"On SF and the Mainstream ..."

Susannah Mandel weighs in on the SF/mainstream literature discussion:

Again, if you haven't been living under a rock, you probably know all about this, but to me it's terrifically fascinating news. And the more I learn about it, the more interesting it gets. Through hounding friends and strangers for advice ("Have you read anything lately that you'd call 'literary speculative fiction'?"), I've put together a reading list that currently includes, among others, recent work by Haruki Murakami, Kelly Link, Margaret Atwood, P.D. James, Michael Chabon, Cormac McCarthy, Aimee Bender, Kazuo Ishiguro, Jeanette Winterson, Geoff Ryman, David Mitchell, China Miéville, Helen Oyeyemi, Ali Smith, John Updike, and A.M. Homes. Some of these I have read before, some I have not; nearly all of them I'm looking forward to. But what surprises me about this list is the trans-genre heterogeneity of its names. How many of these writers have, historically, worked only as realists? How many have regularly seen their work described as "fantastic"? One of the few things I'm pretty sure I can expect from my summer reading is that much, if not most, of it won't slot cleanly into anyone's definition of "science fiction," nor of "fantasy." If the relationship of SF to the mainstream these days increasingly has to be examined in terms of interstitial, inter-genre work, well, that's a pretty interesting statement about the current landscape all by itself.

And while at least a few of those names clearly aren't working within any type of SF tradition, it's interesting to notice (once again) that many of the most prominent mainstream writers are at least stretching the boundaries of realism to fit their needs within particular stories.  Often, however, I'm left wondering "so what?"  I think it makes for some interesting books, but I don't think it means that SF is changing, just that mainstream literature is changing.  People who like Cormac McCarthy and John Updike are not likely to enjoy Dan Simmons or William Gibson, no matter how much people within the genre community say that the books are just so similar.  Because really they aren't.  We have gotten into this huge discussion about content, saying that just because a book published by a mainstream writer contains some element of the fantastic then it is automatically genre fiction (re: The Road).  That type of argument completely ignores all consideration of form, which I feel is what really distinguishes "mainstream literary fiction" from genre fiction, and is definitely what distinguishes a book like The Road from other post-apocalyptic stories written with a more traditional genre approach.  And I am happy that the distinction exists, even if I am not prepared to delineate exactly the distinction is.  But I would love for someone to be engaging the SF/mainstream literature discussion with the goal of making formal distinctions, of ignoring content completely and trying to figure out how the experience of reading mainstream literature differs from that of reading genre fiction, and what formal factors are contributing to that experience.

Comments

[curt]

I try to articulate my own pet theory about a kind of formal difference between genre and mainstream/literary fiction in this post:

http://groovyageofhorror.blogspot.com/2007/02/horror-high-and-low-pt-2.html

and this one:

http://groovyageofhorror.blogspot.com/2007/02/horror-high-and-low-pt-3.html

(Not perfect, I know, but the best I can do so far! Interested to hear more of your thoughts.

[Richard Larson]

Those posts are VERY interesting, and thanks for pointing them out to me. I think that's definitely a worthwhile avenue to explore. When I have time, I want to do a similar analysis using John Dewey's "Art as Experience," which I think is a text that speaks directly to this question of formal experience...