Collapsing Genres
More and more, contemporary writers are rejecting the stratification of literature into "literary" fiction and "genre" fiction. It used to be (and to a great extent still is) that "serious" writers didn't bother with mysteries, science fiction, romances, westerns, or children's books. The cynicism of postmodernism kept any writer from creating an ordered world where things make sense, and genre fiction demands an orderly world. How can it be a real mystery if you can't figure out the truth? What most readers like about genre fiction is that it posits a world where, once all the facts are in, everything makes sense, the good guys are rewarded, and the bad guys are punished. Literary fiction often denies readers those comforts, scorning such ideas as naive and unrealistic.
But some contemporary writers object to the snobbishness that has grown from this separation, and are making a concerted effort to show that genre fiction can be "literary" as well. Joyce Carol Oates was one of the first to deliberately cross the divide, with novels such as A Bloodsmoor Romance (1982) and The Mysteries of Winterthurn (1984). During the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, the "comic book" became the "graphic novel," as writers such as Will Eisner, Art Spiegelman, Daniel Clowes, and Harvey Pekar used the comic book form to write about "literary" subjects such as tenement life, concentration camps, cancer, and coming of age. And as the 21st century goes along, more writers are deliberately rejecting the restrictions of "literary" fiction to branch out. As Lev Grossman says in "Pop Goes the Literature," "One of the interesting things about the present moment in U.S. literary history is that the tough, fibrous membrane that used to separate literary fiction from popular fiction is rupturing. The highbrow and the lowbrow, once kept chastely separate, are now hooking up, which is why we have great, funky, unclassifiable writers like Margaret Atwood, Neal Stephenson, Susanna Clarke and David Mitchell" (Time, Dec. 17, 2004).
Michael Chabon has been the most vocal of the writers campaigning to break down the barriers between literary and genre fiction. He recruited writers from both camps to contribute stories to McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales and followed up that collection of stories with another, McSweeney's Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories. In the Introduction to the first of these, he bemoans the fact that contemporary fiction has become so emotionally arid and predictable: "the contemporary, quotidian, plotless, moment-of-truth revelatory story" and says he wants to make fiction fun and interesting again, both for the writer and the reader.
I leave it to you to decide whether has has done that or not. Either way, it is obvious that fiction is in a transformative period. There's the genre-blending of the writers you're going to read this week. There's the graphic novel. There's the Internet, which is making it possible (for good or ill) for anyone to become a published author. There's the audio book and new experiments with video books. Where all this will go is anyone's guess. So buckle up: it's gonna be a wild ride!