The Genre Stigma

Posted by J. Mark Bertrand
on Tuesday, February 22, 2005
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There is a stigma attached to genre writing. Wikipedia offers a concise summary of the situation:

Often as applied to written work the term "genre" is used pejoratively, suggesting not just similar writings but derivative and generally bad writing. Perhaps in connection with this, the term also suggests writing aimed at a particular audience of readers who are construed as having limited taste. It sometimes connotes a sort of literary "ghetto," to be contrasted with literature proper. Literary fiction is an antonym.

It's sometimes a blurry distinction, of course, this "line" between literary and genre fiction. Literary writers tend to belittle the effort and skill required of genre authors, while genre writers dismiss literary work as pretentious, elitist and coy. These days, I spend too much time in my circle of aquaintance combatting the second impulse. I loathed art appreciation class as much as anyone, but I find myself sounding more and more like the shrill teacher who stands in the darkened classroom insisting that it is so important to memorize the title of each work in his slideshow. So I'm not going to do that here. Instead, I'm going to ask myself whether the first tendency, the stigma attached to genre, is really legitimate. To do that, though, I have to provide a little personal history....

The Berlin Wall had just fallen. On the radio, a band called Jesus Jones was singing, "There is no other place I want to be... Watching the world wake up from history," while the Scorpions rhapsodized about the "wind of change." The Cold War was over and I.... I had just finished writing a spy novel. The book, inches thick and printed laboriously on one of the original inkjet printers in "near letter quality," is now carefully hidden deep in my fortress of solitude. The only thing "literary" about it was the epigraph from Chaucer at the opening. A single copy resides in the public domain: bound in red, tucked onto a shelf at my university, where it fulfilled the thesis requirement for one of my minors. (In fact, there was a thesis defense, an event that remains memorable for two now-humiliating moments: (1) when one of my English professors compared me at length not to T.S. Eliot but to J. Alfred Prufrock, and (2) when an art professor who shared my interest in Jim Jarmusch movies asked whether those films had influenced my book, and I foolishly said they had and kept talking about it in ways that made it clear that they had not.) Before I left college, I did two things with that book. First, I packed the first fifty pages or so into an envelope and sent them along to the University of Houston's Creative Writing Program, where I expected to be welcomed with open arms. Second, I found a little box for the entire manuscript and sent it straight to Knopf so that they could cut me a check and start the publishing end of things rolling.

In the cover letter that accompanied my UH submission, I explained that I did not hold with prissy, pretentious writing; I was an author of blockbusters without much time for hothouse musings. (In spite of this, the list of "favorites" I included ran the gamut from Proust -- I'd read the famous madeleine scene in French Lit -- to Umberto Eco.) I remember reading that letter over before putting it in the envelope, truly impressed with myself. I imagined the professors back in Houston passing it around, each of them experiencing an epiphany by the end.

Providence intervened. It had never occured to me as an undergraduate that there might be deadlines for applying to graduate school. I didn't know anything about the UH program, its illustrious history, or its superb ranking. It just happened to be in Houston where my family had moved, so that's where I applied. My packet reached the program after the deadline expired and -- miracle of miracles -- arrived back at my door unopened. The news from Knopf followed soon after. Far from bowing to my genius, the editors wished me luck in placing the work elsewhere. My period of naive optimism, fueled by the unchecked praise of people who knew no better, came to an end.

This was the summer of 1991. Soon afterward, I left for a trip to Germany, got a new car, started making money for the first time in my life. My plan was to revisit the spy novel, make a few choice revisions, and then despatch it to other publishers. To help with that goal, I enrolled in writing workshops at UH, where I was now pursuing a postbaccalaureate degree in French until the next CWP application period rolled around.

That class, and many more after it, opened my eyes to a world of writing that up until then I had only glimpsed from a distance: the odd but fascinating realm of literary fiction. Before now, I had read Martin Amis and Robert Ludlum side by side without appreciating much of the difference. I liked London Fields and read some Julian Barnes and Ian McEwan, but I was equally pleased with Len Deighton and Adam Hall. Today, I'm still an eclectic reader -- I imagine most of us are -- but I've come to appreciate the value of literary craft enough to see the difference between literary art and literary entertainment.

Even in grad school, though, I had a problem keeping genre influences out of my fiction. Whenever I brought something to a workshop that was considered "too genre," I heard about it. Once I submitted a comic story about a stolen baseball card and all the misadventures that ensue when the thief attempts to recover it from its hiding place under an old lady's staircase. After the discussion, someone congratulated me for having the guts to bring a story like that into the workshop. I was confused -- but not for long. "Don't bring anything like that in here again," I was told. (And my professor was right, by the way. The story was derivative. It was a pure genre caper told in the pulp style that was getting big in the movies in the mid-1990s.)

Later, when I was putting together stories for my graduate thesis, my advisor threw a wrench in the works by excluding one of my pieces from the collection. It was about a reporter holed up in an abandoned hotel somewhere in Bosnia with a mysterious "fixer" with a black pistol. As far as I was concerned, it was great stuff, ripped from today's (or yesterday's) headlines, but again, "too genre."

By now I hope I've established my genre credentials. I read the stuff -- and, yes, I've written it, too. I don't live in an ivory tower. I don't have a butler. My friends don't wear monocles. I live in a "red state." If you handed me a gun I could probably tell you what kind it is. I could certainly load and unload it, and (if the barrel is threaded) affix a silencer. If I had one. (And I wish I did.) So it probably won't come as a surprise to learn that, as far as I'm concerned, the stigma attached to genre writing is ridiculous.

There are a thousand examples I could give, but consider just one: the historical novels of Patrick O'Brian. Not only do they fit the broad defintion of genre -- they are novels about the sea set during the Napoleonic Wars -- but coming on the heels of C. S. Forester's Hornblower books, they fit the narrow definition, too. They are quintessential genre fare. But for all that they are brilliant, risky books. They are art. Should O'Brian have been encouraged to write "serious" novels instead? Hardly.

My problem with the ubiquity of genre writing is not the writing itself but the ubiquity. In the same way that pop has squeezed the rest of music into the margins, genre writing -- the blistering, blockbuster series books and the millions that follow in their wake -- is pushing everything else into the back corner of the bookshop. And like pop music, the range of quality and originality in what remains is questionable. The only way to enjoy it is never to experience the alternative.

The stigma against genre serves to separate "good" writing from "bad" -- this function would be easier to take seriously if literary writing were better done -- but it also represents a defensive measure. It is not, as some genre writers believe, based on envy of genre's success. Rather, it stems from the fear that their success will signal the end of the rest of fiction, that the Stephen Kings and Dan Browns and Michael Crichtons will swallow the rest of the book world whole. To be honest, I share that concern. So many aspiring writers now are nurtured on genre fiction and have very little knowledge of anything outside its conventions. I know from experience how insular that world can be, and how satisfying, and how blindered. The genre stigma will never take hold in most people's minds because it is refuted by genre's success. We are at the point now where we can speak of "the literary stigma," a stigma that is not likely to be offset by financial rewards anytime soon.