"Niska" književnost

It has come to my attention that the World Fantasy Convention has decided to replace the bust of H. P. Lovecraft that constitutes the World Fantasy Award with some other figure. Evidently this move was meant to placate the shrill whining of a handful of social justice warriors who believe that a “vicious racist” like Lovecraft has no business being honoured by such an award.

Spoiler:

Literature, Genre Fiction, and Standards of Criticism


By James Harold (Mount Holyoke College)


Many years ago, I adopted a deliberate policy in order to guide my choices in fiction reading. I resolved to alternate a “serious” book with a “fun” book: so Elmore Leonard’s Swag would follow Vladimir Nabokov’s An Invitation to a Beheading; after Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach, I picked up Stephen King’s Under the Dome. I still follow this pattern, at least most of the time. The appeal of the approach is simple. Serious literature and genre fiction offer different kinds of pleasures. Serious literature is rewarding, but it requires some effort and attention, and so it makes sense to take a break and read something lighter in between, rather like running intervals.
The pleasures of genre fiction are thought to be the pleasures of relaxing, of familiarity, of not having to engage oneself fully, of allowing the novel to do the work of entertaining you. By contrast, the pleasures of serious art require effort of thought and feeling on the part of the audience, engaging the mind and the imagination actively as the reader thinks through the literary work. The distinction between these two kinds of pleasure quickly takes on an evaluative aspect, along the lines suggested by John Stuart Mill: “But there is no known Epicurean theory of life which does not assign to the pleasures of the intellect, of the feelings and imagination, and of the moral sentiments a much higher value as pleasures than to those of pure sensation.”1 The fact that the pleasures of literature are greater than the pleasures of genre fiction is supposed to be evidence of their aesthetic and moral superiority.
The distinction is made visible in the physical layout of bookstores: “Mystery,” “Romance,” and “Science Fiction” each have their sections, while “Literature” occupies its own distinct (and more esteemed) space. While some genre fiction is thought of as respectable and serious, it is not seen in this way unless it is seen as transcending its status as mere genre to become something more important. Edmund Wilson makes this explicit when he denies that Raymond Chandler’s works, which he admires, are really detective novels:

But Chandler, though in his recent article he seems to claim Hammett as his master, does not really belong to this school of the old-fashioned detective novel. What he writes is a novel of adventure which has less in common with Hammett than with Alfred Hitchcock and Graham Greene … It is not simply a question here of a puzzle which has been put together but of a malaise conveyed to the reader …2

Likewise, Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian is not just a Western, and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go is much more than a work of science fiction, so these works may be found in the “Literature” section.
The distinction between literature and genre fiction shapes our practices of critical evaluation in several ways. First, it is widely thought that genre fiction supplies its own internal criteria for success: for example, a mystery, qua mystery, must create suspense in the reader.3 Second, it is also thought, though more contentiously, that literature is not appropriately judged in the way that genre fiction is, viz. according to a fixed set of criteria supplied by the genre itself, but rather according to more universal criteria. Third, and most controversially, literature is thought to be, perhaps because it cannot be judged in the rather rule-bound ways that genre fiction can and perhaps because of the “higher” pleasures it is thought to engender, better or more important than genre fiction. In this paper, I critically examine these three claims and some attempts to refute them. I defend the view that there are in fact real differences between the pleasures of genre fiction and literature, and there are also some differences in how we should critically assess them. But I do not try to argue that this difference constitutes a reason for thinking that literature is better than genre fiction, expect in some very highly context-sensitive sense of “better.”