October 21, 2004
12:36 PM, Thursday, October 21, 2004
This Neal Stephenson interview, brought to my attention by Brandon for other reasons, has an interesting and, I think, somewhat new take on the “genre ghetto” issue.
Accountability in the writing profession has been bifurcated for many centuries. I already mentioned that Dante and other writers were supported by patrons at least as far back as the Renaissance. But I doubt that Beowulf was written on commission. Probably there was a collection of legends and tales that had been passed along in an oral tradition — which is just a fancy way of saying that lots of people liked those stories and wanted to hear them told. And at some point perhaps there was an especially well-liked storyteller who pulled a few such tales together and fashioned them into the what we now know as Beowulf. Maybe there was a king or other wealthy patron who then caused the tale to be written down by a scribe. But I doubt it was created at the behest of a king. It was created at the behest of lots and lots of intoxicated Frisians sitting around the fire wanting to hear a yarn. And there was no grand purpose behind its creation, as there was with the painting of the Sistine Chapel.
The novel is a very new form of art. It was unthinkable until the invention of printing and impractical until a significant fraction of the population became literate. But when the conditions were right, it suddenly became huge. The great serialized novelists of the 19th Century were like rock stars or movie stars. The printing press and the apparatus of publishing had given these creators a means to bypass traditional arbiters and gatekeepers of culture and connect directly to a mass audience. And the economics worked out such that they didn’t need to land a commission or find a patron in order to put bread on the table. The creators of those novels were therefore able to have a connection with a mass audience and a livelihood fundamentally different from other types of artists.
Nowadays, rock stars and movie stars are making all the money. But the publishing industry still works for some lucky novelists who find a way to establish a connection with a readership sufficiently large to put bread on their tables. It’s conventional to refer to these as “commercial” novelists, but I hate that term, so I’m going to call them Beowulf writers.
But this is not true for a great many other writers who are every bit as talented and worthy of finding readers. And so, in addition, we have got an alternate system that makes it possible for those writers to pursue their careers and make their voices heard. Just as Renaissance princes supported writers like Dante because they felt it was the right thing to do, there are many affluent persons in modern society who, by making donations to cultural institutions like universities, support all sorts of artists, including writers. Usually they are called “literary” as opposed to “commercial” but I hate that term too, so I’m going to call them Dante writers. And this is what I mean when I speak of a bifurcated system.
Like all tricks for dividing people into two groups, this is simplistic, and needs to be taken with a grain of salt. But there is a cultural difference between these two types of writers, rooted in to whom they are accountable, and it explains what MosesJones is complaining about. Beowulf writers and Dante writers appear to have the same job, but in fact there is a quite radical difference between them — hence the odd conversation that I had with my fellow author at the writer’s conference. Because she’d never heard of me, she made the quite reasonable assumption that I was a Dante writer — one so new or obscure that she'd never seen me mentioned in a journal of literary criticism, and never bumped into me at a conference. Therefore, I couldn’t be making any money at it. Therefore, I was most likely teaching somewhere. All perfectly logical. In order to set her straight, I had to let her know that the reason she’d never heard of me was because I was famous.
All of this places someone like me in critical limbo. As everyone knows, there are literary critics, and journals that publish their work, and I imagine they have the same dual role as art critics. That is, they are engaging in intellectual discourse for its own sake. But they are also performing an economic function by making judgments. These judgments, taken collectively, eventually determine who’s deemed worthy of receiving fellowships, teaching appointments, etc.
(Because Slashdot, obnoxiously, doesn’t have anchor tags for individual questions, you’ll have to do some scrolling. It’s question two.)
(Also, you should read the bit about Bruce Sterling crashing a liquified natural gas tanker into William Gibson’s pleasure barge.)
Then there’s that large collection of us who fall in between — whose writing is not fully supported either by patrons or by the public. I think that once upon a time most of us — in SF, at any rate — expected to become Beowulf writers. For whatever reason [insert favorite ill-conceived rant about the decline of literacy, or the consolidation of publishing, or the end of the small independent bookstore, or whatever, here] that no longer seems to be as attainable a goal as it once did. It seems like there’s an interesting and, I think, fairly new thing going on right now in SF (groups like the SLF and Interstitial Arts come to mind, not to mention many individual SF writers on the MFA track): A shift from the dream of being a Beowulf writer to the dream of being a Dante writer.
It’s not that I don’t appreciate what those folks are doing. (All-Star Stories is a member of the SLF’s Small Press Co-op, for instance.) But I do understand now, I think, why it’s always seemed to be a little bit at an angle from what I’m doing. I’m not counting on being a Beowulf writer, and I don’t particularly want to be a Dante writer — I’ve got a day job, and it pays better than teaching freshman comp.
Maybe I’m a Kafka writer. Kafka was in insurance.
