The Reading Experience

Don't Blame Leavis

In a post at the Guardian's Books blog, Stuart Kelly argues that we have reached the end of the "genre wars" in criticism, although this has not yet fully registered with publishers and booksellers, who still cling to increasingly "irrelevant" distinctions among genres.

Although I can't disagree with Kelly that few literary critics would want to "dismiss genre writing solely on the basis that it is genre writing," the very fact that "genre" is no longer a barrier to critical respectability (to the extent it ever was) makes his reasoning when accounting for the persistence of genre categories all the more peculiar.

According to Kelly, "if there is a major shift it probably has more to do with the waning of the FR Leavis idea of what constitutes the canon." Thus, it would seem, publishers and booksellers are still unduly influenced by F.R. Leavis and his preference for "social realism." For them, "literary fiction" and "social realism" are synonymous terms, so not only do genre writers get shortchanged, but also literary writers who aren't social realists.

Or at least I think this is Kelly's argument, since finally it just doesn't make any sense. F.R. Leavis no longer holds sway among critics but he does among the marketers who decide how books will be displayed at Barnes & Noble (or Waterstone's)? Publishers make their decisions by consulting The Great Tradition?

Ultimately, Kelly seems more intent on discrediting social realism than in making any useful points about genre fiction. Indeed, the burden of his analysis seems to be that fiction can be divided into social realism and everything else, with all the prestige attached to the term "literary" still going to the former. If Kelly wants to maintain that more adventurous kinds of ostensibly "literary fiction" are often neglected (by publishers and critics alike), I'm with him, but his defense of genre fiction in particular, it seems to me, isn't well advanced by his specific critique of the limitations of social realism.

"Naive realism is no longer the default setting for literary fiction," he asserts, since

The idea of character as psychoanalysable, intact "self", of narrative as a sequence of events, or the liberal assumption that people are, deep down, identical (CS Lewis's unchanging human heart) have all been thrown into disarray, and rightly so.

While this is hardly a novel observation, it is nevertheless largely correct, if incomplete. (The most significant reason that realism has lost credibility is that we no longer have the same trust in the capacity of language to "represent" the world transparently.) Yet it would be difficult to claim that genre fiction itself avoids these same problems. I can think of very little genre fiction that does not center around characters with "intact" selves (some genres, such as crime fiction, depend on characters who are "psychoanalysable"), feature stories that are essentially a "sequence of events" (often strictly linear), or assume continuity in human identity. In my opinion, Kelly is confusing "realism," which is a problem of representation broadly conceived, with the literary strategies that might be used to achieve it. Realism may or may not rest on the kind of conventional assumptions Kelly identifies. Genre fiction almost always does.

If genre fiction still doesn't always quite get the respect many people think it deserves, it can't be because there remains a widespread bias in favor of social realism. I might argue that it has to do with certain assumptions about style, assumptions that genre writers can certainly meet by writing well, and about form--assumptions that are more difficult to meet because genre fiction has a harder time escaping entrenched conventions of story and character.

The Standard of Literature

It appears there are still those in mainstream media and publishing worrying over the the dilution of "standards" in the era of the internet and of self-publishing. Alison Walsh at the Irish Independent is concerned that

In the 'anyone can do it' age, it seems that all you have to do is join a creative writing group, or upload a short story on to one of many websites, or chat to your friends on author forums and hey, presto. But while writing courses can encourage a certain standard, can make you aware of point of view and plot development, can equip you with the skills to compose something that resembles a novel, they can't make you a writer. They can't give you that extra something that lifts a work out of being just a humdrum collection of words into something special, that magic that only a very few possess. . . .

One might have thought that by now self-styled "gatekeepers" would have given up on the idea that they must retain the status they believe they possessed in the old print-only dispensation, but Ms. Walsh is sure that

what's missing from the whole 'anyone can write' idea is a yardstick of quality. The imprimatur of an experienced, skilled individual saying, 'This is good enough to be published', and lifting the standard of literature in the process.

Pretty obviously Alison Walsh is staking a claim to be such an "experienced, skilled individual," although frankly I can find no information about her that would assure me she has the qualifications or ability to determine "the standard of literature" that should be applied to the work of serious writers. Simply because someone has been designated an "editor" by a publishing company whose first priority is always profits does not at all mean that such a person knows the first thing about "literature" or what gives "quality" to writing.

Walsh herself identifies the main reason why "gatekeeping" of the sort she has in mind is a misguided enterprise when she writes that "creative talent can't be judged objectively and what one editor will rave about, another will dispatch to the wastepaper basket." Editorial gatekeeping is at best a hopelessly subjective and uncertain enterprise that encourages the editor (who has often arbitrarily been granted power over a writer's fate) to project his/her fallible judgment as the "standard of literature." At worst it jettisons such a standard altogether in favor of commercial potential or the belief that the target audience's expectations must be met.

If anyone could be said to plausibly have a gatekeeping role it would be the literary critic (although the critic who actually calls him/herself a gatekeeper deserves whatever mockery might ensue). Indeed, what the literary world needs now is not more editors and publishers pretending to be upholding "the standard of quality" but more critics willing to expend the effort to study literature and literary history (which certainly does not require any sort of academic degree) so that judgment is grounded in some degree of knowledge, to consider works of literature comparatively, and to pay the kind of attention required to apprehend and describe what a seriously intended literary work seems to be attempting. Only the presence of this sort of criticism can mitigate against the sort of chaos that people like Alison Walsh think will accompany the "democritazation" of literature. I, for one, don't see why such a critical presence should be an unattainable goal, thus making the era of "anyone can do it" just as likely as any other to produce "quality" works of literature.

What Happened to Literature?

D. G. Myers wants to know "what happened to literary history?" According to Myers, "Seven decades after John Crowe Ransom named the movement, the New Critics have achieved what they were after. . .The syllabus of nearly every English course is little more than a series of discrete texts which can’t be read historically because no one has any literary history."

Although I agree that "undergraduates arrive at American universities notoriously ignorant of their cultural heritage," I certainly cannot agree that this is because for these students "no other conception of literature, if it is to be studied as literature, has any standing" other than the New Critical strategy of "close reading." The problem is that while informing them of literary history (even focusing narrowly on the students' own "cultural heritage") is not on the agenda in what remains of the high school literature curriculum, neither is a focus on literature "as literature," at least to the extent that the "study" of literature means close critical analysis. Since this kind of analysis isn't really testable on the kinds of anti-intellectual, utilitarian tests now favored by the political bean counters and educational "experts," works of literature are reduced to simplistic sources of information that might somehow be "relevant" or contribute to "core skills."

The biggest problem with Myers's own analysis is his identification of the pedagogical strategy at work in both high school and college classrooms as New Criticism. Certainly few high school teachers these days have been trained in New Criticism, but even if we accepted that what literature professors now do with their "discrete texts" is a form of close reading, it is not in any way the kind of close reading advocated by the New Critics. At best this form of close reading amounts to a vague "paying attention" to some elements of the text (certainly not the text as whole, as illustrated in the practice of New Critics), but such attention is not focused on the literary qualities of literary texts but on those details or characteristics that can prompt a consideration of cultural, ideological, and, yes, historical questions. The "history" so addressed indeed is not literary history, but this only confirms that ultimately no one any longer wants to teach or study literature "as literature" at all.

I was in graduate school sufficiently long ago now that some of the faculty still had been influenced by New Criticism, although a number of professors were also conventional literary historians. These were considered not antithetical but mutually supportive approaches. Literary history was important in properly contextualizing the encounter with any particular text, but the reading experience itself required the kind of close attention to not just the particulars but the overall shape and the interdependent relationships among the parts of the text encouraged by New Criticism. If for the last twenty-five years or more students have been deprived of literary history, that's because literature itself is not considered central enough that we would need to know anything about its history, just as we don't really need to read it very carefully.