litcrit, specfic, and the intersection thereof

[truepenny]

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: cherchez la 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.)

Comments

[mirabile-dictu.livejournal.com]

I'm a long-time lurker, and this essay is a great example of why I read your LJ. You've said a lot of things I've thought about, only more clearly than I ever could have. Thank you.

*memories*

[cmpriest.livejournal.com]

horror is all about the gradual process of the symbolic becoming literal

Nicely put. None of my professors ever saw it that way, though.
Alas.

[ide-cyan.livejournal.com]

Have you read Joanna Russ's To Write Like A Woman: Essays in Feminism and Science-Fiction? There's...

Hang on. Heh. The essay in question is online:

"Towards an Aesthetic of Science Fiction (http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/6/russ6art.htm)".

[cataptromancer.livejournal.com]

"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."

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.

[kriz1818.livejournal.com]

Oh goody! Now I have the perfect retort to Academic Literary People: "Just because you don't understand it is no reason to sneer at it, darling."

(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 )

[handworn.livejournal.com]

Actually, I'm surprised to hear that you consider your reviews litcrit. The underlying goal of litcrit usually seems more to be to show how clever the critic is, being able to do something like that, than it is to try to find some wisdom about the human condition. Litcrit to me is the exercise of intelligence without meaning or wisdom; the exercise of judgment without significance. It's scholarly litcrit that celebrates unreadable stuff like Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon. Your thinking and writing about books doesn't strike me as being like that at all.

[fitzcamel.livejournal.com]

What would you call your (wonderful) Sayers series?

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

As one of the people who arrived via the Sayers posts: that's how I got here, it's not why I stayed. I stay for stuff like this (and the piano porn, of course!).

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...

[firecat]

genreneep pointed me here.

This is brilliant.

And besides, I completely agree with you about unsympathetic protagonists.

[heresluck]

I liked this. Thank you for writing it. I am still too jet-lagged to have more than two things to say, which are:

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.