Words Are My Matter Read online

  Small communities with strong traditions are often clear about the way they want to go, and good at teaching it. But tradition may crystallise imagination to the point of fossilising it as dogma and forbidding new ideas. Larger communities, such as cities, open up room for people to imagine alternatives, learn from people of different traditions, and invent their own ways to live.

  As alternatives proliferate, however, those who take the responsibility of teaching find little social and moral consensus on what they should be teaching—what we need, what life ought to be. In our time of huge populations exposed continuously to reproduced voices, images, and words used for commercial and political profit, there are too many people who want to and can invent us, own us, shape and control us through seductive and powerful media. It’s a lot to ask of a child to find a way through all that alone.

  Nobody can do anything very much, really, alone.

  What a child needs, what we all need, is to find some other people who have imagined life along lines that make sense to us and allow some freedom, and listen to them. Not hear passively, but listen.

  Listening is an act of community, which takes space, time, and silence.

  Reading is a means of listening.

  Reading is not as passive as hearing or viewing. It’s an act: you do it. You read at your pace, your own speed, not the ceaseless, incoherent, gabbling, shouting rush of the media. You take in what you can and want to take in, not what they shove at you fast and hard and loud in order to overwhelm and control you. Reading a story, you may be told something, but you’re not being sold anything. And though you’re usually alone when you read, you are in communion with another mind. You aren’t being brainwashed or co-opted or used; you’ve joined in an act of the imagination.

  I know no reason why our media could not create a similar community of the imagination, as theater has often done in societies of the past, but they’re mostly not doing it. They are so controlled by advertising and profiteering that the best people who work in them, the real artists, if they resist the pressure to sell out, get drowned out by the endless rush for novelty, by the greed of the entrepreneurs.

  Much of literature remains free of such co-optation, in part because a lot of books were written by dead people, who by definition are not greedy. And many living poets and novelists, though their publishers may be crawling abjectly after bestsellers, continue to be motivated less by the desire for gain than by the wish to do what they’d probably do for nothing if they could afford it, that is, practice their art—make something well, get something right. Literature remains comparatively, and amazingly, honest and reliable.

  Books may not be “books,” of course, they may not be ink on wood pulp but a flicker of electronics in the palm of a hand. Incoherent and commercialised and worm-eaten with porn and hype and blather as it is, electronic publication offers those who read a strong new means of active community. The technology is not what matters. Words are what matter. The sharing of words. The activation of imagination through the reading of words.

  The reason literacy is important is that literature is the operating instructions. The best manual we have. The most useful guide to the country we’re visiting, life.

  What It Was Like

  A talk given at a meeting of Oregon NARAL in January 2004.

  My friends at NARAL asked me to tell you what it was like before Roe vs. Wade. They asked me to tell you what it was like to be twenty and pregnant in 1950 and when you tell your boyfriend you’re pregnant, he tells you about a friend of his in the army whose girl told him she was pregnant, so he got all his buddies to come and say, “We all fucked her, so who knows who the father is?” And he laughs at the good joke.

  They asked me to tell you what it was like to be a pregnant girl—we weren’t “women” then—a pregnant college girl who, if her college found out she was pregnant, would expel her, there and then, without plea or recourse. What it was like, if you were planning to go to graduate school and get a degree and earn a living so you could support yourself and do the work you loved—what it was like to be a senior at Radcliffe and pregnant and if you bore this child, this child which the law demanded you bear and would then call “unlawful,” “illegitimate,” this child whose father denied it, this child which would take from you your capacity to support yourself and do the work you knew it was your gift and your responsibility to do: What was it like?

  I can hardly imagine what it’s like to live as a woman under Fundamentalist Islamic law. I can hardly remember now, fifty-four years later, what it was like to live under Fundamentalist Christian law. Thanks to Roe vs. Wade, none of us in America has lived in that place for half a lifetime.

  But I can tell you what it is like, for me, right now. It’s like this: If I had dropped out of college, thrown away my education, depended on my parents through the pregnancy, birth, and infancy, till I could get some kind of work and gain some kind of independence for myself and the child, if I had done all that, which is what the anti-abortion people want me to have done, I would have borne a child for them, for the anti-abortion people, the authorities, the theorists, the fundamentalists; I would have borne a child for them, their child.

  But I would not have borne my own first child, or second child, or third child. My children.

  The life of that fetus would have prevented, would have aborted, three other fetuses, or children, or lives, or whatever you choose to call them: my children, the three I bore, the three wanted children, the three I had with my husband—whom, if I had not aborted the unwanted one, I would never have met and married, because he would have been a Fulbright student going to France on the Queen Mary in 1953 but I would not have been a Fulbright student going to France on the Queen Mary in 1953. I would have been an “unwed mother” of a three-year-old in California, without work, with half an education, living off her parents, not marriageable, contributing nothing to her community but another mouth to feed, another useless woman.

  But it is the children I have to come back to, my children Elisabeth, Caroline, Theodore, my joy, my pride, my loves. If I had not broken the law and aborted that life nobody wanted, they would have been aborted by a cruel, bigoted, and senseless law. They would never have been born. This thought I cannot bear. I beg you to see what it is that we must save, and not to let the bigots and misogynists take it away from us again. Save what we won: our children. You who are young, before it’s too late, save your children.

  Genre: A Word Only a Frenchman Could Love

  A talk given at the Public Library Association Preconference on Genre,

  in Seattle, February 2004, revised in 2014.

  The concept of genre is a valid one. We need a method for sorting out and defining varieties of narrative fiction, and genre gives us a tool to begin the job. But there are two big problems in using the tool. The first is that it’s been misused so often that it’s hard to use it rightly—like a good screwdriver that’s all bent out of shape because some dork tried to pry paving stones apart with it.

  Genre is a generic word—naturally!—for “a kind or style, especially of art or literature,” says the OED, and more specifically a term for paintings of a certain type and subject matter: “scenes and subjects of common life.”

  Now, “scenes and subjects of common life” nicely covers the subject matter of the realistic novel, the literary equivalent of genre painting. But when the term made its way into literature, it came to mean anything but the realistic and the commonplace. It was oddly enough applied to fictions whose subject matter is some degrees removed from common life—Westerns, murder mysteries, spy thrillers, romances, horror stories, fantasies, science fiction, and so on.

  The subject matter of realism is broader than that of any genre except fantasy; and realism was the preferred mode of twentieth-century modernism. By relegating fantasy to kiddylit or the trash, modernist critics left the field to the realistic novel. Realism was central. The word genre began to imply something less, something inferior, and ca
me to be commonly misused, not as a description, but as a negative value judgment. Most people now understand “genre” to be an inferior form of fiction, defined by a label, while realistic fictions are simply called novels or literature.

  So we have an accepted hierarchy of fictional types, with “literary fiction,” not defined, but consisting almost exclusively of realism, at the top. All other kinds of fiction, the “genres,” are either listed in rapidly descending order of inferiority or simply tossed into a garbage heap at the bottom. This judgmental system, like all arbitrary hierarchies, promotes ignorance and arrogance. It has seriously deranged the teaching and criticism of fiction for decades, by short-circuiting useful critical description, comparison, and assessment. It condones imbecilities on the order of “If it’s science fiction it can’t be good, if it’s good it can’t be science fiction.”

  And judgment by genre is particularly silly and pernicious now that the idea of genre itself is breaking down.

  That’s the other problem with our good tool; the screwdriver is melting, the screws are all screwy. Much of the best fiction doesn’t fit into the genres any more, but combines, crosses, miscegenates, transgresses, and reinvents them. Seventy years ago Virginia Woolf questioned the possibility of writing realistic fiction honestly. Many honest writers have given up the attempt.

  Terms such as “magical realism” or “slipstream” are taken from the literatures to which they’re suited and slapped hastily across great widening cracks in the conventional structure of narrative. They disguise more than they reveal, and are useless as description. Major novelists appear outside any recognised category—tell me what kind of fiction it is that José Saramago writes. It is not realism; no, it certainly isn’t; but it very certainly is literature.

  The breakdown is occurring even across a major boundary, that between fiction and nonfiction. Jorge Luis Borges said that he considered all prose literature to be fiction. Fiction, for Borges, thus includes history, journalism, biography, memoir, Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Pierre Menard’s Don Quixote, the works of Borges, Peter Rabbit, and the Bible. It seems a large category, but it may prove more intellectually practicable than any attempt to salvage useless distinctions.

  And yet the categories established by genre are not only perpetuated, cemented in, by the stereotyped thinking of reviewers, by the ingrained habits and superstitions of publishers, and by the shelving and descriptive practices of booksellers and libraries; they also are—have been and still are—useful, perhaps necessary, to the appreciation of fiction. If you don’t know what kind of book you’re reading and it’s not a kind you’re used to, you probably need to learn how to read it. You need to learn the genre.

  Useless and harmful as a value category, genre is a valid descriptive category. It may be most useful historically, for defining twentieth-century works; in the postmodern era the genres begin to melt and flow. But where definition by genre applies and is applied fairly, it is valuable both to readers and to writers.

  For example: A writer sets out to write science fiction but isn’t familiar with the genre, hasn’t read what’s been written. This is a fairly common situation, because science fiction is known to sell well, but, being “subliterary,” is supposed to be not worth study. It’s just Sci-Fi—what’s to learn? Plenty. A genre is a genre by virtue of having a field and focus of its own, its appropriate and particular tools and rules and techniques for handling the material, its traditions, and its experienced, appreciative readers. Ignorant of all this, our novice is about to reinvent the wheel, the space ship, the space alien, and the mad scientist, with cries of innocent wonder. The cries will not be echoed by the readers. Readers familiar with the genre have met the space ship, the alien, and the mad scientist before. They know much more about them than the writer does.

  In the same way, critics who set out to talk about a fantasy novel in ignorance of the history and extensive theory of fantasy literature will make fools of themselves, because they don’t know how to read the book. They have no contextual information to tell them what its tradition is, where it’s coming from, what it’s trying to do, what it does. This was liberally proved when the first Harry Potter book came out and literary reviewers ran around shrieking about its incredible originality. This originality was an artifact of the reviewers’ blank ignorance of its genres, children’s fantasy and the British boarding-school story, plus the fact that they hadn’t read a fantasy since they were eight. It was pitiful. It was like watching a TV gourmet chef eat a piece of buttered toast and squeal, “But this is delicious! Unheard of! What genius invented it?”

  When The Hobbit and its sequels were published, ignorance as a critical qualification was celebrated every time a literary pundit exhibited his sophistication by performing the time-hallowed Ceremony of the Ritual Sneers at Tolkien. Happily, that custom is fast dying out.

  All in all we need to rethink genre in order to reform the practices of critics and reviewers and the assumptions of readers, and to bring the description of fiction into some kind of relation to reality. I admit that the temptation to pull a Borges is very strong—to just say, All Fiction is Genre and all Genre is Literature! And I do say it when I lose patience.

  But what’s the use in saying it when you know that you’re running your head right against the solid obstruction of category labeling and shelving practice, from the conception of the book, the contract, the cover, to the bookstores and libraries? How can you tell reviewers to stop shoving books into outmoded categories where they don’t fit when the publishers themselves absolutely insist on the category labels—and when many, perhaps most of the authors would scream bloody murder if they didn’t get the genre label and cover and category that keeps their book from getting lost among all the other books in all the other genres?

  Marketing rules, OK? I have no illusions that intelligence could possibly replace marketing in this or any other matter. Commercial genrification has its reasons. They are intelligible reasons, though not intelligent ones.

  Consumerism also rules. If the books aren’t categorised, if they aren’t shelved by genre, if they don’t have a little label saying SF or M or YA, a whole lot of customers and library users will come storming the counter or the desk or the online book dealer, shouting, Where is my Fiction Fix? I want a Fantasy, I can’t read all that realistic stuff! I want a Mystery, I can’t read all that plotless stuff! I want a Masterpiece of Grim Realism, I can’t read all that imaginary stuff! I want Mindless Fluff, I can’t read all that literary stuff! Etc.

  Genre addicts want books to be easy the way fast food is easy. They want to go to the big online commercial fiction dealer who knows what they like to read and offers cheap fixes, or go to the library shelf and stick out their hand and get a free fix. Did you ever notice handwritten initials next to the previously published titles on the flyleaf of a series mystery at the library—sometimes a whole row of them down the leaf? They’re so people will know they’ve read that one already; looking at the story itself wouldn’t tell them anything, since it’s exactly like all the other books in that series by that author. This signifies reader addiction. The most harm I can see in it is that it may keep addicts from reading good stuff, though they might not read the good stuff anyway, because they’ve been scared into thinking that literature can’t include anything about horses, space ships, dragons, dreams, spies, monsters, animals, aliens, or dark, handsome, taciturn men who own large houses in remote bits of England. Fitzwilliam Darcy, they need you! But they’ve been scared away from Darcy, or never allowed a glimpse of him. Instead, the commercial fiction machine feeds their hunger for story with junk food—commercial, mechanical, formula fiction.

  Any genre, including realism, can be formulised and made commercial. Genre and formula are two different things, but the assumption that they are the same thing allows the lazy-minded critic and professor to ignore and dismiss all genre literature.

  A genre label on a book is usually an appeal to a safe but limited audience.
Publishers go for safe, and so they like genre labels for high-risk authors. But with low-risk big-name authors, the assumption has been that their literary reputation would be damaged by the admission that one or more of their books belongs to a genre. Some “literary” novelists have performed amazing contortions to preserve their pure name from the faintest taint of genre pollution. I am tempted to imitate them, backwards. How am I to protect my unspotted name as a Sci-Fi Writer from the scorn of those who may notice that I have shamelessly published realistic fiction?

  Easy. Consider my book Searoad, which makes ironic use of some realist tropes—but of course I don’t write Re-Fi, as its fat fans in three-piece-suit costumes call it. Realism is for lazy-minded, semi-educated people whose atrophied imagination allows them to appreciate only the most limited and conventional subject matter. Re-Fi is a repetitive genre written by unimaginative hacks who rely on mere mimesis. If they had any self-respect they’d be writing memoir, but they’re too lazy to fact-check. Of course I never read Re-Fi. But the kids keep bringing home these garish realistic novels and talking about them, so I know that it’s an incredibly narrow genre, completely centered on one species, full of worn-out clichés and predictable situations—the quest for the father, mother-bashing, obsessive male lust, dysfunctional suburban families, etc., etc. All it’s good for is being made into mass-market movies. Given its old-fashioned means and limited subject matter, realism is quite incapable of describing the complexity of contemporary experience.

  There are many bad books. There are no bad genres.

  Of course there are genres that are unappealing to individual readers. A reader who liked or valued all kinds of narrative equally would be undiscriminating to the point of imbecility. Some people honestly can’t read fantasy with any pleasure. I honestly can’t read porn, horror, or most political thrillers with pleasure. I have friends who cannot read any fiction with pleasure; they need what they can consider or pretend to be facts. These differences point, again, to the underlying validity of the concept of literary genre.