Genre and Literature
By Juliet Marillier | July 3, 2008 |
By the time this is posted I’ll be in Estonia, about as far away from home as I can get. Preparations for the trip were disrupted by a new arrival – an old, blind dog who needed to be gently eased into my existing menagerie. Life is full of surprises.
Part two of Therese’s interview with Michael Gruber, author of The Forgery of Venus, brought up the old issue of genre writing versus ‘literature’. I’m past being upset by prejudices against genre writing, but I found this statement from Mr Gruber provocative:
True genre fiction can’t exceed expectation or it is not, by definition, genre. Genre is based on expectation … Gene Wolfe and Ursula Le Guin are two of the best writers in America, but no one gives their work serious attention because they’re both in the SF genre ghetto.
There’s an implication there that as Wolfe and Le Guin are in the SF genre ghetto, their work conforms to expectation. According to Mr Gruber’s definition, either it does so or it isn’t SF. Of course, both writers are SF luminaries, and neither is conformist. So why aren’t their books put in the same basket as, say, Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake or Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell? Is it a case of ‘once tainted by the genre title, forever beyond the literary pale’?
As for ‘nobody gives their work serious attention’, evidently the Hugo and Nebula awards aren’t serious; nor is the long-term respect of the international speculative fiction community.
Ursula Le Guin used her storytelling skills to comment on the genre issue after reading a review of Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, a literary novel that won a Nebula award. Read her very funny contribution here.
I once attended a cross-genre critique group in which a literary writer announced at the start that she couldn’t critique the fantasy writers’ pieces because ‘I don’t understand the conventions.’ My response was that good writing is good writing, whatever the genre. When I write, there’s only one fantasy convention that I follow – the world of the book must be internally consistent. That’s common sense. I try to shape my work around effective storytelling, not some set of pre-existing guidelines. I don’t think of myself as writing fantasy. I just tell stories. I don’t believe the essential difference between genre writing and literary writing is to do with meeting expectation. I think it’s more that in genre writing, the primary purpose of the writer is storytelling. That storytelling can be done with more or less skill, originality and literary technique. Mr Gruber tells us that real literature (his term) is by its nature challenging, and that it confronts the reader with life. Isn’t that true of all the best novels, including many found on the genre shelves?
It’s true that a lot of genre writing is conventional. Fantasy novels with a naive young hero, a quest, a wise mentor and so on can still be found, and they have a keen (mostly youngish) readership. The same applies in the romance genre, where the monthly offerings from a publisher like Harlequin still conform to tight guidelines in terms of plot and characters. It’s worth considering the historical roots of both fantasy and romance (they have a shared past) before leaping to any conclusions about recurring themes and tropes.
In the interview, Michael Gruber said of commercial fiction that
risks are limited because most readers of commercial fiction want the familiar. That’s why they call it commercial. In genre, moreover, not only do they want the familiar, they want the same.
To generalize in that way is to insult readers of genre fiction. In the case of fantasy, there is still a market for sword and sorcery epics, but alongside those we have original, inventive and stylish writers like China Miéville, Iain M Banks, Susanna Clarke and relative newbie Joe Abercrombie, all of them capable of surprising the reader at every turn. Iain M Banks (under the ‘pseudonym’ Iain Banks) is an award-winning writer of mainstream literary novels. China Miéville is viewed in the UK as a literary writer. However, both are recognized as working in speculative fiction genres.
Is there any point in making distinctions between genre fiction and literature, or are such distinctions only useful to booksellers? Do genre readers really want the same or are some of them intelligent enough to enjoy being surprised or even (gulp) confronted with deep truths about the human condition? Do you have a favourite novel that breaks genre conventions?
Juliet Marillier has written twenty-four novels for adults and young adults and two collections of short fiction. Her works of historical fantasy have been published around the world and have won numerous awards. Juliet’s most recent series was Warrior Bards, of which the third and final book, A Song of Flight, was published in 2021. Her collection of reimagined fairy tales, Mother Thorn and Other Tales of Courage and Kindness, had its trade release in 2022. Mother Thorn is illustrated by Kathleen Jennings and published by Serenity Press.
Juliet is currently working on a two-book fantasy series. The first book in this duology, The Amber Owl, will be published by New Dawn in February 2025.
When not writing, Juliet looks after a small crew of rescue dogs.
Looking down on genre is an attitude I really don’t understand, but perhaps I’m lowbrow and don’t know it…
I’ve always loved and read genre, from sword-and-sorcery quests in middle school, to romance as an adult. Throughout all those years I also read mysteries.
I’m actually coming back to this post to post a reply after passing it up on the first reading, because of something I read later. I was reading about writing cozy mysteries, and saw a brief mention of cross-genre writing with the conclusion that while mystery readers would not read a futuristic mystery, SF readers would. I don’t know how accurate that is, but it inspired an idea (also influenced by reading about the book by Chabon referenced in the post.)
After I finish my current WIP, I am going to write a futuristic cozy – kind of a Miss Marple visits Mars. I doubt it will sell, but I am inspired by the thought that the emphasis in the cozy on human nature and human relationships easily transcends the current time. Technology and society may change, but we are still human with human weaknesses. Jealousy, envy, pride, vanity, greed… Those don’t go away.
I want to explore the possibilities of this. The potential has been flooding me since I read that line. Whether anybody else will want to read it is immmaterial, really… I want to write it anyway.
Well said, Juliet. I suspect a lot of the snobbishness comes out of envy. Genre sells books: literature doesn’t. It might win the big prizes and get a lot of acclaim as a result – but many of the ones the ones that don’t reach those exalted heights fall to the ground, unread by more than a few hundred people.
It is perfectly possible to be original and to tell a good story that points up some truth about the human condition all in one fell swoop, and all while writing within the discipline of a genre and catering to the requirements of the market – i.e. providing something that people want to read. Your own work proves that.
Mr Gruber tells us that real literature (his term) is by its nature challenging, and that it confronts the reader with life. Isn’t that true of all the best novels, including many found on the genre shelves?
You tapped into all of the points I also had a problem with, Juliet, but I think this is the one I felt the most unsettled by. If we’re writing authentic characters, then we’re tapping into humanity–hopefully at that gritty level that makes readers think.
Looking at this from a different perspective, I thought this outtake from a recent GalleyCat article was interesting:
Charles Stross tells the Guardian what literary fiction can learn from sci-fi’s best:
This subject has been on my mind because I’ve just returned from my annual gig at the santa Barbara Writers Conference, where I teach commercial fiction. Over and over, a writer will have a piece to workshop and express concern that he is not in the right group, then over and over, they find they get a lot of what they need, right there.
I don’t quite understand the idea that one is either a literary reader OR a genre reader. I read all of it. Category romance and literary novels and fantasy and science fiction and magic realism and whatever else strikes my fantasy. As a passionate reader, I understand that different genres offer different experiences. Knowing that gives me the freedom to choose whether I want a challenge to my thinking today or perhaps a gentle dive into something that will give me ease and rest.
We change channels on the television, why not a big selection of reading material, too?
Not to go all Derrida on anyone’s asses, but I consider literary just as much a genre as SFF or romance. Even those ‘literary’ authors who consider themselves unbound by convention must admit deep in their hearts that that supposition is itself a convention.
Good writing is good writing and crosses boundaries anyway. I’m still mulling Gruber’s point that commercial fiction is by nature less risky because the reader demands the satisfaction of having their expectations met. There’s something there, I think. But the very best writers defy expectation anyway.
I agree with all this, and agree at the same time with JG Ballard’s assertion that science fiction is the only literature (yes, I’m calling science fiction literature) which has accurately reflected what has happened in the 20th century. Of course he is talking about a particular kind of science fiction, the kind that Star Trek fans would not recognize. His work was often marketed as science fiction and still is, even though everybody knows that it is JG Ballard, basically, and not “proper” science-fiction. In the end, he has succeeded in defining his own genre, kind of in the way that William Burroughs did, an author also originally marketed by Pan as science fiction.
My novel Hybrids was promoted as science fiction by HarperCollins, but for me it was not science fiction. Just because it had people merging with bits of electronic commodities didn’t make it science fiction for me, and you might call me naive as a result. It was the themes that counted. I’ve gone down this road even more with my latest work, and the touchstone which I am using is Kazuo’s Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. There has been much written about whether this is science fiction or literature, and everybody generally agrees that although the subject matter — cloning and breeding people for operations and spare parts — is in the ballpark of science fiction, the treatment of it is not. And the reason is — and this contradicts what you say above, Juliet — that it does not present a consistent story world. A science fiction writer would normally create a whole self consistent world and describe its features. Kazuo doesn’t do this because he is interested in the emotional lives of the characters, not explaining the wider world in which they find themselves. We already know what the real world is like, we don’t need to be told. We accept the ‘real world’ whether it is self consistent or not (and some would argue that is you not)!
So you wouldn’t stop the narrative of a ‘work of literature’ to explain how a mobile phone works when a character starts using one. And yet science fiction writers do sometimes stop the narrative to explain something about their story world for readers.
Whatever label you put on a book defines its readership to an extent until the writer is sufficiently well known that people will follow his/her work. S/he will break out of the genre. Terry Pratchett is Terry Pratchett. Interestingly, the Raw Shark Text, by Steven Hall, although arguably fantasy, was marketed as literature by Canongate Books, presumably in order to maximise its potential readership.
Then again there is the old chestnut of whether someone like Franz Kafka or George Orwell would be marketed as science fiction nowadays. It doesn’t really matter — they are unique, and perhaps what we should all be doing as writers is concentrating on finding our unique voice and not worrying about genre.
‘perhaps what we should all be doing as writers is concentrating on finding our unique voice and not worrying about genre.’
That’s it in a nutshell, David. And that’s what a lot of us try to do – it tends to be publishers, reviewers and booksellers who find genre pigeonholes useful. Maybe readers do, too.
Genre labels on their own seem harmless, but often they come with a certain prejudice attached. I would like to be more thick-skinned about this, but it’s hard not to leap to the defence of fellow writers of fantasy, romance, science fiction or whatever when people make broad statements implying that we are a lesser breed of writer!
I’m not even sure why this debate exists. Fiction is fiction. Considering it’s all make-belief I find it absurd that anyone would attempt to categorize one type of fiction as more valid or authentic than another.
‘Genre’ and ‘literary’ are artificial categories that didn’t exist in say, Dickens’ time(and would he, if he were writing now, be considered ‘genre’ or ‘literary’, by such purists? The former, I suspect)
Besides, ‘literary’ can be seen, as Kathleen says, as a just another genre–and all too often one in which high-falutin’ ideas excuse boring writing, characters who appear to be anaesthestised out of all emotion, no pace to speak of. What’s more, the ideas themselves, when deconstructed, are trite and banal.
In my mind, there’s only two sorts of fiction–interesting and dull. People who are so closed-minded that they need categories to know whether or not they will like something–well, how sad for them. As readers, they will miss out on some wonderful discoveries.
In my mind, there’s only two sorts of fiction–interesting and dull. People who are so closed-minded that they need categories to know whether or not they will like something–well, how sad for them. As readers, they will miss out on some wonderful discoveries.
Bravo, Sophie! Well said!
And you, ma’am, are a fantasy luminary.
Such prejudice!
I find this a very interesting topic. I think that this type of view also seems to pervade poetry as well. The most commercially successfully poet in Queensland in recent times is Rupert McCall – but generally those in literary circles look down on that type of poetry – it’s just not high brow stuff.
Now the irony I find is that all of those “real poets” complain endlessly about the fact that commercial publishing houses no longer publish poetry – well, their poetry doesn’t sell. It’s a business after all – but none of them are prepared to foster the type of poetry that does sell – it might not be literary brilliance but it’s enjoyable, often funny and easy for the general public to understand without having to spend a year trying to figure our what the poet actually meant by a particular metaphor – I’m not saying that that type of poetry isn’t brilliant and a real art form – it is – it’s just not commercial.
So I think that parallels with the issue in genre fiction – people should just read what they enjoy without having to categorise it – in the end who is it that’s laughing all the way to the bank?
“In genre, moreover, not only do they want the familiar, they want the same.”
This is the part that shocked me. I’ve heard people look down on genre before, and I don’t agree with it by any means, but I’m used to it. But this! People read science-fiction for exactly the opposite reason — because they want something new, something different. A concept or world that no one’s thought of before. Not all sci-fi authors succeed, but many of them try.
I understand that critique a little better for fantasy, which I read more of than sci-fi. But even for fantasy, it seems like he’s expressing only the views of an outside observer. I think it would be hard to find even one fantasy devotee who would say they read fantasy because they want the same thing over and over again. For the good fantasy author, if the archetypes and conventions are limiting, that just unleashes greater creativity, akin to rhyme and meter in poetry. And, of course, there are many who choose not to use a rhyme scheme.
Fantasy allows authors to explore human nature in metaphor, without beating the reader over the head with their point. How is that not literary? Ah, right, it’s popular. It must not be good if it’s popular. Or easy to read. Or hopeful. Why, in a lot of fantasy, the good guys win! Horrors! It’s all the same! But I’m getting distracted into one of my rants.
You’ve already disagreed with this fellow, perhaps I should add something new. You asked, “Do you have a favourite novel that breaks genre conventions?” My favorite is Lord of Emperors, by Guy Gavriel Kay. It’s actually the conclusion of a duology, The Sarantine Mosaic, but the conclusion is my favorite part. Sailing to Sarantium is the name of the first of the two novels. Does it break conventions? I guess so. I’m not really sure which conventions we’d be talking about here. In some ways, it’s barely fantasy — mostly it just qualifies in the basic “feel” of the world. Like Daughter of the Forest (the only one of your books I’ve read thus far, but I’m working on remedying that, because I absolutely loved it), it’s historical fantasy, but with a stronger emphasis on the historical. It’s about a thinly veiled specific time and place, becoming a sort of parallel fantasy world. “Sarantium” instead of “Byzantium,” and so forth. (Whereas Daughter of the Forest seemed to me more like a specific story which happened to be set in a certain time and place, albeit a time and place which fit very well.) I love all his books simply because he’s an excellent writer, but this one in particular because of the themes running through about loving even when you will lose what you love, etc.
Incidentally, I work at a bookstore, and for bookselling, the term “literature” is completely unhelpful. Yes, we do divide the genres of romance, mystery, and sci-fi from the general fiction. But people seem to think we should divide the classics of literature from the rest of our fiction, and we just don’t do that. It would create more work for us, with very little payoff.