of plot, no mechanism to effect dystopia. As for relentless darkness, Peter Kerr,as it happens, was doing a pretty good job of unrelenting gloom. But I guess if Naipaul can't find his way around a poem, why should I expect a BA in English to tell me how a Bronte differs from a Mills and Boone...
For me, literature is what you want to read again and again, and get something out of each time. But then, I'm an unabashed science fiction fan, and have been all my reading life.
Somehow, I can't see Heathcliff as the male lead in a Mills & Boon...
That could be a great working definition of literature... What I like and what you like will be different, and so on for everybody. It's inclusive, more than nice, and it means that everybody can claim their piece of the song and story pie, which is probably as it should be, never mind that it will drive the purists crazy. And the idea of Heathcliff as the male hero in a Mills and Boone entirely pleases me.
Well, the male hero of an M &
B novel is supposed to be a wild child tamed by love. That's not Heathcliff.
Literature, in the end, is what endures in the readers' hearts.
Fragano:
Well, my boy Heathcliff could open up the genre, couldn't he? I like the readers' hearts description. Songs and stories have sustained us since the beginning of time, yet the "academy" have managed to make literature into fare that's consumed by this narrow little group of people. And then we lament falling literacy and a lack of readers. You are lucky. At this point, it's better to be a social scientist. At least that's obeah of recent vintage...
Obeah? Right now I could do with some 'Ile a mek student write sense'.
When I look at literary scholarship these days I wonder what it has to do with literature -- with what the writers say about human life, the human heart, the human world -- as opposed to being theorising in a vacuum.
A Spanish poet of my acquaintance asked me if American universities were still teaching post-modernism, deconstruction and all that nonsense, and I had to say 'yes'.
Mek me tell, you bredren. Dat de ile supplai run out lang time! I was glad to find Ms Paglia raining wrath on the critical foolishness. Mark you, I can BS pretty good myself. My thesis invented a taxonomy of "prismatic forms", derived with the assistance of the prose of Mr. Wilson Harris, which I proceeded to apply to the poetry of Walcott and Brathwaite. But it was all in good fun, and I like to think that inside of it were a couple useful insights. No doubt the theory has its little place, but it has taken over the pool of literature like those Oriental carp, and threatens to eat up everything. Meanwhile songs and stories have gone out of the window, Bob Marley's musings on the ways of the world have been exchanged for the dancehall preoccupation with "cunnilingus and homophobia", as you say, and there are Jamaican children who have never heard of Louise Bennett or Anansi. I fear the hour of the Rough Beast has indeed come round and he has almost reached Bethlehem...
Is your dissertation publicly available? It does sound interesting.
That there are Jamaican children who have not heard of Miss Lou or Anansi I can scarcely credit. That suggests that I am getting old. (Well, my younger son tells me that all the time, so did one of my nieces last year).*
Something has gone very wrong in the world -- and it isn't a lack of religion or religiosity -- and that's not a matter of my turning into my father. Somewhere in the past two decades something happened to drive good sense as far out of the picture as it has ever been.
We are, as your fellow Catholic, Alasdair Macintyre has been at pains to point out creators of narratives, embedded in narratives, yet the stories seem to be drying up. We're getting a crass materialism which makes the Gilded Age seem positively puritanical.
*The fact that I am a parent, and that I have grown children still astounds me.
You can probably get the diss on inter-library loan... I'm now so far away from all that, I no longer know how it works. I myself could scarcely credit the tale that there are Jamaican children who know neither Miss Lou nor Anansi, but it comes from an impeccable source, to wit, a black Jamaican friend, wid de dialec still in ar mout, who went down to work in a primary school for a while. She assures me they weren't foolin ar up. I agree that something has gone very wrong in the world. The spirit has gone out of it – "gloss that all of the ways," to quote "My sister red", which is a poem of mine. And of course we are makers of song and story, though I don't know if we sufficiently appreciate what that means. In this regard, while I admit they are not alone responsible, I indict the "academy", for – what? laziness? profound stupidity? arrogance? – in not regarding the vast, intricate, intertwined arena of human knowledge and experience with the appropriate awe. Instead we commodify it, make students into 'clients and customers' and schools into 'firms and suppliers', traffic in the commerce of skills and knowledge. I too have myself long been astounded by the fact that I am a parent and have grown children, and now a grandchild. Our reasons maybe different, though. I'd be glad to know yours.
A far wiser man than I, named Marx, pointed out long ago that it is the inevitable tendency of capitalism to commodify everything. You and I came to maturity in a period during which capitalism was on the back foot, facing a triumphalist state socialism entrenched in the USSR and China, and consequently in which some space for humanity continued to exist.
Now, I have young people telling that dressing like a prisoner is their 'culture' (I teach at a historically black institution), I listen to mindless drivelling about the quantity of champagne consumed by some rapper and am told that this is the pinnacle of cultural expression, and I look at journals like Small Axe and am amazed at the pretentiousness-to-sense ratio.
It isn't that I'm becoming a conservative, or even a curmudgeon, so much as being in despair at the willingness of people to sell themselves for less than a mess of pottage.
Jamaicans seem willing to abandon their culture, become integrated into the hegemonic grasp of modern capitalism (one-size-fits-all black American version, if you please)because that's where the money is. Being the godless and irreverent sort I am, I note that this is pushed as much by popular preachers as it is by rappers, actors, and merchandisers.
It isn't simply that the academy (though literary scholarship does seem to have gone off the rails) has forgotten that its function is the promotion of knowledge and understanding and the preservation of our connections to both the past and the future, as that who we are has become irrelevant: we are all merely consumers, and we exist merely to buy. No one* can make a profit by mining our culture, so we get sold another one, newer, shinier, and tawdrier that will fall apart thus requiring that we buy another one......
* As soon as I wrote this I thought of Neil Gaiman's American Gods and Anansi Boys, but they aren't being sold to us as such.
I think it's maybe time to do a post on this, Fragano, start a new thread, so to speak. Not sure how best to do it, though. Would I have your permission to use your comments in such a document – with attribution, of course?
Oh, absolutely. No problem. BTW, are you publishing poetry?
Thanks, Fragano. I'll have to think about how to do it. Sandberry Press still does a likl sumting from time to time, most recently in 2005... We've published some great books in the Caribbean Poetry Series. I can send you a list, if you like.
I would certainly like. You can message me on Facebook for my email (or send me a private message on my blog). I'm interested in submitting poetry for publication, if you are willing.
Hi Fragano:
Blog for Sandberry Press has info on our publications, as well as contact information. It's at http://sandberrypress.blogspot.com/
We just hung it up, in response to reader queries, like yours, and in the absence of a website. Thanks again for your interest and support. It is much appreciated.
Hearty tenky!
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