Via Kathryn Cramer this interesting review of Margaret Atwood’s latest, Oryx and Crake in the NYT. Sven Birkerts, who reviews the book, has three main points. First, that Oryx and Crake is science fiction. Second, that science fiction can’t be literature, because it “sacrifices moral and psychological nuance in favor of more conceptual matters.” Third, that Oryx and Crake is therefore not literature.
Now in one sense, this is just deserts. Atwood has been at pains herself to deny that Oryx and Crake is science fiction, because science fiction is apparently all about “rockets and chemicals.” And her publicist has apparently tried to make sure that book reviews don’t use the Dreaded Genre Term to refer to the book, for fear that mainstream readers would be frightened away.
Schadenfreude aside though, there’s something both irritating and silly about Birkert’s argument. Granted, his criticism of science fiction is a little more subtle than the average dismissive put-down. He seems to be saying that science fiction isn’t literature because it allows characterization to be dictated by the logic of its premises. In other words, he says that science fiction exists to illustrate ideas, rather than people. And in fairness, there is a lot of science fiction which does exactly that - a tradition stretching from Hal Clement to Greg Egan (whose work I detest - but that’s another story) and Ted Chiang.
But exactly the same can be said of Literature with a capital ‘L.’ Last time I looked, Borges was all about ideas being pushed to their limits. Not much characterization in there, even in his gaucho stories. Not to mention Sterne, Voltaire, Calvino, Perec, Queneau - all much more interested in ideas than in character. If you want to read about characters being defined by their situation, you shouldn’t be reading SF, you should be reading Beckett. But Birkerts has made it clear in other work that he does consider several of these people’s work to be “Literature.” To put it mildly, he’s being inconsistent. Either “Literature” can include work that stresses situation and ideas over character, or else a substantial chunk of Birkert’s Western Canon gets flushed down the toilet. You can’t have it both ways.
Not only that, but the converse is true as well. Many F/SF writers take character quite seriously indeed. There’s a tradition of the fantastic that starts with Mervyn Peake’s incomparable “Gormenghast,” jumps through Gene Wolfe, Thomas Disch, M. John Harrison, Kelly Link, and of course John Crowley. And that’s only for starters. But I did a post on this a while back (I still have to port it over from Blogger), and don’t want to repeat myself.
All that said, it’s equally a mistake to retreat into mutterings that SF is better than the kinds of self-appointed Defenders of the Serious like Birkerts like. Indeed, that kind of defensiveness is a mirror image of Birkert’s position; it reproduces the divisions between highbrow and genre fiction that Birkerts is implicitly appealing to. Instead, I reckon that it’s better to point to the porousness of the borders between SF and other modes of writing. It’s rather difficult to squash good writers into the SF pigeonhole; they might burst out of their confines when your back is turned. And they can do it without losing the openness and sense of excitement that makes SF such fun. SF can have all the characterization and seriousness that a thousand stuffy literary critics could demand, and still be SF. China Mieville, who is a rather wonderful writer in his own right, has just put up a sort of manifesto for Weird Fiction (scroll down a bit), which sez inter alia:
You can make … analogies with the gay movement. We can be the Log Cabin movement of genre - I’m a writer just like you, and if I happen to write about the odd monster or two, well, it’s all behind closed doors, we’re all fiction under the skin aren’t we, what does it matter, why can’t we all just get along… or we can be Outrage!. We’re Here! We’re Weird! Get Used To It! I know which I’d rather be.
Me too.
Posted by Henry at May 19, 2003 12:01 AM | TrackBackI have to ask: What’s the Greg Egan story?
Posted by: Alan Schussman at May 19, 2003 06:03 PMJust that his work gives me the creeps. There’s a tradition of engineering stories in SF, which don’t have much in the way of characterization. Egan seems to take that tradition and radicalizes it. His work seems to me to be all about trying to transform the messy complexity of human personalities and relationships into an engineering problem, because things are neater that way. If Steven den Beste were smart, he’d write like Greg Egan - there’s a parched, starved, self-referentiality in Egan’s work that makes me feel physically uncomfortable whenever I try to read him.
Posted by: Henry at May 19, 2003 09:21 PMWell, if you start off with a predefined idea of what constitutes literature, it’s not difficult to exclude what doesn’t fit. The problem is that you usually end up excluding much that most people do regard as literature (e.g. FR Leavis and authors like Thackeray and Tennyson). In this case, Orwell, Voltaire, Swift, Butler, Huxley and Mary Shelley would fall by the wayside.
Posted by: Richard at May 20, 2003 02:45 PMA lot of “classic” literature is pulp fiction, especially the whole romance tradition (blood and guts, magic, heros and damsels). Rabelais and Cervantes came out of pulp.
In music, opera and ballet were looked down on in the XIX c. Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington were too lowbrow for Adorno.
And so it goes.
Posted by: zizka at May 21, 2003 01:44 PMChina later argues that
“New Weird is the pulp wing of Surrealism. People like Burroughs, Joyce, the Surrealists, the High Modernist experimentalists, are crucial reference points, but filtered through the pulp insistence on Telling A Story (preferably with bangs and flashes) - though of course that doesn’t mean surrendering to the banality of narrative. Narrative/story is intrinsically comforting, because it is the imposition of structure (and thus implied meaning) on a contingent mass of stuff - narrative arc does violence to the chaos of the Real. This is an impossible circle to square - but we just try to have it both ways, striving constantly to tell the/a story and to undercut its honeyed tones because we - or at least our fiction - are aware of its mollycoddling.”
Check his stuff out if you haven’t already; esp. Perdido Street Station. Historical materialist fantasy that’s fun.
Posted by: Henry at May 21, 2003 02:18 PMThere is an essay by Atwood on the publisher’s site, where she knocks “Science Fiction” in much the same words. This led me to look around on the net for others who had something to say about this, and I found this.
But she also, in that same interview, makes a very good point. Which, whether she means it or not, actually illustrates the point about lack of distinct boundary between SF and ‘non-genre’ fiction:
“Every novel [whether SF or not, I’d say] begins with a what if, and then sets forth its axioms.”
Posted by: Jonathan Nil at September 25, 2003 05:07 PM