I just plowed through "An Aesthetics of Junk Fiction" by Thomas J. Roberts. Since I write (and mostly read) what he calls junk, I wanted to know what a junk connoisseur thinks of the stuff.

I like his notion that classics are isolated monuments that once were peaks in a range, in some genre that dried up and was forgotten. But isn't there an obvious parallel between fans and fanzines in genres like science fiction, and academic scholars arguing with equal passion about the classics they love? Both can and do become trivia games... Nor does he admit that old books acquire canonical status because they address (sometimes coincidentally) modern concerns, though they may have said something quite different to their original readers; what they say now is what makes them classics. That's why some classics stop BEING classics, and others worm their way in. The standards for entry inevitably have a socio-political side--what myths do academics and critics and teachers like--and loathe? What'll give us a stable standard of Beauty, Truth, Art, Right and Wrong, Man (sic)?

He seems to think that real, fully engaged reading--true learning, serious thinking--can only happen with a canonical literary text. Yet ANY book in ANY living tradition, whether mainstream "literature" or science fiction or fantasy or mystery or romance or horror or erotica (or to jump from excommunicated approaches to heretic media) or TV or comics or, dare I say it, websites--most thoughtful work resonates with other works in its medium and/or genre, work it plays off and comments on... adding unpredictable complexity to even superficially simple work.

Nor are all genre books so thin in themselves that they can't be understood or enjoyed fully unless you know their context or genre. Nor are they less individual than literary works, even than classic works. In fact, some of the most deeply original works appear in genres, because ghettos and dumping grounds and reservations are friendlier to heretics and rebels and crazies, as well as the groups that canonical society assigned to the ghetto.

I have doubts about his picture of NON-junk fiction. He means classics only! Apparently EVERYTHING produced in the last fifty years is junk to him. Talk about a missing genre! The absence of ANY contemporary fiction in his study is quite strange and I can't find any explanation. Does he think all we write is junk, or just that all we READ is junk?

I think modern mainstream fiction has narrowed itself to certain concerns: personal relationships, detailed photographic realism (funny how painting has gone the other way: photographic realism is mostly seen as kitsch in visual art, while "literature" rejects everything else!), purely internal psychology (if it's transpersonal, you're outa the club, bub!), mild social criticism but not radicalism or open preaching, spiritual issues linked to Judaism or Christianity... Oh, and words themselves! You can spot a mainstream book with little to say by the blurbs: they'll praise the writing but ignore the story; most genre fiction is all about the story (OK, in science fiction the blurbs will often describe the ideas the book explores--hardly lowbrow!)

Books coming from other assumptions aren't candidates for the canon unless they force themselves over time in on a canonical group by being read and taken seriously by too many people as CHALLENGES to canonical values -- but this takes a long time, and challenging the status quo is still to fight in its arena. Books ignoring the whole mess and treating of other matters entirely just don't become canonical candidates.

As a kid, the way I pictured "literature" vs. my preferred reading (science fiction and fantasy, largely but not exclusively) was to picture "literature" as having just one rule: all events must take place indoors. One outdoor scene, and it's science fiction or fantasy. I knew from the start that "indoors" meant conventional reality, but it took years to realize I'd fallen for the "realist" line: I believed that it WAS reality, that "outdoors" was unreal and I was avoiding reality! Oh, I rationalized that I learned a lot through thought-experiments in the laboratory that was science fiction, and that fantasy helped me face wishes and fears and dreams... but I accepted that the canonical, literary here-and-now (the lab within which it studies 'human' 'nature') was real... not a social construct.

At last I noticed that what I really read describes my life better than literary fiction's paradigms. The canon's assumptions aren't my experience. Characterization in literary fiction is usually detailed, but the range is narrow, for only certain characters are believed possible (or speakable). The thinly sketched characters (hey, is cartooning not art?) in science fiction or fantasy usually (but not always) lack detail, but their proportions and nature--what they experience and what they do about it--are more useful to me, because they reflect issues and experiences like mine--issues I need to think through, experiences I have but couldn't articulate in literary language, which dismisses it as uncouth... or unreal.

When I read a scene from M. Z. Bradley's book THE WORLD WRECKERS in which a person enters a room and senses the characters of people assembled for a telepathic project, I realized "this is how I see people! I'm like that! I'm a latent empath or telepath, or both." I didn't care much that the people in that room were lightly (even crudely) sketched in, and not terribly complex even when Bradley rounds them out. Because they embodied various survival strategies for psychics--and that struggle concerns me, since I live it. As the book helped me realize!

So did the (better written) similar revelation in James Tiptree's UP THE WALLS OF THE WORLD, in which a doctor is forced slowly to recognize he's an empath, that an unrecognized psychic talent has wrecked his life.

Or, to jump genres, the grim first-person narrative opening THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE, which warned me how abusive my childhood had been, for I identified all too readily with the brainwashed assassin, whose abusive childhood had been cruelly played on. I accepted him as a tormented noir-ish antihero, until I found the other characters saw him as insane. Of course my view was somewhat justified by the dénoument: the brainwashed assassin ignores his target and goes after his abuser instead.

What am I saying? At least some of us need literary genres that allow crude style, extreme experiments, uncouth subjects and unrealistic premises, or we'll never know ourselves--or much else. The canon may aspire to universality, but what it's often restricted to is just life as the majority lives it--not mine.

You may be lucky, of course--your life may happen to be entirely within your people's definition of acceptable, sane and real. But even then, you won't really know where your Middle Kingdom is... til you've ventured beyond the Great Wall.

World Dream Bank homepage - Art gallery - New stuff - Introductory sampler, best dreams, best art - On dreamwork - Books
Indexes: Subject - Author - Date - Names - Places - Art media/styles
Titles: A - B - C - D - E - F - G - H - IJ - KL - M - NO - PQ - R - Sa-Sh - Si-Sz - T - UV - WXYZ
Email: wdreamb@yahoo.com - Catalog of art, books, CDs - Behind the Curtain: FAQs, bio, site map - Kindred sites