VanderMeer on the "Language of Defeat"

Jeff VanderMeer has posted a very apt piece entitled "The Language of Defeat" for Clarkesworld Magazine. Before reading anything else in my take on it, please take the time to read it in full.

VanderMeer touches upon a topic that has been troubling me from time to time (and I know I've written multiple times about "state of genre" topics), that of the petty internecine war of words between various "genre" factions and those purportedly of the "mainstream." Lord knows how many times I've been browsing through blog articles or website commentaries and reading all sorts of "provocative" pieces that pretty much, when boiled down to the essentials, are little more than just restatements of prior whines about how the "genre" is "disrespected" or is "underappreciated."

Then as I almost feel a bit of pity for them, I glance at the TV listings and the movie previews that pop up on the screen and I wonder if we might have things all bassackwards. VanderMeer's piece makes a strong argument that perhaps readers of stories marketed as "genre" have been so conditioned to believe that their works have been dismissed by some secret cabal of the Literati (this is so begging for a satirical novel, natch) that many fail to see that not only have genre sales overtaken "literary" sales, but that even a well-informed reader would be hard pressed to name any recently-released fiction titles that didn't have "pulp" or "genre" elements contained within it!

But there is more to it than pointing out just how stupid the finger-pointing and the hang-dog look of "pity poor, poor me!" that seems to be all the rage. VanderMeer doesn't exactly quite come out and say it, but if one speaks of a "ghetto" in this day and age, then one has to ask just why in the hell that readers (and perhaps by extension, authors) aren't doing a damn thing about breaking the walls? Not by trumpeting one flavor of the Baskin-Robbins' 32, but by doing what the first rappers did: Take, steal, rip, twist, and make it into your own.

I believe that's much of what we're seeing in many recent "mainstream" novels. Those authors, many of whom will admit (often quite readily, I might add) to reading and enjoying genre fiction, are taking elements formerly associated with "genre" fiction and making a meld that's all their own...and it is quite good. Alice Sebold had a hit off of a riff on a ghost story with her These Lovely Bones. Cormac McCarthy does the same with his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Road. Others like David Anthony Durham, have "crossed over" and have marketed themselves as "new" writers for the genre audience, while all the time taking elements that they learned from writing in the "literary" frame of reference and making some wonderfully vibrant stories out of that.

And people have dared to bemoan them for their success and for writing excellent stories, just because they weren't "one of us" or because they didn't proclaim the "genreness" of their fiction? Something is very wrong with that picture, needless to say. But perhaps we ought to consider things from a different angle: If said authors are successful in melding non-genre and genre fiction tropes together, then perhaps there might be things contained in these "literary" or "mainstream" novels that ought to be read with the intent of taking and twisting them into something rather new?

VanderMeer's concluding bit with a listing of books that "genre" and "mainstream" readers ought to read of the other's "side" is something that I endorse wholeheartedly. Sometimes I find myself wishing that authors writing today might be influenced not just by a Tolkien or a Lovecraft, but also by a John Updike or a Graham Greene or an Alan Ginsberg. I am curious to see what a Zadie Smith can do with a "fantasy" setting and what a China Miéville might accomplish with a novel that's more closely tied to our here and now (as his first novel, King Rat, has some promise of "wowness" within it).

But I suppose that would mean that authors today would have to be more bold than what they are proclaiming. Too often I've heard of authors saying that they try to avoid reading fiction whenever possible (while reading a lot of non-fiction for possible twisting/borrowing, I might add) so that they don't unconsciously crimp on another's style. I wish those authors would reconsider. A knowledgeable historian writing a study of a period has to read more than just the primary sources. He or she has to be familiar with the research being produced by his/her colleagues. I cannot help but to believe that this ought to be the case with authors to at least some extent. I would argue that being knowledgeable not just what one's genre mates are writing, but also that which the best and brightest in other literature fields are churning out, would lead to all sorts of interesting hybridizations that would make for a more exciting read.

But the "ghetto" has to be cleaned up and out first. Which of course means that the whining and moaning and self-pitying has to stop. There are new vistas out there and the "others" don't bite, or at least not any harder than "we" do.