"A canon of their own," as you put it, is simply a canon organized by any group of enthusiasts who are not going by the standards of whatever "Great Tradition" of literature is currently popular. Within those circles you can have a canon of great sf works, great detective novels, great bass-fishing magazines-- whatever you like, though it's a rare bird among these "subcanons" that garners enough applause to cross over into the Literary Canon.

I agree that it's a shame that no matter how nuanced a fantasy-work gets, writers like Ballard and Beagle will always be tarred with labels like "that Buck Rogers stuff" or "shit with elves and dragons." And yet, I see the same thing with respect to realism. Jackie Collins will never be considered a "realistic" literary writer in the way that John Dos Passos is, but just because Collins sets her stories in a realistic cosmos, some of her readers may automatically consider her work more "mature" than any fantasy could be. In effect, those readers would be giving Collins extra credit for her "realism," when in fact her work is far more escapist in nature than a dozen "farmboys with the power to save the Empire" stories.

An interesting thought. I have nothing against role-playing games or genre fantasy books because I had a really fun time growing up with them. But it is a genre I could see a lot of writers wanting to actively avoid and prevent potential association with, on an artistic level. Which in a way is too bad, because a lot of realism, especially the sparse, unembellished, "Hemingway-is-the-greatest-writer-who-ever-lived" brand written by contemporary authors, is bland, pretentious twaddle, over-valued artistically simply by dint of the fact that it's "realistic." Realism is a perfectly valid aesthetic pursuit, but I don't see any reason a quiet story about an unhappy marriage should be any more inherently valuable than a story about magicians and barbarians -- it simply depends on the thematic and aesthetic imagination that goes into the creation of the tale, the detail, the skill and originality, etc.

But then again, I think any writer who wants to include, say, bow-toting elves or axe-wielding dwarves as characters has to accept the burden to do something really notably fresh with them, and few fantasy authors do anything fresh with them; and, even those who do are only revising a paradigm of interest to a very limited (if not necessarily insubstantial) audience. And it would be quite a feat to write a book featuring such characters that wasn't simply another inspired crap taken in the shade of Tolkien's towering personal achievement. (And I'm not even a Tolkien fan.)

Still, ultimately, I'm not sure "better terms" are really a necessity or of any particular use, because great artists will always be creating works that defy easy categorization; even not-so-great artists pull it off, truth be told.



I haven't read any Harry Potter, but, especially being so "school"-centric, I've always envisioned it being extremely programmatic and contained -- a formula that works, end of story.

There's no particular formula, at least so far as I saw, in literature like The Chronicles of Narnia, or Alice in Wonderland. Even children's books like A Wrinkle in Time or The Dark is Rising probably offer more food for the imagination than Potter does; but, in fairness, I'm just speculating based on what I've seen and heard. I haven't bothered to read a Potter book.



Well, that's part of the reason why a guy who didn't even bother to finish the majority of his own work (much less try to publish it) can enjoy such prestige -- his vision was so strikingly original, so much its own thing, that a need is felt to preserve it despite its roughness.



I've never read any of Bloom's books, but his critique of Harry Potter is simply uninteresting, and for once, I think I agree with Gene, at least in terms of general sentiment: it just strikes me as Bloom getting a cheap kick out of deriding a popular trend that he wasn't really interested in to begin with. He admits (in the interview) that he didn't even want to read the book; he just agreed because they wanted him to say something about it. Just doesn't seem to me like he really put much into it; he says it's not that well written, recaps the plot, and pines for the good old days, blah blah. It's not so much that I presume there's a ton to be said about Harry Potter, but if he wasn't interested in saying something meaningful about it, he shouldn't have bothered; if he decided to do it, well, I just think he could've done a much better job with his critique. I'd love to see Potter articulately, wittily rent to pieces, but Bloom's review is just bland filler.


K

Well, how about these-- unhappy marriages really exist, whereas magicians of the kind you're referring to do not. And an author writing about an unhappy marriage might be speaking from actual experience. Furthermore, the reader might themselves have experience with an unhappy marriage, and can relate to the story and learn from it.

The author of the magician story might be very convincing; but he has no experience with a real wizard, so his efforts add up to nothing more than presenting a convincing illusion.

Pop-culture apologists, it seems, want to blur the distinction between entertainment and literature. But literature is attempting to say something-- about people, about unhappy marriages, about society. If the characters are sometimes presented as having transformed into giant cockroaches, it is in order to say something about our plight as human beings.

I have nothing against entertainment. It serves a valuable purpose strictly as entertainment; and it can communicate ideas that are more than just entertaining.

But entertainment is common. Literature is rare.* Let's value literature for the special status it has earned, and not try to drag it down into the mundane.


*Failed attempts at literature, of course, are not very rare at all.

Maybe; maybe not -- in any case, it says nothing about the quality of the work itself, and perhaps not all of us turn to art to pretentiously commiserate about our missteps in life.

All I'm saying is that a fantasy story can arouse one's interest in life, reality, and various ideas about it just as effectively as a "realistic" story can, and it can do so in a way that displays just as much skill and talent. Just because something is real doesn't mean that it's interesting, and just because something is fantastical in nature doesn't mean it's without value. All fantasies, however wild or unrealistic, have their origin in the human mind/spirit, and because of that, remain quite relevent.

Mind you, I'm talking general theory and mental approach here -- I'm not saying Robert Jordan and William Shakespeare are equivocal. I don't even mean to defend genre fantasy itself, because yeah, most of it is formulaic escapism and there's no particular necessity to try to read all kinds of extra things into it. I just reject this idea that realism is more valuable or even educational. Bleh. I will always get more out of the short stories of H.G. Wells or Franz Kafka than the short stories of Ernest Hemingway or Raymond Carver.

Different things speak to different people on different levels; I won't argue it's all one in the same, but I do think it's important not to dismiss certain genres of work wholesale just because the elements that make them up don't directly speak to you.

Ex: The majority of jazz music doesn't speak to me. It does nothing for me; it's just a bunch of cheesy flourishes that make me feel like I'm on hold on a telephone. It all sounds roughly the same. This doesn't mean it is all the same to the discerning, interested ear, or that I think jazz has no value on the whole, or that it can't be well done on its own terms and effective in its own way and speak to something in people.

As a tangential question, I wonder, does jazz teach you anything about life? If not, why would you value it? Maybe you don't like jazz, but I assume you see what I'm getting at. If the arousal of certain feelings (in the case of jazz, predictable feelings of smoky, somnolent 'apartness') is of no value, where's music fit in to the artistic spectrum? And what should we make of it if listening to Beethoven's 9th offers roughly the same degree of visceral elation as reading about some farmboy who saves the world with a bunch of vividly described magic powers? In the end, both offer nothing more than the thrill of an abstract sensation with no direct bearing on the mundanities of daily reality.



I'd argue that art can never be anything more than a convincing illusion anyway, Joe. Thanks to the power of metaphor, iconography, symbolism, and indeed, illusion, the proximity to our own reality a piece of fiction offers is entirely irrelevent to determining its quality or value, at least to my mind.



To say what? That sometimes people feel like insects? Yes they do. And Kafka illustrates the feeling extraordinarily well and with great imagination and personal style. It is the effectiveness and originality with which his metaphor is rendered that lends it its quality and value -- not the metaphor itself. The metaphor itself can be summed up and fully appreciated as "sometimes people feel like bugs." Let's not get snooty about the profundity of this or try to imply thinking it up is indicative, in and of itself, of artistic genius.



I'm not trying to drag anything down, or necessarily to elevate anything either, and I wouldn't call myself a pop culture apologist. I have a very easy time believing that Harry Potter blows and that there are few works of literature that will ever truly rival Hamlet or The Brothers Karamazov. And although I liked it growing up, I think I've already agreed that the majority of genre fantasy is just escapist entertainment, predictable heroism fantasy -- and little else.

So for clarification, my only real contentions on this thread so far are that: 1) Bloom's review of Harry Potter is uninsightful, half-assed, and I find it strange that such a review would garner any notice or reaction at all, and 2) That the degree of realism in a work has absolutely no parallel to its quality or intrinsic artistic value whatsoever.

If you disagree with 1, well, fine; feel free to explain why, or just leave it as a difference of opinion; if you disagree with 2, maybe we can bat it around a bit more. ; )


K

Why is it pretentious to evaluate our own lives, the good and the bad?

Odd that you would use the word 'pretentious.' It's derived from 'pretend,' i.e. make-believe.



I think our proximity to what we're trying to portray is entirely relevant to our ability to portray it in a meaningful way. An artist may be able to sketch a nude figure without a model, but only after years of carefully studying actual models. In portraying an unhappy marriage, an author can study numerous models of the situation. But in portraying a sorcerer, the author must work without a model. Of course, since there are no sorcerers, there is no standard except entertainment value for deciding whether the author has succeeded in capturing the wizard persona. The author portraying the unhappy marriage, on the other hand, is working against a standard of truth.



This really cuts to the heart of the matter. There is a presumption about literature that some people are not willing to accept-- that it is a source of knowledge and wisdom. That the artist, however flawed his or her own life is, has an insight into life that's worth paying attention to and learning from.

One of the things I like about Bloom's interview is where he reminds us that Shakespeare was smarter than us. That's really what literature is all about-- studying and learning from someone who knows and understands things that we do not.

To dismiss the theme of 'Metamorphosis' as 'sometimes people feel like bugs' is to misunderstand the story. It's far more complex than that, and is certainly more than a mere exercise in style.

K, it's not so much that Gregor feels like a bug, it's his insignificance as a mere means in a familial and larger social system that results in his bugness (why, after all, a cockroach rather than an ant?). He continues to try to play his typical roles despite his appearance, but gradually loses it; that's why the story is funny.

Joe, obviously you're not including Borges and Kafka and Ballard in your dismissal of fantasy. How about Alan Moore? Clearly, he has many elements of traditional fantasy in his stories, but would you argue that an average Moore story doesn't contain relevant philosophical concerns at about a 10-to-1 ratio to that of the average autobiographical comic? What about Samuel R. Delaney? You now seem to acknowledge that fantastic stories can be relevant if they contain ideas which are relevant to our reality, but that's hardly the blanket condemnation from which you started.

Indeed, why not an ant? That would serve the purpose you lay out adequately, I think, if those were really the only intentions of the tale; but it wouldn't be as funny, personal, or tragic, and the story would probably cease to carry its powerful inbred atmosphere of guilt and hopelessness. Ants and cockroaches come with entirely different connotations when used as human metaphors.

But you're right, it isn't that Gregor feels like a bug; Gregor is a bug. Kafka feels like a bug.

And yes, of course, there's more to it than that, but, onwards to Joe ....

K

PS - (He wasn't a cockroach ... though I admit I still prefer to picture him that way.)

You seem to be presuming the aims of realism across the board, or granting only those aims "serious" artistic license. If you want to portray something realistically, perception is required; if you want to portray something fantastical, perception is also required, but also imagination and the extra burden of making your non-reality convincing and relevent to the reader in some way. However, you certainly have more leeway with the specifics of your craftsmanship. They're just two different techniques and approaches, neither inherently superior to the other, neither worthy of general dismissal.

I notice you did not address my question relating this to music. I could raise similar questions in regards to the world of visual art. Do you only value a painting if it reflects something you recognize from reality?



It's a nice, respectful sentiment, and it isn't one I'd dismiss, but at the same time, artists are generally just creative people with talent; in some instances their talents and abilities might indeed even reach the pitch of genius. I respect them based on their achievements in their work, and I support the preservation and study of as many such achievements as possible, but I see no reason to revere them as demi-gods, or to refrain from critical scrutiny. To find that you dislike or find wanting something about a piece of great literature and, in reaction, simply insist to yourself that you're stupid and this person is great and obviously you just aren't at the level necessary to comprehend their vast wisdom -- strikes me as very silly. If Shakespeare is great he will withstand and endure Madget's scrutiny and nit-picking just fine. And if flaws are uncovered or opined they do not necessarily mar the sheer breadth of his overall achievement.



And to sum up The Wheel of Time as "another farmboy saves the world" is also to misunderstand that story. It's far more complex than that.

Of course it's more complex than that. I'm not dismissing The Metamorphosis as anything, just saying that that's the core metaphor, and I see no reason stating it like that should reflect a fundamental misunderstanding of the story. Additionally, I never said it was a "mere exercise in style." I am saying that ideas are a dime a dozen, and what's done with them is -- at least in most cases -- far more relevent in terms of evaluating the art in question than the ideas themselves. The vision that manifests from the idea is the "art" part of it, the part that allows the core ideas to breathe and become "more complex," and I would hate to reduce any piece of true art to mere "educational" utility (or as Nabokov would say, "journalism.")


K

Sorry, Charles; I thought it was understood that my remark about 'dismissing' fantasy was a joke. I'm not even sure what 'dismiss' means in the context that Dumas originally used it. As for Alan Moore, I wrote an essay about Birth Caul, here , but I'm not as much into his other work, and would have no idea how to evaluate its containment of relevant philosophical concerns.

I apologize if I misled anyone. My responses to Madget's remarks were sincere, however.



It's a common misconception that fantasy writing requires imagination and that realistic writing does not. But fiction writing of any kind requires an extraordinary degree of inventiveness. The 'extra burden of making your non-reality convincing' is certainly much greater in realistic writing, since you must convince the reader that your invention exists within a world the reader is already familiar with.

A keen perception of the world is certainly required in order to write realistic fiction. But what perception is required to write fantasy? You can't perceive a wizard, after all, since they don't exist!



Sorry I missed your question. Realism and fantasy don't have the same meaning in music or visual art. Is it necessary that a criteria for one artform apply to all other art forms? If so, let me be the first to criticize Shakespeare's plays for having lousy color-combinations.

Speaking of questions, Madget, you didn't answer mine: 'Why is it pretentious to evaluate our own lives, the good and the bad?'



I never said anything about revering artists as demi-gods. All I said was that literature is a source of knowledge and wisdom. And as for critical scrutiny, I would say just the opposite, that literature is well worth the highest degree of critical scrutiny.



Huh? Does this have any relationship to what I said? All I said was that literature was a source of knowledge and wisdom!




I think you're assuming that an idea is, by nature, a simple and basic conception. That's not how I view it, and my usage of the term might equate more with what you refer to as the 'vision.'

I don't think it 'reduces' a work of art to say it's a source of knowledge and wisdom. Are 'knowledge and wisdom' of 'mere "educational" utility'? That sounds like a very nihilistic attitude.

If you wish to call Nabokov as a witness on your behalf, perhaps it would be better to quote more than a single word from him.

----------------

I love to argue; unfortunately, I'm going to be out of town for the next two weeks at a training class, and my access to the internet will be limited. I'll check back to this thread when I can, but I probably won't be able to indulge in any more long-winded debates for a while.

I’m not saying one requires imagination and the other does not – just that one is more imagination-based and that this doesn’t automatically make it “lesser.” A writer of realism has infinitely more reference material at his disposal. A writer of fantasy or science-fiction has to make his own reference material up and then remain consistent to the context he’s established for himself.

One isn’t inherently more difficult than the other. It depends on what the author puts into it.



Neither do talking bugs. Does this make The Metamorphosis a lesser work than The Old Man and the Sea ... ?

A keen perception of the world is, I think, required to create high-caliber fiction of any kind.



I think you're missing my point, but I'm adding this part to my reply after everything else because I missed it and I'm out of energy at the moment -- if you want me to come back to it later in light of further discussion, maybe I will.



I didn't say it was. But automatically lauding art which reflects your own miseries as instrinsically "better" than art which doesn't strikes me as somewhat pretentious. This is a digression based on pure hypotheticals; to quibble over my application of the term "pretentious" is, again, to miss the main point.


The implication I was responding to was that artists inherently “know more” and possess “greater wisdom” than everybody else, critics especially. I guess I just consider it a slightly frivolous sentiment.



Hmm. For clarification, I didn’t intend to invoke him as a witness on my behalf – I just thought of his disdain for what he terms “journalism” as an amusing afterthought. Nabokov is hardly someone I’d parallel myself with in general – I like Dostoyevsky too well! But, heck, OK – if you’re interested, here are a bunch of snippets relating to his unique philosophy of art. Just because I have some on hand and they’re interesting:

“[...] all art is deception and so is nature; all is deception in that good cheat, from the insect that mimics a leaf to the popular enticements of procreation. Do you know how poetry started? I always think that it started when a cave boy came running back to the cave, through the tall grass, shouting as he ran, “Wolf, wolf,” and there was no wolf. His baboon-like parents, great sticklers for the truth, gave him a hiding, no doubt, but poetry had been born [...]” – Strong Opinions, p. 11

[On being asked why he wrote ‘Lolita’]: “It was an interesting thing to do. Why did I write any of my books, after all? For the sake of the pleasure, for the sake of the difficulty. I have no social purpose, no moral message; I’ve no general ideas to exploit, I just like composing riddles with elegant solutions.” – Strong Opinions, p. 16

[On being asked about modern art and abstract painting]: “I do not see any essential difference between abstract and primitive art. Both are simple and sincere. Naturally, we should not generalize in these matters: it is the individual artist that counts. [...] Only talent interests me in paintings and books. Not general ideas, but the individual contribution.” – Strong Opinions, p. 33

[following question: ‘A contribution to society?’]: “A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual, and only the individual reader is important to me. I don’t give a damn for the group, the community, the masses, and so forth. Although I do not care for the slogan ‘art for art’s sake’ – because unfortunately such promoters of it as, for instance, Oscar Wilde and various dainty poets, were in reality rank moralists and didacticists – there can be no question that what makes a work of fiction safe from larvae and rust is not its social importance but its art, only its art.” – Strong Opinions, p. 33

“The middlebrow or the upper Philistine cannot get rid of the furtive feeling that a book, to be great, must deal in great ideas. Oh, I know the type, the dreary type! He likes a good yarn spiced with social comment; he likes to recognize his own thoughts and throes in those of the author; he wants at least one of the characters to be the author’s stooge. If American, he has a dash of Marxist blood, and if British, he is acutely and ridiculously class-conscious; he finds it so much easier to write about ideas than about words; he does not realize that perhaps the reason he does not find general ideas in a particular writer is that the particular ideas of that writer have not yet become general.” – Strong Opinions, p. 42

[On Dostoyevsky]: “Non-Russian readers do not realize two things: that not all Russians love Dostoevski as much as Americans do, and that most of those Russians who do, venerate him as a mystic and not as an artist. He was a prophet, a claptrap journalist and a slapdash comedian. I admit that some of his scenes, some of his tremendous, farcical rows are extraordinarily amusing. But his sensitive murderers and soulful prostitutes are not to be endured for one moment – by this reader anyway.” – Strong Opinions, p. 42

Strong Opinions is a pretty entertaining read, all in all.


K