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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   33056 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 24, 2023

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The decline of the Literary Bloke: "In featuring just four men, Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists confirms what we already knew: the literary male has become terminally uncool."

Just some scattered thoughts.

The Great Literary Man is no longer the role model he once was. The seemingly eternal trajectory outlined by Woolf has been broken. The statistics are drearily familiar. Fewer men read literary novels and fewer men write them. Men are increasingly absent from prize shortlists and publishers’ fiction catalogues. Today’s release of Granta’s 20 best young British novelists – a once-a-decade snapshot of literary talent – bottles the trend. Four of the 20 on the list are men. That’s the lowest in the list’s 40-year history. In its first year, 1983, the Granta list featured only six women.

It has to be pointed out that any such "great upcoming young novelists" list must be comprised of mostly women, out of necessity. Otherwise the organizers of the list would be painted as sexist and privileged and out of touch and it would probably jeopardize their careers. You don't even need to reach for the more subtle types of criticisms that revisionists make of the traditional canon: "yeah, I know like you feel you were just judging works solely on literary merit, and you just so happened to collect a list of 100 deserving authors where 99 of them are men, but actually you were being driven by subconscious patriarchal bias and you need to escape from your historically ossified perspective and so on and so forth". What's going on now in the publishing industry is far more overt: "it's time to hand the reins over to women, period". In such a cultural context, how could a list of the "20 best young British novelists" be taken as unbiased evidence of anything?

The irrelevance of male literary fiction has something to do with “cool”. A few years ago Megan Nolan noted – with as much accuracy as Woolf on these men in Mrs Dalloway – that it might be “inherently less cool” to be a male novelist these days. Male writers, she continued, were missing a “cool, sexy, gunslinger” movement to look up to. All correct.

It's true that literary fiction is not as cool as it once was, although this in itself is not a great moral catastrophe. It's part of the natural cycle of things. The "cool" things now are happening in TV, film, video games, and comic books. When was the last time a literary fiction author of either gender captured the imaginations of millions of people the way Hajime Isayama did? The literary novel is not eternal (many will argue that historically speaking, it's a relatively recent invention) and it is not inherently superior to other narrative art forms.

The decline of male literary fiction is not down to a feminist conspiracy in publishing houses

Correct, it's not a conspiracy, but only because there is nothing conspiratorial about it. If you were to ask any big (or small!) publishing house if they gave priority to voices from traditionally marginalized groups, they would say yes. If you were to then ask them if women are a traditionally marginalized group, they would say yes.

...

It's not a conspiracy if they just tell you what they're doing!

The most understanding account of male literary ambition was written by a woman.

There's been a meme for some time that goes something like, "men don't understand women, but women understand men - maybe even better than men do themselves", which I find to be quite obnoxious. If there is any "misunderstanding", then it surely goes both ways. There are plenty of things in the male experience that have no natural analogue in the female experience, same as the reverse.

Although wokism has certainly a significant impact on the nature and demographics of modern fiction, it is not the only problem. Another problem, it seems to me, is that more and more modern writers have limited life experience outside of the realm of intellectuality. There have always been highly intellectual writers, of course, but fiction has also greatly benefitted from being pollinated by the works of adventurers and all sorts of other weird rugged characters. I think that there is a similar problem in Hollywood. Many modern movies seem like they are made by people who have lived their whole lives inside the LA celebrity scene.

Literary fiction is very poorly defined anyway. Do works like The Iliad, The Divine Comedy, and Paradise Lost, which depict supernatural events, count as literary fiction? Is Moby Dick literary fiction, or is it an adventure novel? How about White Fang? Is Wuthering Heights literary fiction or is it a weird tale / horror novel? Is Huckleberry Finn literary fiction or is it a young adult novel? Sometimes what should technically probably be called genre fiction becomes so famous and revered over time that even people who care about the supposed genre fiction / literary fiction divide call it literary fiction. Is the notion of literary fiction anything other than a snobby term meant to evoke status differences?

Moby-Dick is 100% literary fiction. Melville wrote it after years of mainlining New England literature and Biblical culture. At the time of writing he was contributing to literary magazines and complaining to Nathaniel Hawthorne:

What I feel most moved to write, that is banned,—it will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the other way I cannot.

I think this…intentionality…is what separates literary fiction from the rest. Melville is openly writing to convey something he feels deeply and passionately. This is not a substitute for craft, but a complement, as he pays great attention to the spiraling structure and the atmosphere. More importantly, though, it’s part of a conversation with the literary community of the time. He is making use of a common cultural context to compress even more into an already dense book.

The end result is a book that benefits from study in a way that mass-market fiction generally does not. There are countless classics which are better as romances, as adventures, as entertainment. Literary fiction has to ask of the reader something a little different.

There is plenty of so-called genre fiction that is written to convey things that the authors feel deeply and passionately, so it seems to me that maybe the author's passion is not enough to distinguish literary fiction? By the standard of passion, for example, a lot of sci-fi should be considered literary fiction, yet many aficionados of literary fiction would probably object to that.

The literary fiction vs genre fiction distinction isn’t that useful. I mean, I know it when I see it, but I don’t get all uptight about keeping genre fiction segregated from “pure” literary works. Works of surpassing quality can certainly include elements of “genre” fiction too, e.g. fantasy or sci-fi settings.

If there is a distinction that I would choose to maintain, it would be the distinction between works of art vs mere products.

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