What is 'literature' and what SF qualifies?

[Extollager]

"Extract the work from its context"...? No, I don't oppose that if "context" means information that helps us to get our ignorance and the assumptions of our time out of the way so that we can read the work. So a footnote to explain the contemporary meaning of a word whose meaning has changed is helpful, for example. An introductory paragraph or two, in an edition of an Icelandic, to explain the aristocratic honor code, might be good.

But it is possible, indeed seems to be common, for academic folk to rattle on like the spectacled socialist speaker at the end of Orwell's Coming Up for Air till you almost wonder if literature has ever happened for them*-- or, at least, I wonder if a long-ago youthful love of books and reading has disappeared and now it's theory + careerism + promoting favored ideologies with the "text"** as a pretext. I would not recommend anyone who loves books and reading to major in English at a typical university.

And here at Chrons I've often seen people attempt to make claims for favored books because the authors were "influential" or because the people liked the books as kids or because the book deals with current-buzz social themes or because of some other factor that really is not very closely related to the enjoyment of reading the work itself. Hence my remark about people circling around a book without coming to grips with it, etc.



*I'm especially thinking of a feminist professor I knew years ago.

**As a rule of thumb, I would avoid the writings of people who talk about "texts" rather than "books." Perhaps their day will pass.

 

[Bick]

"Extract the work from its context"...? No, I don't oppose that if "context" means information that helps us to get our ignorance and the assumptions of our time out of the way so that we can read the work. So a footnote to explain the contemporary meaning of a word whose meaning has changed is helpful, for example. An introductory paragraph or two, in an edition of an Icelandic, to explain the aristocratic honor code, might be good.

But it is possible, indeed seems to be common, for academic folk to rattle on like the spectacled socialist speaker at the end of Orwell's Coming Up for Air till you almost wonder if literature has ever happened for them*-- or, at least, I wonder if a long-ago youthful love of books and reading has disappeared and now it's theory + careerism + promoting favored ideologies with the "text"** as a pretext. I would not recommend anyone who loves books and reading to major in English at a typical university.

And here at Chrons I've often seen people attempt to make claims for favored books because the authors were "influential" or because the people liked the books as kids or because the book deals with current-buzz social themes or because of some other factor that really is not very closely related to the enjoyment of reading the work itself. Hence my remark about people circling around a book without coming to grips with it, etc.

I think context-free reading is valuable, and actually can increase one's enjoyment of a book, and also enable one to judge whether it is truly great, or simply considered great by reputation and long-standing acceptance.

By way of a non-SFF example of the value of context-free reading, I might cite the works of Balzac that I read a lot of a few years ago. I cannot recall now why I started to read Balzac, as no-one I think recommended them to me, no-one on Chrons had mentioned him that I recall, I knew next to nothing about the books, and the only word of mouth comment I had heard was my mother (an English teacher) saying she had 'never got on with him'. i.e. no context whatsoever. And yet, I was delighted to discover Old Man Goriot, Cousin Bette, The Black Sheep and Cousin Pons. I feel sure that being lectured to about the books by a literature professor would have increased my understanding of the texts and provided context, but probably it would also have reduced my enjoyment of reading them, critically and carefully, on my own terms. I now read literature widely without formal literary education and feel able to distinguish the good from the bad, the literature from the sub-literature, and to decide which books have added merit and depth and those which do not. I suspect that my delineation between literature and sub-literature (to borrow Extollager's term) may vary from other's. We all have our own scales and spectra upon which we place books, and terms mean different things to different readers. That said, I think that there probably exists a consensus (among those who are well read), that certain books belong to a 'higher' form than others. The discussion is in the messy middle-ground, I guess. Personally, I'm happy to place the finest work that I read (be it SF or a Victorian classic) into the 'Literature' basket.

 

[KGeo777]

Also, ask yourself if your feeling about a work really has a lot to do with its packaging. I wish fans of Robert E. Howard would do a thought experiment: Suppose that Lancer Books had folded up in the early 1960s rather than ten years or so later, and that the Conan stories had been reprinted by Ace Books instead, with Jack Gaughan being assigned to do the cover art -- not Frazetta. Suppose Frazetta never did a Conan picture. Now ask yourself, would that have changed your feelings about the Conan stories? If so, that suggests that some or even a lot of what you feel about the Conan stories is (without your having realized it) attributable to something extraneous to them.

That's a great question because the original pulp covers for Conan stories are nothing like what Frazetta did. The Frazetta covers give it an exotic quality. Conan is shown as resembling Cary Grant in the cover I saw that Howard had praised. And Frazetta was likely influenced by Zdeněk Burian--his Conan is similar to a Burian prehistoric man crossed with a Comanche or Apache.
John Buscema, I suspect, based his design on Gordon Mitchell.
When I read a Howard story--I don't envision Frazetta or Buscema--I see someone more like Mike Henry. The scarred acromegaly qualities are absent.
Using the subliterature term, I think most of Howard's Conan is subliterature. Tower of the Elephant might the be the closet to achieving a work that reaches a more ambitious thematic level. At least it left the most impression on me.
There is something fundamental and profound in the juxtaposition of the liberated savage youth with the captive ancient alien--it's unusual because it is not a man vs monster story, there's a temporary partnership and a pathos in the creature's predicament.
It is taking what I assume was a Lovecraftian-inspired concept (unless Ganesha was the inspiration) but subverting it to something less sinister, a Homeric "we all live within the walls of Troy" symbolism actually--the idea that demons/gods and mortals are ultimately on the same plane in the cosmos. They both have their trials and tribulations.

 

[Randy M.]

I feel sure that being lectured to about the books by a literature professor would have increased my understanding of the texts and provided context, but probably it would also have reduced my enjoyment of reading them, critically and carefully, on my own terms.

Okay, I understand the annoyance at being lectured, but I believe Extollager is talking about our own readings using our own knowledge. I may be misunderstanding but I think what Extollager is pointing toward is "close reading," which is a valid and useful tool heavily used in criticism of the early 20th century and beyond. Read the work, absorb the work, pay attention to how the work -- er -- works and report on it.

And I'm okay with that but there are limits, and the most obvious example I can come up with is Beloved by Toni Morrison. How would you read that? Would you ignore the real life incident that inspired the story? Would you turn off the social issues that it raises? And how do you extract the writer from the written when the experiences of the writer (that is, what they've lived through, what they've read, what the culture around them was like, their reaction to the society they lived in) led to the work in question? Much the same could probably be said about The Color Purple by Alice Walker and, in genre, The Good House by Tananarive Due. I expect it also applies to much of the recent influx of Black voices into sf/f/h.

Beyond that, if you've read anything about Tolkein, can your reading extract WWI from LOTR? Can you extract his experience with the Dresden bombing to come to terms with Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five?

Your example of Balzac is great in that there are texts ( ) we go into blind and that experience is ripe for close reading without pulling in outside knowledge. But there's a lot we go into with some knowledge (or think we do) and that colors the reading as well as the writing, and so influences where you put a given work on the lit/non-lit scale. That seems fair game for mention, in some cases to deepen the appreciation, in other cases for correction of assumptions.

Again, I'd kind of like an example of what Extollager is proposing, something to act as a template.

 

[Extollager]

Randy, here are some tentative thoughts -- not necessarily my considered opinion. For what they are worth.

With your examples of the books by Morrison et al., which I haven't read, you are asking for something analogous to what's needed when reading some works of science fiction. With some works of science fiction -- I'm just guessing, but I suppose Robinson's books about terraforming Mars would be examples -- the reader will require some specialized knowledge in order to get the full value of the book. Someone with knowledge that I don't possess relating to engineering, ecology, hydrology, etc. will be better prepared to evaluate a novel about terraforming than someone like me. It seems to me that you are saying something like this about the books by Morrison and the others, that the reader who brings to their reading a knowledge of each author's biography, "the culture" around the author, and so on will be better prepared to evaluate those novels.

Many readers in each case (each type of novel) will have to take some elements on trust. I have no competence to evaluate whether or not Robinson's science is excellent, but I may give him the benefit of the doubt if the story otherwise engages my interest. Likewise, I don't know about the life-experiences of Morrison and the others. I might find out what they have said in essays or interviews about their lives, and again I will have to take what they say there on trust. That trust might be completely warranted in the case of Walker. It was not warranted in the case of Rigoberta Menchú, whose autobiography came in for question in the New York Times:

---A younger brother whom Ms. Menchu says she saw die of starvation never existed, while a second, whose suffering she says she and her parents were forced to watch as he was being burned alive by army troops, was killed in entirely different circumstances when the family was not present. Contrary to Ms. Menchu's assertion in the first page of her book that I never went to school and could not speak Spanish or read or write until shortly before she dictated the text of I, Rigoberta Menchu, she in fact received the equivalent of a middle-school education as a scholarship student at two prestigious private boarding schools operated by Roman Catholic nuns.----

In short, you ask readers to take into account factual (possibly "factual") information from outside the novels in question if they are to be read rightly, and this seems to mean that the reader should be biased in favor of the author personally -- which is not the same thing as taking up a work of fiction in a fair-minded manner. (No literary work is likely to be read well when the reader approaches it in a hostile frame of mind. That's why some readers probably shouldn't read certain books or even certain types of books. If, up front, one approaches, say, mystery novels as "whodunnits" -- "twaddle" -- one isn't likely to read the book well. In my case, I probably would not be well-advised to read novels by, say, apologists for Stalinism. I don't know if Lillian Hellman wrote novels, but I don't know if I would be prepared to read them well if she did.)

So may a novel be a hybrid of imagination, autobiography, sociology, journalism, and even propaganda, and be worth reading? I imagine it could be. I wonder if some of the writing of one of my favorite authors (Dostoevsky) couldn't be described thus. But then I would say that the testimony of good readers is that even if so, some of Dostoevsky's books are great novels. Do I need to know about Dostoevsky's life in order to read his novels well? I don't think so. I don't need to know that he suffered from epilepsy, in order to read The Idiot, his novel about an epileptic; I don't need to know that he was involved in a radical group, as a young man, in order to read (for the sixth time or so!) Demons (aka The Possessed), his novel about revolutionists... and so on. It's maybe more the case that the books are so compelling that, having read them, I want to know more about the man who wrote them (and he sure is an interesting man). If I had to know about Dostoevsky's life up front, before reading his novels, I would be likely to think that that depreciated their achievement.

Take Shakespeare. What do we know about Shakespeare? It comes to precious little. I love Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, but I suppose nobody knows anything about the author other than that he wrote in a Northern English version of Middle English and, we may infer from his poem, knew something about conventions of the hunt and so on.

So a novel may be a hybrid as described, and may require a lot of "outside" knowledge if it is to be well thought of. It might be worth reading, but I'm doubtful it can be a really firstrate literary work. Conversely, it may be praised unduly because it checks certain boxes. In the case of the Robinson novels, the science fiction reader can check boxes (I suppose) for really impressive knowledge of engineering, etc. In the case of Morrison -- you tell me. Has her work been praised for "authenticity" or political right-mindedness or whatever, aside from specifically literary merits? Is she boosted as being a "representative of her people," an ambassador from "the" (!) Black experience to white readers with an implied call to them to repent? That might place her books in the company of John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, which are praised for specifically literary qualities but also exhibit an agenda, to confront people with (what John Wesley called) "the old coarse Gospel." In a society in which the old coarse Gospel is highly valued as being good for people as individuals and as good for society, the book might have an unduly high degree of esteem. That is certainly not the case now, and yet (if I can go by my experience of teaching it in a British literature survey for college sophomores and junior) it can still engage readers' interest.

Your thoughts?

 

[Extollager]

---Beyond that, if you've read anything about Tolkein, can your reading extract WWI from LOTR?---

It was years after my first readings of The Lord of the Rings that I learned about his service -- I don't know when I first learned about the trenches. I became interested in Tolkien the man because I loved his books so much. If I knew nothing about Tolkien, I don't know that my experience of LotR would be much affected. Haven't read the Vonnegut.

As might be suggested by my previous posting, although I live in the United States, I have focused on British, not American, writing, and if you subtract American writers of sf (especially) and fantasy, there isn't very much American fiction left, and especially if you subtract the authors I read in good old-fashioned American lit surveys (like Hawthorne, Poe, Melville, &c.). I'm not sure I have read a "mainstream" novel by an American author more recent than Winter in the Blood (1974) -- no, I've read novels by Isaac Bashevis Singer more recent than that, such as Enemies. Come to think of it, I first began to read Singer thanks to an American lit survey course, likewise Winter in the Blood....

 

[Swank]

And I'm okay with that but there are limits, and the most obvious example I can come up with is Beloved by Toni Morrison. How would you read that? Would you ignore the real life incident that inspired the story? Would you turn off the social issues that it raises? And how do you extract the writer from the written when the experiences of the writer (that is, what they've lived through, what they've read, what the culture around them was like, their reaction to the society they lived in) led to the work in question?

There is a middle ground in this. One could certainly read Beloved without knowledge of the inspiring real incident and still find the fictionalized version of that incident just as compelling. And that is because you really don't have to know much to know about American slavery and its legacy on African Americans. You could even be unaware that Morrison is an African American and feel similarly about the work, just as people feel strongly about the film despite Demme not being a black director.

How much detailed knowledge is required to have context?

 

[Randy M.]

Extollager, incidental to all this, I've been rereading Ernest Hemingway on Writing, a collection of excerpts from his works and his letters. From the book's last excerpt (from By-Line: Ernest Hemingway) about critical responses: "All the critics who could not make their reputations by discovering you are hoping to make them by predicting hopefully your approaching impotence, failure and general drying up of natural juices. Not a one will wish you luck or hope that you will keep on writing unless you have political affiliations in which case these will rally around and speak of you and Homer, Balzac, Zola and Link Steffens. You are just as well off without these reviews."

Thought you'd find that a little of interest, given your equally high regard for current academics.

I'm still chewing on your last posting and hope to get back to you sometime this weekend, but I think your equating knowledge of terraforming to knowledge of a culture and society we all live in daily doesn't quite hold up.

 

[Extollager]

Randy, do you live in North Dakota? That’s where I experience culture and society.

When I lived in southern Oregon, the culture was different. I like it here better — less litigious, less affluent, less pretentious, it seems.

But I’m not going to get into a discussion focused on social justice etc., if that’s what’s imminent. I’ll likely read what you post but not comment further. We might be talking at cross purposes, anyway.

 

[Randy M.]

We might be talking at cross purposes, anyway.

Very possibly. But I think it's hard to be unaware of how life works in the U.S. in general, though specifics in areas are less obvious if you're not in that area. I live in a small to mid-sized city in central New York state, by the way.

 

[Extollager]

The discussion that developed between us came out of the posting in which I tried to show that there is a difference between literature and subliterature, and that was a response to postings saying things such as that literature is any writing (perhaps any “text”) and so on. At the risk of being criticized for lecturing, I’ve offered some considerations that could help the original topic of the thread move forward (or not). Whether or not I was persuasive in that and the subsequent ones about the spectrum, I hope I was understandable.

 

[Randy M.]

You were understandable, and I agree there are purely literary qualities in a work that can be assessed -- quality of prose, arrangement of events and handling of characters, among other criteria -- somewhat objectively. But only somewhat because the reader brings information -- and misinformation -- to reading. When evaluating a written work, that (mis-)information, an accumulation of experience, education and the broader influences on one's life from religious views to social identity to cultural understanding to economic standing, all have an impact on one's conclusions. What I've been trying to say is, it may be nearly impossible for a reader to sift those out from purely literary considerations because they affect one's reaction to a given work. If some self-awareness allows including them in what one says about a work, it may help others sort out whether or not the given work is worth their time and attention, regardless of high or low literary quality. And yet I get the impression that this is what you are trying to suppress while looking for a more objective standard of literary versus sub-literary.

For instance, knowing you enjoy the occasional mystery, English fiction and have a religious background, on reading Margery Allingham's The Tiger in the Smoke, I felt you (and Parson, for that matter) would find the book of interest. The reasons for my assumption were extra-literary (subject matter) as well as literary (good, if not great, prose). Meanwhile, I think I could make a strong literary argument for reading Beloved, but I'm far from certain the subject matter, however rigorous her grappling with her themes are, would appeal to you.

Beyond that, the discussion could turn political so, like you, I'll subside.

 

[Extollager]

We agree that one's thoughts about a book are liable to be influenced by factors that, in discussing it, we might want to distinguish from the book itself. I mentioned the packaging (the Conan books with Frazetta covers, etc.). On the other hand, we might want to talk about the experience of reading that particular edition since, in fact, the packaging as well as the words engaged our imaginations.

Arthur Machen is one of my favorite authors. Nearly all of the Machen I have, though, is in the form of printouts of online texts, not books, with the sheets stapled together with big staples to make crude booklets. Machen's writing holds up well, and I positively like not being distracted by lavish packaging or the cachet of first editions and limited edition reprints.

In contrast to me, a video series that begins here:

(I had that Necronomicon Press edition of Eleusinia but donated it to the college library.)

 

[paeng]

Check out John Carey's essay "What is a Work of Art?" from a book reviewed here:

Review: What Good Are the Arts? by John Carey

Blake Morrison enjoys John Carey's inspiring look at our attitudes to culture, What Good Are the Arts?

www.theguardian.com

The conclusion that can only cover all possibilities is that art is what you think is art. Possibilities include art critics arguing that a necktie painted blue by a modern artist is a work of art and the same painted by a little child as a present is considered the same by her daddy. It's not a satisfactory answer but is logical.

And yet in the same essay there are examples of the mainstream press and their readers laughing at tragedies involving such art works. For example, art collectors purchase an unmade bed from an artist as a work of art, and it is accidentally made up by cleaners hired to clean the collectors' apartment. An art installation consisting of wrecked cars left outside a gallery that was being cleaned was hauled off by garbage collectors who thought that it was trash. Porters mistakenly remove brown paper wrapping from a chair to be delivered to a gallery because it turns out the paper wrapping is part of the art work.

Thus, we have art critics who look down at the public because they believe that the latter can't tell what is art and what isn't, others arguing that art should be considered anything that one thinks is art, and members of the public discarding works of art because they thought the works were paper wrapping, beds that had to be made, and scrap metal.

Reminds me of that story about someone throwing trash into a trash bin in an art gallery, only to be told by the staff that the bin is actually one of the art works in the gallery.

So, how does one see this in light of definining "literature"? Logically, it can be anything written down, including medical literature, or pamphlets included with medicine. It can also mean what's popular, and that might not last (what was popular decades ago, and are they still popular today?). It can mean what those who have read a lot recommend, but which most won't follow.

Finally, the last point can be seen in light of not only books but various media. For example, according to IMDB there are millions of movies and TV shows, and thousands more are added to that list every year. I read that some film critics work full-time, watching (and rewatching parts of) two movies every weekday for around ten months a year, for a total of around 600 movies a year (a fraction of what's made every year). That's besides writing notes and essays about what's seen, attending exhibitions in different countries to watch films that are on limited release, and so on. The result is that they have top movies lists that are radically different from what most make by the end of the year. Here's an example (jump to the lists at the bottom):

Best films and television of the year and the devastation of cultural life

It is not possible to discuss any aspect of artistic life, or life in general, in 2020 without central reference to the COVID-19 pandemic, which the various ruling elites have permitted to ravage the world’s population.

www.wsws.org

I don't recognize most of the titles. I don't think they came up with such lists because they're elitist or think of themselves highly but simply because they are able to do what I can't: watch lots of movies from around the world. I think it's very likely that the average person will only be able to watch (and think about) one movie a week x 50 weeks x 50 years = 2,500 movies, or a very small fraction of over 2 million movies.

In light of that, how many SF works are there worldwide, and of that how many have we read? More important, can we compare SF with non-SF and for the former thus argue the importance and lack of such? Given answers to both, can we then argue what's "literature" and what isn't?

I can't, so I may have to rely on critics who have at least a lot. One of them is Harold Bloom, who is said to have read over 10,000 books during his lifetime. Here's one of his lists of recommended readings:

Harold Bloom Creates a Massive List of Works in The “Western Canon”: Read Many of the Books Free Online

I have little desire to rehash the politics, but the facts are plain: by the time I arrived in college as an undergraduate English major in the mid-90s, the idea of the “Western Canon” as a container of—in the words of a famous hymn—“all that’s good, and great, and true” was seriously on the...

www.openculture.com

In light of that, might anthologies like The Science Fiction Hall of Fame series help? SF Masterworks? And for literature in general, anthologies like Great Books of the Western World and Norton anthologies? At least that saves us a lot of time and money having to figure out what to read and where to get it.

 

[Danny McG]

So, for example, when I read the great Russians, whether the physician Chekhov or Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, I find an evocation of the human that is worthwhile and that (so far as I know) could be made no other way than by literature

 

[Elentarri]

View attachment 90158

In Russian Fairytales, all the Princes are named Ivan. Unless, it's the same Ivan. Then he is definitely living in interesting times...

 

[Danny McG]

In Russian Fairytales, all the Princes are named Ivan. Unless, it's the same Ivan. Then he is definitely living in interesting times...

And in English ones he's named Charming

 

[Elentarri]

And in English ones he's named Charming

Hmm... I can't remember what he is called in German fairytales. I think he just goes by the title?

 

[Extollager]

He's not called Charming in genuine English fairy tales, of course. Take it from someone who started the thread on folk tales here. But I don't think Danny was being entirely serious!

 

[Elentarri]

He's not called Charming in genuine English fairy tales, of course. Take it from someone who started the thread on folk tales here. But I don't think Danny was being entirely serious!

Didn't think Danny was being serious. I assumed he was referring to the Disney Prince Charming.
* tootles off to look at folk tales thread *