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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   33049 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.

I'm inclined to agree with the author. Literary fiction is incredibly uncool. I don't know who any of the people he mentions are. I guess I've heard of John Green and The Fault in Our Stars but only in the sense that I knew it existed and that I wasn't interested in it. I might've heard snide comments at its expense. The only thing I know about Infinite Jest is that one of my friends left it around ostentatiously and we mostly thought he was being a pseud, trying to show off. I noticed his bookmark wasn't advancing very far, week by week.

If men cannot dominate the literary landscape, cannot walk into lists like Granta’s, deservingly or not, they will look for other landscapes to colonise.

If men don't want to occupy this landscape, who cares? Literary fiction is not valuable real estate. Let's colonize some other landscapes!

I'll stick with my lowbrow translated Chinese novels, writing from Royalroad and Spacebattles Forums or various webnovels. The prose and editing isn't great but there is some kind of conflict, there are interesting mechanical ideas that people use to achieve their goals. It's almost universally written by men and they usually have no filter preventing them from writing whatever they want, Chinese censorship aside.

I'll add the caveat that forcibly homogenizing things like sci-fi or fantasy to make them more and more palatable to women is bad (or goes against my interests at least). But this article is talking about literary fiction specifically.

they usually have no filter preventing them from writing whatever they want, Chinese censorship aside.

On SB?

No, the translated Chinese novels. On second thought, there is a fair bit of censorship on SB too, but then you just pick another forum like AO3 or whatever.

Well for SB apparently now Questionable Questing is no longer merely a pit of degeneracy.

What do you mean?

The rare few times QQ comes up on SB it's just mentioned as the place where people write NSFW stuff.

It has a SFW section, and some authors put their SFW stories in the NSFW since it's more popular (which leads to frustration among readers). E.g. Beware of Chicken and Virtuous Sons are also posted on QQ, as does Ack.

With This Ring has moved solely to Questionable Questing, after a serious of hilarious events at Sufficient Velocity, and is SFW. (cw: giant archive.)

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