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litcrit, specfic, and the intersection thereof
Thank you, everybody, for answering yesterday's question (and feel free to chime in if you haven't and want to). The general, slightly plaintive consensus seems to be that it would be really groovy if I'd write more about books other than my own.
Which is fair. I recognize that's something I'm good at, and it's something I enjoy--and it delights me, truly, utterly delights me, that other people enjoy it, too. There are, however, problems, namely that in the Venn diagram of books, the categories of "books I enjoy" and "books susceptible to litcrit" have a fairly narrow band of overlap. Notice, please, that "books susceptible to litcrit" and "good books" don't have a one-to-one correspondence, either. One of the reasons (I am convinced) that the academic establishment continues to sneer at, condemn, and otherwise frantically try to disavow sf/f/h is that the conventions of literary criticism and the conventions of specfic are inherently at odds.
What you learn to do when you learn to do literary criticism is explicate symbolism. You learn to look for patterns, metaphors, seemingly ordinary details that, when prodded, emit the odor of Authorial Intent. As an example, the book that taught me how to do this is Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. My eleventh grade English teacher assigned a paper on the imagery of light and dark in TSL, and I went through and noted down every damn use of light and dark in the whole damn book. There's a lot of them, and they all fit together into this beautiful, coherent, mechanical apparatus; all you have to do is wind it up and watch it go. Now, as you practice litcrit, you learn to be more subtle about it, and you learn to interpret details that don't reek of Authorial Intent (the most fun I ever had in college was a paper ripping The Woman in White to shreds, reading persistently and perversely against what Wilkie Collins intended). But the fundamental gesture of literary criticism as it is practiced in scholarly circles is: cherchezla femme le symbole.
Enter speculative fiction. Now, horror (ironically) is pretty much okay, because horror is all about the gradual process of the symbolic becoming literal. But science fiction and fantasy make their symbols literal from the very get-go--think of The Left Hand of Darkness where there's nothing metaphorical about Estraven's androgyny--and leave literary critics with nothing to do.
Now, if you dig down, you can find layers in sf&f that respond to traditional literary treatment. There's a paper I never got around to writing about the way in which The Lord of the Rings is a war between the genres of epic, several different types of pastoral, and the novel. But you have to dig and search and in general behave like archaeologists instead of literary critics. Only not like archaeologists in the obvious way--those are called textual critics and they have plenty of academic oomph, thank you very much--but archaeologists of story. Not even so much of the story's content as of its pattern-making. And that's (a.) hard, and (b.) something academically trained readers haven't been trained for. It's much easier to say there's nothing outside the box than it is to try to come to grips with the fact that the stuff outside the box is outside the box because the rules inside the box don't work on it.
Or you have to bring a different set of tools to the dig. This is one reason science fiction and feminism get along so well, because a feminist reading of a text doesn't depend on symbolism; it depends on the deconstruction of socially-constructed gender roles, and that's a game that can be played in books with characters of one sex, two sexes, three or more sexes, or no sexes at all. Another paper I wrote in college was about gender and feminism in Octavia Butler and Ursula K. Le Guin, talking about stories where even biological sex was an iffy concept at best, much less gender. Feminist criticism doesn't analyze the text in-and-of-itself; it analyzes the text in its social matrix, and that gives it a way to talk about f&sf that more conventional schools of criticism lack. Marxist criticism has the same advantage, although it hasn't, to my knowledge, been wielded with the same efficacy.
Which brings us back around to me and my reading. I don't want to write about books unless I have something interesting and non-obvious to say (i.e., not in the business of doing Reader's Guides here, kthnx), and with f&sf, which wear their hearts on their sleeves, that's not always a given. (Now, if I were an academic, I'd be all Liberty Leading the People with reinventing litcrit vocabulary and praxis to do justice to f&sf, but I'm not an academic. I'm a novelist, and I have things to do with my time that define for me as better.) The sad truth of the matter is that I'm bored by "mainstream" literature (which can be neatly and tautologically defined as "books on which academic literary criticism works"); between the sense of obligation engendered by years and years of English courses, the idea prevelant today that literary protagonists must be unsympathetic in one way or another, and the fact that by the standards of the genres I love, nothing freaking happens--trying to read "literary fiction" is a misery and a burden and I'm not going to do it to myself anymore. And then there's well-written entertainment literature (I'm thinking here of series mysteries), which tends to be seamless in cheerful defiance of a discipline that exists to pick apart seams. I love Emma Lathen nearly as much as I love DLS, but I have nothing to say about them. ("Emma Lathen" having been a pseudonym for two women, whose real names I can never remember--although a quick Google gives me a site that tells me: Mary Jane Latsis and Martha Hennisart. I've never found any of their R. B. Dominic mysteries--are there any eyewitnesses out there?) And while I could write an essay on homophobia in Ngaio Marsh ... it's an ugly, unhappy topic, and I don't want to give it energy I could be giving to something else when the short version works just as well: there's homophobia in Ngaio Marsh; it's blatant and offensive, it makes me despise Alleyn and Fox, whom I don't want to despise, and it hurts. The worst offender is Singing in the Shrouds.
So this leaves us with the occasional essay, like my diatribe on Derleth, proving that it's very easy to practice litcrit on bad literature of any stripe, and otherwise I have to see something in something I'm reading that will reward the particular kind of digging I'm equipped to do--and I have to have both energy and time to do it. I was thinking about it last night, and I'm continuing to think about it this morning, and I'm toying fairly seriously with doing a series on Sherlock Holmes. Because there's stuff in those stories, even if Conan Doyle didn't really intend to put it there.
But it's kind of going to depend on what the rest of my life throws at me.
(No one, by the way, should be worried that they've made me defensive or upset. You haven't.)
Which is fair. I recognize that's something I'm good at, and it's something I enjoy--and it delights me, truly, utterly delights me, that other people enjoy it, too. There are, however, problems, namely that in the Venn diagram of books, the categories of "books I enjoy" and "books susceptible to litcrit" have a fairly narrow band of overlap. Notice, please, that "books susceptible to litcrit" and "good books" don't have a one-to-one correspondence, either. One of the reasons (I am convinced) that the academic establishment continues to sneer at, condemn, and otherwise frantically try to disavow sf/f/h is that the conventions of literary criticism and the conventions of specfic are inherently at odds.
What you learn to do when you learn to do literary criticism is explicate symbolism. You learn to look for patterns, metaphors, seemingly ordinary details that, when prodded, emit the odor of Authorial Intent. As an example, the book that taught me how to do this is Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. My eleventh grade English teacher assigned a paper on the imagery of light and dark in TSL, and I went through and noted down every damn use of light and dark in the whole damn book. There's a lot of them, and they all fit together into this beautiful, coherent, mechanical apparatus; all you have to do is wind it up and watch it go. Now, as you practice litcrit, you learn to be more subtle about it, and you learn to interpret details that don't reek of Authorial Intent (the most fun I ever had in college was a paper ripping The Woman in White to shreds, reading persistently and perversely against what Wilkie Collins intended). But the fundamental gesture of literary criticism as it is practiced in scholarly circles is: cherchez
Enter speculative fiction. Now, horror (ironically) is pretty much okay, because horror is all about the gradual process of the symbolic becoming literal. But science fiction and fantasy make their symbols literal from the very get-go--think of The Left Hand of Darkness where there's nothing metaphorical about Estraven's androgyny--and leave literary critics with nothing to do.
Now, if you dig down, you can find layers in sf&f that respond to traditional literary treatment. There's a paper I never got around to writing about the way in which The Lord of the Rings is a war between the genres of epic, several different types of pastoral, and the novel. But you have to dig and search and in general behave like archaeologists instead of literary critics. Only not like archaeologists in the obvious way--those are called textual critics and they have plenty of academic oomph, thank you very much--but archaeologists of story. Not even so much of the story's content as of its pattern-making. And that's (a.) hard, and (b.) something academically trained readers haven't been trained for. It's much easier to say there's nothing outside the box than it is to try to come to grips with the fact that the stuff outside the box is outside the box because the rules inside the box don't work on it.
Or you have to bring a different set of tools to the dig. This is one reason science fiction and feminism get along so well, because a feminist reading of a text doesn't depend on symbolism; it depends on the deconstruction of socially-constructed gender roles, and that's a game that can be played in books with characters of one sex, two sexes, three or more sexes, or no sexes at all. Another paper I wrote in college was about gender and feminism in Octavia Butler and Ursula K. Le Guin, talking about stories where even biological sex was an iffy concept at best, much less gender. Feminist criticism doesn't analyze the text in-and-of-itself; it analyzes the text in its social matrix, and that gives it a way to talk about f&sf that more conventional schools of criticism lack. Marxist criticism has the same advantage, although it hasn't, to my knowledge, been wielded with the same efficacy.
Which brings us back around to me and my reading. I don't want to write about books unless I have something interesting and non-obvious to say (i.e., not in the business of doing Reader's Guides here, kthnx), and with f&sf, which wear their hearts on their sleeves, that's not always a given. (Now, if I were an academic, I'd be all Liberty Leading the People with reinventing litcrit vocabulary and praxis to do justice to f&sf, but I'm not an academic. I'm a novelist, and I have things to do with my time that define for me as better.) The sad truth of the matter is that I'm bored by "mainstream" literature (which can be neatly and tautologically defined as "books on which academic literary criticism works"); between the sense of obligation engendered by years and years of English courses, the idea prevelant today that literary protagonists must be unsympathetic in one way or another, and the fact that by the standards of the genres I love, nothing freaking happens--trying to read "literary fiction" is a misery and a burden and I'm not going to do it to myself anymore. And then there's well-written entertainment literature (I'm thinking here of series mysteries), which tends to be seamless in cheerful defiance of a discipline that exists to pick apart seams. I love Emma Lathen nearly as much as I love DLS, but I have nothing to say about them. ("Emma Lathen" having been a pseudonym for two women, whose real names I can never remember--although a quick Google gives me a site that tells me: Mary Jane Latsis and Martha Hennisart. I've never found any of their R. B. Dominic mysteries--are there any eyewitnesses out there?) And while I could write an essay on homophobia in Ngaio Marsh ... it's an ugly, unhappy topic, and I don't want to give it energy I could be giving to something else when the short version works just as well: there's homophobia in Ngaio Marsh; it's blatant and offensive, it makes me despise Alleyn and Fox, whom I don't want to despise, and it hurts. The worst offender is Singing in the Shrouds.
So this leaves us with the occasional essay, like my diatribe on Derleth, proving that it's very easy to practice litcrit on bad literature of any stripe, and otherwise I have to see something in something I'm reading that will reward the particular kind of digging I'm equipped to do--and I have to have both energy and time to do it. I was thinking about it last night, and I'm continuing to think about it this morning, and I'm toying fairly seriously with doing a series on Sherlock Holmes. Because there's stuff in those stories, even if Conan Doyle didn't really intend to put it there.
But it's kind of going to depend on what the rest of my life throws at me.
(No one, by the way, should be worried that they've made me defensive or upset. You haven't.)
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*memories*
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Nicely put. None of my professors ever saw it that way, though.
Alas.
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Still, I like my theory and like to parade it out whenever people talk about horror.
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I like the idea that horror is a method of dealing with grief. I like that a lot.
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Sad, and I hate to admit it, but it's still true.
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Hang on. Heh. The essay in question is online:
"Towards an Aesthetic of Science Fiction (http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/6/russ6art.htm)".
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Thanks for the food for thought, [Bad username or site: truepenny. @ livejournal.com]
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I'm not sure if I get the distinction between "symbolic" and "literal." Are you suggesting that with SF, since it isn't bound up by the constraints of realism, gives the writer power over a wider range of the symbolic possibilities of her text (story, novel, whatever)? In my field of study, there's tons of allegory -- which is pretty much the definition of the symbolic and the literal holding hands -- but it hasn't really stopped criticism. There isn't an attitude that says "the writer has said that the griffon is the church and the pelican is the faithful poor and since the pelican wins this tale is obviously saying X." I mean, I guess I just can't fathom how SF would be resistant to the kind of readings you're discussing.
Also, as you recognize yourself, "literary criticism" is an incredibly wide collection of practices -- a bit like "fiction." I'm not convinced that the "elucidate the symbol" approach is the majority practice, although it is a very easy and productive thing to use in teaching (but on that note I wouldn't say that the 'personal essay' is the core of all writing just because it's quite often taught in writing courses).
I'll leave it up to my SF-studying colleagues to really say, but unfortunately I think the reason that litcrit doesn't seem dwell on SF (and it does these days, it seems, with increasing intensity) is good old fashioned ignorant prejudice. I think literature studies has always been a bit of a poseur lacking in self confidence, so it's had to reassure itself that it's discussing "important" works of literature, so it's been resistant to adding things that are recent, new, "popular"-seeming, outside of the canon, etc.
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The One Ring is neither a symbol nor an allegory of ultimate evil; it's a metonymy. Because Sauron is ultimate evil, and he's right there in the story with agency and everything. So you can't talk about the symbolism of the One Ring, because it's already spelled out for you.
I agree that litcrit is about a lot more than symbolism; what I was trying to say is that when you're taught to do litcrit, you start with symbolism, and that therefore it's very difficult to change gears to a mode of thought wherein symbolism is practically irrelevant.
Which is not to say things can't be symbolic in sf&f, anymore than they can't be allegorical. But the fundamental mode of the genre(s) is against it.
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I mean, I don't know Tolkien beyond that of a very low-key admirer, but it still seems like there's tons of stuff that is possible to say about the ring that is not completely "spelled out." After all, "evil" isn't a very interesting reading, even with "ultimate" put in front of it.
In addition, this kind of "spelling out" seems to occur in other books quite a bit. Melville, as I remember, pretty much heaps on statements about the symbolism of the White Whale, not to mention T.S. Eliot's explanatory notes in 'the waste land.' So if anything perhaps in fantasy&SF it's a difference of degree, not in kind?
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But a literary critic's first instinct: what does the Ring symbolize? The evil of Sauron. Oh, wait, we know that already.
coupled with the prejudice and stereotyping you mentioned above (I am increasingly unfond of the way genre fiction is always judged by the worst examples while "mainstream" fiction is always judged by the best)
creates an atmosphere in which specfic and litcrit do not lie down together like the lion and the lamb.
Also, my floundering analogy about archaeology was trying to indicate that it isn't that there isn't stuff to analyze, just that you have to be prepared to look for it.
And, again, I'm not an academic. I don't want to sweat blood trying to invent a new wheel. This was never a post meant to explain why f&sf can't or shouldn't be subjected to literary analysis, merely why it's difficult to do so and why it's not the hill I want to die on.
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"Hill to die on" is a great expression.
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I learnt it from
---
The matter of modes and functionalities of texts is a tricky one. There's a way in which, of course, you're right, but I know from my own experience that trying to analyze nonliterary primary sources (pamphlets about ghosts from 17th century England) was deeply frustrating with only literary-analysis tools--and not particularly successful, either. I've also found that people who read and enjoy sf&f approach what they read with a very different mindset from those who do not. One of the semesters I taught creative writing, I had the students critique a sf story of mine. Which was, admittedly, not very good (I can say with the distance of several years), but the way in which they had trouble with the story was very much about not having the right protocols for reading it. SF&F readers expect, enjoy, and want to solve puzzles in their reading (this may be one reason why the overlap between specfic readers and mystery readers is so large); people who don't read SF&F look for patterns and are only confused by puzzles. Even very small puzzles, like indicating an sfnal setting by background details rather than coming out and saying, "Long long ago in a galaxy far far away."
Every genre has its conventions, and if you don't understand and/or appreciate the conventions, you will neither understand nor appreciate the genre. And it's very hard to analyze successfully something you don't understand.
Also, all genres blur together; you can write sf with a mainstream sensibility or mainstream with an sf sensibility, and there's all sorts of excitement about the ideas of "interstitial" and "slipstream" writing in the part of the sf community that is trying for intellectual rigor and academic respectability. And obviously reading one genre does not preclude one from reading any other genre.
I keep arguing with myself about whether I think sf&f have a different "mode" from other types of literature, although I keep getting sidetracked into the question of what I think "mode" is anyway. I do think the literature of the fantastic requires learning a particular set of reading protocols, just as other genres do, and that the nature of its protocols is potentially alienating.
And there's the other hobby-horse in the back of my head, the one about how actually science fiction and fantasy aren't so much genres as settings; they have no narrative expectations coded in ... but then they do, as I was saying above, have expectations about how the reader approaches the text.
I'm making my own head hurt and am thus going to shut up.
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Right there with you. I type this as I distract myself from reading statutes about the behavior of royal officials. I think it can definitely be done, though. I know in medieval lit studies there are lots of people who are doing it in different ways. I think the key might not be so much to seek to bring litcrit approaches to 'nonliterary' texts, but to come up with a framework of inquiry that can comprehend both. But to really sound like I'm saying something instead of just bsing, I'd need to really sit down and draft something out here, and that would become dangerously like the work that I LJ to get away from...
Hurt heads are the way to the promised land. I like the way you lay out the conundrum of genre/mode/setting (if memory serves, I think nihilistic_kid had some good things to say about that a while back). I guess my two cents would be to push a bit more on your claim about puzzle solving, and whether it's really a sfnal trait or not. I guess I would see more of a qualitative distinction between people who like narrative that does or does not make certain demands of them.
Now my head hurts, and I haven't even typed that much.
(and just as an anecdote/coincidence: I'm on this email calls-for-papers list, and as I've been typing this there've been cfps for a SF and litcrit conference in Utah and a collection of critical essays on Michael Moorcock.)
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It's a chicken and egg conundrum. Either there's a qualitative distinction between types of readers or types of texts, and then arguably there must be a similar distinction between types of authors, who are after all themselves types of readers ... and I'm chasing my own tail again.
What was I saying back at the beginning?
Traditional literary criticism as it is traditionally taught is ill-equipped to deal with sf&f; since I am a traditionally trained literary critic, though no longer on the professional circuit, I probably won't be doing much hardcore literary analysis of sf&f in this blog (although the occasional review is far from unlikely). Honestly, I think that's all I meant.
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Genres have their own style of pacing. What you're calling "sensibilities" can be seen as pacing. Reader expectation of pacing is adhusted for genre. This is one of the things mainstream writers who write SF often (Piercy, Lessing, James) get wrong, and what leads the mainstream work of SF writers (Simmons' Phases of Gravity) its peculiarity.
The text that made me come up with this was Byatt's "The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye", a charming novella in which a female academic discovers a genie in a bottle, on page 100.
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(This assumes that I eventually succeed at both getting an academic post AND getting some (genre) fiction published. But now I am prepared. 8-D )
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And I wouldn't say I'm trying to find some wisdom about the human condition. All I'm doing is saying, Ooh, shiny! Look at this pattern I've found!
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I didn't mean that you were deliberately trying to find wisdom, but I think you or your readers are a lot more likely to find it with your approach. You're saying, look how neat this pattern is! The Sturgeon's Law litcrit people seem to have this undertone which says, look how great I am to be able to see this. I find it common to academe.
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Sure, it would be great if everyone who wrote litcrit articles could do it for the sheer goofy love of it, but that's not the way academia works. Also, the tone I take in my posts is inappropriate to academic writing; my dissertation advisor would never have let me by with such off-the-cuff scatter-witted blitherings.
I should post an excerpt from my dissertation and see if you find the look at me being cool undertones. 'Cause I'll bet they're there.
I'm not saying you're wrong; I'm just saying ... well, I'm not sure what I'm saying, except that there are extenuating circumstances for that tone.
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The problem I have with academe is that people in it don't seem to acknowledge that so little is at stake. They seem to take themselves way too seriously and also seem to believe that their work makes the world a better place. What I'd say to them is this: if your work is so incredibly stodgy and full of jargon and PC ideas (and I do not by any stretch limit this to the English department) that no one with a brain (or a heart) will ever want to read it for its own sake, then, no, you don't make the world a better place.
Of course, maybe most of them wouldn't have thought they were making the world a better place. Maybe they were simply willing to pay the coin of working that way to be able to work in the field they were in at all. That, I could respect. Not emulate; but definitely respect. It's just that the business-oriented message underlying the tone your thesis advisor would urge seems to me to be, "You have to quantify the inherently unquantifiable, and justify that which needs no justification."
A strident undercurrent sometimes creeps into my arguments despite my best efforts, so please excuse me if this has seemed so. I suppose all this amounts to no more than a personal standard for me. There's no career in the world which doesn't involve some compromise. I just wouldn't be able to make those compromises which people seeking tenure at a university have to.
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What looks important depends to a great extent on where you're standing.
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Genre theory (which is my favorite mode of attack) can of course be applied to sf&f--but there you start running into trouble with questions of how you define "genre" and what constitutes it. And the fact of the matter is that most sf&f writers who think about genre in their work are humorists. Terry Pratchett is the shining example. But his explorations of genre always break the fourth wall (it's the nature of Discworld), and I personally find something peculiarly joyless in analyzing humor anyway.
Serious sf&f writers (meaning those who write stories whose main intent is not humorous, rather than those who are serious about their work--seems to me Pratchett takes his work as seriously as anyone could ask for) very rarely engage with genre in the ways that interest me, partly because sf&f don't have the kind of conventions that mysteries do ... and I really am going to have to write that post on definitions of genre and why they can get you in trouble, aren't I?
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---L.
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Which isn't to say that there isn't something worthwhile to be said on Tolkien - why it works, in what respects it doesn't work, why the things about it that work don't work elsewhere and what kind of book this makes it - but if I can't make time to write it, why should you?
It's always interesting to hear you talk about your own writing: but so often frustrating, since when you talk about work in progress, you are by definition talking about stuff I have not yet read...
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This is brilliant.
And besides, I completely agree with you about unsympathetic protagonists.
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1) This post made me think about narratology, and how one of the reasons it's so unfashionable is that it is concerned with symbolism, if at all, in only a tangential way; the important things are the process of storytelling and reception, and how a reader reads and reacts to particular symbols may be part of that, or not, but that type of explication is just not an end in itself. So there *are* modes of not-explicitly-politicized lit crit (i.e. not inherently feminist, Marxist, etc.) that do not work the way you describe them here, but those modes are not the main stream. This makes me wonder whether SFF and narratology might suit each other in ways that SFF and mainstream lit crit do not. SFF might have some nifty insights for narratology, in much the way that mysteries and romances do for Rabinowitz's ideas in Before Reading.
2) I am wondering what the effects will be of the contemporary authors (particularly but not exclusively anglophone) who are lionized by pop reviewers and to some extent by literary critics, but whose novels subvert or simply do not participate in many of the conventions by which most mainstream litfic is defined. I am thinking, not surprisingly, of Rushdie and Carey (many of whose novels have been labeled "magical realism" -- coincidence?). Rushdie, for example, is as a rule not interested in antiheroes, and he *is* interested in Big Ideas like Love and History and Faith and Progress and other concerns that do not always map neatly onto current mainstream literary forms but which are subjects that most of us are accustomed to encountering in some (not all) SFF. So he folds, spindles, and mutilates the form to suit his purposes, while retaining enough of it to get awarded the Booker Prize. I am looking forward to seeing whether that spirit of genre-mangling is something that gets picked up by the kids at home.