posted
I came across this here, and thought it was worth sharing. I wasn't familiar with the James/Stevenson feud, and found it to be a fascinating insight.
quote: What do you think about the situation in the science fiction and fantasy genres today? Why is it that they are often frowned upon by the mainstream critics?
I think you have to separate the genres, because the field has separated them, at least in the United States. Fantasy is booming commercially, it's selling very well. On the other hand, a lot of it is very bad. Not all of it, I think there are some very good people writing fantasy; Robin Hobb is doing some excellent stuff, there's still Jack Vance who is, I think, one of the grandmasters of both of these fields and there are some other people; but there is also a lot of very bad fantasy out there and it's selling well. Science fiction is just the reverse. It's not selling as well as it used to. It's kind of struggling over here but on the other hand, some excellent work is being done in science fiction. There's a lot of very fine new writers. But these things are all cyclical and every genre goes through its ups and downs, periods where it's flourishing and periods where it's struggling. I think all this will change in time. As to the question about mainstream critics, I don't know how much of this would be applicable to Croatia, but I think it all goes back to the 19th century, the end of the 19th century and the early 20th century and the great literary feud between Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson, who had very different ideas about what fiction should be about. They conducted a very celebrated feud in the pages of some of the magazines and journals of that day. And I think you had a division in English literature at least at that point where some people followed James and became the so called 'literary writers' following his tenets of what was the appropriate subject for literary matters, like realism and so forth. Other people followed Stevenson and a much more romantic tradition, the romance, the adventure story, fanciful stories, fantasies. Certainly, science fiction and fantasy are both very much in the Stevenson camp and are following in his tradition but most of the mainstream literary critics are very much in the James camp and still go by the rules that he layed down, that something can't be serious literature unless it is very grounded in reality and common ordinary experience.
quote:something can't be serious literature unless it is very grounded in reality and common ordinary experience.
The irony being that much of academia is so far away from reality and common ordinary experience, they gaffaw at it when they see it.
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posted
I was in my grad class the other day, and we were discussing the...lack of relevancy and purpose literature studies is beginning to face. Even in the academic world, many are not so far from reality that they are blind to the spreading cracks in that constructed world. Since few people like to shoot their careers in the foot, it is the sci-fi and fantasy authors that are willing to say it publicly, but that ivory tower does have, as far as I can tell, a growing awareness of their own airy uselessness.
posted
Coincidentally I'm reading a book of collected essays by Henry James. While it's true that he and Stevenson had this feud, James also liked Stevenson very much and thought his work was good -- for what it was.
Plus James had no problem with 'romances' per se -- at least as long as they seemed to reflect some 'truth' to them. Of course, he decried the commercialization of fiction and all the hack-work, but so does Martin.
I'm going to have to investigate this further. While I think that what Martin says is true in principle, I don't think he represents James' stance on fiction and his relationship with Stevenson very well. Of course, I could be wrong.
EDIT: Oh yeah, I would lay the blame on Ezra Pound, Joyce and Virginia Woolf.
I'm pretty sure that the feud that Martin is referring to is between Henry James and H.G. Wells. James corresponded with most of the major British and American authors of his time. While he and R.L. Stevenson wrote very different types of fiction and disagreed about some things, they seemed to have had a rather close relationship.
James and Wells also corresponded. Wells sent James copies of each of his books as they came out -- James responded somewhat patronizingly, claiming that his idea of fiction was very different, but was on the whole complementary of Well's writing. Wells was much more aggressive than Stevenson and felt like James definition of a novel excluded his writings [and to a certain extent it did -- although to restate James did find some value in the romantic tradition and like Hawethorne, especially]. In 1915 (20 years into their friendship), Wells published under a thinly-veiled pseudonym Boon, The Mind of the Race, The Wild Asses of the Devil, and The Last Trump, Being a first selection from the literary remains of George Boon, Appropriate to the Time, Prepared for Publication by Reginald Bliss, with an Ambiguous Introduction by H.G. Wells. Weird, no? The work contained a chapter called "Of Art, of literature, of Mr. Henry James."
Basically, Wells brought all the charges you might expect against James -- that his characters were too rarified, mannered and aristocratic. He claimed that they were "denatured" and that James was the "culmination of the superficial type."
The book was precipitated by an article (maybe a book, I'm not clear on that) that James (who was in his late 60's by now) had written in 1914 in which he tried to describe the "new novel." In it, he admires Wells Balzac-like energy and profusion of detail, but expresses his dislike for the untidy form of his narratives and for injecting too much of his (Wells') own personality into his characters.
James, as you might expect, was very hurt by Wells' book. He responded that Wells misreads his fiction. Wells expresses regret that he had to take down his friend, but never backed down from his belief that James idea of the novel was very different from his own and was much too ascendent in the world of fiction.
While I agree with Martin's characterization of mainstream critics being in the literary camp as well as the importance of this feud in establishing some of the tone of future discussions, I think that most of the blame for the split between genre and literary fiction lies with the more modernist writers (as I state above -- and add T.S. Eliot to the list) as well as the development of English departments in the early 20th century (very few actually existed in the 19th century).
What's hilarious (at least to me) is that literary fiction wrote itself into a 'realism' corner and so has had to turn back to some of the same traditions that speculative fiction grew out of. Toni Morrison, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jose Saramago -- all are recent Nobel Laureates whose novels are *not* strictly 'reaslistic.' And the list could go on.
EDIT: *not* missing
Part of that is Kafka's fault, of course .
Sources: Two Formulas for Fiction: Henry James and H.G. Wells by E.K Brown. College English, 1949; _The Art of Criticism_ (selected writings of Henry James) edited by William Veeder and Susan M. Griffin, The University of Chicago Press, 1986.
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