Sanford and Cheney on Genre and the Literary Establishment

The last week or so has seen an interesting discussion echo round the blogosphere.  The discussion was prompted by an article by Jason Sandford in the latest issue of NYRSF.  Evidently, this article so enraged The Mumpsisimus' author Matthew Cheney that the normally mild-mannered and cerebral litblogger went off on a rant.  The discussion spread and Sanford felt obliged to respond that Cheney was missing the point.  In fact, Sanford has been putting out fires left right and center and as a part of this desire to right a wrong, he contacted me and asked me to take a look at the original piece following my response to Cheney's original post.  Seeing as my copy of the NYRSF seems to arrive by donkey, I agreed.

Is Cheney being unfair to Sanford?  partly, but in quite an interesting way.

Sanford's original article argues that, against a background of falling sales and readerships, mainstream American literature has started to rediscover ideas that were long considered of interest only to genre authors.  However, rather than situate said works of mainstream fiction in a genre dialectic by talking about the genre works that came before them, mainstream critics and cultural gatekeepers have allowed their prejudices to get the better of them; praising the likes of McCarthy's The Road to the heavens but continuing to sneer at genre works that travel much the same ground.  An act of cultural bigotry on a par with 1950's music moguls taking music popular with black audiences and recording it with white musicians in order to sell to white people.

Cheney responds by stating that there is no such thing as a "literary establishment" and, as such, blaming mainstream critics for genre's lack of appeal to mainstream audiences is to come dangerously close to the paranoia of a persecution complex.  After all, some critics like SF, others don't.  However, even if mainstream critics are wrong to turn their noses up at SF, works from the post-apocalyptic genre such as Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz are largely irrelevant to any discussion of McCarthy's The Road.

What struck me as interesting was the fact that there are probably three different quality yardsticks at work in this debate.

 

• Quality of writing - sheer linguistic flair and technical skill
• Originality of content - does the writer re-invent the wheel or stand on the shoulders of many pygmies
• Quality of ideas - is the book about interesting ideas

If you take the first two as rough yardsticks for whether or not a book is worthy of praise then it's easy to see not only why mainstream literary critics ignore most SF but also why they fail to mention that a lot of tropes have been used elsewhere.  For them most genre is poorly written and largely derivative and so there's little reason for writing about it or praising its possible contribution to better works.

Contrarily, if you take the last yardstick then there's absolutely no reason why you wouldn't mention the likes of A Canticle for Leibowitz or The Day of the Triffids in any discussion of The Road.  In fact, it would be difficult to write a review of The Road without mentioning other people who have written books that touch on some of the same ideas, regardless of whether one has any reason for thinking that they were directly influential or not.

Indeed, historical discussions of McCarthy's work tend to focus less on the genres he passes through (post-apocalyptic in the case of The Road but western and horror in the case of Blood Meridian) and more upon the fact that he's part of a largely southern tradition of sentimentalist tough guy writers stretching back to Faulkner.

In short, I think Sanford is allowing where he sits to determine how he stands.  SF being a genre largely concerned with big ideas, it makes sense for any piece of SF criticism to engage, at least partly, with the ideas underpinning the work and to see the relationships between books as one of similarity of idea.  The problem is that this view, while perfectly suited for the job of SF criticism tends to be ill adapted to mainstream literature because, by and large, mainstream literature is “myopic sensitive heart-rending personal blah, blah, blah, blah, blah" as Sanford quotes Gail Caldwell as saying.

The mismatch in yardsticks also accounts for the Ansible-style "as they see us" effect whereby legions of non-genre fans tramp by, week after week, dismissing SF as nothing but spaceships.

The issue should be, is there a place in mainstream literary criticism for an aesthetics of ideas?

Comments

[Jamie]

That's a very interesting question you have come to at the conclusion of that post. I think that the answer should emphatically be 'yes', most especially in those cases where novels are not only full of good ideas, but also score highly on your Quality of Writing yardstick. I'm thinking here of Walter Miller, but also Priest, Harrison, Delaney and the like.

I'm not optimistic that such a sea change is likely to happen very imminently though...

[Jonathan McCalmont]

"Should" is the operative word there. The problem is that the culture of mainstream literary criticism and the educational system that feeds it and the publishing system that is related to it are not really set up for weighing ideas.

Traditionally that's the job of philosophy.

This is why most mainstream lit doesn't tend to feature particularly interesting ideas. It's more about small ideas such as networks of relationships being expertly conveyed.

I think what happens when SFF writers jump the fence is that they are strong enough in other areas to be taken seriously. The real gap between mainstream and genre criticism is that mainstream criticism is resistant to discussing a book in terms of its ideas alone, and that is aside from the issue of whether or not the ideas used in SFF are to the taste of what Sanford calls the literary establishment.

Oh, I agree absolutely. However, there are still many authors who are strong enough in other areas that they should be taken seriously, yet haven't managed the jump to mainstream.

[Jamie]

Oops. Forgot an attribution...