During our xxxholic roundtable last week, Suat intimated that manga critics were too nice. M. at coffeeandink, in a post titled: “Summary of some recent comments in a discussion of manga, refutes him thus:
GUY #1: Manga critics are much too nice and praise substandard work. Naturally, I feel no need to provide any evidence of this contention. Maybe it is because of all the girls.
GUY #2: Yeah, I don’t like any manga. Even when it’s good, it’s made for girls. No, wait, I do like one manga — it is by a man, and about stereotypical guy stuff. Since it is male, it is gender-neutral, unlike yaoi or shojo, which people only seem to like for political reasons. My reasons for liking things are completely apolitical and entirely justified by intellectual arguments. When women write in detail about relationships, it’s just not aimed at me. When men write in detail about relationships, it shows complex emotional realism.
Also, why don’t you ever talk about boys’ comics?
GUY #2: Once again, I must assert that people are lying about their opinions of manga for political reasons, without evidence or example, and my list of all male great comics artists is completely without political bias. Also, I am going to cite Osamu Tezuka as a great comics artist, even though his career and oeuvre actually contradict everything else I’ve been claiming about audience and identification.
GUY #2: Wait, I haven’t named enough great male comics artists yet.
I am going to continue to assume that girls’ comics = comics about romance is such an obvious statement that it will inform all my thinking and yet never need to be clearly stated.
GUY #1: Whether situations are realistic, how intellectual they are, and how deeply invested the reader becomes in the story are totally objective metrics that are completely independent of all individual tastes and socio-cultural influences.
GUY #3: The problem is an age bias, not just a gender bias. To prove this, for the rest of this comment, I will only talk about comics written by men.
I would submit that this is truly high class snark, and not even a little bit nice.
I had a back and forth discussion with m that I thought I’d reproduce here, at least in part.
Me: I did want to point out though, that, whatever their failings, Suat and Matthias, were both very open to dialogue, and unfailingly polite when contradicted (as, indeed, were people like Melinda and VM with whom they were arguing.)
m: …comments like Suat and Matthias’ are why I basically gave up on looking at comics or manga blogs not specifically recommended by friends. You characterize Suat and Matthias as “very open to dialogue, and unfailingly polite when contradicted,” and indeed they seemed respectful of the people to whom they were directly speaking. But their comments are not open, polite, or respectful; their comments are extremely sexist. By this I don’t mean that they hate women or spoke with any malice or ill intent; I mean that their comments treated men’s responses and men’s experiences as the default and characterized women’s responses and experiences as deviations from the normal, special exceptions, and less meaningful or authoritative than men’s experiences.
They are hardly the worst cases of this I’ve seen, particularly in the comics blogosphere, but I’m not sure you understand the weariness that comes from encountering this over and over and over again–even in cases, such as this one, where these voices are not in the majority. Ultimately, it was a lot less painful and exhausting for me to stick to a different set of blogs and communities, where the readers and writers did not by default consider women’s writing or women’s reading less significant or less interesting than men’s.
Me: I’ve engaged in a number of irritating interactions with mainstream and arts comics readers on behalf of shojo and manga, so I have some sense of how wearying it is to have the same argument over and over — though, obviously, not being a woman, I’m probably not as personally infuriated. In any case, I certainly understand the impulse not to want to engage with that sort of thing. You certainly have no responsibility to tell people they’re wrong on the internet. I wish I was less prone to do that myself, honestly.
Nonetheless, for me — and I’m coming from a slightly different place, as I said — I think it’s worthwhile to try to have people from different kinds of communities talk to each other. That’s going to entail some (though not necessarily equal, alas) frustration for everyone. But I think the results can also be worthwhile — and seemed to me to be so in this case, where the back and forth was fascinating, and brought up a number of really interesting points (I thought Shaenon and Kristy in particular were fascinating on why they felt manga was worthwhile and/or different from Western comics.)
Along those lines, I think its useful to make some distinctions at least. I think calling Matthias’ and Suat’s comments “extremely sexist” is a bit harsh. It’s not hard to find extreme sexism on the web or in life, alas, but does this really qualify? Neither Suat nor Matthias dismisses women’s writing out of hand; in fact, both have read a fair bit of shojo and acknowledge some of its virtues, despite their reservations. Neither categorically dismisses either women’s writing or romance — in fact, elsewhere in comments, Suat basically says his problem with xxxholic isn’t that it is romance, but that it didn’t move him to tears. Both Matthias and Suat express an eagerness to read more by women critics and to think about these issues in greater depth. Suat linked to Melinda Beasi at the end of his original post; Matthias pressed VM for links (and she linked you, among others.)
I just feel like both Matthias and Suat were very much trying to meet their interlocutors halfway — as indeed, were folks like Melinda and Shaenon and VM. I think that’s worth something, and worth respecting, even if, at the end of the day, my own views are much closer to yours than to theirs.
You can read the whole thing, along with some interesting comments from other folks, at M.’s page here.
For what it’s worth, this woman did not take Matthias and Suat’s comments as the least bit sexist.
Elitist, sure — but elitism by a man against something a lot of women like is not necessarily sexist just because of the gender of the people talking.
As the Guy #3 snarked at above…I’ll just say that I wasn’t suggesting that attitudes toward manga weren’t sexist—but that they were ALSO agist. I did say this the first time. I tend to agree that sexism is probably at work to some degree in the comments made by guys about the dismissability of popular kinds of manga….and I’m conscious of my own possible participation in such sexism. In my comment, though, I wasn’t even talking about my own tastes so much (although they do get mentioned)…but how criticism of “romance” comics in themselves does exist. I’ll admit that my own tastes in comics tend toward the masculine. Since this isn’t really true of my tastes in other things (books, music, etc.), though, I’ll plead “not guilty” to the “hey, you’re a sexist” snark….except insofar as I’m willing to buy the notion that everyone is a bit sexist, racist, etc.–We all (all in US, anyway) exist in what is still a racist/sexist culture. Those who deny this has some kind of effect on them (male/female and black/white), I think, aren’t really being honest with themselves. I disagree with Caro though…clearly the mysterious M. (James Bond’s boss?), is making accusations of sexism–which are, of course, linked to accusations of elitism. Not that M. is wrong in the general, of course, but nevertheless I bristle a bit about being reduced to Guy #X here. I’m sure M. will just write this off as male defensiveness, but I’m perfectly happy to believe there are great manga and great manga criticism out there…I just don’t get into it for reasons that do not necessarily revolve around me having a penis (more about me not having money/time to try all the things I would like to).
Well…I don’t know that elitism and sexism are exactly separable in that way. Arguments about what’s important in culture and why often dovetail with “what guys think is important.” The arguments over Twilight, for example, are usually phrased in a “this is crap” way (elitism), but I don’t think it’s out of bounds to suggest that the reason it’s considered crap has a lot to do with the age and gender of those who consume it.
I think her overall argument is reasonable. I think it would have been fairer if she’d pointed out that Suat and Matthias are willing to engage with women’s viewpoints — and I’m sure both would vigorously contest the idea that women aren’t capable of creating great art (I think that’s fairly evident from the discussion too.) But she wasn’t trying to be fair…which is why it’s not nice, and thus serves as something of a refutation of Suat’s original post.
And, yeah, I thought she was particularly unfair to Eric, for all the reasons he says.
Not that I haven’t been unfair myself in the interest of good snark, of course.
I am not sure whether I should just come out and say this or not. But I suppose I will.
The argument that Suat especially engaged in is one that is so absolutely exhausting, and (intended or not) offensive, that I have considered that there is no point any longer in my blogging here. While both Suat and Matthias are willing to engage, it is in certain ways, and it is the kind of engagement that I, as a female, find so exhausting and demeaning of my perspective that it seems, well, pointless to continue. Which is why I posted links to female-written manga criticism and then stopped commenting.
Thanks Noah, for posting this — and again, thanks for a good discussion. No, I don’t believe women can’t make great art. If anyone thought so, I think it says more about the sorry state of their culture of debate than anything else.
I’m fine with this criticism: although I obviously don’t agree with most of what M says, it’s always good to be reminded of potential blind sides to one’s arguments.
VM: I was trying to convey my experience of reading certain things (certain comics criticism, certain manga) as honestly as I could, precisely because I value the points of view I might encounter here. I got that, and am grateful for it. But I’m afraid I still fail to see why this would be demeaning to you and feel terrible if you thought so.
In any case thanks so much for the links. Much appreciated!
I am wondering if it was such a good idea to poke the bear again. My ability to tell when discretion is the better part of valour is not always of the best.
Matthias, you’re a gem, truly.
VM: I certainly hope it doesn’t come to your leaving the blog! As I said to M., I do understand that the whole engaging on the internet thing can be tiresome, and certainly there’s no reason to do it if it seems like too much trouble. I hope you’ll continue to find it worthwhile, though.
All right; in a somewhat futile effort to find common ground…I’m wondering what folks think about Moto Hagio? Or any of the Year 24 group? I haven’t read much of that (except AA’, but it seems like it might be a point of intersection for shojo fans and folks like Suat and Matthias who have a space in their hearts for artier manga.
Or Est Em, for that matter.
Yeah, Kinukitty just reviewed Age Called Blue. in fact. Which I haven’t read, but should.
I guess that’s where I get hung up, Noah– what’s ‘arty’? Because I’m hoping that for Mattias and Suat ‘arty’ doesn’t just mean ‘what I like,’ but I’m having trouble finding another definition– perhaps because I’m pretty new to the blog and came around to hear the discussion of xxxHolic. (Also, while poking around the blog, I can’t seem to see what Suat likes at all!)
The one Moto Hagio story I’ve read — the one in the shojo issue of TCJ — I loved. Beautiful stuff. Been meaning to seek out more.
The little Keiko Takemiya I’ve read — the first To Terra — I found pretty, but terminally dull.
Unfortunately, I haven’t read any other of the age 24s. I should.
I guess I’m sometimes ‘elitist’ in my taste, and like the quote-unquote more “arty” stuff, but I also dig a lot of art that is very mainstream.
Er, sorry, *Year 24s* *blush*
I shouldn’t speak for them…but what the hell, they’ll correct me no doubt.
First, I doubt either of them would characterize their tastes as arty solely, or even in general. That was me being just slightly snide, maybe. And I don’t think either of them would dismiss any genre out of hand. Suat seems to have some appreciation for Clamp’s older work, as just one example.
Matthias likes a lot of American literary comics (Chris Ware, Dan Clowes, etc.) He also knows a ton about European comics (he’s from Denmark, I think, and speaks several languages at least, I believe.) I think his review of Kramer’s Ergot is a lovely piece of writing, and maybe a place to start getting a sense of his perspective. You can see him explain to me why I’m an idiot for not liking Tin Tin here.
I think it’s also worth noting that much of what m. takes as a general attack on shojo-enjoyers is a much more specifically intended poke at me. Or perhaps I’m just being egotistical…but that was my sense, anyway.
Suat’s got a really good piece about Pogo here He explains why I’m an idiot for dumping on Lone Wolf and Cub here. And he has a nice appreciation of Ghost World here.
Suat’s read a ton of manga, and is very well versed in Japanese history, incidentally. I’d bet something of moderate value that he has read Moto Hagio and has interesting things to say about her.
Obviously I disagree with both of them frequently, but I learn things whenever I do (as I learned things from m.’s post and comments, for that matter.)
This is the problem with coming into a blog new– you’re not always familiar with the ongoing conversations so personal in-jokes may seem different when taken out of context. (And Suat’s piece on Pogo was a true pleasure to read. I’ve seen some of Kelly’s originals as well, and they’re something.)
Matthias is completely right on Tintin, let’s just make sure we’re all clear on that. It’s funny, though, because some of what I love in Tintin (and the like) is what I love about manga, too– the free spirit, the adventure, the feeling that the artist is working more for both his and the audience’s enjoyment than out of any commitment to High Art and Greater Truth– but can sometimes hit on both those things anyway.
I think I’m too tired to make a greater point at the moment, but I wanted to get that out there before I forgot.
I will unabashedly claim elitist and arty taste. There’s a lot of pressure here to dig genre, so somebody’s gotta hold the contrarian mantle.
Noah:
I think you get into really dicey territory when you don’t distinguish elitism from sexism. In the weeds, we can argue, but the danger of linking them too tightly is a position where “having high critical standards” is too easily equated with “sexist.”
Elitist/populist already maps onto art/mass culture. It’s a mapping insisted upon as much by the enthusiasts of mass culture as by the artsy types. If you then map elitist/populist onto male/female (which is an effect of linking elitism to sexism), by extension you’ve got art/mass culture mapped onto male/female. That’s no good.
Female readers could easily take away the impression that M.’s position is the “right” perspective for women while the ones Matthias and Suat present are “male” and sexist and evil. Women can advocate high cultural standards too. Women can even adhere to cultural standards that consider romance to be “low.”
Caro: Women could do that…but then they’d be wrong! Just like Matthias!
I’d agree it’s a dicey binary, but (as I said on m’s blog in a slightly different context) there’s nonetheless something there. Jane Austen is highly critically validated…and yet, at the same time, she’s not as critically validated as, say, Joyce, for reasons that are not unrelated to gender. Lowbrow work (like Dashiell Hammett, say, or Philip K. Dick) has a much easier time earning critical cred if it’s lowbrow in a male way than if it’s lowbrow in a female way (like say, Georgette Heyer).
Basically, you don’t have to be Adrienne Rich to think that Harold Bloom is a shithead, would I guess be my position.
Pesia, I love the idea of seeing TinTin as manga. That totally makes sense. Did Tezuka ever see Herge’s work, I wonder? Or is my chronology screwed up?
None of which changes the fact that you, and of course Matthias, are tragically wrong about TinTin’s quality. I’m just saying.
Noah, it’s a safe bet: Tintin translations came out in Japan in ’68, along with Marxist riots. I can recall many heady nights out, drinking imported cognac with the Japanese Marxists, speaking of Tintin’s quality.
I’m not sure that Jane Austen’s not as if not more validated than Joyce. Emma always came up as “best work of English prose” in my undergrad days, though your larger point seems sound.
Nonetheless, speaking as an unreformed elitist hick, genre remains the NCAA Division I basketball of art.
Nah. Ulyssesis number 3. Middlemarch is the highest by a woman at 8. Emma is at 11, which is deeply wrong, since that’s nowhere near the best Austen novel.
Unfortunately, I don’t speak sports metaphor, so that last paragraph is completely uninterpretable.
There is no way literary critics in the last 50 years have typed more characters about Middlemarch than Orlando.
God spare us from Middlebrow Victorianists: he ruled out Heart of Darkness because it wasn’t long enough. I’m guessing that metric also doomed To the Lighthouse, Three Lives and The Bluest Eye (three good bets for the ladies), not to mention Catcher in the Rye.
Speaking of Philip K. Dick: interesting piece in the LA Times today. By Scott Timberg, called “A Plastic Paradox.”
OK, I’m wrong — cutoff point seems to be about 110 pages. He picks Beloved over the Bluest Eye, though, and that’s totally against prevailing opinion. He probably only knows it from the movie.
I hope you’re not hating on Middlemarch here. It’s like the Best Novel Ever. (Seriously, I love Middlemarch…maybe even more than Orlando.)
The last time I read Middlemarch I was also reading a lot of Georgette Heyer.
What’s this? –> “Lowbrow work (like Dashiell Hammett, say, or Philip K. Dick) has a much easier time earning critical cred if it’s lowbrow in a male way than if it’s lowbrow in a female way (like say, Georgette Heyer).”
Agatha Christie? Patricia Highsmith? Ursula Le Guin? Joanna Russ? What exactly do you mean that mystery and sci-fi are “lowbrow in a male way, hmm?”
Romance is not “lowbrow in a female way” – it is formulaic. I’d say that you were equating “formulaic” with “feminine” but I’m sure you could dig a bit among comics and find “lowbrow in a male way” genres that are actually mostly formulaic too.
Typical romance (as in not Austen or Bronte etc.) is devalued these days — although you can find plenty of work on Heyer from a culture-criticism slant — not because it’s female but mostly because it doesn’t hold up well over time. The mores it utilizes to pack its emotional punch are extremely tied to a particular historical moment. Go dig around in the Victorian Women’s Writers Project: it’s almost all romance, but it does not retain that powerful emotional affect now that Victorian social-sexual mores are no longer operative.
Ursula K. Le Guin I’ll give you. I don’t think Agatha Christie is actually especially critically validated even now.
As I said to Matthias recently, I don’t think romance is any more formulaic than contemporary literary fiction — or than modernism, for that matter. Stream of consciousness isn’t exactly unpredictable. And I do very much think that genre — in how it’s marketed, perceived, appreciated, and thought about — has a ton to do with gender.
“not because it’s female but mostly because it doesn’t hold up well over time.”
Come on. Books can be good or bad for various reasons, but the “great art lasts over time!” is just another hoary way of saying that the stuff you like is worthwhile and the stuff somebody doesn’t is bad without having to actually explain yourself. Canonical books don’t make any sense outside of their time period either. I mean, Antigone? What the hell does that mean to someone today — all her actions seem ridiculous. But it’s been decided that the book is important for various reasons, so people learn about the cultural background so they can understand it.
Plenty of romance retains an impact, from Shakespeare to Jane Austen. It’s not any more likely to lose its impact than anything else — which is to say, it’s fairly likely, since times change. But, yes, romance is treated less seriously than sci-fi or male pulp, (or than super-heroes?), and that has a lot to do with the gender with which it is associated.
This is kind of the same argument for us from a different perspective, isn’t it? You think art has intrinsic value/quality; I’m somewhat more skeptical.
Joanna Russ is probably more validated than Le Guin. I think the argument can be made that Russ’s work was so critically successful that she actually helped create the climate where other science fiction writers could receive more critical attention.
I think we might be on opposite sides here of where we usually are: you’re really insisting on this tight map between the gender of the readers and the gender of the work, to the point that gender is almost being treated as an intrinsic quality of the work itself.
Romance genre fiction doesn’t reference the formal, structural abstractions that characterize literary fiction: it references living, emotional cultural dynamics that are extremely historicized.
That very tight tie between the emotional framework and a particular cultural moment, particular cultural and psychological anxieties is what makes romance fiction GOOD and fun and satisfying to real women living in the real world. (Like me, I read plenty of it. It’s great in boring teleconferences. I’ve even written shipper fanfic.)
But it’s also what makes it NOT LITERARY. It is possible to make an intellectual distinction without making a value distinction too.
It’s critically shallow to elide the difference between Austen and, say, Jayne Ann Krentz. It’s not only unfair to Austen, it’s unfair to Jayne Ann Krentz who accomplishes an entirely different thing.
What you lose when you refuse intellectual distinctions and varied critical judgments because you read them as prejudiced is access to the mechanism that writers like Joanna Russ used to muck up the gender normativity of sci fi and make it possible for the genre to not only recognize but cultivate a literary strand as well as the more raw, pulpy one: if Joanna Russ had read sci-fi as “intrinsically” gendered rather than “incidentally” gendered, she never could have done what she did, which was to pick the genre apart using traditional critical tools and put it back together again in a way that completely defied the masculinity of the convention. In the process, she proved that it wasn’t science fiction that was gendered male; it was just the science fiction subculture. And in doing that, she opened up that subculture to the rest of us girls.
I don’t think that’s an argument about the inherent value of art. I think it’s an argument about the inherent value of diversity.
“Romance genre fiction doesn’t reference the formal, structural abstractions that characterize literary fiction: it references living, emotional cultural dynamics that are extremely historicized.
That very tight tie between the emotional framework and a particular cultural moment, particular cultural and psychological anxieties is what makes romance fiction GOOD and fun and satisfying to real women living in the real world. (Like me, I read plenty of it. It’s great in boring teleconferences. I’ve even written shipper fanfic.)”
I don’t disagree with any of that as far as genre fiction goes. I disagree with it as far as literary fiction goes. Why do you believe that “formal, structuralized abstractions” aren’t historicized? Why are they somehow outside history, while stories about relationships between people are culturally determined? You think modernism somehow found the key to the universe? Or did it rather meet particular people’s needs at a particular time? The Wasteland was “fun” for a certain group because it met historical and cultural needs, just as romance does for a different (though no doubt overlapping) group.
You realize that one of the discourses around sci-fi/fantasy recently is that they’re going to hell because they’re too female?
I don’t think any of this stuff is intrinsic — as in “romance is, was, and will always be female because God decided it when he created the universe.” It’s female because that’s what the culture has decided it is. You can mess with that and try to change it in various ways, certainly (though, along those lines, Russ probably has a lot less to do with sci-fi appealing to women than, say, Star Trek does.) But to deny that romance, as the genre is currently defined, is written largely by and for women, and that that is central to its tropes, its distribution, and its cultural position, seems willfully blind.
When did I say Jane Austen = Jayne Ann Krenz? Just because two writers work in the same genre or a similar genre doesn’t mean they have to be very much alike, in quality or in any other way. Jack L. Chalker and C.S. Lewis are very different writers, but they still both write SF.
Why do you believe that “formal, structuralized abstractions” aren’t historicized? Why are they somehow outside history, while stories about relationships between people are culturally determined?
Unfortunately I have to go get on one of those boring teleconferences, but quickly: I don’t think they’re “outside history”; I think they are deliberately constructed to take into account a longer timeframe of historical context and to privilege formal elements that aren’t as susceptible to the zeitgeist or to psychological anxiety. That’s why the literary reading of Antigone cares more about concepts like “ate” than it does about the fact that her actions don’t make emotional sense to 21st century readers.
A good book that does a nice job explaining the gendering of modernism and mass culture (including romance novels, but not sci-fi) is Andreas Huyssens “After the Great Divide.” The chapter entitled “Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism’s Other” should solve all of your problems in this debate (well…maybe not, but pretty close).
” I think they are deliberately constructed to take into account a longer timeframe of historical context and to privilege formal elements that aren’t as susceptible to the zeitgeist or to psychological anxiety.”
Right, I think that’s nonsense. Romance tropes are incredibly resilient and have been around several hundred years at least and appeal to enormous numbers of people; T.S. Eliot’s weird cut and paste allusive gobbledygook appeals to, comparatively, nobody, and has gone out of fashion after only 70 years or something. Yet Eliot is less historicized?
No, he’s just more culturally validated, for various reasons which have to do with, among other things, class and gender. Antigone’s lasted for historical and cultural reasons, not because Sophocles sat down and said, “yeah, I”m going to write this in a way that’s so open-ended that professors speaking languages I don’t understand or even imagine will still write about it on the internet, whatever that is.”
Eric…could you expound? I want my problems solved, but doubt I will read the book right away….
The chapter in question talks about how the moment of “modernism” (here defined by Flaubert at its outset–so its a continental modernism more than Anglo-American) is the moment in which “high culture” vs. “mass culture” is defined. In order to define high culture vs. mass culture, the former is defined as “masculine” and the latter as “feminine.” This happens specifically in Madame Bovary, wherein Emma is foolish, stupid, etc. for mistaking the “romance novels” she reads for a “real” possibility in her own life. Thus, her silly idealism (much like Don Quixote’s 200+ years previous…but crucially female now) is linked to her consumption of “mass commodities”–particularly romance novels. Flaubert’s well-known “formalism” (he wished to write a book about “nothing”–he claimed–just to focus on form) is constructed against these silly romance novels, then…even though his book could certainly be read as a “romance” of sorts (if a disappointed one). Clearly, we are meant to see Madame Bovary itself as NOT the kind of book Emma is reading. Rather, this book is “serious,” “realistic” and formally complex (formal complexity is, of course, the hallmark of “literature” for almost anyone who believes in detailing what makes “literature” “intrinsically better” than other kinds of texts). Huyssens then goes on to explain/describe how this splitting of culture into high/low is a specifically gendered move–linking elitism to sexism at its origin. THat’s about all I remember. I’ll send you a pdf of the chapter if I remember–I have one lying around somewhere.
It’s got problems. For instance, Virginia Woolf tries to define modernism AS feminism (and vice versa to some degree). For her, formal complexity, stream-of-consciousness, etc., is the way of getting at what is elusive (“life”) and that we perhaps need “a woman’s sentence” and “a woman’s sequence” (non-linear, no plot, etc.) in order to achieve it. She’s then willing to see Joyce and Proust (and Shakespeare) as fairly androgynous for her purposes (although she does have some reservations about both Joyce and Proust). The fact that Madame Bovary can be read as a fairly feminist novel itself (in its critique of Emma’s limited opportunities) also makes the division somewhat slippery.
Woolf’s attempt to define modernism as female contradicts the “Men of 1914” school (Eliot, Pound, Lewis, etc.)–but leads one in other directions (Mansfield, Dorothy Richardson) which problematize the Huyssens thesis. Still…it’s a pretty good essay.
Also, “novels” have been the most feminine of literary forms for quite some time (since the 18th century at least). Women read them and wrote them with little objection–when it was still considered more or less “impossible” for women to write great poetry. So…Woolf’s interest in fiction and only fiction (never wrote poetry of any kind) links her to the female tradition, even if her “modernism” might seem to link her to “high culture” (and therefore a kind of masculine sexism). Novels were always considered a kind of second-rate genre–ok for women, but not as “high” as men could aspire.
Dear M.–I’m not supporting these last notions, just explaining some prevailing historical beliefs.
That is helpful.
I think Woolf is interesting in several ways…not least because I think she’s often considered something of a secondary modernist (compared to Joyce, Eliot, Pound at least) and precisely because of her gender (and/or of the way that her gender is linked with her work.)
Joanna Russ is interesting too; she’s a much, much less well known and respected figure than Samuel Delaney, in a way that mirrors and is gendered analogously to the Joyce/Woolf division, I think.
Well, I don’t think Eliot is more culturally validated than romance fiction. I think he’s more critically validated than romance fiction.
I also don’t agree that romance is homogeneous over time. There are indeed high-level tropes, but they’re so high-level that they completely fail to capture what makes a good romance work for the readers engaging with it in a particular historical moment.
The Victorian romances housed in the Women’s Writers Project do not easily yield the same emotional experience as contemporary romance. I even find it difficult to go back to romance novels I read in the ’80s because the “eightiesness” of them disrupts the experience that I read them for. I can make it work, but it is a very different experience.
Literary fiction is aware of literary history in a very specific way that is part of the definition of “literary.” Insofar as genres speak to their own historical arcs, they do it differently from literature and with reference to a shorter timeframe and necessarily with a less varied toolbox of formal elements, because formal elements are so key to the definition of the genre.
Literary instances of genre fiction tend to reference that longer timeframe and utilize more of those diverse formal elements: Philip K. Dick, for example, frequently references Eliot’s themes and techniques throughout his work. He references Stendhal, and Finnegan’s Wake. He references them self-consciously, and he does it very deftly, and he does more than make “allusion” to them: he hybridizes and synthesizes them into a voice that is more his own than that of the genre. That’s why he gets critical attention. Not because he’s a man.
There was a time when critics did not recognize how much Dick was in conversation with literary history because they were prejudiced against genre. That time is past. But the commitment of literary critics to technique and structure and the conversation with literary history is still there, because if you don’t have critical standards to use as metrics you aren’t writing criticism. You can trouble those metrics, and you can peacefully exist without ever paying a minute’s attention to the literary subculture. But you can’t expect that subculture to validate your preferences and opinions if you ignore and dismiss their metrics.
Genre doesn’t have to be literature to be good. But it has to be literary to be literature. And it is always a fair question whether any given instance of genre fiction is literary or not. That’s what I saw in Suat’s challenge to “treat it like Chris Ware,” and the reaction against it as sexist — in 2010 — was absurd.
There was definitely a time when the standards of literary critics were biased against genre, against women, against all kinds of things. All those arguments against the very idea of literature originated in that time, and they are arguments which were entirely valid up into the 1970s but which the literary subculture, both critical and artistic, has been working, somewhat successfully, to change and trouble and complicate for decades now.
If you think that the challenges against literary standards from 50, or 25, or 10 years ago are still valid, without alteration, today, then you are the one arguing that literature is outside history. Good criticism is genre writing. It speaks to a cultural moment. And it has a really short shelf-life.
I did write this before Eric’s post popped into my inbox.
The basic idea holds true though: I don’t think that any of the issues here are particular “modernist”. Literary modernism was mostly over by 1965 and with the exception of creating an undergraduate syllabus, I don’t think literary critics are particularly enamoured of modernism at the expense of later work.
It used to be the case that Woolf was considered a secondary modernist. After the big uptick in Woolf studies coming out of the feminist movement (60s-70s), Woolf has progressively become more and more of a bona fide “major” modernist in most eyes, however. I think, at this point, very very few consider her secondary (maybe Hugh Kenner–if he’s still alive). The canon used to be referred to as “Beowulf to Virginia Woolf” after all (hopefully it goes past 1941 at this point!). F. R. Leavis established “The Great Tradition” in his book of that title (I think, if memory serves) many moons ago and he promoted D. H. Lawrence as the most important modernist. Woolf certainly gets more attention than Lawrence now! (in fact, some see it as time for a Lawrence revival). In fact, she’s right up there with Joyce and Eliot as “top modernists”–and most critically considered. So…while your sense of Woolf “used to be” right–I don’t think it is anymore. One of the big moves in modernist studies of late is to talk of “Modernisms” in an effort to break the notion of some kind of hegemonic monolith that IS “modernism” and to subject things like genre writing, working class writing, film, comics, etc. to the label…to turn it into less a “genre” and more of a temporal marker (like “Victorian”–which includes anything produced between 1832-1901, give or take). I’m not sure this was/is ultimately successful, but it does give a sense of where the academy is occasionally trying to move (away from canon, to some degree). Woolf, though, is one of our most studied figures…and she is still read by “common readers” (her term!) too…Joyce, less so.
Poor Katherine Mansfield on the other hand…
Sure, literary criticism is a genre too. So why isn’t literary fiction? Because it references earlier literary fiction? Georgette Heyer wasn’t referencing Jane Austen? Twilight uses literary references compulsively, from Romeo and Juliet to Austen to Bram Stoker, to name the most obvious. So is it timeless? Is it literary fiction?
I mean, your point is that literary fiction references literary fiction. I can’t argue with that. Does that make it more transhistorical and qualitatively superior? That’s an argument you can make if you’d like; I just don’t buy it.
Philip K. Dick is a weirdo, and one of my favorite authors ever. And, yeah, he writes in an extremely male mode in a lot of ways, both as a sci-fi writer and as a literary fiction writer, all of which explains in part why his treatment of women in his novels is so consistently and thoroughly dicey.
I also find your argument that the academy has dispensed with all possible bias against genre or women to be kind of humorous. Certainly that academy talks a good game. The follow through is not always as impressive, however.
“because if you don’t have critical standards to use as metrics you aren’t writing criticism.”
Oh, bullpucky. Lots of critics have argued that the kind of critical standards you’re talking about are nonsense. You can write formal analysis or cultural analysis which have nothing to do with qualitative evaluations, to name just two approaches.
One problem may be terminology? I think “literature” in the way that you’re using it is a fairly recent construction; post-Flaubert basically (if we’re using the critique Eric supplied.) Shakespeare and Austen in their own time were a lot closer to what we think of as genre literature than they were to what we think of as John Updike (if we have to think of him). You’re going back and saying that they were writing as if they were Flaubert and/or T.S. Eliot, and therefore making contemporary “literary fiction” a transhistorical phenomena that it never was.
Apparently I implied that Woolf was less than central to modernism. That wasn’t my intent. By the time I was studying modernism in the 1980s she was already considered a major figure.
I don’t think it’s new to consider “modernism” a temporal marker, either, or to move away from canonical texts. Modernism was already a “period” even by the time I was an undergraduate. I think if anything there’s a trend back toward the canon in academia due to the problems of the job market: while I was in graduate school in the 1990s, the PhD exam reverted back to a canonical, periodized model from the more theoretical one due to the fact that graduates with theory specializations had trouble finding jobs.
I read the trend toward plural “modernisms” as exactly the opposite from you: as an effort to make the term more of a genre — again — and less of a period, to rehabilitate its central themes and priorities against the classic critique by the plethora of posts, and make it a useful heuristic for reading texts from all periods, sort of the same way psychoanalysis is used.
I also think it’s worth making a distinction between academics — who have to specialize in periods and talk about what they mean and where they success and fail — with the “literary critic” writ large. It’s hard these days, because the populations have bifurcated into reviewers and academics, with not a lot in between, but I think it’s worth making some effort to separate out the need to make a syllabus and get tenure and define a sphere of critical inquiry for professional purposes from the impulse to say something thoughtful about culture and creative work.
Maybe Katharine Mansfield and Sherwood Anderson are off having tea together somewhere and bemoaning their fates.
Did you read that article in the LA Times on Dick? It was a delightful celebration of his weirdness.
I don’t dispute that literary fiction is a genre. I just dispute the idea that it’s sexist to look at other genres and ask how they might or might not belong to the literary genre too. Comparative genre criticism is not the devil incarnate.
Most of what bothers me about the intensely pro-genre perspective that so often pops up here is that it does not allow a fully reciprocal clash of perspectives: at its most consistent, it asks for each perspective to be validated on its own terms. At its worst, it expects literary fiction to bow to challenges from the genre perspective. It almost always cries foul when literary fiction challenges it.
The whole thing consequently feels like a gigantic cliquish power struggle, so that every description and all analysis is read as a assertion of relative value, power and quality. Here are Marcia and Jan with the divide down the center of the bedroom. Seriously, literature — even the old fashioned hegemonic version of it — is just not powerful enough anymore to warrant this kind of intense opposition.
Here’s a film example with less intense gender connotations. Thesis: Oklahoma, Cabaret, and Moulin Rouge evoke emotional responses in their audience and engage the history of their genre (musical theater) in meaningfully different ways than Testament of Orpheus, the 400 Blows and City of Lost Children (French art film). What do you think? Does that statement entail some qualitative difference in inherent worth?
Let’s use another word than standards if that is such a painful term. Let’s use heuristics, maybe. Literary fiction has certain defining heuristic parameters that are different from those of genre. You can’t write criticism without a heuristic perspective, and contemporary criticism in particular works by putting into play reciprocal clashes of heuristic perspectives.
Anything else is really self-validating. Criticism — and literature for that matter — is supposed to make you uncomfortable.
“At its worst, it expects literary fiction to bow to challenges from the genre perspective.”
Yep. I think the split between lit fic and genre has been a disaster for decent writing over the long term. I think the transhistorical modernist notion that literature is going to save us by making us uncomfortable or challenging us in some ahistorical way is largely nonsense.
“so that every description and all analysis is read as a assertion of relative value, power and quality.”
Yes, discussions about literature and culture are all shot through with assertions of power, value, and quality. That’s why people get excited about them, and why they’re enjoyable. If we’re talking about nothing, then why bother? (And, no, that doesn’t meant that we’re changing the world by engaging in them.)
“Criticism — and literature for that matter — is supposed to make you uncomfortable.”
According to who? And how come? Again, if my arguments are tired (and sure, they’ve been said before) this sort of “serious literature is difficult and tumultuous” thing is every bit as familiar.
And anyway, Twilight makes people a lot more uncomfortable than whatever wins the Pulitzer this year. But that’s not the right kind of discomfort, yes?
You’re not being strategic, either, by the way. Film did not become the cultural powerhouse that it is both in and out of the academy by rejecting the idea of art film. It cultivated a conversation between art film and popular cinema at every level…with the consequence that film criticism is just about the only criticism left that still has real cultural currency…
I think the split between lit fic and genre has been a disaster for decent writing over the long term.
Yeah, but decent writing is “what you like” and you don’t like anything that isn’t influenced by genre.
I could say just as easily that the recent obsession with genre has created a glut of pedestrian, pseudo-literary narrative fiction that isn’t nearly as much fun as either Nabokov or Joyce. It’s just a bunch of subjective aesthetic assertions.
Genre work in all media has a much greater influence on America’s economy and the culture than literature. It always has. And you can thank a lot of very literary people in the 1960s and 1970s, like Joanna Russ and Samuel Delany, for the fact that genre fiction is so much better and richer and less gender- and race-bound now than it was before their work.
Twilight does not make me uncomfortable, for the record, except for the fact that the vampire makeup in the movie makes Robert Pattinson look like he has a heart condition. Which I suppose is the point.
Two things…
1) I agree that adherence to genre is just as boring, if not more so, than adherence to “realism” or “formalism” or whatever (or we can call these things genre). If a text merely executes genre tropes repeatedly, I tend to find it kinda boring. Just as someone who repeats the Joycean/Faulknerian stream-of-consciousness style is now kind of boring. At the time, it was new and that helped make it interesting. Repetition of it is much less so. Likewise with tried-and-true sci-fi or romance tropes. The best books will at least jiggle with them a little–merely executing them “well” doesn’t do it for me. I won’t say that they are “intrinsically” bad for doing so…but, for me, this is a problem with genre and “literary” writing alike. These days, when as soon as something is successful or interesting, it can be imitated to death within a year or two, it makes writing or producing something really “new” or interesting very difficult, but I still like to think it’s something to shoot for. Yes…I know the Greeks were already complaining that everything had already been said and done.
2) Re: The Huyssens argument. He’s a Marxist, so he’s interested in breaking down the mass/high culture divide from a class perspective, as well as a gendered one. He sees “postmodernism” as an interesting attempt to do so (since pomo works, at least initially, shot to be both bestsellers and to be formally experimental—I always think of Fowles’ French Lieutenant’s Woman, which is both romance/mystery Victorian novel and experimental–and it sold well and had critical cache–etc.). In the end, though, I think Huyssens argues that postmodernism fails in its “promise” to challenge these divisions. I think it ends up being right about this…”literary fiction” and even “postmodernism”–end up as a niche market–not part of or in conversation with the mass market.
Yeah, I can see that argument going to “postmodernism has been reassimilated.”
That’s really what I was getting at when I said that criticism has a short shelf life: because there’s this constant back and forth conversation, creative work responds to criticism and criticism has to change to the new conditions.
Any second now, Noah is going to accuse you of being teleological in that 1), Eric.
Noah, how _do_ you get out of the teleology vs. repetition cycle in your very pro-Genre aesthetics?
I don’t feel like you’re pro-repetition, but teleology is a monster critical bugaboo of the same ilk as all the other “transcendent postulates” you oppose…
–c
“Yeah, but decent writing is “what you like” and you don’t like anything that isn’t influenced by genre.”
But I love Nabokov! And Kafka, and Woolf…and Eliot, for that matter. Not to mention Shakespeare…or does he count as influenced by genre now?
“And you can thank a lot of very literary people in the 1960s and 1970s, like Joanna Russ and Samuel Delany, for the fact that genre fiction is so much better and richer and less gender- and race-bound now than it was before their work.”
Right…everything good in genre fiction is the result of literature; to the extent that film is decent, it’s because art film saved the genre crap…etc. etc., same old song.
Samuel Delaney and Joanna Russ are neither better nor richer than H.G. Wells or Robert Louis Stevenson or C.S. Lewis or, for that matter, than Hugh Lofting — quite the contrary I’d argue, though I like both Delaney and Russ well enough. The idea that sci-fi was genre crap until the sexy writers of the 70s saved it is just not true.
Russ and Le Guin and folks like that did add an interest in gender that wasn’t around before in quite that way in sf, which is something I like and which I appreciate. But I don’t really see why that means I have to like Dan Clowes.
Oh, holy crap, I can answer one of your questions with an actual reference to comics!
Who says should be uncomfortable?
Jerry Moriarty! He said at SPX that when he puts a mark on the page, it’s stupid and he’s stupid, and it’s difficult and he has to work at it and he doesn’t know what it’s all about, and then he makes more marks, and he thinks about what the art has to say, and he “gets smart with the art.”
It was honestly the best lecture on art I’ve ever heard.
That’s what I mean by uncomfortable. You are confronted by this thing, and it doesn’t validate your assumptions, it makes you feel stupid and not quite right, and then you think about it and work with it, and it starts to open up to you, and you “get smart with the art,” and you come out the other end somewhere else from where you started.
“Right…everything good in genre fiction is the result of literature; to the extent that film is decent, it’s because art film saved the genre crap…etc. etc., same old song.”
Oh, come on. Russ and Delany would have said at the time that they were working in genre.
BOTH are good. BOTH are necessary. Both perspectives, both subcultures. It’s a CONVERSATION. Which is why it is so annoying when the literary side of the conversation gets bullied by the genre folks. They don’t need to be such exclusionary cliques.
Such a feminine thing, conversation.
I mean, sure, that’s one model. But why couldn’t you just as easily say, “art is what gives you a sense of rightness and stability and connection to the past?” Gothic cathedrals, anyone? Seeing art as the challenge at the heart of life is just a culturally determined set of nodes — romanticism, modernism, etc. etc. Basically it just means you want art to be your religion in a particular way — which is fine, but that’s not my church.
I don’t see why I have any particular problem with teleology…but perhaps you can explain further?
The short version sans homework is that teleology is the idea that art is “goal oriented”, on it’s way through time to perfection. It’s classical in origin obviously and referred to the Aristotelian Forms and the Great Chain of Being, and subsequently it’s one of those Big Transcendent Principles of Traditional Western Religion and Art — Christ’s blood cleansing us, humans elevated above the beasts, Art serving a privileged human purpose, continually advancing toward some perfect artistic Form. It’s sort of this goal-bound “arrow of progress” toward an ideal state. I’ve always thought of it as the epitome of the “transcendent thing.”
The poststructuralists knocked the dialectic as teleological and a lot of post-Marxist work has been trying to rehabilitate the dialectic from charges of teleology, to various degrees of success.
That said, the poststructural opposition to teleology is one of the principles that motivated all that circular postmodern literary fiction that (I think) you also dislike. That’s why I was wondering where you stand on it: it’s seems only tangentially at play for you but you definitely react against other flavors of transcendence so it didn’t seem entirely irrelevant.
No, no; I know what teleology is (my master’s thesis was about it, more or less.) I just don’t see why it should be a problem for me. I don’t think art is improving or degenerating particularly; I don’t think history is going anywhere or progressing. I don’t really see why that matters in terms of whether I think there’s something called “literature” which is or is not bound by genre conventions, though.
You’re also somewhat confused about my take on transcendence. I’m not against it. I think it’s necessary to have in order to have values or make judgments, in fact. I dislike your elevation of art because it’s materialist, not because it’s transcendent.
You said: But why couldn’t you just as easily say, “art is what gives you a sense of rightness and stability and connection to the past?”
You can. That’s very conservative — reminds me of Breakfast at Tiffany’s when they give him the ring from the crackerjack box to engrave — but it’s certainly one of several possible versions of those heuristic perspectives.
It does not, however, give you-the-critic as much room to play as Jerry’s version, because it’s got a thesis already in it. Art as “uncomfortableness” lets you figure out how it’s uncomfortable and interesting on a case by case basis. If you start with “rightness with the past”, you’re always going to be comparing/contrasting against that past you’re feeling continuity with…
You did call me out on asserting a transcendence for art in the last iteration of this, though, didn’t you? I’ll have to read it again…
Do you distinguish between materialism and dialectical materialism?
Aha! Knew you’d go to utility.
If it’s just a “well this is more fun for the critic” argument, it’s a little empty though, isn’t it? And even by those standards, why do you assume that it’s less fun/useful to measure against the past than to explore the fluctuating disequpoise of your own navel? T.S. Eliot wrote a fair amount of decent criticism from this conservative perspective; didn’t seem to slow him down any.
Yes, I felt you were ascribing transcendence to art, which I think leaves you in a materialist mess, since art isn’t actually transcendent. I’m not really distinguishing between materialism and dialectcal materialism because my Hegel is too weak to allow me to do so, basically. (Can’t even spell dialesghpo, as it turns out.)
I didn’t say it was more fun. I said it gave you more room. Room in the sense that your starting presupposition does not dictate your outcome as much.
I think each is internally consistent: a more open starting point leads to a more varied criticism; a more closed starting point leads to a more pointed criticism.
But again — I think the approach that ends up with more diversity is better.
Earlier I said and you objected to defining one of the genre conventions of literature as having this progressive relationship with past literature. You took me to mean that literature has a referential relationship and I agree that most writing period has that. I think for literature mere reference is insufficient. I think it’s instead that dialectical creation of “the new” — new voice, new technique, etc. — that Eric describes. It’s also in that process I mentioned with regards to how Dick and Russ re-imagine and remake the previous framework.
You have to be willing to say either that the dialectic is not teleological or that teleology is ok for that to work, if you’re anti-teleology, which I thought you were. I do think of teleology as transcendent, but I am also anti-teleology; I don’t think the dialectic is either teleological or transcendent. Teleology and the dialectic are two different alternatives to nihilism: the dialectic being materialist and teleology being transcendent.
To get any further than that I’ve got to go back and more accurately sort out where you stand on transcendence…
Hm. I’m surfing through the old thread and I’m a little stuck. Maybe you can say what’s wrong with materialism?
“But again — I think the approach that ends up with more diversity is better.”
But then shouldn’t you actually be advocating for lots of different approaches? Why not let some people do one and some the other? If the point is to have proliferating criticisms, why would you attempt to privilege one over the other?
“I think it’s instead that dialectical creation of “the new” — new voice, new technique, etc. — that Eric describes.”
Yeah, I don’t agree with that. New things can be great; things that aren’t new can be lovely as well. And, again, Twilight is actually a much, much weirder revision of tropes than, say, Kavalier and Clay. Which is why it makes people uncomfortable (sparkly vampires!) I enjoy that about it, though I don’t think it necessarily makes it better than, say, Anthony Trollope, who never felt it incumbent upon him to do anything especially new.
Hey Caro. Can I get back to you? I may try to write a post about it…but in any case I need to scurry off and won’t be able to continue this probably till next week.
But it’s been fun as always!
I am kind of ok with saying that Twilight is better than Trollope.
I don’t advocate against the existence of different approaches. I advocate against the sort of bullying that says that what Suat and Matthias said is sexist and they shouldn’t have said it.
It’s not sexist. Saying it’s sexist works against the diversity that terms like “sexist” are meant to oppose. As you rightly pointed out, they weren’t trying to shut anybody down — unlike M., who was.
There’s this idea that “art whatever” is so powerful a discourse that anybody who deploys it will always inhabit the more powerful position and anybody who doesn’t dismiss it in favor of (the weaker category) genre is somehow by definition trying to leverage an insidious power structure to silence other viewpoints.
The absolute opposite of that may be just as false, but relative power disparities between artistic subcultures do not operate according to the same logic as relative power disparities in politics. The gendering of art is a metaphor. It is a materialist metaphor, with empirical referents and a history, but it is still made of metaphor. And metaphor can subvert it. Art can subvert its own gendering with much less difficulty that a person can.
That’s where we really disagree, I think — on the “right” way to kick back at power. We sort of covered this before with how much I dislike Lester Bangs. I’ll never accept that all this snark and attitude and “locked rooms” and cliquishness and fetishization of binary difference is productive. It diffuses the feeling of being on the wrong side of the power dynamic, but it doesn’t actually confront it. It ossifies rather than transforming. I think Joanna Russ’s subversive response is better, because it hybridizes and creates more diversity, not less.
All this binary power stuff — art/pulp, male/female — is severely reductive. Binaries themselves have almost always been thought of as gendered male, and, largely because of my feminism, I think both poles of the binaries are likely false in most instances. But the most developed versions of the “art” perspective tend to be underrepresented here — in contrast, say, to film criticism — probably because art comics are very young.
When critics start to explore those perspectives, the subculture disengages. Who exactly has the power there?
Oh, new post. I’m sorry.
Yes, you can get back to me; of course. Looking forward to it.
Argh; now I want to respond…but must stop. I’ll pick it up again later….
Noah, did you think M’s paraphrase of the comments was accurate? Or even close to accurate? To me it seemed so far off that the “snark” became useless. It was more like, yes, if the fellows in question had said something rather different, than she really would have got them.
This is always my objection to internet snark, Tom…rarely does it actually confront what people are actually saying. Snark is fine on SNL or something—since everyone knows that the point is to mock not to engage (it’s not a dialogue after all). Internet comments threads (and etc.) seem to be about engaging/discussing—but the snark turns it into a skit for laughs.
And gothic cathedrals are great…but less so if you built one now. Their greatness is linked to when they were built, for what purpose, etc. Art is always related to its historical moment–
Sorry that these two blurbs have no relation to one another (although they do intersect with the posts above somewhere)
I thought it was accurate in the way a mean-spirited caricature would be accurate, I guess. I could recognize the people she was talking about even though they don’t actually look like that.
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I thought she was so far off. The equivalent from the other side would be someone saying “Yeah, and if you don’t like Georgette Heyer you’re sexist,” except that paraphrase would be a bit more accurate.
Fascinating conversation. I lost track, but did pick up this from Caro:
“Most of what bothers me about the intensely pro-genre perspective that so often pops up here is that it does not allow a fully reciprocal clash of perspectives: at its most consistent, it asks for each perspective to be validated on its own terms. At its worst, it expects literary fiction to bow to challenges from the genre perspective. It almost always cries foul when literary fiction challenges it.”
This is kind of what I was trying to say with my initial, slightly snarky remark — only put much better — before the whole thing went off the rails.
Thanks for your comments, Caro, Tom and Noah. I’ve tried to answer M. over on her blog and hope it has cleared the air, though that remains to be seen.
At the end of the day, the good outweighed the bad in that discussion, so I’m happy with it, and even more with following this one, even if I’ve only managed to do so spottily.