A certain literary publication, in its fiction-writers’ guidelines, advised that they do not want “any hint of genre.”
That’s funny. What they really mean is they will accept only stories in the genre called “literary.” It’s a sure sign of overreach when you consider yourself sui generis. “Literary” is a genre of fiction just as surely as “fantasy” or “Western.”
“But ‘genres’ are all formulaic,” you say, “whereas literary fiction is unexpected, new, creative.” Sure, most sci-fi stories are utterly predictable, written to a formula, and boring. But then, so are most “literary” stories. Raymond Carver was a genre writer, as surely as Philip K. Dick was (although Carver was a far better writer qua writer, while Dick’s sentences march to the beat of the inevitable subject-verb-object. His boring prose style is, indirectly, admitted by those who write studies of his work [see, for example, Christopher Palmer’s Philip K. Dick: Exhilaration and the Terror of the Postmodern. Liverpool University Press, 2003, page 23].) Where was I? Oh, yes. The dreaded epiphany.
“Literary” stories are dominated, and have been for some time, by the “epiphany”; the telling moment when the protagonist recognizes something about himself that the reader has been carefully coached to know all along. How predictable! Whenever I find an epiphany I feel cheated: that’s not the story I was reading; that’s someone’s psychotherapy. I’ll have my own psychotherapy, thank you.
But not all literary work is formulaic; only the followers are formulaic. The true originals are there, and celebrated: Beckett [my favorite]; Kafka; Robbe-Grillet; Blake; Walter Abish; Pynchon; Borges; Aeschylus; Robert Coover; Huysmans; Jeannette Winterson; Jean Baudrillard [not much of a philosopher, but a wonderful writer, especially in his journals]; Erving Goffman [forgettable prose style, but brilliant concepts; and, as in Jean Renoir’s films, a brutal hilarity underlies a calm exterior]; and many others.
Can a true original be someone who writes sci-fi, or horror, or fantasy? Certainly; remember Jonathan Swift? But not these days. Publication venues cherish their formulas. So where does the outsider go now?
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