UF vs. Literature: Death Match!

[alanajoli]

lyster wrote in response to my last entry:
My sense, based on the books I've seen self-identified as UF, is that few UF readers would recognize any of these three as Urban Fantasy, or at least as "their" urban fantasy. Am I correct? If so, where's the line? If not, whence this perception?

There's a lot of marketing that going into defining genres. I was heartbroken when Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell came out and was shelved in the fiction section at Barnes and Noble, rather than in fantasy where it belonged. Michael Chabon supposedly commented to someone at a conference that he's delighted he's been getting away with writing genre fiction for years, and people think he's writing literary fiction. (While searching for an exact reference to that, rather than a memoried retelling, I came across an article from Salon explaining why Chabon is both literary and genre fiction, comparing him to Michael Connelly. In this case, it's a murder mystery being discussed.)

The truth about urban fantasy is that it's a handy replacement phrase for anything set in a contemporary world, which may be divergent from our own or may be twisted due to a magicopalypse of some kind. It encompasses everything from Charles de Lint, Neil Gaiman, and Emma Bull (who are sometimes considered progenitors of the current genre) to the current trend of sexy vampires and werewolves and covers featuring women with tattoos on their lower backs. Any genre that can include both Neverwhere and Twilight without people blinking is a genre so broad that its label is almost meaningless.

The same could, of course, be said of fantasy in general (or, worse, the fantasy/SF designation used by most bookstores and libraries). I think Josh Jasper's division between UF and horror is, perhaps, the best designator I've seen -- the major difference between the two is the purpose of the setting. Otherwise, how do you determine that vampires, which for years belonged in horror (or, thanks to Anne Rice, the general fiction section), are now a UF trope?

The term literature might be treated in the same way. There may or may not be a handy definition out there of what "literature" actually means (since, if it means "worthy of being discussed in a college classroom," Buffy and Patricia Briggs's "Mercy Thompson" series are among the titles I've seen on course syllabi). If there's an official definition inside the publishing industry, I'd love to hear it! My own associations with the term are somewhat troubled (in no small part due to the condescension with which the literary establishment, whoever that is, addresses genre fiction on the whole, which Genreville has covered in other entries -- that sort of attitude seems geared to make genre writers go on the defensive). In a conversation over on sartorias's blog, I commented:

[Literature] as a word tends to leave a bad taste in my mouth. It conjures up assigned reading, a list of white-male-dominated classics, and books that are read because then you can say that you've read them (rather than books that are read because the reading of them is worthwhile). "Literary fiction" seems to be synonymous with "depressingly hopeless" in some circles.

If by literature here, however, we mean "good stories that somehow reach toward a greater meaning and enrich the lives of the readers" -- well then, perhaps even those of us who are hoping to entertain may be striving for that in the end.

In the case of Michael Chabon, it tickles me that he feels he's getting genre fiction past the literary establishment on the sly -- that he's really "one of us," but is walking in "their" world without "them" realizing it. In the case of may really excellent fantasy novels that end up getting published as "general fiction" instead, it typically makes me irritated -- the idea seems to be that "normal" readers will only pick up books from the fiction section, so we can pass off this book, which is really fantasy, as "normal" and appeal to the general (or possibly literary) market, when really, the fantasy section is where it would find readership. (It seems to me that the greatest disservice I've seen in this scenario is to shanna_s's Enchanted Inc. and sequels. They were published to hit the chick lit audience, which dried up, but they remain helplessly shelved in fiction, where fantasy readers, who would really enjoy them, won't necessarily find them.)

What I tend to look for in fiction, in terms of depth, thinking about "big thoughts," or making me question my assumptions about how I understand the world (things one assumes that literature is supposed to do, while "hack fiction" is not), tends to revolve around my interest in how people/characters deal with concepts of the divine, or deal with their own mortality. I've found people writing about those topics across all sorts of genre lines, from the novels of Charles Williams; to the exceptionally wonderful collection of artificial intelligence stories by Jeff Duntemann (jeff_duntemann), Souls in Silicon; to, both surprisingly and delightfully, several of the novels published in the roleplaying world of Eberron. Stylistically, of course, there is a shift from one to the next. But stylistically, I see the novels of Catherynne M. Valente and Caitlin Kittredge's Street Magic in particular being written in a poetic, metaphoric style -- which I simply call beautiful language, but others might call literary. Is it the depth of meaning that brings the sense of literary, or is it a stylistic quality?

Really, rather than a death match, it makes more sense to me to acknowledge that the boundaries between the world of literature and the world of genre fiction -- like the barriers between this world and the next at places like Glastonbury -- are thin. If there's a herm that stands between literary and genre fiction, Hermes is guiding writers right past it all the time, and the folks who are leaving him libations are finding an audience on both sides of the "us vs. them," "pop culture vs. establishment" divide. To them, I offer my heartiest congratulations.

Comments

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Interesting thoughts! It really can vary, can't it? One writer is using literary or beautiful language to this reader, and overwrought and self-conscious tangles of words to that reader over there. Chick lit to one editor, fantasy to the second editor, mainstream to a third. Crazy-making.

[alanajoli.livejournal.com]

Oooh, I hadn't been thinking of it that way, but you're quite right: to me, beautiful language might actually be someone else's purple prose! Not only is there the whole marketing issue, but there's also just the plain and simple matter of taste to throw into the equation. :)

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

And sometimes it's even just a matter of mood on the part of the reader. My feelings about whether language is gorgeous and rich or annoying and overdone changes depending on my mood, for sure.

[jeff-duntemann.livejournal.com]

'"Literary fiction" seems to be synonymous with "depressingly hopeless" in some circles.'

And hopelessly depressing. The problem with literary fiction--and the reason that genres evolved and are doing as well as they are--is that literature (as we now define it) drew its boundaries ever more tightly around itself, excluding more and more of the territory that writers of fiction were once free to explore, until every story now seems pretty much like every other story. What's there isn't bad, but it's so constrained that I simply don't read much of it anymore.

Genres can be constraining, too--if you let them. But what I love about genres today is that both readers are writers are willing to bend the walls of literature and remix the concepts and settings into entirely new things. The cross-pollination has been particularly energetic in the last twenty years, as the Internet allows followers of a genre to find others who read what they like, and authors to interact with their readers.

A young woman who once worked for me left Coriolis for a career in foreign rights marketing, and one of her mainstays was lesbian pirate fiction. From there it's a short plank to Vampirates, and who knows what else. (I can only read so much, and pirates just aren't my passion.) The old Bordertown stories were a mashup of all kinds of things, and while some worked better than others, none were the Same Old Stuff. (I much liked the werewolf computer hacker.)

I read a few westerns ten or twelve years ago, and decided to play with the concept in my own way, with the Drumlins stories as the result. Howard Waldrop made War of the Worlds collide with the Old West in "Night of the Cooters." Cowboys and Aliens, same deal, and nobody's complaining.

The key: Everybody I know in genre fiction is having a great deal of fun, even if they're not getting much into print. And if it isn't fun, what's the point?

[alanajoli.livejournal.com]

I have a friend who didn't take any creative writing classes during college because she'd heard too many horror stories of friends who'd been dissuaded from writing anything with fantastic elements. I thought, what a missed opportunity! But then, perhaps she was right about what she might have experienced. I was discouraged from writing anything "in genre" during college, but only because the prof thought students should learn basic elements of writing before playing inside of a more narrow rules set. Now I wonder, with genre boundaries busting open so wide, if you're right, and that they're *less* constraining than supposedly non-genre fiction.

I also tend to agree on the topic of fun, but some dour folks would claim that if you're having fun then you aren't really getting it. Pooh pooh on them!

[jeff-duntemann.livejournal.com]

"Pooh pooh" is being gentle. I'd use only four carefully chosen letters in front of "them."

If I had had to write literary fiction to learn things like plot, setting, internal dialog, and so on, I doubt I would ever have sold even a single story. The reason? I wanted a more interesting challenge. I needed to write action/adventure to keep me going, else I would have stopped right there and gone back to fooling with electronics. I learned how to plot first, and then (with effort) learned the rest, by writing SF and (very occasionally) fantasy. Good advice from established writers helped me more than I appreciated at the time, but above all else I had the freedom to practice in areas that excited me. Genre is more tolerant of mistakes, and engages inexperienced writers more thoroughly than tightly constrained literary fiction. I look back at my college-years fiction and groan a little, but it was practice, and it was fun. If not for that, I would not be writing what I'm writing today.

[lyster.livejournal.com]

It's unsettling that good genre fiction ends up shelved as literature -- Emperor of Ocean Park isn't in the mystery section, nor is Cat's Cradle in SF/F. Not only does this keep "normal" folks from reading other genre books they would like, it also keeps genre readers away from awesome books like Master and Margarita and Satanic Verses, traditionally thought of as literature, which are amazing stories, and far less formulaic than mainstream fantasy. Not all literature is as depressing as Thomas Hardy, any more than all fantasy, urban or whatever, is about vampires mourning the fact that alas, they, damned childer of Caine, are cursed forever more to wander the earth without feeling the touch of the sun, tragically alone etc.

A good quotes from the estimable GK Chesterton, a great literary mind if there ever was one, on the danger of too much angst regardless of whatever fiction you're writing:

"A detective story generally describes six living men discussing how it is that a man is dead. A modern philosophic story generally describes six dead men discussing how any man can possible be alive."

[alanajoli.livejournal.com]

I think the good genre fiction getting shelved outside of the genre is one of the things that contributes to the continuing anti-genre slur from the literati (as I don't want to assume that all of the "establishment" thinks thusly, and will only attribute the thoughts to those elitist anti-genre folks). Obviously, they must say, if it were good enough, it wouldn't be ostracized in a section where people who enjoy it will actually find it! ;)

Of course, Jane Austen, who I've heard claimed is the grandmother of all modern romance, is in literature (or at least general fiction) rather than romance. In her day, I believe she was just intending to write novels (where Hawthorne was, in his market, publishing romances); it's only been a reclamation from the current romance market that feels Austen is appropriately genred. So I guess it can go both ways.

The Chesterton quote is utterly lovely. :)

UF vs Literature: Death Match

[(Anonymous)]

First on the trivial side: I blink at the inclusion of Twilight in Urban Fantasy, except in the most literal sense that it happens to have some urban fantasy creatures. To me, Twilight is paranormal romance (or as one commenter put it, "abstinence with vampires"), and much more romance than paranormal. Their fandom is proof enough of this. It's almost exclusively female, and the Twilight fans I saw at NEFX last year looked and acted like Muggles who had wandered into Diagon Alley and wondered who all these weird people were. The same, I've heard firsthand, was true of the Twilight fans at SDCC. The clincher: my genre-indifferent, chick lit and teen soap loving teenage daughter loves Twilight.

More generally, we are back at the perennial question of the usefulness of genre definitions (and btw, in defiance of conventional definitions I consider realistic literary fiction to be not "mainstream" as its proponents exist, but one genre among many). I'm glad that Jonathan Strange landed on the "fiction" shelves of bookstores, though I've also seen it in the SF sections. We fantasy fans would have found it anyway, and when it is classed as just "fiction," it may be discovered by many people who wouldn't otherwise read it because they "don't like SF."

Finally, for the pleasure of all of us who know that genre and literary are not mutually exclusive, here's the URL for Ursula K. Le Guin's (speaking of literary writers who write genre) response to a "literary" reviewer who decried Michael Chabon's use of genre: http://www.ursulakleguin.com/Note-ChabonAndGenre.html

K Stoddard Hayes
http://worldbuildingrules.wordpress.com

Re: UF vs Literature: Death Match

[alanajoli.livejournal.com]

To be fair, Twilight is probably most properly categorized in YA, which is a different beast (though writers I know who think YA is a genre in and of itself would blink at that inclusion also). Paranormal Romance in the marketing sense seems to refer to a very specific, category romance styled formula of fiction that Twilight doesn't fit. (Then again, neither does Richelle Mead's "Succubus" series, and that's where marketing categorizes that. They obviously didn't ask me!)

I'm amused that the Twilight fandom comes off like Muggles, since the tales I've heard of that group have been some of the scariest, most rabid fandom stories. (Girls cutting themselves at movie premieres and asking Pattinson to drink them? Not cool, kids!) But that's a whole different set of issues. :)

One of the posters on sartorias's blog also noted the literary-fiction-as-genre issue, and I think I'd like to hear more about that as an idea, since "literary" seems so very ephemeral to me as a term. Many people to use it in dissimilar ways -- or, frequently, as a short-hand for "not that genre crap" in a highbrow review, which, of course, is what probably started my aversion to the term in the first place. "Realistic" seems to be yet another genre subdivider, so I certainly see where you're going with that thought!

When JS&MN came out, we hand sold it like mad at my local B&N, and it was displayed all over the store, so people couldn't avoid seeing it, regardless of what section they were looking in. I've not actually spoken to a lot of (actually, any) fantasy adverse readers who did read it, so I don't know if the marketing ploy was successful in that venue. But, as it irks me when J. K. Rowling says that the "Harry Potter" books aren't fantasy, it strikes me as somehow disingenuous to claim a book that is clearly one thing is actually another. As a different example, I felt awful for J. R. R. Tolkien's grandson (whose first name I miserably can't remember), whose first mystery novel came out and was shelved in general fiction at the bookstore where I worked at the time. It looked like an excellent mystery novel, and garnered quite good reviews, but I never saw any of our regular mystery readers find it. JRRT fans weren't likely to be interested just based on name (though I think more of them picked it up than any other group, anecdotally), and mainstream readers could easily identify it by its cover as a mystery novel.

For what it's worth, I know SFF readers who aren't involved in any online communities and who only find books by browsing or friend suggestions. These folks would miss books my library categorizes as fiction if I didn't send them into the fiction section after them. Even with a Neil Gaiman endorsement, some of the real target audience might miss a book shelved where they weren't looking. Which maybe says more about how modern bookstores and libraries shelve fiction than anything else. :)

Of course, at this point my comment is as long as my original blog post, so I should stop burbling and get back to it! Thanks again for the LeGuin link -- she may be fodder for an original post. :)

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Sad to think of books languishing because they've been poorly "branded." You mentioned fantasy mislabeled (trying to "pass") as mainstream, but I wonder if the reverse ever happens, if something is labeled "fantasy" that doesn't appeal so much to the broad swath of fantasy readers, but would appeal to a "mainstream" readership.

Boy the labels are killing, aren't they? People do, thank goodness, tend to read more broadly than a label implies.