----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Alison Croggon" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Wednesday, January 17, 2007 5:08 PM
Subject: Re: "Some Guests" / narrative and lyric


> Fascinating conversation, Chris and Frederick: and perhaps it
> interests me particularly because my days at present are busy writing,
> well, narrative. And it's old fashioned narrative, an adventure story
> which is supposed to tranfix teenagers to the chair. This is the final
> of four 500-page books, and the other three, if I'm to judge by sales
> and fan mail, are fairly successful at said transfixing. One thing
> that writing this work has made me hyper conscious of is that a good
> story is as much (or even primarily)  its means of telling as the
> story itself. What is Kipling's "Listen, O my beloved" or "Once upon a
> time" or "Sing in me muse" or any of those tropes but exhortations to
> listen, promises of a kind of magic?
>
> I agree with Frederick about how its "distance from reality
> reveals...that of mainstream writing". However, this is for me
> liberating rather than otherwise; what honest fiction writer pretends
> that he/she is transparently reflecting the world itself, rather than
> his/her perception of it? And I am not so sure that SFF is as despised
> as Frederick supposes. Only by literary snobs, I'd suggest; there are
> too many good writers practising the form for it to be so comfortably
> dismissed. Speculative fiction is as full of sub-standard writing as
> any other branch of literature, but it's only fair to judge it, like
> any other literary genre, by its best practitioners. They include
> writers as thoughtful and various as Stanislaw Lem, Ursula Le Guin,
> Margaret Atwood, Cormac McCarthy, China Mieville, Ismael Kadare or
> Russell Hoban. All of them are as engaged in the "real" world as in
> the world of imagination and language.
>
> Writing this kind of work, even at the conventional end like me (and I
> like to think that it's writing that has some beauty and insight and
> meaning, even so) has for me opened a new richness in the work of
> people like Beckett or Bernhard or Howe (or Prynne or HD or Milton or
> anyone you care to name, really). But I don't think one reads fiction
> or poetry to learn about "a slice of reality": I think one reads for
> pleasure. A "difficult pleasure", as Brett Whitely said of painting.
> And there are many kinds of pleasure to be had.
>
> All best
>
> A
>
Alison, I have the impression that science fiction is more respected, and 
more integrated into the literary mainstream, in Australia than in the US. 
Certainly Australia has produced some first-rate SF writers:  George Turner, 
Jack Dann, John Baxter.  There is no American equivalent to Peter Carey's 
The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith (one of my all-time favorite novels).  Nor 
can there be, because it's about NOT being America.

When I was young the only genuinely critical social satire written in the US 
took the form of science fiction.  Pohl and Kornbluth, in The Space 
Merchants and Gladiator-at-Law; later, Disch in 334, reflected realities 
that mainstream styles couldn't.  (Not to mention Philip K. Dick.) 
Conversely, mainstream novelists who wanted to say something more profound 
(and less intimist) than usual about what was happening often resorted to SF 
mechanisms: Gore Vidal's Messiah; later, Atwood.  Critics and reviewers 
here, however, still talk about SF and the mainstream novel as being two 
entirely different types of writing, and either ignore or dismiss the 
former..

As for writing as a "slice of reality": I was thinking of Henry James, who 
in some critical essays justifies the novel in sociological terms: the 
Russians cut off their slice of the pie, the French theirs, etc.  Of course 
there are vast stylistic, psychological, and moral differences, but he 
manages to see the enterprise of the novel as collegial and cumulative - not 
as a series of mutually exclusive visions.  In "The New Novel" he despises 
D. H. Lawrence (who, one can tell, rather frightens him) because he can't be 
easily fit into this mould; something else is too obviously going on.  James 
preferred Hugh Walpole.  This aspect of his criticism seems weirdly at odds 
with James's practice - and yet I think it does correspond to how many 
19th-century writers saw what they were doing.