Writing: Genre and Literature

 Dear Reader, I write here often about the slippage between literature and genre. I am not good at respecting the distinction. I like following Joan Jett on blurring lines.  This may not be so much a brave stance as much as proof of me not knowing what I am talking about.

If Charles Dickens is literature, then what about the detective story of The Mystery of Edwin Drood? Isn't William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom, a detective story also? Do I discount Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five for its science fiction elements?

One more item as a preamble: I just do not get Thomas Pynchon. I got to read him in prison after hearing about him for years. Not that I do not want to understand what is all the hoopla, which is why I read something like “Inherent Vice, Bleeding Edge, and Thomas Pynchon’s Hardboiled.". Yes, it is an academic paper, albeit one that is not completely buried under incestuous jargon:

A consensus seems to be emerging that the dominant literary develop-
ment of the 21st century is exactly the sort of process outlined by Formal -
ism and polysystem theory. Elements of marginal, non-canonized genres
have been adopted by canonical writers, and embraced by the institutions
involved in policing literary boundaries, while whole genres, previously
considered to be beyond the pale, have begun to migrate towards the
center(s) of the literary polysystem. Tim Lanzendörfer has recently pro-
posed the term “‘détente’ fiction” to describe the results of this process,
a form of contemporary literary writing that rejects a sterile bifurcation
between high and low culture (3). Similarly, Theodore Martin has identi-
fied an earnest engagement with genre as a key feature of 21st-century lit-
erature (7–8). Examples abound, such as Colson Whitehead’s 2016 The
Underground Railway, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the
National Book Award, but also the Arthur C. Clarke Award for the best
SF novel by combining a realistic slave narrative with elements of fantasy, science fiction, and alternate history.4 Similarly, Nobel Prize winner
Kazuo Ishiguro’s most recent works include a dystopian science fiction
novel (Never Let Me Go, 2005) and a piece of historical fantasy (The
Buried Giant, 2015). It seems that we are now prepared to recognize that
serious works of literature, worthy of popular and critical attention and
our most prestigious accolades, can involve or even rely on substantial
elements of genre fiction.

We live in a corrupted world - unless one is Pangloss and this is the best of all possible worlds - which means crime should exist in our fiction. Hester Prynne committed a crime that led to her wearing a scarlet A. Oliver Twist meets several criminals, witnesses several crimes. Early on I had an idea born out of exposure to the 1898 lynching in Versailles, Indiana, I set it aside when I felt unable to compete with William Faulkner, only to take it up much to my surprise when I was in prison, and it is a two-fold crime story: the gang terrorizing the county and the county's refusal to indict anyone for the gang's lynching. These crimes tell us about ourselves and our society.

The investigator lets us into the different strata of society, exposes us to a range of characters. I am drawn to this discussion of Pynchon for that very reason:

Jameson has argued that one of the main achievements of the hard-
boiled is its ability to “to bring us up short, without warning, against the
reality of death itself, stale death, reaching out to remind the living of
its own moldering resting place” (87). In Pynchon’s hardboiled we are
brought up short not only by the presence of death, but by a fundamen-
tal, inescapable wrongness, against which the investigator is powerless.
Bleeding Edge ends as Tarnow watches her children go to school, leav-
ing behind the “precarious light” of childhood’s grace and entering “the
indexed world” (476). For all her investigative talents, for all her quiet
heroism, there is nothing she can do about what is going to happen to
them and the world they live in. The last line of the novel (and what may
come to stand as the last line of Pynchon’s published body of work) is an
open admission of this powerlessness: “She can watch them into the ele -
vator at least” (477). The conclusion of Inherent Vice similarly confronts
readers with the limits of investigation. Sportello has solved a series of
interconnected mysteries, and deflected the attention of the Golden Fang
from a number of vulnerable people. Yet the novel ends not with triumph
but with Sportello driving through the fog, waiting for it “to burn away,
and for something else this time, somehow, to be there instead” (369).
Both Inherent Vice and Bleeding Edge offer their readers a hardboiled vi-
sion of a fallen world in which the persistence of hope, however tenuous
and unjustified, is the only recourse — even for a private eye.

 I may have a better idea of the attraction others find in Pynchon having read this article. It may be he and I see the world differently, that what concerns him I have come to through others and find him less a novelty. Still, he points the way for incorporating the popular and the literary. I do not see how, if literature is to have relevance to reality, it can ignore the concerns of genre fiction. Justice and guilt are part of our real world.

About the hard-boiled detective, The Myth of the Private Eye: In Search of Hidden Truth makes a point I think relevant here:

...But along the way he has learned that in modern society guilt is pervasive and diffuse: he can’t defeat it all: no one can. The Grail he pursues can’t be fully realized. The modern urban Wasteland and its ailing potentates can’t be decisively healed or revivified. Thus, as George Grella concludes, in effect “the hard-boiled novel inverts the conventions of both the whodunnit and the romance.” The hero’s victory is compromised, the state of “innocence” is not restored, and guilt persists: Eden is irrevocably lost, or if not lost, it is merely internalized in one lone figure whose code enables him to walk down mean streets without being himself mean, in search of a truth that he alone knows and values. He is, we might say, a romance hero inhabiting a world devoid of romance. His stance toward this world is thus tenuous and elegiac. His only real victories are inner ones, and even these are often rendered hollow, fruitless, gained at too great a cost. And yet he persists in the arduous search for hidden truth.

Seems to me, the form presents a dialectic between society and the individual. Which is a very American dialectic. 

This may be the place to point out an earlier interest in pulp fiction as literature, Is it a Crime?

Stein delves into the pulp genre in her essay, “What Are Master-pieces and Why Are There So Few of Them,” while ruminating on literature and its aims. Or rather, she gives the reader a sampling of her theory in support of the crime story as literature; as a subset of something new awakening in American culture: whether it—the country, the populace—was aware of it, or not.

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We might consider how this relates to writers such as Dashiell Hammett, author of The Maltese Falcon, who straddles the line between literature and pulp fiction. In “Making ‘Literature’ of It: Hammett and High Culture,” Mark McGurl makes the case for Hammett’s literary situation— as in where his work is situated in relation to “highbrow” literature and crime fiction. Hammett’s writerly efforts elevated pulp fiction to an art, in conversation with modernism. McGurl posits:

Admired by such [writers] as André Gide, André Malraux and Stein, Hammett’s fiction echoes the more obviously elite modernism whose central texts he appreciated and discussed even as he continued to sell his work to the pulp audience. His work shows us both what modernism looks like to mass culture and what mass culture looks like to modernism, without canceling the relative autonomy of these two discourses.

Hammett even says in a letter to Blanche Knopf: “Some day somebody’s going to make ‘literature’ of it,” referring to the detective story, and its nascent, yet-to-be-revealed potential. Indeed, Stein not only admired the genre from afar, she made her own attempts at the detective story. According to Brooks Landon, Stein wrote “a short play, ‘Three Sisters Who Are Not Sisters,’ a curious 80-page short novel, Blood On the Dining-Room Floor, an impenetrable thirty-page piece enigmatically titled ‘Subject Cases: The Background of a Detective Story,’ and several other short works with detective themes or subjects.”

Taking a different genre, Liu Cixin in his afterword to The Three Body Problem, claims the science fiction novel as representing the social novel. Wasn't society the territory of Balzac and Thomas Hardy and William Faulkner and John Dos Passos?