Literary Credentials

Let me trot mine out so we all know where I’m coming from.  I’ve got a bachelors degree in English Literature, from a fine New England based liberal arts college.  I stymied the English Department there because half-way through my sophomore year, I’d already run through all of the English elective course they offered and in order to graduate with that particular degree, I needed more points in my core curricula.  The solution was to allow me to take graduate-level courses and even to make up some of my own independent study classes.  One such was learning Anglo-Saxon, which allowed me the treat of reading some of the earliest ”English” literature in the original;  I even managed to puzzle my way through some of the Icelandic sagas.

I also spent time abroad, studying at an associated school nestled in the Cotswolds region of the UK, where I was drowned in Shakespeare, Chaucer and Kipling. (The school maintains the C.S. Lewis library, so I had a bit of exposure to him as well.)

I was fortunate enough to have a very liberal faculty adviser.  I was lucky when they drew lots and ended up with the head of the English department, a man who was also a member of the World Future Society, which helped me greatly.  He understood that genre science fiction was literature too, even if the school didn’t offer a class in it, and despite the fact that it was looked down on at the time.   (We were still in the ‘oh, that Buck Rogers stuff’ era.)

I ran a small literary magazine while at school, wrote feature exposes for the school newspaper, received a grant for publishing a science fiction semi-prozine and was generally regarded as an L’Enfant terrible’ of the campus.  I was one of some 30 students selected to attend that overseas school, helped my adviser organize and run a WFS conference that featured Frederick Pohl as the guest speaker, wrote fiction and (‘gasp’) poetry at night and even smoked a pipe for a while.  I had a 4.0 in my core (until a disastrous run-in with a professor who didn’t agree with my views on H.L. Menken.  At least that was her excuse.  In reality she resented the presence of an undergraduate in her class and was apoplectic over my term paper.  I’d proposed to interview several of Menken’s surviving colleagues from the American Mercury Magazine and she never thought I could get the interviews.  Of course I did, but its never a good thing to put one over on your professor.)

I never went on for  my Masters or Doctorate for a variety of reasons, but the above should illustrate that I was educated in at least the basics of literary criticism, had plenty of opportunity to be ‘exposed’ to the seminal works and applied what I had been taught in a variety of different ways.

 The main thing I learned is that literary criticism is a crock.

Calling it a crock doesn’t mean that its entirely without justification or value.  Before you can begin to discuss the merits of one piece of art versus another, you’ve got to agree on the symbols you’re going to use. 

The symbols that have been settled on over the years are psychological, mythological, philosophical and historical.  All of those symbol sets have at least one thing in common – they’re all ’squishy’ sciences.  They all rely on their own internal sets of relatively defined symbols.  None of them are hard in the sense that you can’t convert those symbols into solid, measurable numbers.

This makes internal sense because the way we react to art is subjective.  The phrase “arts & sciences” itself reflects a clearly recognized divide between the subjective and objective.

All of this is prefatory to my main point which is this:  ultimately, the definition of what is good and what is bad, or what is merely mediocre, comes down to the weight of personal opinion.  Perhaps I should say ‘influential personal opinion’. 

If one could somehow brainwash all of the highly respected critics and all of the academics who supposedly inform our own opinions about what is art and what is trash, what would the result be?  Suppose we were to make them all believe that Peanuts and Buck Rogers were the epitome of literary evolution.  What would they do?

First, they’d go back and find the literary antecedents, analyzing the historical record.  They’d find themes and examples of precursors.  They’d write tomes dedicated to justifications of this, that or the other literary theory.  And all of it would be scholarly, seemingly logical and, to those studying literature, it would all make sense.  High Schools would start offering elective classes in Peanuts and Space Opera, Oprah would pick the ball up and run with it.

There’d be nothing inherently wrong with doing so either because all that would have really changed would have been the nature and value of the various meaningless symbols that were used to analyse everything. 

What would happen on the street?  Not much.  The intelligentsia would happily go along with the new symbology, adopt it as their own and they’d feel smart and justified in turning up their noses at whatever low-brow crap the popular market was serving up.

Low-brow crap would still dominate, both in popular acceptance and economically and the vast majority of people who occasionally read a book, watch a movie or follow a TV show would hardly notice the change. 

Which is why I take issue with the concept of trying to turn science fiction into a “literary genre”.  Those serving the market are barking up the wrong tree.  What needs to be addressed is not what the authors are turning out.  We need to change the symbology that the hoity-toity are using.  If you want to turn Dune into the SF equivalent of Moby Dick, all you have to do is convince a bunch of high school English teachers that it IS Moby Dick and, poof, one generation later it will be. 

Forget changing the genre into what you think the academics will accept and start trying to change the academics.  We all know the genre has already produced some fine literary classics.  This is proof positive that science fiction is already capable of being ‘literary’.  The problem does not lie with the literature itself.  It lies with an outmoded perception of what the genre is.

Besides, its impossible to successfully change the literature.  The academic bar itself keeps changing and shifting; the target being aimed at will no longer be there when the missile arrives.  The best you can hope to achieve is a game of catch-up.