Normally, I would have made this one of my “Impressions” posts but I feel there’s a little more to say here than my normal brief thoughts and impressions on what book I happen to be reading at the time. Took a trip to Arizona this past week and I brought with me a book of essays called “Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands” by Michael Chabon, a writer I’ve never read before. I bought it while I was in Minneapolis, kicking around the local Barnes & Noble and bought it because, one, there were two particular essays I really wanted to read and, two, I’ve heard so much about this author, I thought it was time that I read him. (I also picked up his novel “Wonder Boys” in order to sample his fiction).
It was a long ass flight to Arizona from New York - four and a half hours, to be exact, and I thought perhaps reading this small book of essays would help pass the time and I was also interested, after a cursory glance inside the store, in what he had to say. From the get go found myself highly impressed as well as relating to a lot to what Chabon had to say about writing and particularly the way fiction is often perceived, whether its just the general reader or those in the Ivory Tower. I knew I was in for a very interesting set of essays once I read the first few paragraphs of “A Trickster in a Suit of Lights”, Chabon’s thoughts on the modern short story.
The very first thing that struck me was how he noted that “entertainment” has been given a bum rap. “Entertainment”, he argues, is often associated with “Coppertone and a dripping Creamsicle, the fake butter miasma of a movie-house lobby, of Karaoke and Jägermeister, Jerry Bruckheimer movies, a Street Fighter machine grunting solipsistically in the corner of an ice-rink arcade. Entertainment trades in cliché and product placement. It engages regions of the brain far from the centers of discernment, critical thinking, ontological speculation {...} Intelligent people must keep a certain distance from its productions. They must handle the things that entertain them with gloves of irony and postmodern tongs. Entertainment, in short, means junk, and too much junk is bad for you - bad for your heart, your arteries, your mind, your soul.”
Once I read this statement I knew where he was going with this and I immediately felt something of an artistic connection. I didn’t even get a chance to formulate my own thoughts about it when he had already written the words out of my head: “Maybe the reason for the junkiness of so much of what pretends to entertain us is that we accepted - indeed, we helped articulate - such a narrow, debased concept of entertainment.” He goes on to say that he reads for entertainment as well as write his novels with the hopes to entertain. But his definition of what “entertainment” is with regard to reading and writing is, “the engagement of the interior ear by the rhythm and pitch of a fine prose style; the dawning awareness that giant mutant rat people dwell in the walls of a ruined abbey in England; two hours spent bushwhacking through a densely packed argument about structures of power as embodied in nineteenth century prison architecture; the consummation of a great love aboard a lost Amazon riverboat...” You get the idea. I know I did, as soon as my eyes ran across these words.
All of this is leading up to his thoughts on the modern short story. He writes that to about as late as 1950, if one referred to “short fiction” you would have been talking about one of these kinds of stories: the ghost story, the horror story, the detective story, of the macabre, the sea, adventure, spy, war or historical story; the romance story - arguing that all these types of stories have rich traditions in American fiction going all the way back to Poe and Hawthorne. At some point, he argues, the short story went from these “genre” type stories to that of “contemporary, quotidian, plotless, moment-of-truth revelatory” stories, stories that he himself admits that he has written himself. One could argue about the merits of both kinds of stories but I think he’s essentially right about this. All one has to do is read the current literary journals filled with this kind of stuff. I’ve even written a couple like these as well, as I’m sure most writers born after a certain time has.
He then goes on about a topic which I’ve written about here before and often see while surfing the internet - the never ending battle between what is considered “genre fiction” and “literary fiction.” But I’m not here to argue this. He notes that genre fiction often has its “rules” in which a writer can’t stray from - a notion I disagree with entirely (most of the time it’s the readers themselves that won’t allow for writers to break out of the framework of typical genre fiction) - but he also goes on to say about how Literary fiction has its own set of rules and parameters: “Whether through willfulness, ignorance, or simple amour propre, what tends to get ignored by “serious” writers and critics alike is that the genre known (more imprecisely than any other) as “Literary Fiction” has rules, conventions, and formulas of its own: the primacy of the unified point of view, for example; letters and their liability to being read or intercepted; the dance of adulterous partners; the buried family secret that curses generations to come; the ordinary heroism of an unsung life.” Just a quick glance at what novels released today under the banner of “Literary Fiction” will show you that it does indeed have a certain sensibility, sameness, feel, and subject matter. But all of this made me think of one thing and one thing only, and it has nothing to do with the merits of either style or whether or not a writer should be producing one kind of fiction over another. It reminded me of a time in one’s reading life when none of this mattered.
Before I go on, I feel I have to say a few things, since this is being read on the Internet after all, and more often than not people only skim the surface of these posts, pick out a line they disagree with and often go ballistic when disagreeing with it, having not read the context in which it is being written:
I do not, under any circumstances, denigrate those writers who’s aspirations are to achieve something “higher”, serious writers who take their work very seriously and aspire to create a work of art. Some writers are actively seeking to produce “literature” with a capital L. I have the utmost respect for these folks - especially since most of them have the talent to achieve that goal. I also do not denigrate those writers who write genre fiction (Sci-fi, Detective fiction, Horror, etc), whose sole purpose is to entertain with a good, engaging, well written story. It’s my view that there is room for everyone and people will naturally gravitate toward what kind of fiction they like best. For me, personally, I tend to read more of what’s considered “Literary Fiction” and most of my favorite authors fall into this camp - but that doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy “genre fiction” as well (and have fully admitted in the past that writers such as Raymond Chandler, Jim Thompson, Mickey Spillane, among others, have influenced me as much as Ernest Hemingway or Henry Miller has).
Reading Chabon’s essay - as well as some of the others in this wonderful book (where he writes about comic books and artists, Cormac McCarthy, fantasy stories and writers, Arthur Conan Doyle) - brought to my mind one thing: that time in our lives when we chose what we read and enjoyed before we got older and all the theory came in and gunked up the works. He writes with such pleasure about all the different kinds of writing he enjoyed throughout his life that it brought back that very same feeling I had when I was young, picking up and reading anything that looked interesting to me, totally unconcerned with what “type” of book it was. It didn’t matter then. All that mattered was how a certain book or story moved you and was read for the sheer pleasure of reading them on their own terms. It reminded me of a time - I was 12 years old - when there used to be a local bookstore in my neighborhood in Flushing, New York - the Paperbound Book Shop - which I frequented all the time, always looking for something to read next; and those choices always varied. Whether it was “The Lord of the Rings” or Ray Bradburry or Isaac Asimov or some other kind of book, I would take them home and devour them for the stories that these authors had to tell. When I got a little bit older (and the bookstore made way for a health food store) I began exploring other places such as Walden Books, B. Dalton, Barnes and Noble and especially Coliseum Books on 57th Street and found pleasure on the works of George Orwell, Tadeusz Konwicki, Milan Kundera, Jack Kerouac and a host of others, I began to formulate my personal preferences in reading. Not that I now dismissed these old genre books (during this same period I read a healthy dose of Hardboiled Detective/Noir fiction as well) but it was clear to me what kind of authors and books I preferred. There was no feeling of “embarrassment” of choosing to read one over the other, no sense of having to appear a certain way, no airs of any sort. I enjoyed what I enjoyed and enjoyed them for what they were, on their own terms. Simple enough.
Then came the time when I began to take my writing more seriously - and of course, when that happens, you often come across others who share your passion for writing and you begin to explore more Literary theory and other books and articles on “the craft.” As I’ve written before here, it started with poetry and then morphed into the desire to write fiction. That innocence was gone now, of course, and now armed not only with a steady diet of “serious” fiction as well as heaps of literary theory and advice, I had to decide what kind of writer I wanted to be and what kind of books I wanted to write. Naturally, the more “literary” style would be what I would gravitate towards. There are previous posts about the “trials and tribulations” I went through to write my first novel so there’s no need to replay the whole thing here. It was when I embarked on my second novel that I hit the brick wall, feeling stymied by all the things I thought I was “supposed” to do to be considered a “serious” writer. I’ve since learned that being a “serious” writer and being serious about your writing are two different things altogether.
“Serious” writers, to me, are authors such as Milan Kundera, Salman Rushdie, Mario Vargas Llosa, Louis Ferdinand-Cèline, Cormac McCarthy, and a host of others. According to my definition, I do not consider myself a “serious” writer. However, I do claim to be very serious about my writing, meaning that I try to make what I do the best it can possibly be within the parameters of my own abilities. To me, the writers stated above (among others) are the “heavyweights”, extremely gifted and talented writers who deserve the accolades and critical acclaim they earned. I found that although I felt a drive, a desire to write about certain things, in a certain way, I wasn’t allowing myself to because I felt that if I wanted to be taken seriously as a writer then I would have to write “serious works”, i.e. like the writers stated above. I constantly had the question “Is this literature?” in the back of my mind whenever I sat down at the keyboard and I felt something was holding me back. It was during the writing of my second novel that I thought about what it was I was doing and what it was that was holding me back from doing it, and that was this: worrying about whether or not what I was writing was literature with a capital L. I had the desire to incorporate all the different influences into my own work, to perhaps even write a book that wasn’t necessarily “literary” in nature. Why shouldn’t I write a detective novel - of sorts - if I so desire? Why not dabble in a little Sci-fi if I wanted to? In other words, why not throw it all into the pot and try to come up with something that is uniquely my own, forget the labels and the perceptions and just sit down and fucking write what you want to, with the caveat of trying to make it as interesting and as uniquely mine as possible?
Chabon notes, more than once, that some “serious” writers have done just that. In his essay on Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” he writes of how this writer of serious fiction “dared” to take a turn towards science fiction with that novel, set in a post-apocalyptic America, it’s feel somewhat (in my humble opinion) very much in the science fiction mode. He writes how critics and dedicated readers of “serious” fiction tend to dismiss this turn toward genre fiction and regard what he did - and others who have done the same - as “a parable”, the words "Science Fiction" not dared uttered in their reviews. He also noted that Vladimir Nabakov’s novel “Ada, or Ardor” contained a plot concerning “alternate-world and time theories and a key early example in the retro-futuristic sub-genre of science fiction that years later became known as ‘Steampunk” and how Cormac McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian” has its basis in Westerns. True that these authors took these genres and pushed them into the stratosphere, pushing the boundaries further than your average genre fiction would - but somehow, due to their literary reputations, the critics would never define these novels as either Science Fiction or a Western but - in essence - that’s what they are.
It is Chabon’s willingness to sort through the pretentious bullshit often associated with literature and writers and writing that greatly appealed to me, since, for a long while now, I have felt the same way about it. Once I decided to stop worrying about what I was writing was literature with a capital L, I feel creatively free, more inclined to experiment with different ideas, narrative possibilities, stories, plots, conventions, what have you, and it’s opened up a new creative front for me personally. Reading these essays only validated something I’ve been feeling and thinking about with regard to my own work and as I move forward I will continue to just write what I feel like writing, without a care in the world for labels, perceptions or expectations that so often come along with telling people that you are a writer of fiction but do not write genre novels. I think it’s high time for writers - or artists of any medium - to get back to that time before theory and expectations hamper their growth and ability to move forward and actually work joyously. The only thing anyone should worry about when delving into this world is to write the best book you can, tell the story you want to tell, tell it how you want to tell it, and forget the “watchful eyes” and be free to create - and most importantly, enjoy it.
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