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Thursday, July 05, 2007

On Serious Literature

Posted by John Holbo on 07/05/07 at 12:04 AM

`Michael Chabon has spent considerable energy trying to drag the decaying corpse of genre fiction out of the shallow grave where writers of serious literature abandoned it.’ Ruth Franklin (Slate, 8 May 2007)

Ursula Le Guin responds in the latest Ansible:

Something woke her in the night. Was it steps she heard, coming up the stairs—somebody in wet training shoes, climbing the stairs very slowly ... but who? And why wet shoes? It hadn’t rained. There, again, the heavy, soggy sound. But it hadn’t rained for weeks, it was only sultry, the air close, with a cloying hint of mildew or rot, sweet rot, like very old finiocchiona, or perhaps liverwurst gone green. There, again—the slow, squelching, sucking steps, and the foul smell was stronger. Something was climbing her stairs, coming closer to her door. As she heard the click of heel bones that had broken through rotting flesh, she knew what it was. But it was dead, dead! God damn that Chabon, dragging it out of the grave where she and the other serious writers had buried it to save serious literature from its polluting touch ...

And while we are pottering around at Dave Langford’s, it seems J.K. Rowling has warned readers against a spate of ‘spoilers’ - books purporting to predict the fate of her protagonist. That would be Langford’s The End of Harry Potter?, plus about a dozen [amazon] other titles on the market. This would be the same Langford who remarked, back in 2000: “I think we may say that Harry Potter fever is getting out of hand when the Washington Post devotes 39 column inches, including two pictures, to the astonishing story that some kid managed to buy this year’s manifestation before the release date.” His new book is 208 pages.

Is there any literary precedent for this sort of prediction-mongering as a literary phenomenon in its own right? (It’s quite likely that these books are best-sellers in literary criticism, at the moment. Big fish in a small pond, sales-wise.)

Come to think of it, Langford’s book might be useful for illustrating points I was making a couple weeks ago (start here) about how theories of literary interpretation tend not to account for the rather basic fact that what you do, when interpreting, is investigate the implications of situations (not just the meanings of words or the intentions of authors.) Presumably these books contain a mix of inferences to ‘facts’ concerning the world of the fiction, plus attempts to read the author’s mind, plus considerations about what would be most satisfying/fun. Plus lots of trivia. I might read the Langford book, if I can find a copy. But I’m going to read Chabon first.

Comments

Thanks for pointing out the Le Guin piece. What a great bookend to Ruth Franklin’s review. Poor Le Guin! Had she had Ulysses at her bedside, no doubt she could have fought off the monster. Roth’s works are so much slimmer, and more self-doubting.

I especially enjoyed Franklin’s/Chabon’s call to arms:

What Chabon seemed to long for most was a culture in which fiction, in whatever form, could permeate the national conversation and be essential to people’s daily lives.

It’s an attractively rosy vision when the rate of reading fiction fell from 57% of adults in 1982 to 47% in 2002.

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Thursday, July 05, 2007

On Serious Literature

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