Recently, after years of being a Miltonist, researcher, English graduate student, and teacher, I left academia for greener (weirder) pastures, but my time among the stewards of the literary canon left me feeling a little uneasy about myself and the genre I love. That’s right. Call the record books. I’m a writer that feels marginalized and misunderstood. Have I blown your mind yet?
Ok, it’s not so much me that feels marginalized, it’s “genre fiction” in general. Reject my oddball fiction if you like academia, but cast aside all contemporary genre fiction? Nobody puts baby in the corner.
The thing that makes me feel dirtiest is that I more or less bought into the stigma. When I published articles on Paradise Lost or a poem about epistemological uncertainty, I’d slap the thing on my CV as soon as I got notification of acceptance. On the other hand, when I published a story about a desert-roving assassin in a dystopian future, I kept it to myself –skeletons in my publishing closet.
I first really sensed the hypocrisy of this attitude while speaking on a Milton panel at an academic conference in Salt Lake City, Utah. A room full of people who could and would speak passionately about battles between angels and literal kings and queens of chaos and ancient night went silent when, after the formal discussion concluded, I explained my love of books like Jim Butcher’s The Dresden Files. I recommended Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell to one twenty-something scholar who looked at me as if I suggested that she read Snooki’s new book.
So, apparently, it’s perfectly fine to geek out about fallen angels building infernal war machines and divine armies uprooting mountains to use as projectiles, but heaven forbid I get excited about a crime-solving wizard? Don’t get me wrong. There are lots and lots of academics who are just as excited as I am about crime-solving wizards and their ilk. But, the attitude is there and I don’t get the sense that it’s leaving anytime soon.
Maybe the most frustrating thing about the academy’s attitude about contemporary genre fiction is how readily the literary canon embraces the forbearers of fantasy, horror, and Sci Fi. Nobody blinks an eye when a literature class studies H.G. Wells or Bram Stoker. And take a look at the roots of the western literary tradition: Homer, Beowulf, Gawain and The Green Knight. Where do you think those narratives would belong if the bookstores dismantled their classics sections? Beyond that, what about Shakespeare, Spencer, Milton, and Melville? The list goes on and on. So, where’s the cutoff date? When did the elements of modern “genre fiction” become intellectual taboo?
Alright, I might have fallen short of my original “no whining” goal for this post, but this issue is near and dear to me. I love academia. I love genre fiction. I just don’t see why those loves need to be kept separate. As I begin to market my new contemporary fantasy novel, Casting Shadows, it’s hard not to linger next to the “books by local professors” section of the bookstore near my apartment. I don’t see anything resembling my work on those shelves, but I suppose it never hurts to ask.
J. Kelley Anderson is a fan of comic books, John Milton, tattoos, pulp detective novels, herpetology, folklore, video games, and all things sci-fi and fantasy. Growing up, he wanted to be either a ninja or a maple tree. These aspirations led him to teach college English. He lives in Ohio.
Anderson’s work has appeared in 14 Hills, Mosaic, Eclectica Magazine, Mind Flights, Ray Gun Revival, and elsewhere. His new novel, Casting Shadows, is available wherever awesome books are sold. Find him online at www.jkelleyanderson.com.
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The issue is that contemporary literary fiction is simply not regarded as a genre — which of course it is. Genre should broadly be considered as a form, and the Dubliners-inspired epiphany novels are every bit as much beholden to tropes, convention and cliché as any other genre. What makes those worthy of study and consideration, but fantasy or science fiction is beyond the pale? Well, I think there’s a couple of things going on here.
Invisible genre. Literary fiction is an invisible genre. People have been conditioned to view the genre of contemporary fiction not as one mode of many, to be used when the story fits it, but as the default form of literature. When stories deviate from that, people (read: snobs) seem them as being cast into a new (and often lesser) form, instead of simply being decanted into a different container.
Realism. Good or bad, fantasy fiction isn’t ‘realist’ in the traditional sense. While there is plenty of fantasy and science fiction that is told in a strictly realist mold, the events and ideas are anything but like what we’re used to. Of course, there’s nothing remotely realistic about contemporary fiction, either — what could possible be odder than having an unseen, unacknowledged, omniscient narrator tell a story about a person with access to their own mind? But that’s largely restating the first point.
Tradition. Milton and Shakespeare regularly used fantastic elements in their works, and the further you go back, the weirder stories get. Ovid’s Metamorphasis? Icelandic sagas? The Illiad? Full of transformations, gods, monsters and strange events. But, they’re classics, and therefore in their own genre. The category that things exist in is very important for people. Thomas Pynchon used tons of fantastical elements in his novels, but people don’t think of his books as fantasies, because they’re not told that they are fantasy. Films have it even easier: Kubrick, Spielberg and Scott have all made amazingly successful genre films that rank among the best ever made. But because there isn’t a sense that one particular genre of film is the default mode, genre films have a much easier time being accepted.
And, of course, there are some troubles that fantasy has kind of caused for itself:
Sexism. There are some really unpleasant images on the cover of fantasy novels. People who might be otherwise inclined to enjoy fantasy are extremely turned off by the covers of novels, which all-too-often feature some kind of sub-Frazetta, barely clad Amazonian warrior princess/damsel in distress masturbation aid. Take a look at this blog post, where author Jim C. Hines tries (and fails) to strike some of the common poses that women on the covers of fantasy novels are forced in to. And beyond the cover, fantasy novels seem to harbor an unfortunate tendency to break female characters down into either agency-less victims and screeching harpies with little space or subtlety in between.
Repetition. Another problem is that fantasy has an unfortunate tendency to reuse the same Joseph Campbell-inspired hero’s journey that we’ve seen a thousand times before. I have no problem with people falling back on tried-and-true frames and basic settings, but it can still be enormously hacky and boring.
There are a lot of other problems with contemporary fantasy fiction, of course, from the weird status of race and racism to its strange emphasis on Western European history. But a lot of authors are breaking these molds and moving into new and interesting directions: Daniel Abraham exploring interesting, non-Western settings and inspirations, Steven Erikson really examining religion’s place in fantasy, and what it would mean for gods to really exist and participate in human events, and the aforementioned Susanna Clarke’s book pushing the genre in new directions.
Uhg. Don’t get me started on fantasy covers. I expect I’ve missed out on some great books because I couldn’t stomach the ridiculous cover art. We live in the internet age. Nobody who wants pornography has any trouble finding it, so we don’t need to inject it into every aspect of art/culture.
Ahem.
See what you did there? You got me started.
Anyway, yes, certainly there are examples of awful fantasy books, but there are also wonderful examples. In terms of narrative depth and general craft I would put Susanna Clarke up against pretty much any living writer.
It’s not as though I want to see genre abolished all together. Categories are useful… except when they aren’t.
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