Jennifer Pelland, talented short story writer, tireless chauffeur for various snot-nosed VPXers, and all around Good Egg, finds herself freshly irritated by the literary vs. genre divide:
I emailed a literary review journal based at my alma mater to see if they’d make an exception to the “we don’t review genre fiction” rule for an alum, and was told that no, they only reviewed “literary” fiction.
I meant to chime in with some hopefully soothing words, “Don’t worry, ‘literary’ as that journal defines it is really a genre,” aka the Key Lime Pie Theory of Literary Fiction. But one of Jen’s commenters, apintrix, already had an interesting take on that:
[Pierre] Bourdieu’s theory, in a nutshell, is that part of what has defined the discourse of “literature” or the literary since C19, as well as “high art” more generally, is a resistance to commercial or market pressures– the genius aesthetic, basically. The more your art is separated from the market, the more “pure” and “literary” it is. There’s something to that idea, I think, beyond it being “just another genre”; particularly because one of the central oppositions in the “literary field” is precisely between literary and genre fictions, which Bourdieu might say are “genre” because they cater to particular markets, and are explicitly heteronomous between the field of actual capital and cultural capital.
(The name “Pierre Bourdieu” rang a bell. As it turns out, David Brooks mentions him in Bobos in Paradise, which I’m embarrassed to admit I even read, let alone found amusing in parts, so let’s please just pretend I didn’t say any of that. Good? Good.)
Anyway, as apintrix observes, it’s interesting that “… ‘genre’ fiction appropriates the language of the market and of industry — authors ‘working hard’, being ‘productive’, all this stuff — while in literary fiction you’re more liable to see language like ‘inspiration’ or ‘transcendence’.” That does seem like a fundamental difference, not to mention a fairly new idea. Our ancient literary predecessors were certainly concerned with winning popular acclaim and economic success. If this has changed, I suppose the only fair thing to do is to blame Rousseau.
Ultimately, I think this is related to the argument sketched out in James Miller’s Is Bad Writing Necessary?, which discusses the tension between deliberately opaque writers like Theodor Adorno and deliberately transparent writers like George Orwell. To the Opaques, the fact that the Transparents have more popular acclaim and influence outside the academy “fuels their suspicion that plain talk is politically perfidious — reinforcing, rather than radically challenging, the cultural status quo.”
As quoted in Miller’s original article, Katha Pollitt has a scathing response:
When intellectuals on the left write in a way that excludes “all but the initiated few,” [Pollitt] remarked, what almost inevitably results is “a pseudo-politics, in which everything is claimed in the name of revolution and democracy and equality and anti-authoritarianism, and nothing is risked, nothing, except maybe a bit of harmless cross-dressing, is even expected to happen outside the classroom.”
The parallels between Literary Fiction and Opaque Non-fiction are striking. To what Pollitt said, I can only add that if I were The Man, Evil Overlord and Oppressor of all that is Radical and True, I could think of no better allies than those who exhort their colleagues to remain safe in a self-constructed academic ghetto. After all, shooting radical writers is messy and counterproductive. The optimal strategy is to convince them to endlessly chase their own tails.