The man who invented the future

Thursday, July 22nd, 2004

In The man who invented the future, Scott Thill interviews Alan Moore, “who reinvented the comic book as the cutting-edge literary medium of our day.” The interview, unfortunately, starts with a prolonged — and surprisingly simplistic — leftist diatribe on the war in Iraq, the Bush dynasty, etc. Eventually it moves on to Moore’s take on literature and the literary establishment — which, while I may agree with it, certainly has a “sour grapes” taste to it:

Over here, the literary establishment is still running, as back in the days of Jane Austen, on the novel of manners, which she more or less invented. And, of course, they’re about the social intricacies of the middle class, who were also the only people at the time who could read or afford to buy the books. They were also the people who made up the book critics. And I think that, around this time, critics were so delighted by this new form of literature mirroring their own social interactions that they decided that not only was this true literature, but this was the only thing really that could be considered true literature. So all genre fiction, anything that really wasn’t a novel of manners in one form or another, was excluded from that definition.
[...]
I recently saw a program about the history of the novel on TV over here — it was a short series and it was ridiculous. I predicted before the thing was actually shown that there would be nobody representing any form of genre fiction whatsoever — and I was, for the most part, right. They managed to get through the 18th and 19th centuries without a mention of, say, the gothic novel. Fair enough, perhaps the gothic novels weren’t as extraordinary as literature, but they also didn’t mention Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein,” which is an incredibly important book for all sorts of reasons. But I guess it has become what they would term genre fiction, so it is amongst the literary damned. My only mistake was that I said I didn’t think there would be a mention of H.G. Wells, but my girlfriend told me they did mention “The History of Mr. Polly,” which is one of the few works by Wells that I have not been able to get through. To completely ignore “The War of the Worlds,” “The Time Machine,” “The Invisible Man” and all his other work shows you the way that the literary critical establishment tends to regard even people in so-called lower literary genres. So if you are working in comics, which is considered a whole lower medium, well, let’s just say that I’m not anticipating being given the Booker Prize anytime soon — and I’m immensely glad of that.

Leave a Reply