The Innocent Genre

Posted on December 19, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

Earlier this week, Chris Gavaler argued that literary fiction is now willing to incorporate genre fiction — unless the genre fiction is romance. Chris argued that the exclusion of romance was due to the fact that “the new literary landscape allows anything but a convention-determined plot outcome.” Romance requires a formulaic happy ending; literary fiction requires a non-formulaic (often unhappy) ending. Thus, the two may never flirt, fall head over heels, and/or consummate.

I think Chris is wrong for a number of reasons. First, romance is a lot less formulaic than this suggests. But, more importantly, the premise is false. Literary fiction and romance cross-pollinate all the time. In fact, in many cases the basic lit fic plot is romance. Much of the traditional literary fiction canon — Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, E.M. Forster, Anna Karenina, F. Scott Fitzgerald, big chunks of Shakespeare, D. H. Lawrence, Henry James, and on and on — is based around romance plots. Lit fic doesn’t incorporate romance as genre, or see romance as genre, because romance, when in a lit fic setting, is always already lit fic. The distinction between lit fic and romance is really almost entirely a matter of marketing. And since it’s just a matter of labeling, removing the labeling makes the genre, as genre, disappear.

As an example, look at Ian McEwan’s “The Innocent.” Like many romance novels, it’s got a historical setting — in this case early Cold War Germany — and the richness of the period detail is part of the sensual appeal that distances the reader from hearth and home, providing a setting for a different, fantasy love affair. And all the hallmarks of romance are there, from the instant, shocking moment of initial recognition (“Years later, Leonard had no difficulty at all recalling Maria’s face. It shone for him the way faces do in certain old paintings”) to explicit sex, and even to hints (and more than hints) of sexual violence and rape. Pamela Regis’ eight essential elements of the romance novel are all carefully articulated, from the meeting through the betrothal, and not excluding the point of ritual death — which here, in an excess of punctilliousness, involves an actual, accidental but brutal murder (of Maria’s abusive ex), and an extended dismemberment and disposal of the corpse.

It’s true that the precise order of Regis’ elements are somewhat scrambled — the moment of ritual death occurs after the betrothal, for example. And there are long, unexpected dislocations between one element and another. Most notably, Maria and Leonard actually break up and leave each other for decades, both marrying others and having children, before finally (tentatively) planning to reunite at the very conclusion of the book.

If you hadn’t read many romance novels, you might conclude that this was lit fic running roughshod over convention and breaking out of the romance genre straight-jacket. But, the truth is, romance novels mess with Regis’ order all the time, and aren’t even adverse to throwing some years and intervening marriages between the meeting and the final consummation. Kathleen Gilles Seidel’s folk rock romance “Til the Stars Fall,” for example, has its main characters meet during college and break up; Krissa rushes into a marriage with another guy and has several children before she divorces and she and Quinn reunite. Pam Rosenthal’s regency “The Slightest Provocation” is about a husband and wife who have fallen out; the plot is to get them back together, not to unite them in the first place. If you wanted, you could argue that McEwan is more unconventional because the ending is more indeterminate — but on the other hand, you could argue that Seidel is more unconventional because the main emotional energy in the book is on the relationship between Quinn and Krissa’s brother Danny, rather than on the relationship between Quinn and Kirssa.

There is one aspect of The Innocent which marks it as literary fiction rather than romance: it’s told from the man’s perspective. For most of the novel, most of the time, you’re inside Leonard’s head. This is virtually never the case in the romance novels I’ve read, where consciousness is generally split between the male and female leads. Even here, though, McEwan does not abandon convention entirely. At important points in the narrative, you shift into Maria’s head — as if to assure readers that yes, this is a romance, and not (despite the title) a lit fic bildungsroman, or a lit fic male psychodrama. McEwan carefully puts you in Maria’s head to let you see Leonard from her perspective, and understand why he’s attractive. After he tells her he’s a virgin, for example, you get this.

For hers was the laughter of nervous relief. She had been suddenly absolved from the pressures and rituals of seduction. She would not have to adopt a conventional role and be judged in it, and she would not be measured against other women. Her fear of being physically abused had receded. She would not be obliged to do anything she did not wants She was free, they both were free, to invent their own terms. They could be partners in invention. And she really had discovered for herself this shy Englishman with the steady gaze an the long lashes, she had him first, she would have him all to herself. These thoughts she formulated later in solitude.

You need this passage for the same reason you need both perspectives in a romance novel — so that Maria is a person, rather than simply a reward or an object of desire. Or, if you prefer, so that Leonard too is a reward and an object of desire — so that the story is about a relationship between two people, rather than about only one.

Similarly, when Leonard confusedly tries to initiate a BDSM scenario and ends up almost raping Maria, we’re mostly in his head — but we switch to her memory of seeing another woman raped during the war by Russian soldiers. The abusers perspective, the novel insists, is not the most important one, or the only one; Leonard wants to make her a part of his fantasy life entirely, but she is her own person. And finally, at the end, after the murder of the ex boyfriend and the break-up, and after the two have lived their lives, and had their separate marriages, the final words of reconciliation, by letter, are Maria’s. As a result we actually end up learning more about her life than Leonard’s — we know about her marriage, her kids, and about her continued love. “And in all this time I’ve thought about you. A week hasn’t passed when I haven’t gone back over things, what we might or should have done, and how it could have been different.” And yes, even that romanticization and flirtation with infidelity is a romance trope.

“The Innocent” shows that romance can be incorporated seamlessly into literary fiction — or rather, that what is needed is not incorporation, but merely a slight change in perspective. If the new lit fic purveyors of thrilling tales avoid romance, it is not because romance is conventional, but because one big convention of lit fic is romance. It’s embarrassing, when you want to go slumming with genre, to have the world find out that you’ve been happily married to her the whole time.

Power Records Presents

Posted on December 18, 2014 by Brian Cremins

I first posted this essay on my blog early in 2013, not long after I’d seen Baz Luhrmann’s version of The Great Gatsby. This year I wrote about the Power Records sets again for the zine Towards a Poetics of Man-Bat and for The Los Angeles Review of Books, so I thought it would be fun to revisit this older post. Happy holidays.
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My first exposure to literature—to the “great books” I was asked to study in high school, college, and then in graduate school—came in the form of the book and record sets issued by Power Records in the 1970s.

The cover of Power Records Book and Record Set #12 (dated 1974), adapted from issue #168 of Captain America and the Falcon (Marvel Comics, December 1973), with a cover by Sal Buscema (pencils), John Verpoorten (inks), and John Costanza (letters).

One of my favorites was #14, an adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein written by Gary Friedrich and drawn by Mike Ploog for Marvel Comics. Their comic book version of Shelley’s novel originally appeared in the first few issues of The Monster of Frankenstein, edited by Roy Thomas. Issue #1 has a cover date of January 1973. I was born in late November of 1973.

Issue #1 of The Monster of Frankenstein (Marvel Comics, dated January, 1973). Cover by Mike Ploog.

“It’s fun to read as you hear!” proclaims the copy on the cover of The Monster of Frankenstein, which included a 45 rpm record. At the end of each right-hand page the record would beep, a signal to turn the page to read the next panel. Each set, I realize now, was a radio play. By the late 1970s, radio dramas were already a relic of the 1930s and 1940s, a form of entertainment that had barely survived the 1950s as television took hold as the means of mass communication.

The 45 from my copy of Captain America and the Falcon.

The cover of The Monster of Frankenstein #1 is almost identical to the cover of the Power Records edition of the comic. Both promise a story of “The Most Famous, Most Fearsome Monster of All!” And, as drawn by Mike Ploog, Frankenstein’s creature is a hulking, ferocious presence: his enormous, cinderblock hands reach for his creator. The leather straps that held the creature to the dissection table fail to restrain him. A forlorn skeleton appears in the right-hand corner of the image, waiting for the inevitable struggle between the monster and his creator.

Mike Ploog’s granite-colored antihero is not the John Milton-reading, delicate, misunderstood romantic of Shelley’s text. In a famous sequence from Vol. II, Chapter 6 of Shelley’s novel, the creature stumbles across “a leathern portmanteau” that contains “several articles of dress and some books.” These books include Milton’s Paradise Lost, Plutarch’s Lives, and Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther. In reading these books, Shelley suggests, the monster also learns what it is to be human:

The possession of these treasures gave me extreme delight; I could continually study and exercise my mind upon these histories when my friends were employed in their ordinary occupations. I can hardly describe to you the effect of these books. They produced in me an infinity of new images and ideas that sometimes raised me to ecstasy but more frequently sunk me to the lowest dejection.

When it came time in high school for me to read Frankenstein, I knew what I’d be studying. Friedrich and Ploog’s adaptation, despite the superheroic imagery and action familiar to readers of other Marvel Comics from the 1970s, is generally faithful to the novel.

I think this first exposure to literature in comics form shaped my expectations of the other classic novels assigned in middle school and in high school. I resisted The Catcher in the Rye and The Great Gatsby. My father insisted I would enjoy Salinger’s novel if I gave it a chance, but when I asked him to describe it to me, he could not remember the plot.

Most of the novels my middle school teachers recommended were about dogs—White Fang, The Call of the Wild. The Catcher in the Rye, I reasoned, must be about a dog.

Years before I read the novel, I imagined it: a young boy adopts a beautiful, spirited, bright-eyed retriever. They have adventures together. They follow the course of a major American river. They probably hop a train. Or they hitchhike. Later in the novel, the boy and the dog lose each other in a field of corn that sways in bright, clean, Midwestern sunlight. The sky is blue and cloudless as the boy observes his dog walking the field’s perimeter.

I don’t know, I told my dad. I don’t think I want to read about a dog. They always die at the end. Or they get eaten by something.

And, anyway, my family always had cats, not dogs.

The Catcher in the Rye’s oxblood cover was no help. It was blank except for the title and the name of the author. I took this as further proof that Salinger had written a kind of sequel to Old Yeller.

A few years later, I looked forward to reading The Great Gatsby, a novel about a famous escape artist and magician. To conceal his identity, the hero wears a mask and never speaks about his experiences in World War I. The first fifty pages of the novel describe his relationship with Houdini and with Walter Gibson, a pulp writer best known for his work on The Shadow in the 1930s and the 1940s. The Great Gatsby must be some distant relative of Doc Savage, I thought, except Fitzgerald’s hero probably falls in love and, as a consequence, loses his magic powers. He fights off a pack of dogs at the end. There’s always a dog. Also, he wears a gold mask and dresses in purple.

I still cherish my expectations of The Catcher in the Rye and The Great Gatsby. What I imagined each novel would be is still more compelling for me than the stories they tell. Some part of my imagination will always insist that The Catcher in the Rye is about a dog and that The Great Gatsby is about a spectacular, handsome, world-weary aviator and magician, sort of like this:

A June, 1972 paperback reprinting of the 1939 debut of pulp hero The Avenger written by Paul Ernst under the Street & Smith house name Kenneth Robeson. Author Lester Dent wrote the popular adventures of Doc Savage under the same pen name.

A friend asked me if Allison and I enjoyed Baz Luhrmann’s recent big-budget adaptation of Fitzgerald’s novel. Yes, I said, but I couldn’t bring myself to admit my disappointment that Luhrmann neglected to include the scene in which Gatsby, having failed to win Daisy’s love, dons his cloak of invisibility and vanishes, only to wash up a few days later on the shore of a volcanic island where he and his agents continue their war against various international crime syndicates.

Nightcrawler: The Holiday Season’s Best Violent Movie

Posted on December 17, 2014 by Michael Carson

Most people read or watch war stories not to peek into life but to get an intimate glimpse at death. The irony here is of course that the more anti-war a book or movie wants to be, the more likely it is that they it emphasize violence. It is almost as if a condition of a truly anti-war piece is that it provides voyeurs as much violence as they desire. So the honest war storywriter ends up creating excellent war porn for the would-be voyeur and directors as politically and aesthetically diverse as Stephen Spielberg, David Ayers and Clint Eastwood compete with each other to reveal war’s obscenity to an audience eager for the obscene.

Though not a war story, Nightcrawler, Dan Gilroy’s directorial debut, contemplates a problem central to war stories: namely, the cultural appeal of violence and the authorial exploitation of obscenity. And by subverting our expectations surrounding violence, art and success, Gilroy’s manages to successfully satirize both an audience that consumes violence and the people who orchestrate this consumption without – as is the case in some comparable projects – resorting to the same exploitation he decries. Would-be tellers of war stories could learn a lot from a movie like Nightcrawler.

The plot is simple enough: Louis Bloom – played by an emaciated and bug-eyed Jake Gyllenhaal – evolves from a Los Angeles bottom-feeder who steals copper to sell for a little money to a Los Angeles bottom-feeder who steals the last moments of people’s lives to sell for a little more money. It is a classic American success story, where a young man or woman harnesses a unique skill set to make friends and influence people. Except in this instance the hero succeeds by filming people in extremis, artfully recording hemorrhaging bodies and eventually arranging their deaths to keep up with the audience’s insatiable demand for such theater.

Many movies have explored the corrupting influence of money and violence and the way in which American culture uniquely intertwines the two (and not a few have used Los Angeles as their setting). The satire comes not in Bloom’s rise to prominence but in the very ridiculousness of his conquests. As opposed to movies like Wolf on Wall Street, where the rise and fall is dramatic enough to elicit envy in the audience, Gilroy scales Nightcrawler back to reflect the banality of Bloom’s efforts and achievements. Bloom counts himself a success because he owns a business with two trucks instead of one. He considers shaking hands with a third-rate newscaster tantamount to fame. He falls for a failed news producer twice as old as him who he has to blackmail into having sex with him. Bloom is a petite-bourgeois devil, one whose success is as pathetic as what he has to do to achieve it.

Neither does Bloom have any sense of having done wrong. Early on in the film Bloom sits alone in his empty yet tastefully furnished apartment and clicks through the morning TV news shows. He laughs at the newscaster’s corny jokes unaffectedly. In the film’s final moments, the detective investigating Bloom can’t get past the fact that Bloom filmed his friend dying. Bloom replies, “It’s my job. It’s what I do. I like to think if you’re seeing me you’re having the worst day of your life.” Bloom’s laughter remains the same – innocent as it is amoral. Here and elsewhere, the film lacks any dynamism, either into cynicism or away from it, and the static characterization, Bloom’s resolute innocence, survives his ethically questionable activities unscathed, even as the more and more people end up on the wrong side of his camera.

In the climax, we do learn something important about Bloom: it’s not that he doesn’t understand people, it’s that he understands them and discounts their reality. “Maybe I just don’t like people,” he tells his partner. Throughout the film he makes seemingly earnest attempts to mimic human emotion – patting his assistant’s shoulder after they see someone they know die, giving self-help talks to the people that he meets, “Who am I? I’m a hard worker…people say I am persistent” – and the sad fact of the movie, the central conceit, is not that Bloom is a joke but that everyone in the film ends up being like Bloom; ultimately, we must take him seriously, for this is what passes for seriousness in our society – his grotesque films and entrepreneurial optimism are the only art and hope in an artless (indeed kitsch and sentimental) world.

Gilroy seems to be saying that Bloom dislikes us, the people who watch his videos, who form the literal fodder for his ambitions, but we watch these videos because we dislike people as much as him. In this respect Nightcrawler is not quite like other satires of American masculinity, violence and terror (like say American Psycho or Fight Club). Nightcrawler satirizes these movies. It critiques our rabid consumption of violence in movies that seek to make an earnest commentary about violence in America. It mocks us for desiring this violence, for wanting to indulge in death while simultaneously acting sententious about those who indulge in death (tellingly, Gilroy gives us little actual obscenity in a movie about obscenity). At times the plot stumbles – Gilroy has too many targets for a single film – but the movie does better than most in capturing this curious tension between indulgence and opprobrium, between our own self-involved fears and nihilistic desires.

Now what does this have to do with war stories? Well, a lot actually. Most war stories over the last forty years have been obsessed with representing the true obscenity of war; they operate under the notion that realism – a faithfully rendered account of horror – somehow does justice to the conflict. Many of these stories try to abrogate politics through authenticity and eventually mistake obscenity for profundity. Bloom and the people around Bloom rationalize his snuff films in much the same way. In a way, Bloom gives the dying people dignity, by acting as a sort of witness to their final moments. The audience participates willingly, possessed by fear and hatred, projecting themselves on to the dead, forgiving this invasion of privacy and sadomasochistic prurience under the auspices of aesthetics.

Fury has been in theaters for about a month now. American Sniper will soon follow (timed perfectly to capture the coveted January demographic). These Christmas films have gone through great lengths to be accurate, to replicate the obscene violence of 1944 Europe and 2006 Iraq. Many will argue that it is possible to watch them simply out of respect for authentic death, not to find a sense of authenticity through this death. Yet after a movie like Nightcrawler, it is increasingly difficult to make the claim that we can do the former without also indulging in the latter, and perhaps this all movie about American violence can do – open us up to the nightcrawler in each of us, the ones making these films and the ones who keep going to see them.
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Michael Carson has written non-fiction about war and violence at Salon, the Daily Beast, The Hooded Utilitarian and Splice Today. He also attempts to write fiction that neither indulges in obscenity nor sanitizes the obscene. So far he has been unsuccessful. Check out his blog, the Wrath Bearing Tree, or follow him @WrathBT on Twitter.

Is and Isn’t: Literary Upheavals in the Post-Real Landscape

Posted on December 16, 2014 by Chris Gavaler

H.G. Wells was not a science fiction writer. Neither was Philip Nolan when he created Buck Rogers. But Flash Gordon—a Buck Rogers knock-off that appeared five years later—is science fiction. Aldous Huxley is harder to call. Brave New World appeared in 1932, three years after magazine editor Hugo Gernback invented the term, but it wasn’t in standard use yet. Others would have happily retained the older moniker “scientific romance.” Gernback preferred “scientifiction.”

Literary genres seem so monolithic—walk into a book store or skim a college course list—we forget they were ever contested. In 2009, Writer’s Chronicle blogger Emily Cross spotted a new genre, “a mix of literary and SF” that includes novels hard to label “fantasy/ science fiction/literary because they are both but neither.” Like 1920s scifi, it goes by more than one label, but the top two, “Slipstream” and “New Wave Fabulism,” are essentially “one and the same.” If the emergent genre follows the path of its predecessors, one of the terms will gain general acceptance and retroactively claim writers who never heard of it while writing its representative works, and the other term will go the dodo way of “scientifiction.” The change, however, involves more than naming rights. Rather than witnessing the birth of a new genre, or the reshuffling of works previously claimed by older genres into a hybrid category, we have a tectonic event affecting the wider literary landscape.

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In Fall of 2002, Conjunctions editor Bradford Morrow handed over an issue of his “otherwise honorable literary journal” to the “conspicuously popular horror author” Peter Straub to guest-edit a volume of “innovative cross-genre science fiction, fantasy, and horror.” Six months later, McSweeney’s editor Dave Eggers handed his equally honorable journal to Michael Chabon for essentially the same project. Writers Kelly Link, Neil Gaiman, and Karen Joy Fowler appear in both volumes. Straub and Morrow subtitled theirs The New Wave Fabulists. Chabon and Eggers went for the retro-pulp Thrilling Tales. Neither name has stuck, but the shared project has. Two more anthologies appeared in 2006. Rusty Morrison and Ken Keegan’s Paraspheres: Extending Beyond the Spheres of Literary and Genre Fiction includes the additional subtitle Fabulist and New Wave Fabulist Stories—as well as Bradford Morrow in the table of contents and Peter Straub and Kelly Link in backcover blurbs. James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel’s Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology includes stories from Michael Chabon, Kelly Link, and Karen Joy Fowler, plus Jonathan Lethem who, along with Kessel, is an alum of Straub’s Conjunctions.

So while the four sets of contributor pages are at times identical, the labels barely overlap. Chabon’s buzzwords are “entertainment” and “borderlands,” but he otherwise avoids naming his pulp reclamation project. When Eggers handed over a second, horror-heavy issue, they titled it McSweeney’s Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories. Morrison and Keegan coined “paraspheres” because their selections “seem to extend ‘beyond the spheres’ of either literary or genre fiction.” But they also acknowledge Morrow and Straub’s term—while differentiating “New Wave” from earlier “Fabulists.” Phantom Drift, a recent entry in the literary marketplace, whittled the Conjunctions term down in their subtitle, A Journal of New Fabulism. Slipstream also has its own journal and history dating to the 1980s when the term was coined by science fiction author Bruce Sterling. Add the competing terms transrealism, new weird, speculative, interstitial, and literature of the fantastic, and suddenly Gernback’s “scientifiction” doesn’t sound so peculiar.

Rudy Rucker, another Paraspheres contributor, coined “Transrealism” in 1983 to describe works that treat “immediate perceptions in a fantastic way,” using “tools of fantasy and SF . . . to thicken and intensify realistic fiction” and so create “truly artistic SF.” Bruce Sterling’s 1989 “Slipstream” is more slippery to define, at times encompassing anything postmodern or, more vaguely, “anything that makes you feel very strange.” At other moments slipstream seems simply to denote “non-realistic literary fiction” or literary fiction with “fantastic elements.” David Memmott, currently the managing editor of Phantom Drift, started Ice River Magazine in 1987 “to explore, for lack of a better description, a literature of the fantastic . . . . literature of intersections” that included “Literary science fiction.” Phantom Drift is now “resisting the temptation to ‘tell’ the creative community what we mean by ‘new fabulism’ or a ‘literature of the fantastic’ by instead ‘showing’ you.” Chabon also resists, preferring to allude to the growing number of authors “in the borderlands among regions on the map of fiction.” Morrow adopts the same metaphor: “For two decades, a small group of innovative writers rooted in the genres of science fiction, fantasy, and horror have been simultaneously exploring and erasing the boundaries of those genres by creating fiction of remarkable depth and power.”

The geographic metaphors, however, suggest more than individual authors or communities sneaking between marked territories and establishing new colonies. The landscape itself has changed. Look at the non-borderland territory of contemporary fantasy. When Kevin Brockmeier guest-edited the 2010 Best American Fantasy, he and series editor Matthew Cheney subtitled their anthology Real Unreal. After describing the parallel traditions of “realistic fiction” and “the otherworldly,” Brockmeier asserts that “the branches of the ordinary and extraordinary are so tightly interwoven that it is nearly impossible to tell them apart.” He intends his selection as a gathering of “such grafted trees,” fantasy that takes elements from “the best realistic fiction.” This is the same literary project pursued by the emergent genre anthologies—except here it is held securely within the genre-protecting borders of Best American Fantasy. Brockmeier’s list of “ten favorite fantasy stories of all time” includes one by Theodora Goss, a Feeling Very Strange author, and the ubiquitous Kelly Link’s “Catskin,” one of Chabon’s Thrilling Tales. For his 2010 contents, Brockmeier also selected Feeling Very Strange contributor Benjamin Rosenbaum and editor John Kessel. The terrain is the same.

Fantasy, however, has been situated outside of traditional literary fiction, and so upheavals in its landscape do not necessarily reflect changes at literature’s center. Unless they do. When Brockmeier’s own story “The Ceiling” won the 2002 O. Henry Award, juror Joyce Carol Oates wrote: “It’s rare that a tale of dark fantasy makes its way into a mainstream publication, and still more rare to discover such a tale in the distinguished O. Henry Awards anthology where, through the decades, that category of prose fiction we call ‘realism’ has always predominated.” Oates admires how Brockmeier “conjoins the parable and the realistic story, the horrific with the domestic”—a variation on why Brockmeier admires his 2010 selections, and why all of the other editors admire theirs.

Oates, although a long-term borderland resident of horror, has a reputation firmly planted in literary fiction. Stephen King, however, does not—or at least did not when he won an O. Henry in 1996 and served as a juror in 1999. Chabon’s inclusion of King in Thrilling Tales wasn’t a breakthrough moment but the continuation of an arc. While Brockmeier included him in the 2010 Best American Fantasy, King’s “literary” standing expanded further with his novel 11/22/63, which earned a position on the New York Times best books of 2011. This is not evidence of an emergent genre. King is still writing horror—or, if you prefer, speculative fiction—but the landscape underneath him has shifted.

Similarly, Brockmeier drew almost half of his twenty 2010 fantasy stories from literary journals as honorable as Conjunctions and McSweeney’s: Tin House, New England Review, One Story, Oxford American, Kenyon Review, Pindeldyboz, and American Short Fiction. Dave Eggers published Brockmeier’s “The Ceiling” in McSweeney’s, but he, unlike his co-juror Oates, chose a traditionally realistic story for his 2002 O. Henry selection, as did the third juror, Colson Whitehead, who went on to publish Zone One, a literary zombie novel, in 2011—an unimaginable act a decade ago. When Brockmeier graduated to juror for the 2006 O. Henrys, he went with a work of realistic fiction, not Stephanie Reents’ story about a woman with a removable head, which series editor Laura Furman described in language that echoes the Slipstream and Paraspheres anthologies published the same year: it “is heartachingly familiar, but it feels like new literary territory.”

But is it new? As I glance through my shelf at a few O. Henry and Best American Short Stories anthologies of the last decade, I find works about an android, a village on the back of a giant whale, and an eleven-fingered pianist. If these fantastical stories appear firmly in the literary mainstream—what slipstream, etc. define themselves against—then we’re not talking about an emergent genre. We have a change at the core of contemporary literature.

The center does not hold. Or rather, literature now maintains multiple epicenters. If the metaphor is territories, then today’s authors have more than just passports; they have dual citizenships. Take my short story “Is” as an example. It first appeared in New England Review in 2008, then Brockmeier’s Best American Fantasy in 2010, and its sequel, “Isn’t,” appeared in Phantom Drift in 2012. Together “Is” and “Isn’t” are and are not “literary fiction,” “fantasy,” and whatever term you prefer to call the not-so-new genre-linking genre of Linkism. (Kelly Link, by the way, identifies herself as a science fiction writer.)

While the varied Linkists can’t always agree on what they are and aren’t, they do agree on what “literary fiction” is and isn’t. Keegan identifies the primary meaning among U.S. academic institutions as fiction that has “lasting meaning and value,” but within the publishing industry, literary fiction denotes “narrative realism,” as opposed to any other genre with its equally and inevitably artificial conventions. The conflated term limits quality to realism. Chabon reduces the problem to one word: “serious.” Literary fiction is, everything else isn’t.

Or, I should say, wasn’t. The monolithic realism that spurred all of this border crossing and boundary shifting is gone. Once four 21^st century Pulitzer winners—Michael Chabon, Michael Cunningham, Cormac McCarthy, and Junot Diaz—have written about alternate timelines, androids, post-apocalyptic futures, and magic mongooses, traditional realism can no longer be claimed as a prerequisite of contemporary literary fiction. Add, in no particular order, Philip Roth, Sherman Alexie, Isabel Allende, Jane Smiley, Tom De Haven, Kazuo Ishiguro, Jennifer Egan, David Mitchell, Don DeLillo, Austin Grossman, Lev Grossman, George Saunders, Glen Duncan, Tom Perrotta, and Caryl Churchill to the already long list of fabulous slipstreamers, and we’re no longer describing authors migrating between genres. The genres themselves have been leveled.

Soon they may never have been there at all. Just as H. G. Wells became the retroactive father of science fiction, 20^th century authors previously ensconced in narrative realism will emerge as fantastical realist godparents. Reread Joyce Carol Oates’ widely anthologized “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” or John Cheever’s equally canonical “The Swimmer.” Or better, come up with an argument for why one of the most highly regarded novels of the 20^th century, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, is not first and foremost a horror story.

When I teach the contemporary novel at Washington and Lee University, I subtitle my course “Thrilling Tales.” The challenge is limiting the syllabus. Chabon’s anthology title—a fanciful act of literary transgression a decade ago—now describes a wide swath of “serious” mainstream fiction. Chabon’s dream of literary eclecticism has come true. Werewolves, time-travelers, clones, superheroes—nothing is out of bounds.

Or almost nothing. Despite the leveled landscape, one gulf still divides “literary” and “non-literary”: formula. This is not a hold-over prejudice from old school literary fiction. The bias was articulated early and often by the genre-splicing outsiders. After declaring that “straight realism is all burnt out,” Rucker demands that a “Transrealist artist cannot predict the finished form of his or her work. The Transrealist novel grows organically.” While defining slipstream, Sterling bemoans the state of category SF for its “belittlement of individual creativity, and the triumph of anonymous product.” He could be describing the vast majority of novels mass produced in the heyday of the pulp magazine industry. Despite his revisionist nostalgia, even Chabon acknowledges the “formulaic nature of genre fiction,” shifting the blame toward publishers and book-sellers. It was their marketing practices and formula-driven products that originally prompted a generation of writers and editors to construct “literary fiction” as a boundary against them.

But formula is not innate to any genre. Octavia E. Butler identified herself as a science fiction writer—not speculative fiction or anything else—until her death in 2007, because SF “was so wide open, it gave me the chance to comment on every aspect of humanity. People tend to think of science fiction as, oh, Star Wars or Star Trek, and the truth is there are no closed doors, and there are no required formulas. You can go anywhere with it.”

In short, the new literary landscape allows anything but a convention-determined plot outcome. Although romance was a major pulp category in the first half of the century, Chabon did not include any representatives in his Thrilling Tales. Despite its use of realistic surface details, romance is definitively formulaic. The reader begins with the guarantee of two lovers united. Throw in as many obstacles as you like, but the conclusion is set. Mystery and detective fiction offer a similar problem. Poe’s writing dictum still holds: begin with the end and work backwards. This might explain why only Chabon champions the mystery subgenre. He’s written two detective novels (Chabon maintains citizenships in an enviable range of territories), but the other anthologists mostly limit themselves to science fiction, horror and fantasy—anything that bends the conventions of realism. Detective fiction, like romance, behaves like realistic fiction. Only its deep structure—the requisite agreement between writer and reader that the detective will solve the mystery—separates it from narrative realism. Superheroes—once the greatest amalgam all things non-literary—were embraced as “serious” literature only after their old plot requirements collapsed. Alan Moore’s Watchmen upended the 1954 Comics Code dictum that “In every instance good shall triumph over evil and the criminal punished for his misdeeds.” Flying men in tights are easier for literary fiction to swallow than a formula-mandated ending.

It sounds easy. Just yank out the plot rug and let the genre pieces—aliens, elves, gangsters, it makes no difference—rattle into new configurations. Michael Cunningham’s Specimen Days, however, shows how tricky old school genre plotting can be. The middle section of Cunningham’s 2005 novel is written in the style of a police thriller, which requires certain characters to be at certain places at certain times. In order to chance into the terrorist suspect, for instance, Cunningham’s cop has to have a coincidental reason to return to her apartment where he’s secretly waiting. Narrative realism requires the reason to appear organic, but Cunningham, like most narrative realists, doesn’t have much practice with plot-defined storytelling. When his cop mouths an authorial excuse for her detour home, Cunningham’s strings show. Frankly, it’s a little embarrassing—which is why “literary fiction” shunned pulp genres for so long and so successfully.

But the fact that Specimen Days even exists—with its gothic tropes in part one and its aliens and androids in part three—is evidence alone that something very strange happened in the first decade of the new century. Cunningham is not a Transrealist, Magic Realist, Slipstreamer, Paraspherist, or New or Old Wave Fabulist. He’s a mainstream literary fiction writer.

Welcome to 21^st Century Literature.

[This essay originally appeared in The Writer’s Chronicle.]

The Trick of “Overcompensating”

Posted on December 15, 2014 by Cathy G. Johnson

Trigger-Warnings: Discussion of domestic violence and abuse, mention of incest and child sexual abuse.
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On December 7, 2014, Mike Dawson published a comic titled “Overcompensating” on The Nib. In it, Dawson creates a character, which, for the purposes of this article, will be called The Narrator. The Narrator tells us he has a “bad breakup” with his partner. The Narrator tells us many times he is a man, male, white, and American. He describes how society has framed his demographic as the protagonist, and because of this he feels entitled. We see images of muscular movie stars. The Narrator seeks revenge against his ex-partner, and has a fight with her new love interest.

The beginning image is the waist of a man holding a gun, and the last image is that same waist without a gun. We can surmise there is a penis in those pants. The comic suggests his masculinity, gun = penis, was at stake throughout this scenario. It also claims to critique this belief.

This comic is about retaliation when The Narrator, a man, feels wronged. It is about controlling his ex-partner, a woman. Yet we never see her. This comic is inherently about women, yet it’s as if women do not exist in this world. The Narrator frames this about himself and his masculinity.

The Narrator wants this comic to be about him and his inadequacies, rather than the woman he is perpetuating violence against.

This is a story about an abusive man.

Breaking up with an abuser can be very hard to do. In fact, leaving a nonabusive partner is generally easier, contrary to what many people believe. Few abusers readily allow themselves to be left. When they feel a partner starting to get stronger, beginning to think for herself more, slipping out from under domination, abusers move to their endgame. Some of their more common maneuvers include:

Threatening or assaulting anyone you try to start a new relationship with, or anyone who is helping you.

Stalking you.

This quotation is taken from Lundy Bancroft’s book, Why Does He Do That?: Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men. Published 2003 by Berkley Books, New York. Bancroft has spent over twenty years specializing in domestic abuse and the abusive behavior of men.

In the 1890s Freud wrote a paper titled “The Aetiology of Hysteria.” Due to the large amount of his female patients revealing childhood incest victimization to him, Freud concluded that child sexual abuse was one of the major causes of emotional disturbances in adult women.

His colleagues criticized this paper. No one could believe that men of excellent reputations, as his female clients were daughters of well-to-do families, could be perpetrators of incest.

Freud recanted his conclusions, thus proposing the Oedipus complex, explained by Bancroft:

According to this theory any young girl actually desires sexual contact with her father, because she wants to compete with her mother to be the most special person in his life. Freud used this construct to conclude that the episodes of incestuous abuse his clients had revealed to him had never taken place; they were simply fantasies of events the women had wished for when they were children and that the women had come to believe were real. This construct started a hundred-year history in the mental health field of blaming victims for the abuse perpetuated on them and outright discrediting of women’s and children’s reports of mistreatment by men.

Once abuse was denied in this way, the stage was set for some psychologists to take the view that any violent or sexually exploitative behaviors that couldn’t be denied – because they were simply too obvious – could be considered mutually caused. Psychological literature is thus full of descriptions of young children who “seduce” adults into sexual encounters and of women whose “provocative” behavior causes men to become violent or sexually assaultive toward them.

There is a long history built into psychology that maintains the elimination of survivors from narratives of abuse.

As Dawson’s Narrator expounds in this comic critiquing male privilege, he ignores the existence of people who are not men. There is no vantage point for a woman or non-binary person to enter this narrative, because they do not exist to him, as with many narratives on abuse since the dawn of the Oedipus complex. He is focusing on himself, his masculinity, and his anger.

In this comic, The Narrator is very angry. “Overcompensating” has no other emotion in it than anger. But anger does not make a man abusive. Bancroft explains:

When people conclude that anger causes abuse, they are confusing cause and effect. [My client] was not abusive because he was angry; he was angry because he was abusive. Abusers carry attitudes that produce fury. It would be futile to teach [my client anger management skills], because his thinking process will soon get him enraged again.

Although our feelings can influence how we act, our choices of how to behave are ultimately determined by our attitudes and our habits.

Abusive men aren’t abusive because of anger; anger is developed because they are abusive. Abusers carry entitled attitudes that make them angry. This entitlement is key to Dawson’s character, and the comic attempts to explain this entitlement through film tropes.

The Narrator fantasizes himself as the hero of his movie. He is big, muscular, in control. However, in the reality of this comic strip, The Narrator is scrawny. The fight he has with his ex-partner’s new love interest is a joke. Contrary to the images of gun toting strong movie stars, the fight scene is drawn in a style that portrays The Narrator and the man he is fighting as childlike.

What does this comic’s climactic fight scene do? Does The Narrator believe he is being self-deprecating? This comic is titled “Overcompensating.” But that’s misguided. The Narrator depicting himself as scrawny is not a self-deprecating joke. It perpetuates the myth that only muscular men can be dangerous. But, as Bancroft says, abusers can be of any demographic, size and shape, and can be just as harmful physically and emotionally. In this comic, Dawson claims that men who do not look like a film star feel the need to “overcompensate.” But Bancroft explains:

My abusive clients sometimes become aware of these ways which society has shaped their values and, sticking closely to their long-standing abusive habits, seize this insight as a new excuse. Instead of saying “I was drunk” or “I was abused as a child,” they rise to a new level of sophistication in escaping responsibility, declaring, “I did it because I learned entitled expectations and the devaluing of females.” I respond by telling the client that he is putting old wine in a new bottle. “The number-one lesson you seem to have learned,” I say, “is how to make excuses for abusing women. And I see that you’re still practicing it.” Abusive men do need to learn about social influences, but not in a way that gives them yet another means of letting themselves off the hook.

Anger is not a reason for abuse. Being socialized a man is not a reason for abuse. The only reason abuse happens is because a person is abusive.

The Narrator is a man who admittedly seeks control over a woman. Is this the only incident of abusive action by The Narrator? We’re never told. But what leads a man to stalking his ex-partner? The feeling of ownership, entitlement, the right to her. This didn’t spring up overnight.

An abuser’s core problem is that he has a distorted sense of right and wrong. This comic presents to its audience this distortion under the guise of self-criticism. The story of self-criticism is seductive, sympathetic. Bancroft explains why abusers create these stories:

You may wonder why, if abusive men feel justified in their actions, they distort their stories so much when seeking support. First, an abuser doesn’t want to have to explain his worst behaviors – his outright cruelty, for example, or his violence – to people who might find those acts distasteful… Second, he may carry some guilt or shame about his worst acts, as most abusers do; his desire to escape those feelings is part of why he looks for validation from other people, which relieves any nagging self-doubt.

Through self-centering The Narrator seeks validation for his actions. But to delve further into Bancroft and specifically why this comic is about The Narrator’s masculinity:

The abuser’s dehumanizing view of his partner as a personal possession can grow even uglier as a relationship draws to a close. I sometimes find it extraordinarily difficult to get a client to remember at this point that his partner is a human being with rights and feelings rather than an offending object to destroy. At worst, his efforts to reestablish his ownership may include following her and monitoring her movements, scaring people who try to assist her, threatening men she is interested in dating, kidnapping the children, and physically attacking her or the people close to her. For abused women separation is a time of particularity high risk of homicide or attempted homicide, which can sometimes involve murderous assaults on her new boyfriend, her children, or on other people she cares about.

To repeat:

I sometimes find it extraordinarily difficult to get a client to remember at this point that his partner is a human being with rights and feelings rather than an offending object to destroy.

This comic is only about The Narrator’s masculinity because he has forgotten his partner is a human being. He has minimized her humanity in this event of his life. She exists as a ghost of his past, but The Narrator still keeps tabs on her to the present day, as said at the end of the comic:

Decades later, that couple is still together. They got married, they have kids. How much time do they spend today concerning themselves with questions of my masculinity? How fortunate is it for all of us the answer is likely, none at all?

The Narrator ends this comic by applauding his ex-partner and her husband for not currently concerning themselves with his masculinity. This again casts the point of view completely on The Narrator and his needs. Of course The Narrator’s emotional needs would never cross their minds! At the time, they were focusing on protecting themselves against a violent stalking man. If they do currently think of him, it wouldn’t be to ponder his masculinity; they would be processing this distressing event. This was a moment of extreme violence in their lives.

The danger within this comic is the creation of excuses for abusive behavior. The Narrator never outwardly admits he was abusive. He gives us statistics on domestic violence, but he never once owns his actions as wrong or violent towards his ex-partner. He gives us events and excuses for them. We are meant to read into the story that his actions were possibly abusive, while at the same time casting doubt upon that assumption. This story is a distortion meant to create empathy, a story developed in his point of view and his point of view alone.

“Overcompensating” develops the point-of-view of an abusive man, asking its audience to empathize with its Narrator under the guise of a critique on masculinity. It’s misguided in its critical approach, effectively eliminating a woman’s humanity. We do not get to know if this is a true case of abuse. And even if he were to tell us, The Narrator would not be the proper source to diagnose a problem. Only his partner can tell us if this is a case of abuse. But we do not even get to see her face.

Bruce Goes Camping

Posted on December 14, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

The Batman TV Show is known for its campiness, but it reaches an apotheosis of arch gay subtext in the episode with Liberace as the villainous pianist Chandell and his evil(ler) twin brother, the cigar-chomping, Harry — who essentially gives Liberace the opportunity to don butch drag.

I’ve mentioned before in this series that the Batman TV show tends to play shell games with objects of desire; the camera lingers on scantily clad lovelies, who then express visible/audible lust for the delectably paunchy Batman. That scrambling of hetero and homo (whatever the identity of the watcher) reaches its apotheosis in this episode, which features not the usual single villainness, but three, who improbably dress up in Scottish highlander garb (with mini-kilts) and/or Orientalist Balinese wisps of nothing. They undulate sensuously about the screen, and especially around Liberace, who undulates sensuously himself about a besotted Aunt Harriet. Chandell’s manly charms conceal and reveal his manly charms, just as Harry imitating Chandell reveals the truth of Liberace elaborately imitating himself — and someone else.

The Chandell episode is wonderful in part because it is the most explicit revelation/elaboration of the meaning of the show’s camp, and the one which connects the show’s irony and flamboyance most directly to drag and homosexual performance. Liberace’s presence is not just a camp display in itself; it infects everyone and everything around it; with Chandell nearby, Bruce and Dick rushing into a closet can’t help but have a double meaning. Then there’s the scene where Dick is sitting and sighing with a high school sweetie — and suddenly he gets a call from Batman, and instantly dumps ice cream in his girl’s lap so he can talk to his true love. A crime fighter has to make sacrifices, he sighs — but his eagerness to drop that desert suggests that maybe he’s protesting too much.

The message of the camping here isn’t just “Batman and Robin are gay!” Rather, it’s that heroism is a pantomime of masculinity, linked to and comparable to Liberace’s multiple pantomimes, and dependent on a deferred sensuality, in which the fetishization of women is rerouted into a fetishization of masculinity. Thus, the show suggests, it is Liberace, with his double identity, his capes, his colorful costumes, and his virtuoso mastery, who is the greatest superhero of them all.

Utilitarian Review 12/13/14

Posted on December 13, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

Book News

Official release date for “Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism” is still January 14 — but the Kindle edition is now available for download at Amazon.

If you look at that link you’ll see that there’s also been several reviews posted by folks who got early copies: Albert Stabler, Adrian Bonenberger, and Peter Sattler all said very kind things about the book.

And hey, if you download the Kindle version and love it and want to share the love, please leave a review on Amazon. Every little bit helps, they tell me.

On HU

Featured Archive Post: Julian Chambliss on the slimming down of Amanda Waller.

Me on Adam West’s worst villain.

Me on the sensuality of Bat-gas.

Charles Bell on Atari, past and present.

Osvaldo Oyola on Serial, Lost, and the virtues of endings that don’t end.

Chris Gavaler on TV superheroines of his lovelorn youth.

Chris Gavaler on post-traumatic superhero syndrome.

Michael A. Johnson on the Judith Forest hoax and the crisis of authenticity in autobio comics.

Utilitarians Everywhere

At the Atlantic I wrote about comics’ gendered insecurities, cosplay and pop art.

At Pacific Standard I wrote about

— Donald Pfaff, who says our brains are hard-wired for altruism. I am skeptical.

— Edward Baptist’s book on the history of slavery and how America is built on torture.

At Reason I wrote about:

— why many sex workers have criticized Anita Sarkeesian.

—Eric Posner’s book about the problems with human rights law.

At Ravishly.com I wrote about

— Fantagraphics’ new gay manga anthology Massive and how we all eroticize men.

—Taylor Swift, Beyonce and the dreary pedestal of white perfection.

— Maddie and Tae and feminism and sexism in country music.

At Splice Today I wrote about:

— publishing my book and experiencing neurotic terror.

—the fact that nobody really cares that much about the New Republic.

I got mentioned in this press release about trans porn star Mia Isabella. (very NSFW)

Other Links

Ta-Nehisi Coates on TNR and race.

Jonathan Bernstein makes the case that John Boehner is a great speaker of the house.

Helen Redmond on the problem with draconian painkiller regulations.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

Yearly Archives: 2014