"In my experience at least, to dismiss genre fiction as escapism is to seriously under-think what happens when someone opens a genre novel. According to the escapist theory, people read genre fiction to leave behind the cares and sorrows of reality — a genre novel is, in Krystal’s words, “a narrative cocktail that helps us temporarily forget the narratives of our own humdrum lives.” It’s like we’re sucking on a literary pacifier: genre readers “simply want the comfort of a familiar voice recounting a story they that they hadn’t quite heard before.” Calgon, take me away! (Old-person humor.)
Personally I don’t think it’s anywhere near that simple. If that’s true, then what kind of escape do you find in George R.R. Martin’s Westeros? Or in the grim, rain-soaked Britain of Kate Atkinson? Or in Suzanne Collins’ brutal, subjugated Panem? What kind of cocktails are those? They make you forget your own problems, sure, but they replace them with a whole new set of problems, even more dire (hopefully) than the ones you left behind.
There’s more than escapism going on here. Why do we seek out these hard places for our fantasy vacations? Because on some level, we recognize and claim those disasters as our own. We seek out hard places precisely because our lives are hard. When you read genre fiction, you leave behind the problems of reality — but only to re-encounter those problems in transfigured form, in an unfamiliar guise, one that helps you understand them more completely, and feel them more deeply. Genre fiction isn’t just generic pap. You don’t read it to escape your problems, you read it to find a new way to come to terms with them.
Krystal also dwells quite a bit on the quality of the writing in genre novels: “the prose may be uneven,” he writes, “and the observations about life and society predictable.” And so on. Again, I don’t quite agree. I would argue that what he’s describing there isn’t genre fiction. What he’s describing sounds more like shitty genre fiction. The writing in good genre fiction is not at all uneven. It’s not easy to find a sentence out of place in Tana French, or to find a work of literary fiction that sparks and snaps at you like Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash. God knows there’s plenty of bad writing in literary fiction, too, but Krystal never talks about that. The badness tends to be a different kind of badness — slow, earnest, lugubrious prose, or too-clever and self-conscious prose — but bad it nonetheless is. You wouldn’t want to judge literary fiction on the basis of its mediocrities. So why judge genre fiction that way?"
Personally I don’t think it’s anywhere near that simple. If that’s true, then what kind of escape do you find in George R.R. Martin’s Westeros? Or in the grim, rain-soaked Britain of Kate Atkinson? Or in Suzanne Collins’ brutal, subjugated Panem? What kind of cocktails are those? They make you forget your own problems, sure, but they replace them with a whole new set of problems, even more dire (hopefully) than the ones you left behind.
There’s more than escapism going on here. Why do we seek out these hard places for our fantasy vacations? Because on some level, we recognize and claim those disasters as our own. We seek out hard places precisely because our lives are hard. When you read genre fiction, you leave behind the problems of reality — but only to re-encounter those problems in transfigured form, in an unfamiliar guise, one that helps you understand them more completely, and feel them more deeply. Genre fiction isn’t just generic pap. You don’t read it to escape your problems, you read it to find a new way to come to terms with them.
Krystal also dwells quite a bit on the quality of the writing in genre novels: “the prose may be uneven,” he writes, “and the observations about life and society predictable.” And so on. Again, I don’t quite agree. I would argue that what he’s describing there isn’t genre fiction. What he’s describing sounds more like shitty genre fiction. The writing in good genre fiction is not at all uneven. It’s not easy to find a sentence out of place in Tana French, or to find a work of literary fiction that sparks and snaps at you like Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash. God knows there’s plenty of bad writing in literary fiction, too, but Krystal never talks about that. The badness tends to be a different kind of badness — slow, earnest, lugubrious prose, or too-clever and self-conscious prose — but bad it nonetheless is. You wouldn’t want to judge literary fiction on the basis of its mediocrities. So why judge genre fiction that way?"
—Lev Grossman, Literary Revolution in the Supermarket Aisle: Genre Fiction Is Disruptive Technology. How science fiction, fantasy, romance, mysteries and all the rest will take over the world (via relatedworlds)
“You don’t read it to escape your problems, you read it to find a new way to come to terms with them.”
05.23.12 @ 21:08
9 notas
