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Remember my disclaimer at the beginning of this series? I’m about to take note of an argument between two writers whose fiction I have not read, discussing mostly other fiction I have not read, who are discussing a genre I have read little of. Ben Marcus, author of The Age of Wire and String and Notable American Women (which is a novel), has taken on Jonathen Franzen (author of The Corrections) in a discussion about what literary fiction ought to do (and by the way, who’s oppressing whom) in a long piece, “Why Experimental Fiction Threatens to Destroy Publishing, Jonathan Franzen, and Life As We Know It: a correction,” which is listed as a “folio” in the October 2005 Harper’s Magazine (Vol 311, No.1865) . I don’t know what they mean by “folio,” unless that the piece is long enough to stand on its own like some nineteenth-century monograph. Another disclaimer: I haven’t found the original Franzen piece yet, and I’m hoping it doesn’t matter for my purposes. I’ve been reading interviews and snips of his to try to make up for it. I have nothing for or against Franzen or Marcus. There’s just these ideas I want to deal with.
Marcus starts out with a brief discussion of the parts of the brain involved in understanding reading. Honestly, I thought that part seemed a little garbley, but the important part is this: he says that the parts of the brain that are involved in reading comprehension are developed by reading, and it should be a writer’s desire, therefore, to have an audience which is practiced in reading and has their reading brain all nicely developed and strong.
According to Marcus, Franzen’s lately been writing pieces in which he says that “experimental” writers are turning off readers from literature and that this ultimately threatens serious publishing. He says Franzen says that certain modern writers are being too difficult for their audiences and turning them off so that they will tend to go off and read comic books or watch movies or something. And this is bad because you can’t be a reader if you do those things (okay, here I’m caricaturing what might have been a caricature of the original, so remember I’m not holding Marcus or Franzen responsible for any of these statements).
Marcus says that the people who say the things that Franzen says get to call themselves realists. He takes a sidetrip to explain that this is unfair because if you get to call yourself a realist, the other guys have to call themselves something in opposition to realism, which makes them sound weak in comparison. I just got off a month or two of trying to defend and define magic realism to a group of mostly spacecore science fiction fans (I think), and I can hardly ever find anybody else who likes socialist realism romantic adventure pulp writing, so it was a surprise to me to realize that there are contexts in which realism is the top dog connotive widget, whether or not those contexts are any broader than Marcus’s defense of somethingother than realism. The one person I ever heard saying anything about realism as an embattled genre – remember I’m sort of undereducated in contemporary literary genres and the arguments about them – was the wonderful writer Carter Wilson, my teacher at UCSC and one of the best friends a human being could ever have, and at the time he wasn’t so much dismissing other ways of writing as saying there was something valuable in this kind of writing and he was proud to do it. I mention this as a preliminary confusing tactic, because the next thing I want to say is that my stepmother, who is better read than I am, upon reading Carter’s magnificent Treasures on Earth, said that the book reminded her of William Burroughs, a puzzle I have returned to many times over the years because frankly Burroughs creeps me out and I don’t see the comparison. I assume it must be the intensity of sensual detail, or something, that makes the comparison. I can’t ask her right now because she’s getting ready to go to Africa again (everybody goes places but me).
I get the impression that realism in this context means stories wherein the narrative line is the organizing principle for the structure – right, but aren’t most stories written that way? – and in the structure is more or less conventional – that is, not “experimental” – and that there’s not that much more to the description. About this point in Marcus’s piece, he switches to a person named B.R. Myers who writes in the Atlantic Monthly, who asks for “a time-tested masterpiece or what critics patronizingly call a fun read – Sister Carrie or just plain Carrie.”
That’s pretty general to be fighting over. But they’re doing it all the time. I’m going to end this here, except for one thing: if these guys were science fiction writers instead of literary writers, they’d still have these discussions, but they’d be different. Later I’ll get to what that’s all about.
Next section is about this idea of Marcus’s: literary ambition. It's not necessarily what it sounds like.
Marcus starts out with a brief discussion of the parts of the brain involved in understanding reading. Honestly, I thought that part seemed a little garbley, but the important part is this: he says that the parts of the brain that are involved in reading comprehension are developed by reading, and it should be a writer’s desire, therefore, to have an audience which is practiced in reading and has their reading brain all nicely developed and strong.
According to Marcus, Franzen’s lately been writing pieces in which he says that “experimental” writers are turning off readers from literature and that this ultimately threatens serious publishing. He says Franzen says that certain modern writers are being too difficult for their audiences and turning them off so that they will tend to go off and read comic books or watch movies or something. And this is bad because you can’t be a reader if you do those things (okay, here I’m caricaturing what might have been a caricature of the original, so remember I’m not holding Marcus or Franzen responsible for any of these statements).
Marcus says that the people who say the things that Franzen says get to call themselves realists. He takes a sidetrip to explain that this is unfair because if you get to call yourself a realist, the other guys have to call themselves something in opposition to realism, which makes them sound weak in comparison. I just got off a month or two of trying to defend and define magic realism to a group of mostly spacecore science fiction fans (I think), and I can hardly ever find anybody else who likes socialist realism romantic adventure pulp writing, so it was a surprise to me to realize that there are contexts in which realism is the top dog connotive widget, whether or not those contexts are any broader than Marcus’s defense of somethingother than realism. The one person I ever heard saying anything about realism as an embattled genre – remember I’m sort of undereducated in contemporary literary genres and the arguments about them – was the wonderful writer Carter Wilson, my teacher at UCSC and one of the best friends a human being could ever have, and at the time he wasn’t so much dismissing other ways of writing as saying there was something valuable in this kind of writing and he was proud to do it. I mention this as a preliminary confusing tactic, because the next thing I want to say is that my stepmother, who is better read than I am, upon reading Carter’s magnificent Treasures on Earth, said that the book reminded her of William Burroughs, a puzzle I have returned to many times over the years because frankly Burroughs creeps me out and I don’t see the comparison. I assume it must be the intensity of sensual detail, or something, that makes the comparison. I can’t ask her right now because she’s getting ready to go to Africa again (everybody goes places but me).
I get the impression that realism in this context means stories wherein the narrative line is the organizing principle for the structure – right, but aren’t most stories written that way? – and in the structure is more or less conventional – that is, not “experimental” – and that there’s not that much more to the description. About this point in Marcus’s piece, he switches to a person named B.R. Myers who writes in the Atlantic Monthly, who asks for “a time-tested masterpiece or what critics patronizingly call a fun read – Sister Carrie or just plain Carrie.”
That’s pretty general to be fighting over. But they’re doing it all the time. I’m going to end this here, except for one thing: if these guys were science fiction writers instead of literary writers, they’d still have these discussions, but they’d be different. Later I’ll get to what that’s all about.
Next section is about this idea of Marcus’s: literary ambition. It's not necessarily what it sounds like.
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