Where Left Is Right / The Old Site

Today's NYT's Books section includes a review by Terence Rafferty of Michael Cunningham's Specimen Days. Cunningham, as you may know, previously authored the very popular The Hours, which was made into a very successful film starring Nicole Kidman (who got a Best Actress Oscar for her role as Virginia Woolf), Julianne Moore, and Meryl Streep.

Rafferty describes the three stories comprising Specimen Days thusly:

Cunningham... chooses to cast each of these new stories in the form (more or less) of a popular genre: the first, "In the Machine," is a kind of ghost story; the second, "The Children's Crusade," is a police-procedural thriller; the last, "Like Beauty," is science fiction. The idea, I think, is that the use of such dubiously respectable forms is somehow "democratic"...

...at which point I had to stop reading for a moment to let the blood clear from my eyeballs.

Now, I have read neither The Hours nor Specimen Days, so I'm not in a position to comment on a critic's review of either work. And I don't object to the word "democratic" (even in quotation marks), certainly not because this blog deals primarily with the body politic, a context in which any use of "democratic" (or "republican," come to that) might be expected to put my guard up.

No, what brought me up short was the phrase "dubiously respectable forms." Rafferty might have simply left it at "forms," or he might have simply modified it with something innocuous like "popular." But "dubiously respectable" had to be a conscious choice.

Of course, one man's respectability is another man's sleaze, and everybody's a snob about something (which is FLJerseyBoy's Rule #3, or thereabouts, for dealing with people). Most of us don't have anything to do with pornography, for instance; at the other extreme, most of us don't attend opera.

Still, the casual -- or formal -- dismissal of the respectability of genre fiction as "dubious" really cries out for response.

In my return-to-WLIR post a couple weeks ago, I mentioned that while I was away I spent a lot of time escaping into genre fiction. It's not that I had never read in the genres before (indeed, I wrote and published a mystery of my own over a dozen years ago). But aside from an early-adolescent infatuation with science fiction, I'd never immersed myself in them before, for such an extended period of time. That immersion reminded me that the respectability of genre fiction is not really -- or necessarily -- dubious at all. Genre fiction can be every bit as complex, literate, and thought-provoking as the mainstream variety.

I think the genres suffer in contrast to mainstream works in several ways:

1. The bar to publication is set fairly low. Not that just any Joe Schmoe can publish a mystery, a romance, or whatever. But not every reader of genre fiction demands high quality, and the publishers know it, and so what gets put out there on the genre racks is, well, disproportionately junky. (The same thing is true, by the way, of self-published works.)
   
2. Genre fiction is, by definition, constructed around recurring tropes -- thematic, stylistic, and narrative. Because the shape (in one sense or another) of a given work is the shape of many others, the natural tendency is to dismiss it as "easy." There's a wonderful passage in Diane Ackerman's The Natural History of the Senses in which she discusses how our senses notice phenomena only so long as the phenomena are fresh. If you repeatedly tap a lover's arm, she says, his or her immediate impression is to thrill to the experience. Keep tapping, though, and your lover's sense of touch will eventually come to ignore it: "Oh, that again," it says, and turns its attention elsewhere. The same thing happens with people's understanding of genre fiction; because they've seen it before (or imagined they have), they generalize and believe it's all pretty much alike.
   
3. Genre fiction appeals to emotions as well as to intellect; and it must also, almost above any other consideration, be readable. The readability and emotional propulsiveness of genre fiction speak to the things we have in common with our ancestors as much as they do to "modern" tastes. People get shot in contemporary mainstream fiction as well as in mysteries, but getting shot -- violence in general -- is something people have had to deal with for a loooong time.
   

Ninety percent of everything is crap, as the saying goes -- not excepting non-genre fiction. But the things we value most in mainstream or "literary" fiction may be found among genre fiction, too. (Ditto for movies, as Mr. Rafferty -- a long-time film critic -- can surely appreciate.) All you have to do is look -- shut your prejudices down, pay attention, and fight the Oh, that again knee-jerk instinct which has your frontal lobes imposing predictability on the genre world.

Starting this Friday, and on (I hope) every Friday thereafter, I'll devote one post to what I'll call "Friday Guilty Pleasures Blogging." (Mrs. FLJerseyBoy and I have seven cats, but the Friday Cat Blogging thing is thoroughly taken care of elsewhere.) I won't just cover genre fiction, but will get into movies and television shows, maybe even music, as well. I hope you'll stop by on Fridays even if WLIR's politics aren't your own -- stop in, and join what I hope will become a very lively discussion. Perhaps even a dubiously respectable one.