On "Literature"
What is and what isn't.
Someone made the mistake once of asking me about “literature.” I wrote this out. Since it’s a whole freaking essay, I figure I might as well post it.
Growing up, I had always understood / defined a book of literature as anything that survives the generation that published it.
You will note that this immediately scraps such works of “literature” as Margaret Atwood, Stephen King, or even William Golding.
That one can find any of them being taught in education speaks more to the low quality of education than to the quality of the works.
The reason that Literature must survive the generation that spawned it is simple: if it survives that long, that means it has something that speaks to the next generation. Indeed, it is something that speaks to all generations. To declare what that may or may not be before the due date is tantamount to precognition. Why? Because many works of literature were never considered “art” in their own day and age. For us to do so would be the highest presumption on our part.
Take Dumas or Edgar Rice Burroughs — who were both highly commercial authors at the time of publication. The Three Musketeers were published as serials in newspapers. Imagine your daily comic strips becoming “classic.” Burroughs wrote as one of the many pulp authors of the time, cranking out books as part of his industry. And yet both of those are still read and enjoyed by a great many people — I literally cannot escape social media circles in which Burroughs is praised.
That is why we have to wait. To look into the mists of time and declare this or that work is “literature” that will survive the wreckage of time is on par with me precisely forecasting what every roll of the dice would be for the next hundred rolls.
And if you did wish to glance into the crystal ball, I am more certain that William Goldman’s The Princess Bride will be remembered in another generation or two, while William Golding’s Lord of the Flies will not be. Why? Goldman says many things while telling a classic adventure story. While on the other hand, Golding takes so much time to say so very little (“Man is a wolf to other men,” a message he stole from Thomas Hobbes). The same can be said for Margaret Atwood (”Christianity bad,” even though she stole every element from post-Shah Iran).
Golding’s piece of garbage was published in response to The Coral Island by RM Ballantyne. Coral Island was about three British boys who stranded on an island but maintain their civility and morality. It was apparently too Christian and too civilized. Golding wanted to write about “children who behave in the way children would really behave.
Except, Lord of the Flies is a lie. In 1965, schoolboys were shipwrecked, left on an island for 15 months. They got along fine. Nothing untoward happened.
Lord of the Flies is garbage on every level.
Anyway… when I can sum up the full theme of the work in a sentence, then the novel can’t be very good. There is a reason why Watchman is a crap comic book — because its point is summed up as a single line by Aristotle, written before Christ was born (”Who watches the Watchers?”).
Anyone who has deemed Stephen King literature should be examined closely. Not only is he far too contemporary for that judgement, I find it suspect when one of his most famous works features a pre-pubescent sewer orgy of one girl and five boys.
Do not speak to me of literary awards, lest I unleash a hellfire and brimstone sermon that starts with the Hugo awards.
There are some special cases. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World is of the genre fiction that started with Plato’s Republic, and continued in Thomas More’s Utopia. To most it is a dystopian horror where “all the right people” have genetically modified a “perfect society” of philosopher kings and worker drones. It warns of trying to make a perfectible society through science and technology. It should act as a warning to anyone who tries to construct a Heaven on Earth through what amounts to mad science and “the right policies.” Unfortunately, as with 1984 and Frankenstein, it seems most people have considered it an instruction manual.
Right now, we already know that CS Lewis, Tolkien, Burroughs and Robert Howard will all outlive any of the current Hugo Awards winners. They are already works of literature, while Stephen King’s works languish in the remaindered stacks of Barnes and Nobles and Edward R. Hamilton catalogs.
So anyone who insists that “science fiction and fantasy cannot be literature” is already wrong, because we already have stacks of books that have earned the title, if only because they have lasted the test of time.
How do proponents of SF being non-literary explain Nobel prize winners in literature who have written SF, or have SF elements in them (e. g., William Golding, Rudyard Kipling, Sinclair Lewis, John Steinbeck)? They don’t explain them, anymore than they explain a conversation with the Devil in The Brothers Karamazov— if they explain it, it is a fantasy. A delusion. A conjuration of Freudian nightmares and Jungian archetypes. The same with other novelists and authors that the literati have already deemed to be “literature,” and thus too good for SFF. Anything resembling the lower genres can be explained away! Deconstructed! Vivisected! A monstrous manta ray after a black pearl? It is not science fiction! It is metaphor! It is allegory! It is whatever ephemeral hook they can hang their hat on to escape the content and focus on the “literature.” It is something to be deconstructed, and therefore destroyed. The literati don’t need to explain themselves, they just need to do what their type has always done — spin. It is the entire point of postmodernism and deconstructionism — make things up about the meaning of words until they say whatever they want them to say.
Ahem.
Not that I have sufficiently strong opinions on this or anything.
But yes, literature is what naturally survives the era it lives in. Real literature has caught something eternal and carries it along for the ride. Something that can’t be dated by time. John Carter will live forever. Hammond. Chandler.
What will survive today? Who knows. Hopefully, not James Patterson. Ugh. That would be horrific.
I think I’ve beaten this topic to death.
Again, feel free to ask me anything in the comments. If you get an email, you can ping me through the comment button at the top.
And please, feel free to buy a book, or leave a book review. Either would be greatly appreciated.