Every city & town seems to have an out of the way restaurant that has great food & survives by word of mouth. With some 'em, they might look like a rundown shithole from the outside, but once inside the food & atmosphere are amazing. However, there are some people who think only a chic restaurant that serves small portions on huge plates, and charges $150 for a steak can have great food. The inverse is also possible. Some people like to be contrary. To them, if something is popular something must be wrong with it. These sort of biases can be exhibited in a lot of areas, even literature.
An interesting little brouhaha is occurring across the pond. Kim Stanley Robinson, the author of the "Mars Trilogy," published an article in which he criticized literary critics involved with the prestigious Booker Prize for ignoring science-fiction. Some of the judges responded to the criticism, and at least one seemed to confirm Robinson's argument by saying science fiction is for a "special kind of person."
Are there certain genres that are automatically discounted by critics just because of it's subject matter? Or because the author or work might be popular? Are there critics & academics who actually judge a book by its cover?
In his article, Kim Stanley Robinson, who has won Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards, pointed to Adam Roberts' "Yellow Blue Tibia," as a science fiction novel that should have been considered for this year's Booker Prize, while decrying "ignorance" in the literary establishment.
From The Guardian:
"Speaking as an outsider from California and as a science fiction writer I see these very brilliant writers doing excellent work who are never in the running at all, for no reason except their genre and who their publishers are – the so-called club members. It just needs to be said," he said today. "The Booker prize is so big, the way it shapes public consciousness of what is going on in British literature, but the avant garde, the leading edge, is being ignored or shut out of the process entirely."
According to Robinson the ghettoisation of science fiction is a comparatively recent phenomenon. He pointed to a little known letter written by Virginia Woolf to the science fiction writer Olaf Stapledon, after he had sent her a copy of his novel Star Maker. "I don't suppose that I have understood more than a small part – all the same I have understood enough to be greatly interested, and elated too, since sometimes it seems to me that you are grasping ideas that I have tried to express, much more fumblingly, in fiction," wrote Woolf. "But you have gone much further and I can't help envying you – as one does those who reach what one has aimed at."
Robinson believes that Stapledon's "strange novels" made a "real impact on Woolf", changing her writing. "Her final novel, Between the Acts ... ends with Stapledonian imagery, describing our species steeped in the eons. Woolf's last pages were a kind of science fiction," he wrote in his article for the New Scientist. "When it came to literature, she had no prejudices. She read widely and her judgment was superb. And so I am confident that if she were reading today, she would be reading science fiction along with everything else. And she would still be 'greatly interested, and elated too' – because British science fiction is now in a golden age."
Some of the Booker Prize judges responded to Robinson's criticisms, claiming that with the exception of Margaret Atwood's "Year Of The Flood," publishers hadn't submitted any science-fiction books for the prize & his quarrel should be more with them. However, at least one of the judges seemed to dig a deeper hole, by exhibiting some prejudice against science fiction as a genre.
John Mullan, Naughtie's fellow judge for this year's prize and professor of English at University College London, said that he "was not aware of science fiction," arguing that science fiction has become a "self-enclosed world".
"When I was 18 it was a genre as accepted as other genres," he said, but now "it is in a special room in book shops, bought by a special kind of person who has special weird things they go to and meet each other."
A special kind of person? According to the "Geek Hierarchy" chart, science fiction literature fans are at the upper echelons of geekdom. I don't know what that wins you, but I'm sure it must come in handy at the "special weird things they go to."
Adam Roberts, the author of "Yellow Blue Tibia," decided to write his own column giving his perspective on the issue, while also responding to Mullan's comment.
When I heard that Kim Stanley Robinson thought my science fiction novel, Yellow Blue Tibia, should "probably" win this year's Man Booker prize, I nearly fell off my chair. It's a pretty rickety chair, but still. The fact that Robinson is one of the five greatest science fiction writers alive today (together with – probably – Brian Aldiss, Samuel Delany, Ursula Le Guin and Gene Wolfe) meant that my reaction was compounded of one part vainglorious ego-puff, one part genuine pride and three parts fanboy enthusiasm.
Actually, Robinson's argument is not about my novel: it is, rather, an eloquent jab at the literary apartheid keeping genre science fiction away from the respectable literary establishment... Not that many outside the genre seem aware of it. Like many SF writers I've plenty of experience of the kneejerk hostility evidenced by, for instance, my professorial University of London colleague and Booker judge John Mullan in reaction to Robinson's article. Without actually reading any contemporary SF, he dismisses the genre as "bought by a special kind of person who has special weird things they go to and meet each other". Ouch, John. (Also: using "special" in that awkwardly euphemistic way? Not cool.)
It seems strange that this sort of prejudice would exist against science fiction. Look at the authors attached to it over the years. Science fiction is a genre that includes the likes of Daniel Keyes with "Flowers for Algernon," Ray Bradbury with "Fahrenheit 451" and "The Martian Chronicles," H.G. Wells with "War of the Worlds," Kurt Vonnegut with "Slaughterhouse-Five" & "Cat's Cradle," Robert A. Heinlein with "Starship Troopers" & "Stranger in a Strange Land," Philip K. Dick with "The Man in the High Castle" & "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep," Arthur C. Clark with "Rendezvous with Rama," and Isaac Asimov with the "Foundation" & "I Robot" series.
However, this sort of thing happens across different mediums. To bring things back more to my wheelhouse of film & television, it used to be the network a show appeared on could determine how "acclaimed" it might be. Before HBO broke through with "The Sopranos," it was unusual for cable programs to win top tier Emmy awards.
Take a show like "Buffy the Vampire Slayer." Towards the middle/end of it's run on television, a good number of critics started writing columns wondering why the show was never acknowledged by Emmy voters with at least a nomination. The general consensus was that it came from two factors. One, it was on the WB/UPN (which is now called "The CW"), and the other reason was its fantasy genre of vampires & demons. The big problem with the latter is that it sorta misses the point of Joss Whedon's stories. "Buffy" & "Angel" are not really about vampires, or the occult. "Buffy" is really the story of a young girl growing into a woman, and learning to deal with the world, with the demons being allegories for modern problems. "Angel" is not really about the struggle against an inter-dimensional law firm bent on destroying the world. Angel's story is about struggling to find redemption. The best episodes of "The Twilight Zone" are not really about aliens wanting "to serve man," upside down places where beauty is ugly, or doomed worlds where if there's "time enough at last" you might want to have a spare pair of reading glasses. The best episodes of "The Twilight Zone" are the ones where the stories exhibit fundamental truths about the human condition. The science fiction elements allow Rod Serling's parables to come across, where in a realistic" drama it would seem preachy.
With films & awards, being a big-budget pop-corn movie or part of genres that are not seen as "artistic" might not help. For example, 1988's 'Die Hard.' Generally, an "action" film doesn't get very far at awards time. I don't think I would go as far as to say that it should have won Best Picture that year, but considered for a nomination? Sure.
All of this is subjective, but for one thing, I think most people will agree it's a good film & a "classic" of its genre, and secondly, look at its significance. Compared to the films nominated that year, which has had a longer, lasting impact on film? It's one of the progenitor's of the "summer blockbuster."
This gets into whether a work's popularity can sometimes be a hindrance in it being taken seriously by critics & academia. A few years back pico had a a great diary which detailed some of the arguments over the western canon (a canon of books, and, more widely, music and art, that has been the most influential in shaping Western culture. It asserts a compendium of the "greatest works of artistic merit." Such a canon is important to the theory of educational perennialism and the development of "high culture.").
Some of the defenders of the canon have been criticized for being a tad elitist. Harold Bloom, Yale's Sterling Professor of Humanities, is one of the big defenders of the idea of a canon of Western Civilization. He also likes to take pot shots at popular writers. In a piece in the Wall Street Journal entitled "Can 35 Million Book Buyers Be Wrong? Yes.," Bloom went after J.K. Rowling & "Harry Potter."
A vast concourse of inadequate works, for adults and for children, crams the dustbins of the ages. At a time when public judgment is no better and no worse than what is proclaimed by the ideological cheerleaders who have so destroyed humanistic study, anything goes. The cultural critics will, soon enough, introduce Harry Potter into their college curriculum, and The New York Times will go on celebrating another confirmation of the dumbing-down it leads and exemplifies.
Back in 2003, Stephen King was honored by the National Book Foundation with a lifetime achievement award (Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters). Bloom wrote a column denouncing the decision.
The Decision to give the National Book Foundation's annual award for "distinguished contribution" to Stephen King is extraordinary, another low in the shocking process of dumbing down our cultural life. I've described King in the past as a writer of penny dreadfuls, but perhaps even that is too kind. He shares nothing with Edgar Allan Poe. What he is is an immensely inadequate writer on a sentence-by-sentence, paragraph-by-paragraph, book-by-book basis. The publishing industry has stooped terribly low to bestow on King a lifetime award that has previously gone to the novelists Saul Bellow and Philip Roth and to playwright Arthur Miller. By awarding it to King they recognize nothing but the commercial value of his books, which sell in the millions but do little more for humanity than keep the publishing world afloat. If this is going to be the criterion in the future, then perhaps next year the committee should give its award for distinguished contribution to Danielle Steel, and surely the Nobel Prize for literature should go to J.K. Rowling.
Now, just to remind everyone of some of the things Stephen King has written during his time on this Earth.....
- "Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption"
- "Salem's Lot"
- "Carrie"
- "Misery"
- "The Shining"
- "The Body" (AKA 'Stand By Me')
- "The Green Mile"
- "The Stand"
- "The Dark Tower"
In his
speech accepting the award, King addressed literary critics who discount certain genres & authors, and those who would discount someone's work just because it's popular.
"For far too long the so-called popular writers of this country and the so-called literary writers have stared at each other with animosity and a willful lack of understanding. This is the way it has always been," King said. "But giving an award like this to a guy like me suggests that in the future, things don't have to be the way they've always been. Bridges can be built between the so-called popular fiction and the so-called literary fiction."
King said: "Tokenism is not allowed. You can't sit back, give a self-satisfied sigh and say, 'Ah, that takes care of the troublesome pop lit question. In another 20 years or perhaps 30, we'll give this award to another writer who sells enough books to make the bestseller lists.' It's not good enough. Nor do I have any patience with or use for those who make a point of pride in saying they've never read anything by John Grisham, Tom Clancy, Mary Higgins Clark or any other popular writer. What do you think? You get social or academic Brownie points for deliberately staying out of touch with your own culture?"