Ted Gioia explores the rise of conceptual fiction:
During the middle decades of the 20th century, literary works that experimented with language were seen as harbingers of the future. These Joycean and Poundian and Faulknerian creations were singled out for praise and held as models for emulation. These works won awards, were taught in universities, and gained acceptance (at least in highbrow circles) as contemporary classics.
During these same years, another group of writers, universally scorned by academics and critics, were working on different ways of conceptualizing reality. Unlike the highbrow writers, they did not experiment with sentences, but rather with the possible worlds that these sentences described. These authors often worked in so-called “genre styles” of fiction (science fiction, fantasy), publishing in pulp fiction periodicals and cheap paperbacks. Despite the futuristic tenor of their writing, these authors were not seen as portents of the future. And though these books sold in huge quantities and developed a zealous following among readers, these signs of commercial success only served to increase the suspicion and scorn with which these books were dealt with in highbrow circles.
In a strange quirk of history, literature in the late 20th and early 21st century failed to follow in the footsteps of Joyce and Pound. Instead, conceptual fiction came to the fore, and a wide range of writers — highbrow and lowbrow — focused on literary metaphysics, a scenario in which sentences stayed the same as they always were, but the “reality” they described was subject to modification, distortion and enhancement.
This was seen in the magical realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Salman Rushdie; the alternative histories of Michael Chabon and Philip Roth; the modernist allegories of José Saramago; the political dystopias of Margaret Atwood and Kazuo Ishiguro; the quasi-sci-fi scenarios of Jonathan Lethem and David Foster Wallace; the reality-stretching narratives of David Mitchell and Audrey Niffenegger; the urban mysticism of Haruki Murakami and Mark Z. Danielewski; the meta-reality musings of Paul Auster and Italo Calvino; the edgy futurism of J.G. Ballard and Iain Banks; and the works of hosts of other writers.
Of course, very few critics or academics linked these works to their pulp fiction predecessors. Cormac McCarthy might win a Pulitzer Prize for his novel The Road, a book whose apocalyptic theme was straight out of the science fiction playbook. But no bookstore would dare to put this novel in the sci-fi section. No respectable critic would dare compare it to, say, I Am Legend (a novel very similar to McCarthy’s in many respects). Arbitrary divisions between “serious fiction” and “genre fiction” were enforced, even when no legitimate dividing line existed.
Only commercial considerations dictated the separation. Literary critics, who should have been the first to sniff out the phoniness of this state of affairs, seemed blissfully ignorant that anything was amiss.
José Saramago’s Blindness might have a plot that follows in the footsteps of Michael Crichton’s The Andromeda Strain or Greg Bear’s Blood Music, but no academic would ever mention these books in the same breath. Toni Morrison’s Beloved might have as its title character a ghost and build its action around a haunting, but no one would dare compare it to a horror novel — even though it has all of the key ingredients.
It almost seemed as if the book industry (and critics and academics) had reached a tacit agreement. “If you don’t tell people that these works follow in the footsteps of genre fiction books, we won’t either.”
The only contemporary use the works of Joyce are good for is that (in a right to carry state) you can stop an intruder cold with Ulysses and finish them off with Finnegan’s Wake.
Joyce would make a very good fantasy writer — if fantasy had been already invented.
He was a master of style; unfortunately, he wanted to be considered a genius by critics, and he was unable to cope with it intellectually. And so he made up for his lack of ideas with bullshit- for which he had a real facility, too. Perhaps he had kissed the Blarney Stone.
“I hear an army charging upon the land,
And the thunder of horses plunging, foam about their knees:
Arrogant, in black armour, behind them stand,
Disdaining the reins, with fluttering whips, the charioteers.
They cry unto the night their battle-name:
I moan in sleep when I hear afar their whirling laughter.
They cleave the gloom of dreams, a blinding flame,
Clanging, clanging upon the heart as upon an anvil.
They come shaking in triumph their long, green hair:
They come out of the sea and run shouting by the shore.
My heart, have you no wisdom thus to despair?
My love, my love, my love, why have you left me alone?”