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Recent comments:

• 
  Margie
  January 11th, 2012 @19:30 #
   
  
  

  A criminal cat is loose amongst the literary pigeons. Reading for pleasure is a good thing. Pleasure is good too - it would appear that many readers get their kicks from being frightened out of their wits. and fear, in my experience, certainly focusses the mind. the elegant essence, I suppose, of good crime fiction lies in its ability to create worlds that are usually hidden - the inner workings of pleasure and cruelty and power. Kind of like a literature department at a university.

  
  
• 
  Kelwyn Sole
  January 12th, 2012 @08:57 #
   
  
  

  Hi Margie - well, just so long as it's not a literary cat loose amongst the krimi pigeons. I suppose Leon's invoking of Philip Sidney in what he writes is making a similar point. But when it's about pleasure, it's not just about pleasure, though, is it? There is a further point, for me - WHY do certain things give me pleasure, when I read?

  Anthony Braxton makes the point that most people (he's talking about music) respond to standard sorts of systems in art (speaking conceptually or technically)... which they recognise and have learned to respond to with certain emotions. Being an avant-garde saxophonist, he of course want to avoid evoking standard responses; he's more of a discombobulate-the-listeners type. And I suppose one of the questions being made on slipnet is whether the South African version of crime, or fantasy, or horror genres are adding something different to an established genre; or simply running through a genre type borrowed from the North and spiced with a little local flavour.
  Lord knows, there are South African models of figures that invoke terror - zims, for example, or that river monster with a bad case of warts that you get in traditional tales - that could be used. (IMO Lauren Beukes does attempt something like this).

  I was wondering how close the frission I feel, when I read something arresting (no pun intended), is to the enjoyment of being frightened out of one's wits ... but then, I guess that frission is what literary types call 'the sublime'. Is there a crime novel sublime?

  
  
• 
  Colleen
  January 12th, 2012 @09:50 #
   
  
  

  Tracey Farren's Snake is I think a literary psychological thriller that for me both discombobulates and satisfies (rather than gives pleasure). It doesn't fit neatly into genre though although it has elements of crime fiction, thriller, etc. I would be interested in what others think.

  
  
• 
  Margie
  January 12th, 2012 @11:52 #
   
  
  

  I thought DISGRACE rather a sublime crime novel. And Kelwyn, I am not sure that crime fiction is so easily labelled as a construct of the 'North'. It is a literary form that rose with modernity and urbanism. It is a form that could contain the terror the chaos of the crowded and vicious urban centres that coalesced around industrialisation. The famous Man in the Crowd - spectator, spectre, possibly friend or killer. that is what underlies so much crime fiction -outside of the cosies and the Number One Detective agency type books. Crime fiction was a way for me to write about the urban - about the city - one needs a way to navigate a large city and to do that one needs a flaneur - or flaneuse - the walker (and in the woman's case the streetwalker). It is a form that works very well because there is little to differentiate the vicious cities of the world - alienation, dirt, litter, waves of unloved and unkown people moving through them. At the same time pockets of care and domesticity and morality. It is shifting and ambiguous and allows one to paint larger canvasses than the farm novels that seem to define so much of South African literature. I always remember learning in Economic History that South AFrica was dependent on wage income - cash - from the late 1800s. That cash is generated in the cities. The city is the domain of the crime novel, for all intents and purposes.

  
  
• 
  Kelwyn Sole
  January 12th, 2012 @14:08 #
   
  
  

  Interesting; thanks, Margie. Ja, I agree; it's a question of the similarities, and/or differences, of localised experiences of modernity that need to be addressed here.

  My one question re flaneurship is: what role does the reader play in all this? Surely he/she has to be a non-stroller, sitting at home being terrified or enthralled? Or have I got it wrong? I also am not sure whether the crime novel always has to be citified ... if one uses one of the other possible meanings of flaneur - the marginalised individual - then there's a whole trope in SA fiction about the rebellious outsider within a community who commits a crime, and then gets hunted down (cf Achmat Dangor, for instance). (Mind you, they've generally been to the city, and have come back and become a form of disturbance).

  Still, I think I am trying to say something - imperfectly - about needing to get one's form and subject matter - whatever one's writing, poetry, 'highbrow' novel, fantasy novel, whatever - to grow out of that fusion of the local and the global which is (in your argument) the experience of the city. There's a lot of exploring into local models and precedents that can be done, excitingly; so my suggestion about a plethora of indigenous possibilities remains. IMO, it'll be fun to watch local crime writers decomposing their works in such terms....

  Moreover, my limited reading suggests that crime in the history of SA literature has often been linked to notions of resistance, either rightly or wrongly. This doesn't seem merely local. I'm busy reading Patrick Chamoiseau's 'Texaco', and for him it seems 'crime' has other resonances as well - the criminals are e.g. those who keep trying to tear down the shanty-towns, or ordering them torn down ... and it's fine, it seems, to resist this violently. This uneasy theme of the relationship of crime to resistance vs. loss of morality pervades SA literature at one point; Alan Paton's trope of respectable fathers getting killed by tsotsi sons; the romanticisation of gangsters in some black literature (Mzamane, the socalled Drum writers) from the 1950s onwards.

  "The night of our cities ... is a vast sheet-metal monster pierced by countless knives" (Louis Aragon, Paris Peasant)

  
  
• 
  Helen
  January 13th, 2012 @01:00 #
   
  
  

  Have been following this debate over on Slipnet with great interest, and the occasional urge to dole out some slaps with a pap snoek. I have another question: why this anxious policing of the genre boundaries, this territorial snarling, the invoking of a kind of bookish snobbery in which the so-called literary books occupy a higher standing in the food chain? Who is going to call Hamlet a krimi? Kelwyn's notion of pleasure is the bottom line -- and like many (if not most?) readers, I don't care what genre the book in my hands falls into, as long as it engages, delights, instructs. Oh look, I've gone all Platonic. I note with great pleasure the great genre-blurring going on all over, but esp in local writing. Do carry on.

  
  
• 
  Kelwyn Sole
  January 13th, 2012 @10:01 #
   
  
  

  Helen, I guess what it boils down to is that different things engage, delight and instruct different readers/listeners, not so? Even so, and this being granted, I'd want to suggest that the questions/issues that then emerge are not ALL just about subjective assessment, just so much as they are not ALL just about extra-text ideology (or etc). So IMO we need arguments about aesthetics and value, just as I think these arguments often revolve around different assumptions about how one should read, and how one should seek pleasure and enlightenment.

  Also, even though we have to indulge in them and try and clarify issues, they'll never reach absolute resolution. And when we indulge in them, I suspect we throw light on our own assumptions, willy-nilly, just as much as we are questioning our 'opponent'.

  I find myself torn about this issue, and I dislike the stark terms into which two 'camps' are being divided. On the one hand, I remember very well, from the past, similat situations to this - e.g. when I arrived in CT from Jhb, I couldn't believe the snobbish mindlessness and certitude with which the boundaries of what was, and what wasn't, 'good poetry' were being policed here. So, sure: never pre-judge a genre; or believe that there's an absolute distinction between 'highbrow' and 'popular'; or that they don't interpenetrate (or else how would one understand the limericks in Gravity's Rainbow, for example?).

  On the other hand, some of the authors of the popular genres have wanted to act like new kids on the block: with a little bit of swagger. Those of us in our dotage tend to get irritated by this (even though, to be fair, there was a time when the now decomposing, like myself, did think we were hot s***. That's how it goes, I suppose).

  This being granted, I do think some of the claims being made for the popular genres at present are exaggerated, and that in addition there's too much defensiveness on both sides of this rather synthetic 'divide' (the original report re 'genre snobs' on this site was to my mind not exactly non-partisan, for example). But speaking personally, I do have difficulty with the claim that crime novels are the 'new political fiction'. My immediate thought would be 'yes, but only in a very particular sense and from a particular angle, and with a lot of qualifications'. But it's provocative statements like that which allow us all to start arguing it through more minutely, and allow us to start to go through those qualifications. And may provoke authors to join in (Margie's discussions on both sites). So this debate is a good thing, I think?

  I think some of it, finally, has been about style - Nicol's prose caused Chetty irritation, for example, if I remember. I do think that popular genres often do not (or do not have the time to, maybe) develop prose styles as engaging as some of the mainstream - Joyce, Beckett, or if you want the stripped-down, people like Coetzee and Fitzgerald. Even so, there are exceptions - in sf and fantasy, the stylistic brilliance of a Gene Wolfe, or John Crowley, or Garden Dozois in his early stories are noteworthy.....

  
  
• 
  Helen
  January 13th, 2012 @12:16 #
   
  
  

  Thanks Kelwyn, and yr last line could start an entirely new debate -- with rare exceptions, I find Joyce unreadable, which is either proof of the vast risk involved in claiming high ground, much less a pinnacle, for ANY kind of creative writing project, or proof that I am a not-so-secret peasant when it comes to the written word. (To be fair, I have read an AWFUL lot of stuff, from an awful lot of centuries.)

  I must say, as someone also decomposing at a rapid rate, that the crop of genre writers I've seen spring up (misleading term, most of them have been grafting away for decades) are far from swaggering new kids on the block. Esp when compared with the enfants terrible of the late 70s and 80s, all those early 90s lit fests when (mostly white and invariably exclusively male) wunderkids would pontificate drunkenly and aggressively from platforms -- local lit was divided into camps so hostile as to be reminiscent of holy wars.

  I get to work with a lot of genre authors, and the ones I know personally are diffident, humble, supportive of their colleagues, and uncomplainingly tireless and professional in co-operating with the marketing campaigns their publishers and agents arrange for them (one does need to distinguish between the person and the persona created by the marketing team). Some of them work diligently at self-promotion, and their publishers sob with gratitude and relief. Some, with tongues-firmly-in-cheek, play out the role of the krimi author from time to time, but this is generally a form of stand-up. Compared with the writing fraternity (and yes, apart from the distant Duchess Gordimer, it was a fraternity) of the 80s, where one ducked as the chairs and vitriol flew, and the air was thick with testosterone (I never got out of a literary event ungroped), I'll take today's new kids in a heartbeat. Some, like Margie and Sarah Lotz, just off the top of my head, use their "commercial" publishing platforms as springboards for activism, esp re gender rights.

  PS: As you are still housed in academia, the home of a thousand barbs in the back, I hasten to add I am not including you in my assessment of yr peers -- you weren't an enfant terrible except politically, which is the best kind of terrible to be. I wish I saw more of that today (which I think is what you're trying to say). But then one risks being shoved into the kind of box Arundhati Roy now inhabits, excepted to generate noble soundbites and espouse the issue de jour. Meanwhile I just want a lovely book to read.

  
  
• 
  Margie
  January 13th, 2012 @12:49 #
   
  
  

  Perhaps the rise of us common and garden genre writers is an indication that South AFrica is, after all, a common and garden society where life is sometimes nasty, sometimes brutish, sometimes short. And not the exceptional case, that rare thing - a society and a nation that was somehow different, somehow more tortured, somehow more blessed, somehow demanding of higher morality, higher responsiveness. Maybe we just have mean streets to walk down, mean politicians to be fucked-over by, and satisfyingly mean vengeance to be wrought in the smaller domains that crime fiction offers. Because so much of the discussion about South AFrica, its cruel and vicious history, its glorious post-apartheid leap of faith, and the venal collapse of so many fantastical dreams is coloured by the notion that we are somehow 'different' (we had Madiba!) but in many ways we are not - we are just ordinary people trying to muddle into an ordinary future. One thing one learns from writing crime fiction - and researching it - is that ordinariness is marvellous. It means that nothing has happened to you, and that you have been able to live through, and carry on with your day. In fact, what most people manage to do every day in South Africa.

  
  
• 
  Kelwyn Sole
  January 13th, 2012 @12:58 #
   
  
  

  Thank you, Helen, though I do think I'd partly, rather than entirely, agree with the stark manner in which you paint the 'bad old days'. There was nuance ... I either knew well, or casually, a number of writers in those times who were humorous, humble, self-deprecating, etc despite the blah around them. And I do think that the presence of women in those scenarios does change somewhat between. say, the mid-1970s and the early-1990s: although this position stays marginal. And, yes, there are some scandalous stories, as you know, a number of which have never come out, and whose perpetrators are still there - and occasionally venerated - on our literary scene.
  (Another issue for me would be the assumptions then, and now, that women need to 'act like men' in order to make it in these circles. Or that men need to act like men). Having said this, I do miss the passion with which people held positions in those days (even as, again, some of these could be masks for self-advancement ). If I had the power to ban a word, it would be 'whatever'. But my particular beef with the 1980s is that it set in position a number of apparatchiks, who had little literary output themselves to demonstrate why they should be in the positions in the background they were/are in.

  To get back to the point: I do think issues of style are a large part of what's being argued about here. Come on! Joyce is fun - he had a huge sense of humour and playfulness e.g.
  - where the bus stops, there stop I.
  - it darkles (tinct, tint) all this our funanimal world.
  - the flushpots of Euston and the hanging garments of Marlybone.
  - all moansday, tearsday, wailsday, thumpsday, frightday, shatterday till the fear of the Law.
  - the hearsay in paradox lust.
  ..and, pertinent to our situation (substitute 'South Africa' for 'Ireland'),
  'Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow'.....

  
  
• 
  Margie
  January 13th, 2012 @13:09 #
   
  
  

  JOyce is a pain with way too many body functions. Too often like an overgrown little boy wondering at the fact that bodies excrete. I can very very easily do without him. In fact I have. I prefer the Irish maudlin and pared down - like Beckett

  
  
• 
  Helen
  January 13th, 2012 @13:11 #
   
  
  

  You had me at "flushpots of Euston". "Moansday" et al has me running up white flag and digging out my copy of Portrait of the Artist.

  
  
• 
  Helen
  January 13th, 2012 @13:13 #
   
  
  

  Although isn't it interesting that the first delish titbit you present is Joyce riffing on Shakespeare... the Big Daddy. Intertextuality rocks.

  PS: You're right, I do miss passion. It was enabled, partly, by what Margie refers to, the belief in our exceptionality.

  
  
• 
  Helen
  January 13th, 2012 @13:17 #
   
  
  

  Just seen Margie's comment on Joyce -- now if we're talking Irish writers, I have one word for you all: YEATS.

  
  
• 
  Kelwyn Sole
  January 13th, 2012 @13:42 #
   
  
  

  Apparently when she first met him, Nora Joyce said something like, "I hear the man's a genius, but what a dirty mind he has, hasn't he?' Love it! I also still can't have the ocean come into view without thinking 'The snotgreen sea. The scrotum-tightening sea'...and then there's that piece that ends up in a Jefferson Airplane song: 'I'd rather have my country die for me....'.

  I think most of this is in Ulysses or Finnegan's Wake, Helen. And I never liked Beckett until I got hold of his Complete Short Prose. Amazing.

  Ah, Ireland. I've never been in an airport before or subsequently that has huge black-and-white photographs of writers in it (Dublin = Joyce, Synge, Beckett, Yeats, if I remember - hope they're still there). Read in a pub in a village there once, and had e.g. truckers and fashion designers come up to me afterwards, who completely got what I and the other poets reading where trying to do. Goddamn.

  
  
• 
  Kelwyn Sole
  January 13th, 2012 @14:57 #
   
  
  

  ReJoyce (as in the title of the Jefferson Airplane song):

  1) writers who use the scatological - Joyce, Wilmot Earl of Rochester, Zappa, Rampolokeng etc - can be argued to be expressing a moral enterprise: it often comes out of a sense of moral disgust at the 'normal' world around them, what Zappa would call the world of the 'just plain folks'. This is probably less the case in Joyce than the others....and doesn't, of course, excuse FZ's, or Wilmot's, sexism
  ( check out Ben Watson(aka Out to Lunch)'s book, 'Frank Zappa and the Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play', which confronts this issue). On the other hand, there are critics who argue that the Molly Bloom soliliquy in Ulysses gets closer to being in sync with quote unquote 'woman's consciousness' than any other male writer (??).
  And he mocks men ("Phall if you but will, rise you must...")

  2) Joyce has a sense of music, and the closeness of literary utterance to music, that is marked - e.g. the one chapter in Ulysses that echoes musical notation and truncated chords etc, is a clue here; as is hearing Joyce himself read from Finnegan's Wake, when it suddenly becomes much easier to understand (there's a piece from the Anna Livia Plurabelle section that there's a recording of).

  3) TS Eliot didn't like Joyce, saying he was a 'dead end' for the English language. Added point in JJ's favour.

  4) Joyce once said to Yeats: "I've met you too late. You're too old for me to help you."

  Here endeth the defence.

  
  
• 
  Chiara
  January 13th, 2012 @15:34 #
   
  
  

  For those interested in Joycean vulgarities, I point you in the direction of the letters he sent to his wife. Warning: this is not for those weakly constituted - even the web doesn't seem to fare well with its presence, as I can only get a cache copy of the original webpage: http://bit.ly/w8glvW

  Kelwyn, your comment about moral enterprise puts in mind a recent article by Percy Zvomuya about dirty African proverbs: http://bit.ly/xRzNMc

  
  
• 
  Kelwyn Sole
  January 13th, 2012 @15:56 #
   
  
  

  Thanks, Chiara. Wow. I'm speechless ... as a review I remember said, when reviewing Nabokov's 'Ada or Ardor, A Chronicle' on its first release: "...and he's a randy old soul, too."

  ... gotta love Fatma's blog comment, "I think that might just be the most James Joyce that I've ever read in one sitting".

  
  
• 
  Rustum Kozain
  January 13th, 2012 @16:49 #
   
  
  

  Although, er, Joyce did write the best literary sex scene, in Ulysses, something like "He did. She did. They did," isn't it?

  
  
• 
  Kelwyn Sole
  January 13th, 2012 @17:42 #
   
  
  

  Take a back seat, Bataille Apollinaire etc...hmmm. I wonder if the 'Michael Bodkin' in the letters transmuted into 'Michael Furey' in that most perfect of short stories, 'The Dead'.....

  Here's a game for the weary of heart: Joyce quotes of relevance to SA. How about "He prophets most who bilks the best"?

  
  
• 
  Helen
  January 13th, 2012 @20:32 #
   
  
  

  *cough* Can we go back to Yeats for a minute? For those who don't see the point of poetry:

  To A Young Girl

  My dear, my dear, I know
  More than another
  What makes your heart beat so;
  Not even your own mother
  Can know it as I know,
  Who broke my heart for her
  When the wild thought,
  That she denies
  And has forgot,
  Set all her blood astir
  And glittered in her eyes.

  Eleven lines, 42 words, most of them single syllables, and the emotional heft of a lifetime. Happy sigh. And Kelwyn, did I see a wee dig at TS Eliot up there? I don't like all his stuff, but "Marina" slides between my ribs every single time.

  
  
• 
  Kelwyn Sole
  January 14th, 2012 @08:55 #
   
  
  

  Even worse, the remark about Joyce appears in an essay where TSE is dissing Milton (an enterprise in which he was joined a few years later by Mr Potato Head himself, the Bearer of the Great Tradition). Guess who had the last laugh? ... All those nasty marxist and feminist critics emerged, and reactivated Milton ("my sect thou seest..." as the faithful angel Abdiel says to Lucifer in PL. Her her).

  Point taken, Helen. There're a few nice TSE lines, in amidst all that straining for sublimity. Is "I should find some way incomparably light and deft..." etc from Mariana? Gerontion?

  Good poetry is also about concision. Joyce again, a poem re a symphony concert:

  Gentlemen! Gentlemen!
  Rap, rap, rap!
  Fiddle, fiddle, fiddle;
  Clap clap clap.

  Says it all,doesn't it. Shouldn't we get back to crime fiction?

  
  
• 
  LyndaGilfillan
  January 14th, 2012 @09:08 #
   
  
  

  Yeah, back to crime fiction. I was told this week that Unisa runs a 3rd year course which claims: 'One version of postmodern writing is to be found in the increase in "genre fiction" (romances, detective fiction and science fiction) ... Some postmodern writers take the forms of these genres, which are often seen as "popular" and thus not"'literary", and play with them ... in both [Paul Auster and Thomas Pynchon], the framing device of the detective's quest for meaning is seen as symptomatic of the difficulty of making any meaning out of life in the late twentieth century.'

  
  
• 
  Kelwyn Sole
  January 14th, 2012 @10:09 #
   
  
  

  That sound right - certainly it's a literary phenomenon world-wide, that should be taught at universities. The detective figure is also homologous to the activities of the academic/literary researcher, as is clear in the demeanour and some of the work (cf his Morija book) of someone like Tim Couzens.

  Lynda, I think (practically) no one is arguing that the tropes and themes emanating from / contained in popular genres such as the crime novel aren't valid; although there is some questioning of its structural tendency to resolution (cf Moretti in 'Signs Taken for Wonders'). But I am sceptical of the claim that it's the 'new political novel'.... . If one grants that in order to evaluate a text, one has to look at its production and reception as well as what's on the page; my question is - what does the crime novel DO, in society? Then, you have to counterpose Auden's belief that 'literature makes nothing happen' with Milton's contradictory hope that books are "...as lively, and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous Dragon's teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men."

  I choose the latter: to me a genre that acts politically has to provoke action in a wider world, or at least try to change consciousness among its readers/listeners. We've had some discussion of the crime novel's ability to to frighten, or cause frission, or result in some sort of catharsis. But that isn't enough in my book to call something 'political'. Socially involved, yes - but all literature is socially involved.

  
  
• 
  Kavish
  January 15th, 2012 @10:37 #
   
  
  

  Hi Chiara,

  With respect, you've reduced my opinion to a rather facile and superannuated high/low distinction, which belongs to an era before Stuart Hall.

  1. The "irreconcilable premises" point was posed as interrogative, not assertion, so that's not an argument of mine.
  2. I didn't use the word "greatness", so it shouldn't be apostrophised, and I explicitly avoided saying anything about "preclud[ing]"/excluding crime fiction from analysis. The opposite: I asked what the precise nature of crime fiction was beyond its conventions, aesthetic or thematic.
  3. My suggestion was more simply: "In crime-fiction, history is subordinate to convention."
  4. The “plot, character, action, resolution, some good sex” quote is Margie Orford's, not mine.

  Just wanted to clear my name, lest those selective quotations/misquotations/misattributed quotations make me sound like a prat with no sense of complexity. Cheers.

  
  
• 
  Kavish
  January 15th, 2012 @12:39 #
   
  
  

  Sorry, the above post sounded far more accusatory than I intended. I understand the difficulties of having to reduce for swift reportage.

  
  
• 
  Chiara
  January 16th, 2012 @20:30 #
   
  
  

  Hi Kavish, sorry about some of the mix-ups. Technically it would have been more correct to use double as well as single quotes when I referred to your use of Orford's phrase, "plot character.." etc., which, in trying to keep my intro short, I must have felt was an unimportant clarification. Sorry about that. Luckily, I don’t think it affects the context too much.

  While I'm sure you used the phrase "greatness" and also referred to "great literature", I wasn't necessarily quoting you there, but rather, using quotes in the same way I did in referring to "genre", “prestige” and “literary” - to show that the terms are loaded. My use of double quotes throughout instead of alternating between double and single might be the cause for confusion.

  Regarding the more relevant point about irreconcilable differences, you wrote: "This debate as to whether 'genre-fiction' can enter the 'canon' is dead on arrival, because it’s stuck in a deadlock of irreconcilable premises." I took this to mean you were saying that "irreconcilable premises" make it difficult for genre to enter the canon, or be appreciated the same way as other works regarded as "great". This seems to echo with your comment that genre "has a circumscribed set of conventions to work with which necessarily leaves much on the peripheries of its vision.".("Necessarily" being of importance to the question of "irreconcilable"). I also thought this consistent with your other comment, "I don’t think there can be any argument whatsoever that crime fiction can meet DeLillo, Roth, Franzen for writing that is cognitive, embodied, questing." If I have interpreted or misconstrued this wrongly, sorry for that. I brought it up as I thought it raised an interesting question about aesthetic conventions - whether certain codes make it impossible to communicate outside of their associated context, as in the example of debates around pornography (can a work that employs the conventions of pornography be non-pornographic?).

  I'm not quite sure what you mean by '"preclud[ing]"/excluding crime fiction from analysis', but your other question (what is the precise nature of crime fiction beyond its conventions...) seems consistent with what I've explained above. Likewise “ "In crime-fiction, history is subordinate to convention." leads to no contradiction.

  No doubt I've missed nuances of your argument here but the point was to alert general readers to the interesting discussion at SliPNet by offering them a quick introduction to salient features. Hopefully the discerning readers will see I've done little justice when they read your comments in the correct context. (Apologies once again for the hasty and unconsidered use of quotations marks.)

  Anyway, it's nice to welcome you to the discussion over here!

  
  
• 
  Ben - Editor
  January 17th, 2012 @08:18 #
   
  
  

  Nicely clarified, Chiara.

  To adapt (steal from) a recent paper on the Japanese noise musician Akita Masami, Western modernist literary discourse is flush with talk of "the fictional material", a rhetorical figure which imbues writing with enigmatically self-inherent tendencies or even desires, while simultaneously adumbrating the subjugation of these tendencies to the rational ends of literary form through compositional technique. This trope echoes the broader Western “utopian vision" of the mastery of nature's unruly energies through art and science.

  The compositions of crime writers challenge such conceptions of meaningful literary experience as mastery over history. Twisting the normally unwanted ambient hum of violence into self-oscillating feedback loops which overload readers' processing capabilities, they can be seen as unbinding the inherent momentum of human events, forestalling their subsumption into "high" literary material. This aesthetic stance takes on a political resonance in works such as "Dolphin Beach" (2008), which makes reference to Japanese fishermen's practice of herding dolphin conservationists to their deaths by pounding metal rods submerged in water, and “13 Japanese Yakuza” (2009), which likewise references ultrasound devices used to repel birds from buildings in Japanese cities, forcing them to descend on unwitting pedestrians with fatal, beaky consequences.

  Just to dispel any notion that this is a forum for "prat[s] with no sense of complexity" and/or humour.

  
  
• 
  Henrietta
  January 17th, 2012 @10:43 #
   
  
  

  Ah Ben, you had me at simultaneous adumbration. Nice one.

  
  
• 
  Margie
  January 17th, 2012 @11:23 #
   
  
  

  Ben - thanks for explaining! I like those self-oscillating feedback loops. and the ambient hum of violence. I think it was Frank Zappa who sang so brilliantly about a 'dynamo hum'. But thanks for clarifying things so nicely. Could crime be the mistressy over history? if Literary Fiction is the mastery - after all the literary boys have had a long long turn. And mistresses are generally more fun than masters. Nicer knickers at any rate

  
  
• 
  Kelwyn Sole
  January 17th, 2012 @11:34 #
   
  
  

  Not quite a feyerabend, but definitely a feyeratwist to the tale. And a adumbanddumberration.

  You know, I admire the crime writers' esprit de corpse, but it strikes me it is nonetheless ok to scrutinise the way they decompose. To wit, I liked the remark made on slipnet about seeing who would blink first ... so , bojaleka, as Chinweizu and his crowd would say. (Or, as far as the western logophallocentric traditiongoes, one can only cite Joyce: i cain if you are abel.....).

  
  
• 
  Helen
  January 17th, 2012 @13:15 #
   
  
  

  Margie, you had me at "nicer knickers". Ben, have I told you lately that I love you? And Kelwyn, if anyone ever tells me that puns are a low form of humour, I am directing them to yr comment.

  
  
• 
  Kelwyn Sole
  January 17th, 2012 @15:39 #
   
  
  

  All I'm saying, Helen, is: viva debate about literature, viva! (Or, in this case: let a hundred disembowellers bloom, let a thousand skollies of thought contend....).

  My puns are relatively innocent: I'm not so sure about Margie's suggested punishments.

  
  
• 
  Rustum Kozain
  January 17th, 2012 @15:39 #
   
  
  

  I'm lost, like a new gumshoe.

  
  
• 
  Kelwyn Sole
  January 17th, 2012 @15:58 #
   
  
  

  Mind you, cancel that....Let a hundred morticians exhume, let a thousand skollies of thought contend!

  
  
• 
  Margie
  January 17th, 2012 @20:41 #
   
  
  

  Rustum, maybe if it is South African genre fiction you might be lost like an old takkie

  
  
• 
  Kelwyn Sole
  January 17th, 2012 @22:48 #
   
  
  

  Perhaps that's the issue causing debate - whether or not SA crime fiction is takkie.

  
  
• 
  Margie
  January 18th, 2012 @00:10 #
   
  
  

  It's so takkie its Bata

  
  
• 
  moi
  January 18th, 2012 @11:09 #
   
  
  

  wouldn't it be nice if, as with Crocs, everyone wanted some for themselves no matter what the taste snobs sniffed

  
  
• 
  Rustum Kozain
  January 18th, 2012 @12:00 #
   
  
  

  What's the etymology and accepted spelling for "takkie"? I know "tekkie'" in Afrikaans. But which came first, "tekkie" or "takkie"? Is "takkie" the anglicised version of "tekkie"? And is "takkie" from "tacky" because of the informal nature of the shoe. As a child I learnt "sand shoe" or "tennis shoe" as the English for "tekkies".

  Re genre: I grew up on genre fiction, from crime novels to Catherine Cookson romances. It was all my mother read. Never Mills and Boon, though; my mother couldn't tolerate the stuff, even as she never strayed beyond genre fiction. But we didn't call it "genre fiction"; we called it "books", sometimes a "love story" or a "detective story". She loved both, but didn't like "westerns". So, there were levels of distinction even within the boundaries of what I still think is better described as pulp fiction. My mom and I parted ways with James A. Michener, strangely. For her The Drifters was too 'sophisticated'. And we didn't know then what to call it ("popular history", "historical-romantic fiction"?).

  I don't have an issue with the co-existence and enjoyment of the high and the low. Nor even with the distinction between the high and the low, even if that distinction is unstable and relative, artificial and 'arbitrary' (in the sense that it is historical and not necessarily due to some 'inner quality' of the art). The whole idea behind the early days of popular culture studies was [I've mentioned this before on other threads, so apologies if it's boring] that a pop song could have as complex an emotional register for its audience as a Shakespeare sonnet. Yet one cannot help but be forced to distinguish between say, Marvin Gaye's "What's going on" and Rebecca Black's Friday (19.5 million views on Youtube: http://youtu.be/kfVsfOSbJY0). Because of this I think a distinction between popular culture and mass culture is still necessary.

  I know I am less entertained - or mostly not entertained at all - by something that is formulaic, and more entertained by that which, among other things, surprises me, by that which is dramatic (but which doesn't employ the elements of drama in a predictable way), by that which dazzles me without using bells and whistles, and by that which knows how to deploy repetition (Prince, Joy in Repetition: http://youtu.be/XDiRUM_7T1I)

  Does that make me a snob? I like some jazz, very little 'classical' music, and mainly a gamut of popular music - rock in many further sub-categories, reggae, soul, funk; but I also like a host of 'lower' genres, disco/post-folk Bee Gees. And as I often joke to friends, yes to foie gras AND KFC. (so I get my fill of the low cultural) I've tried reading some neo-pulp fiction in crime and science fiction, and I know that, based on reviews, there are remarkable exponents of the 2 genres out there, but there's also so much non-pulp out there where I know the odds are quite high that I will be wholly entertained by it (excepting of course the scores of novels that pass as non-pulp but which are flat, predictable, etc). So I plump for those.

  Is this an inherent snobbery or a deliberate snobbery? Do you really not enjoy a piece of salty, crispy chicken, or is it because you've learnt that it is unhealthy? I don't know; but I know that when it comes to reading I want something... something else. I'm reading Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon; several friends recommended it highly. It started well, but then soon became too clever, too showy (look at the amazing adjectives I can use! How's about that simile; you weren't expecting that huh? How's about my discoursing on breakfast cereal for 2 pages!). I think it would make a good tv series or a film, but I'm not enjoying the book for the way it is written.

  So, yes, where I do like my genre fiction is in film and television (although access is an issue), but even here there are distinctions between the gripping and the predictable, the well-made and the cookie-cutter bad. And many series start out brilliantly but by the 3rd series simply go through formulaic motions. The Wire seems to be an exception, as does Deadwood. As a kid I preferred Battle Star Galactica to Star Trek and Star Wars, but its remake was boring. I don't really enjoy all the Star Trek series and spin-offs, but will watch it because, well, I can't keep on watching the Alien quadrilogy nor Bladerunner nor The Matrix (I).

  I think crime and science fiction stories are good vehicles for staging entertaining drama, but in visual formats - film, television, computer games. It's interesting, the relationship between books and films. Novelists used to deride film at its advent, claiming that it couldn't really equal the storytelling abilities of fiction. But film can stand its own as a 'literary' form as it has aspired to the literary. It seems there's a turnaround now, that many novels aspire to the filmic, and genre fiction is best considered in comparison to these visual forms of the genre - film and computer games - than to written fiction. If we want to consider the place of narrative, in any case, computer games, I would say, should be the focus because it produces a deeper immersion in NARRATIVE than either film or written fiction. So, in terms of narrative entertainment, but also in terms of the other political, ideological and social roles that stories have always played (socialisation and subversion), computer games are taking over from books and film.

  A few years back, for instance, the US Army opened parts of its virtual training system to anyone on the internet. Ostensibly, it was for the further development of the software (bug reporting)[EDIT: it's actually a recruiting vehicle: http://www.americasarmy.com/); but also, I imagine, for the provision of virtual fodder to the actually training soldiers. A central ideological role - the normalisation of the presence of US armed forces in especially urban environments that, also, are almost inevitably 'middle-eastern' - comes as an extra special bonus.

  Producing a computer game costs time and money, but there are communities of developers who produce games on their own time. Singular ones may be as visually slick and impressive as the big, corporate produced ones. I know Marion Walton at UCT is involved in developing games of a progressive educational bent (but without being didactic). I imagine Lauren Beukes's books, with its apocalyptic environments and quest narratives, could work very well as computer games that could appeal to the average apolitical gamer and teach them a thing or two about the corporatisation of the world, etc. As computer gaming technology advances and becomes more accessible to a wider range of people, I think it will be the main place where people encounter narrative fiction. Immersion is its most powerful tool, and, in some of the classics I've played many years ago (first-person adventures, mainly science fiction but also detective), the games were already masterful in telling the story and even manipulating the player/protagonist. The plots and subplots were unpredictable, complex; the player often had to pause and work out their next moves; but you'd be drawn in, and so absorbed that you don't notice the seventeen hours that have passed. How many people spend a 17-hour session on a novel?

  So, hopefully, Anonymous is working on a game around Wikileaks and Occupy, etc.

  Like many on these boards I bemoan our impoverished reviewing culture - too little space, reviewers hardly quoting from a book to give a reader a taste, large claims made in terms of everything without substantiation, etc. In short, no space (nor inclination?) for close-reading, which would allow a reviewer to convince me to read or not to read a book. And I mean close-reading, whether Literachah or pulp. All good things can survive close-reading, but not Rebecca Black.

  
  
• 
  Margie
  January 18th, 2012 @12:28 #
   
  
  

  NO CROCS!!!! a fashion crime of Myra Hindley proportions. Rustum, you are right - Tekkie - I'm bad at spelling. I love that shop Tekkie Town or is it Takkie Town? I also like your discussion of film and television and things popular or of broad appeal. that is the site of a shared culture, I think.

  
  
• 
  moi
  January 18th, 2012 @12:42 #
   
  
  

  odd how the term 'pulp fiction' is denotes books way less likely to end up at the pulp factory than many of those that transcend the term :-)

  I've enjoyed M&B and smart-ass detectives since way back before I knew better and still do even tho' I now supposedly do.

  For me, novels written to formula are much like poems written to form - not confined to a (eg sonnet/krimi or hyg/rhyming couplet ;-) cage, but written around a climbing frame/form from which (I hope) authors will make their content swing, dangle upside down, leap at the moon.

  Kind of thing... it's way too hot here today :-/

  
  
• 
  Rustum Kozain
  January 18th, 2012 @13:25 #
   
  
  

  Etymology of pulp fiction: it used to be printed on cheaper paper, paper most probably produced from the mush of all the high lit novels and The Waste Land being pulped.

  I've tried reading some of the crime novels I read as a teenager. There's the highly formulaic James Hadley Chase - strong on plot, but doesn't satisfy. I can't get hold of Twelve Trains to Babylon, but I don't buy online, and I doubt it will live up to memory. I've tried reading Silence of the Lambs, which I read in one sitting when I was an undergraduate - overwrought, not as gripping as I remembered. But Name of the Rose is as gripping as when I first read it - just in story, character and dialogue (I don't get all the learned stuff).

  My larger point is that people make distinctions all the time, based on quality and, because of one's sense of quality, whatever it may be, one constructs one's own sense of high and low. Nevertheless, one cannot uphold KFC as wholly nutritious or the only food. And no matter how much one loves KFC, it would be disingenuous to suggest that there's nothing better.

  Some poet somewhere once said that writing a sestina is like stuffing a cat.

  Moi, there's still the conditional: "written around a climbing frame/form from which (I HOPE) authors will make their content swing, dangle upside down, leap at the moon."

  It goes without saying that yes, there's a lot to enjoy when this happens. Pop songs are, for instance, where this happens in volume; hiphop is the pre-eminent form of rhyming couplets; and yes, it happens in poetry too. But too often you know it's gonna be bad because it's formulaic, because the writer isn't able to magick the formula, in fiction. And in poetry, if we consider traditional poetic forms as formulaic, there are thousands of form poems that are technically adept, but that's it. It becomes poetic IKEA. Functional, maybe even looks nice the first time you see it, but when you see it in so many homes, all the same...

  
  
• 
  moi
  January 18th, 2012 @13:53 #
   
  
  

  yeah I sourced that meaning too, despite wiki being out to toyi-toyi today. Books/writings prolly have as little chance as we do of outstripping our etymologies but in preparation for my grandchildren who'll likely never see paper, pulped or otherwise, I should prolly consider 'kindle-fiction' as a descriptor..

  
  
• 
  Rustum Kozain
  January 18th, 2012 @13:55 #
   
  
  

  I used my heavy print dictionary; but because my hands are sweaty, it almost slipped and crushed my toes.

  
  
• 
  Kelwyn Sole
  January 18th, 2012 @13:56 #
   
  
  

  Enough, already! 'genre fiction' and 'genre snob' are meaningless terms ... all literary works belong to a genre, and many works belong to overlapping genres. If you look at their conditions of production, for instance, Dickens' novels were an example of 'genre fiction' par excellence. Samuel Beckett is genreless? Robert Browning is genreless? Come off it, pls. (Mea culpa in this regard, by the way).

  I think one has to define further what 'complex emotional register' means, Rustum - I'm conscious, arguing this through, how much I personally value and want to proselytize works that push readers and listeners further, inform them, make then think, challenge them ... 'catharsis' isn't good enough for me, and certainly not a 'good read' . (Eve Bertlesen puts the case magnificently for the kind of literature and criticism I'm talking about, in her rebuttal of Albie Sachs in the early 1990s). From this angle, 'The Dispossessed' is as valuable a work as 'Blindness'. Even Neal Stephenson...I think Cryptonomicon is pretty ordinary, but try his Baroque Cycle - it's as excessive, but one can learn a helluva lot about the eighteenth century from it, despite the fact that it has been dissed as a 'historical fantasy', and despite how much he shows off. In fact, the novel of excess is a phenomenon of modernism and postmodernism - from Musil all the way to Vollmann.

  However, many people would disagree with my notion of 'value' above. One has to argue this out, then, before any common language is possible.

  Myself, I would want to know more about the topology of SA's upsurge of 'genre fictions' like crime and horror, in terms of issues that are not immediately about aesthetic value. Like e.g. (expanding?) reading publics - is this a white, suburban phenomenon re readership, or does it spread further? Whose consciousness does it reflect? Does it become a defensive, or an exploratory, way of viewing the world? What about writers like Mzobe? (Whatever the answers, one can't think about this upsurge without keeping Zukiswa Wanner's recent article on this site in the back of one's mind).

  Moreover, I think one also has to realise that, specifically, crime fiction is the one genre in SA at the moment that bids to have some commercial success. Certainly, bookshops and websites promoting literature are going to view it with kindness as a phenomenon, for very sensible reasons - notions of value here become complicated very quickly, avd perhaps more than usual, by economic interests and factors (as a poet, it's hard for me to maintain the high ground here!).

  Also, rightly or wrongly, many people in SA have got impatient with being preached to/talked down at by both writers and people who teach literature. (Personally, I think it's a misrecognition to view the literary scene of the pre-liberation period facilely as doing this; but it's become fixed in people's minds, partly through the ideological thrust of SA's literary departments in universities. What can I say: it's a country where pumpkins to professors are promoted, and often squishy conservative pumpkins at that). So, the emergence of new areas of literature, seemingly not controlled by the mandarins of culture, seems like a breath of fresh air for many people.

  On the one hand, I do think that 'genre writers' (here I go again) have been a bit paranoid about criticism - being talked about is a good thing, not a bad thing. I think Kavish was right to query the tone of the initial report - it didn't exactly resemble enough what I had read on slipnet. However, I thought your response was good, Chiara.
  But yes, the quality of the writing is going to be discussed. Get over it.

  On the other hand, if it's going to be an object of scrutiny/critique in universities - as it should - I think this should be clearly done in its shadow, after the fact. Otherwise critics become 'enemies of production' (Brecht, to Benjamin: "You never know where you are with production; production is the unforeseeable. ... And they (he's talking about critics like Lukacs) themselves don't want to produce. They want to play theapparatchik and exercise control over other people. Every one of their criticisms contains a threat").

  
  
• 
  Margie
  January 18th, 2012 @14:42 #
   
  
  

  Penny 'orribles. that was the old name for pulp fiction - or the English name/Victorian name. I quite like the idea of writing penny 'orribles.

  
  
• 
  Rustum Kozain
  January 18th, 2012 @15:09 #
   
  
  

  What about Tickey Terribles.

  
  
• 
  Rustum Kozain
  January 18th, 2012 @15:22 #
   
  
  

  "Enough, already! 'genre fiction' and 'genre snob' are meaningless terms ... all literary works belong to a genre, and many works belong to overlapping genres." True, but not where it concerns the industry - bookshops, marketing, reviews, online lit threads. I also do think they are useful as filters; I know I may be 'limiting' myself by turning away from 'genre', but there's only so much KFC even I will eat.

  I'm also reacting against the accusation of snobbery by suggesting we all make distinctions in terms of quality (cf my previous post.). Naturally, a range of terms have to be unpacked, but that can be an endless exercise. "Complex emotional register" - I can't remember the exact phrase, but in some early critical work from Birmingham, arguing for why a pop or folk song can be the basis, for what I imagine then was considered humanistic literary studies, as much as a Shakespeare poem, it had something to do with what we assume we can 'get' from Shakespeare. The argument was that it could also be gotten from some pop songs.

  Stephenson - perhaps there's a difference between "excess" and "showing off" though. I like excess, but sometimes it's difficult to figure whether the excess is necessary, part of the game, part of a text's politics, or whether it's "showing off". But saying "I like excess" doesn't mean I want it all the time, in everything I read. Even excess has to make a kind of sense - but that is probably why I struggle with a lot of avant-garde stuff.

  And despite a "good read" being used often as a critical veil for texts that are unchallenging, I still think there's a place for a phrase like it in after-the-fact criticism. I think Ulysses was a good read, as well as Last Exit to Brooklyn. Yes, you cannot define, order, police production, but I want to be able to say why I don't like something. If one of those reasons is that it "doesn't read well", then I'm going to take it. The next novel that doesn't read well may do it well though, so then it might be a quality of the book. Ultimately, "doesn't read well" may be a tool in a particular book; but it can so easily also be because the writer isn't in control of the mechanics. It doesn't flow, pace is up and down, time frames are not well signalled, it discourses on cereal for 2 pages, supposedly to give us insight into a character's psychological make-up (meanwhile, we've learnt enough of this character's compulsions), etc.

  I'd also like to see critical work on 'genre fiction' as a literary-cultural phenomenon. Especially horror. As a kid, I liked horror movies, but hated whatsername's book, Frankenstein. And that other one, Dracula. Didn't much like literary gothic - or, sorry, the 'gothic' fiction that was studied in English Lit departments. But I missed much of the horror movies through the 80s and 90s. At some point something is gonna come through the window and scare the shit out of you, etc. I saw Alien, I saw Prophecy. Saw The Shining late in life. But generally gave horro the miss. Then there was a sort of a lull, or maybe I was now going to better cinemas. Then new horror - cheap, straight to video stuff - started appearing in video stores and a younger generation got hooked, and now it's everywhere. I've seen some, but, sorry, in terms of skin-crawling suspense, they don't come near Shining or Alien. This, I imagine, is due to all sorts of factors: script, acting, directing, etc., but there is a sense that it's also a refashioning without renewal. But hoo-hay, I guess that's postmodernism.

  The interesting question is: why is it happening? Why does horror in films and novels appeal so widely now? Any takers?

  
  
• 
  moi
  January 18th, 2012 @15:37 #
   
  
  

  For me the world of words (like the world) is divided primarily into that which is predicated on patriarchy and that which rises above/attempts to rise above/is outside of that tired old, boring old, predictable old discourse. Which is probably why I find it difficult to recreate my enjoyment of many child/youth-hood favourites other than Pippi Longstocking.

  Once, in desperate refuge, I spent a few blissful years reading only lesbian fiction, and lesbian whodunnits in particular, before venturing back into the mainstream. For a long while too, I avoided work written by straight men unless someone could assure me it was not yet another descent into same old same old manifests of dude-fest. And yes, I know straight women writers are just as mired in patriarchal discourse – I learned to spot and avoid them too.

  Nowadays I’m able to deal with the patriarchal stuff I must read (don’t get me wrong, I love patriarchs - I think they’re cute) but what I really enjoy about much recent S’african fiction is the ways in which it either speaks back to or ignores our traditional and pretty much entrenched/revered patriarchal discourse.

  You’ve just got to look at Chanette Paul’s heroines, Marié Heese and Hawa Golakai’s women, François Loots’s men and Finuala Dowlings’ families, to see how local writers of romance, historical fiction, krimi, memoir and literary fiction are doing this.

  So, the lure of recent S’african fiction in all genre for me, is those books that are, as Kelwyn puts it,

  “works that push readers and listeners further, inform them, make them think, challenge them ...”

  moi

  PS - deduce what you will about my etymology but those shoes were plimsolls where I grew up

  
  
• 
  Helen
  January 18th, 2012 @18:35 #
   
  
  

  Rustum, have I told you lately that I love you etc. Some gems here: Moi's "wiki being out to toyi-toyi today". "Tickey Terribles"; poetic IKEA" (Rustum); "[SA is] a country where pumpkins to professors are promoted" (Kelwyn).

  Moi, very interested in what you say about patriarchal narrative formula. I intensely disliked the few Minette Walters/Val McDermid krimis/Patricia Cornwell krimis I read (I don't dig torture porn), but I did notice a distinct shift in the gender power differentials between characters. I've only read one of Jassy Mackenzie's books (My Brother's Keeper) and was extremely interested in the commentary on masculinity that was a subterranean thread (you see something very similar in Margie's novels).

  Etymology notes: The term in my family for pulp fiction was "penny dreadfuls". And a friend in Dorset referred to her tackies as "dabs".

  
  
• 
  Kelwyn Sole
  January 18th, 2012 @18:46 #
   
  
  

  In point form:
  - Rustum, at the level of the market, Ulysses is surely 'packaged' into genre as much as, say, Peter Straub or King? In the face of this, one needs to unpackage. Read Straub. Read Joyce. Then start making one's own distinctions. Treat the complacencies of the 'industry' that has grown up around any cultural form with suspicion.
  - I am a 'snob' insofar as I react against people who are lazy consumers - who aren't prepared to work at something, and try to understand it. Complexity is always more interesting; and if one takes this attitude, I think there will be a sifting out of the superficial. (Cecil Taylor is noise the first time one hears him, for instance; but if you keep at it, the patterns - and his brilliance - start emerging).
  - both Dracula and Frankenstein are pretty good novels IMO. I never thought I'd say this, but there are people who do horror well - even as I think a lot of it that's overblown. There are distinctions within genres. I would take someone like Straub seriously. Or Alice Sheldon, say, in sf. Or Billingham in crime. Etc.
  - some of the questions I was asking, Moi, was about gender; but gender in relation to class and race. Looking at one in isolation doesn't cut it, for me.

  
  
• 
  moi
  January 18th, 2012 @20:45 #
   
  
  

  @ Helen, I agree - what I've read of Orford, Mackenzie and Hichens, they're all, as does Golakai, writing s'african krimi outside of patriarchy predictables.

  @Kelwyn - From what I've seen/read, patriarchy operates in exactly the same way no matter what the race, class, culture it has infested. The detail might differ but, bottom line, it's predicated on 'adult alpha het male = top of the food chain' and all other constructs get to grub about and vie for (more or less precarious) positions on the lower rungs.

  Also from what I've seen, any excursions into race/class/culture/& etc intersections within those lower rungs serve best as diversionary/divide & rule tactics to preserve that top rung. So I try avoid going there - unless it's not patriarchy that's on the postmortem table.

  
  
• 
  Kelwyn Sole
  January 18th, 2012 @21:20 #
   
  
  

  Moi, I don't want to divert this into another discussion, and perhaps I'm misunderstanding you. But I think this 'top rung' stuff is dicey, and does for the purposes of discussion here relate to issues of reading publics and ventriloquism. As a marxist, for a long time I thought class was the primary machine of social division and inequity: maybe I still do. However, more recently I think I would accept that issues of race, class, gender etc interact with each other in complex ways, and there's no 'top dog' among them except in that cop-out, 'in the last instance'.

  If you make one primary and super-historical, you tend to run into homologous problems, it seems to me. For example, the proposition that all the consciousness and perceptions of the world of the constituent individuals in your chosen 'top rung' category is pretty much the same. That one can talk for/in respect of one's own race/class/gender (pick one) without huge problems. That solidarity and sympathy equates with knowledge of one's 'others' within the group. And so on.

  To dismiss necessary questions about divisions and differences as a 'diversionary tactic' that takes attention away from the 'real issue' that needs to be resisted is a form of suppression, and has a disreputable presence in recent history: and again, I don't care whether one's talking about class, race or gender. Stalinist Russia is an immediate example. So is racism, in whatever example. At best it's a strategic thing, and used politically and contingently.

  Who is the one to decide what issues are 'real', and which aren't? Again, you hit problems as to which group of individuals, or individual, are acting as author(s) (I choose the term advisedly) of and for the group. 'Author' is linked to 'authority', remember.

  
  
• 
  Rustum Kozain
  January 18th, 2012 @21:27 #
   
  
  

  "- Rustum, at the level of the market, Ulysses is surely 'packaged' into genre as much as, say, Peter Straub or King? In the face of this, one needs to unpackage. Read Straub. Read Joyce. Then start making one's own distinctions. Treat the complacencies of the 'industry' that has grown up around any cultural form with suspicion."

  I take all this as read, thus my note about unstable or relative distinctions; I was just using the terms in which the debate has unfolded.

  "- I am a 'snob' insofar as I react against people who are lazy consumers - who aren't prepared to work at something, and try to understand it. Complexity is always more interesting; and if one takes this attitude, I think there will be a sifting out of the superficial. (Cecil Taylor is noise the first time one hears him, for instance; but if you keep at it, the patterns - and his brilliance - start emerging)."

  I'm quite happy to distinguish between complexity and the superficial, but these would also be terms that need to be unpacked. And I would want to reiterate that everyone makes such distinctions - they may not distinguish between complex/superficial, but it may be in terms of other indicators of 'quality'.

  "- both Dracula and Frankenstein are pretty good novels IMO. I never thought I'd say this, but there are people who do horror well - even as I think a lot of it that's overblown. There are distinctions within genres. I would take someone like Straub seriously. Or Alice Sheldon, say, in sf. Or Billingham in crime. Etc."

  Too many books, too little time. And I'm a dreadfully slow reader.

  
  
• 
  Rustum Kozain
  January 18th, 2012 @21:35 #
   
  
  

  If one thinks of crime in South Africa as the only radical critique (actually existing) of post-1994, how could one link it to the rise in popularity of, er, fiction that takes crime and its solving as its central theme.

  
  
• 
  Margie
  January 19th, 2012 @00:18 #
   
  
  

  One of the things I have tried to figure out - as a citizen and as a writer - is what crime means in post-94 South Africa. If there is a grammar to violence, if there is what it is and what it is saying. How a nation that went so right also went so wrong. It seemed to me (when I returned to live here in 2001, having left in 1988) that the violence of the 1980s (what I saw and experienced peripherally as a young woman) had sublimated from the public sphere into the intimate sphere of violence against the (often) anonymous and unknown bodies of others. The righteous and rightful protest and marching and the unbelievable aggression (often highly sexualised) of necklacing (the shadow of the liberation movement) that was in many senses a civil war had nowhere to go with the political dispensation that was negotiated. My own sense is that it has been dispersed into the lawlessness and social disruption that feeds into the particularly violent crime that has South Africa in its grip. the experience of violence is so deeply personal and intimate that when I started writing I felt I needed a way to find out how it feels for one person, to ask that very simple questions that the crime novel poses: Who? When? and WHY? that old question of motive is fascinating - and in that or from that comes a complex play of class (poverty/wealth) race (spectrums of injustice and alienation and privilege and dispossession and skewed senses of entitlement) and gender (the extreme misogyny that seems to have rooted itself so deeply in the psyche and the family). I am not sure if I went down the right track - but the appeal of having an investigator as protagonist was that that person must ask those questions: what I want to understand (and write about) is the nature of violence and how it is dealt with socially and by individuals. Where the resilience comes from that helps people survive and carry on as before (sort of). I don't know....it is tricky and extremely complex. Trying to make sense out of the apparent meaninglessness of crime. Perhaps poetry would have been a safer bet.

  
  
• 
  moi
  January 19th, 2012 @00:39 #
   
  
  

  oy, Kelwyn - you lost me at ventriloquism.

  But from the bits following that, that I do understand, I agree you're right: you are misunderstanding me. Rather a lot.

  
  
• 
  Helen
  January 19th, 2012 @01:00 #
   
  
  

  Very interesting, Margie -- I was reaching towards similar conclusions in my academic publications on why we're a nation of rapists -- that we were a spectacularly hierarchical society, with that (ostensibly) racial hierarchy publicly and violently policed -- and when that policing was removed, the violence soaked into domestic and intimate strata of society (where it had been lurking for decades, but usually muffled by the public violence of the state). And so other violent forms of propping up social distinctions (between insiders and outsiders, men and women, haves and have-nots, etc) arose.

  
  
• 
  Helen
  January 19th, 2012 @01:07 #
   
  
  

  And the truth is: lots more people read Clare Hart novels than my respectable (sort of -- I've had my work attacked, but at least no-one complains that I'm lowering the tone of Literature) academic writings.

  
  
• 
  Kelwyn Sole
  January 19th, 2012 @09:13 #
   
  
  

  Agreed absolutely, Margie and Helen. My own view is that there's more to this than 'violence' and 'hierarchy'. I think that one has to look at the kind of politics and behaviour that apartheid legitimised, as well as the kind of politics and behaviour that was used in its resistance (the word 'populism' was mentioned on this site a while ago. Good. I hope it was in scare quotes).

  The necklace is an immediate example - it seems that it became a ritual that had to be fulfilled, and many a time a 'traitor' had to be found, regardless of the facts, and gruesomely 'corrected' - but it also boils down to having a close look at what those in power would call Strategy and Tactics. Just as on example, it boils down to the questionable ethics, and implicit elitism, of the 'tap' strategy employed after 1990 (i.e. it's ok to violently resist until I tell you to stop). And so on and so forth .... many many examples.

  While I can see why crime fiction can take on part of this (helluva eloquent defence Margie - has shifted my thoughts on this, for one), I also think (my old hobbyhorse) that there needs to remain in existence a politicised mainstream literature to take this on as well. We are not a 'normal' society, and any shutting-down of this avenue now is criminally stupid. In my humble opinion.

  Literature can be a powerful tool for legitimating, or delegitimating, modes of behaviour - as Njabulo Ndebele pointed out 30 years ago.

  Moi, social ventiloquism is the act of speaking on behalf of another, whom the speaker/author puts forward as 'us'. Literature ipso facto does this quite a lot: but there are different ways of doing it, and naturalising or denaturalising it - a long debate all in itself, which again has been raised on this site - I remember Maya saying something a while ago?

  
  
• 
  Rustum Kozain
  January 19th, 2012 @09:22 #
   
  
  

  Frontier society, colonialism, dehumanisation, apartheid-dehumanistaion, negotiated settlement, Fanon, agency, etc etc. It's all biting back. We're not human to each other any more, have not been for a long time, long before the 80s.

  
  
• 
  Margie
  January 19th, 2012 @11:04 #
   
  
  

  @Rustum - it is that inhumanity that fascinates me. What is it? a person, an action that is 'inhuman' but done by a human being, a person with a soul and a history. It is very perplexing.

  
  
• 
  Rustum Kozain
  January 19th, 2012 @11:27 #
   
  
  

  /nods.

  
  
• 
  Kelwyn Sole
  January 19th, 2012 @11:34 #
   
  
  

  "...there is nothing that one human being will not do to another..." - Carolyn Forche, in her book of poems about El Salvador.

  
  
• 
  Helen
  January 19th, 2012 @14:52 #
   
  
  

  All too true. Also nodding at Margie's question. But what happened to the notion of "pleasure" (raised way back)?

  Kelwyn, let me put on my publisher's hat: who is going to read (much less purchase) "politicised mainstream literature" outside the academe? Not nearly nearly NEARLY enough people to sustain the industry. SA political lit during apartheid was (ironically) basically sponsored. Think of folk like David and Marie Philip and the blokes at Ravan, who poured in (white middle-class) capital to sustain publishing of books by Ndebele et al, with significant subventions and support from the North who (with a few exceptions -- projects like the Caine Prize, the Jacana Literary Foundation sponsored by the EU, I think) have since hugely divested from SA literary and cultural enterprises, preferring to invest in, if at all, (guess what) our genre fiction. Political/literary fiction sales worldwide are shrinking every year, if I heard Frederick de Jager correctly at Open Book.

  More news from the coalface: increasingly, even mainstream local publishers here are asking new authors of "literary" manuscripts if they can contribute to or pay in full the editing costs (overseas academic publishers have been doing this for decades and there are alarming indicators that local university presses are going the same way). I've just been offered the TOP rate by probably SA's most well-resourced publisher to do an extremely complex and labour-intensive "literary/political" MS. This rate is 15% lower than the top rate I was paid to do a similar project by the same publisher (wait for it) SIX YEARS AGO. Now for the most shattering of all -- that top rate (and this publisher is the best payer in the industry, mind) is 38% of the standard industry rate for academic editing. In other words, anyone (publisher, designer, editor, along with any other freelancers involved) who works on a "literary" fiction novel is essentially co-sponsoring the work. There will come a point (and I've almost hit it) when the simple exigencies of bond, insurance, electricity and grocery bills make this kind of silent investment in and of underpinning of local literature impossible.

  Goes back to the point I made earlier: hypothetically, if I turn the fruits of years of blood and sweat and tears researching sexual violence and trying to answer the unanswerable questions above into a political/literary novel (let's assume I can write REALLY well), who is going to read it? Maybe 300 people (this is not a guess -- this would be the industry norm, unless it got prescribed at a university). Whereas Margie can explore the same questions in a Clare Hart novel, and it will be read by thousands, get translated, sell abroad, etc.

  Should it be this way? I'll leave that to the philosophers. But it IS this way. And finally (because I must get on with earning a living) it's been raised before (but doesn't seem to have sunk in): genre books often cross-subsidize their supposedly loftier cousins in the literary ghetto. So the "genre snobs" are in some sense genuinely biting the hand that feeds.

  
  
• 
  Rustum Kozain
  January 19th, 2012 @17:02 #
   
  
  

  Not much one can say against the money trump card. But I guess that is or was, all along, the boundary against which the debate was set: readership, market, publishing. And one can always throw in the wild card of false consciousness, I guess...

  I don't even want to go where this leaves poetry, the true art, after all.

  
  
• 
  Kelwyn Sole
  January 19th, 2012 @17:02 #
   
  
  

  I think you partly answer your own questions, Helen, by the details you lay out. You know, I don't think publishers set trends: they do respond to them, and to some extent eventually may calcify them (IMO) by overkill - it's a minor miracle that crime etc has engaged a reasonable readership, given how small the overall readership is in this country.

  But how are these trends set, and by whom? They can't just come out of nowhere. It's a highly complex, and global, question - but there was a time when political literature was sexy. How, and why, did this change? I don't have large answers: although I feel great anger at the way in which literary academics have behaved since 1990. If you tell generation after generation that political literature is trite, simplistic, that it's had it's day, that we're at the end of politics and in a normal (?!? whatever that means) society etc etc, then this is sure to become a truism in time ( I've even had students diss the pre-1990 literature of SA when - if you prod - it's clear that they've never actually read any!).

  Otherwise, I can only talk from my own experience - the book of mine that sold best, sold best because the publisher was prepared to throw faith and money at it - including (yikes) large mugshots in Exclusive. I think that that contributed more to sales, than whether or not the atmosphere it appeared in was still politicised or not. To sell a book, you have to make people curious enough to buy it - and Lord knows, political literature vanishes into a vacuum these days; poetry vanishes into a vacuum; drama vanishes into a vacuum. Etcetera. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy.

  And it leaves us clueless when SA politics moves forward, runs into crisis, throw us huge issues to deal with and understand. It's just dumb.

  
  
• 
  Margie
  January 19th, 2012 @18:13 #
   
  
  

  Poetry: True art
  Crime writers: True Tarts

  
  
• 
  LyndaGilfillan
  January 19th, 2012 @18:57 #
   
  
  

  @Helen. Absolutely: the genre snobs, or whatever term they might prefer, are 'biting the hand that feeds'. It's all about economics. Good crime writers make a good living from their work.

  
  
• 
  Kelwyn Sole
  January 19th, 2012 @20:04 #
   
  
  

  Well, that's alright, then. Especially as we live in a 'post-capitalist' world, eh, Lynda? (cf Slipnet)

  
  
• 
  Margie
  January 19th, 2012 @21:11 #
   
  
  

  I'm a bit disappointed that it got all post-capitalist before I could make my fortune - despite wandering about London like Dick Whittington.

  
  
• 
  Rustum Kozain
  January 19th, 2012 @22:39 #
   
  
  

  I guess it's time to leave the playground when the gloating starts.

  
  
• 
  CA
  January 19th, 2012 @23:03 #
   
  
  

  I have been reading these posts with interest and would like to jump in with the heavies if I may …
  I don’t think South Africa is at all unique in the debate about the merits of literary works versus genre fiction. In fact, the recent flurry over the Man Booker became so acrimonious that a new award, supported by several writers of literary fiction, has been established to “reclaim” the roots which they believe the Booker has abandoned. This came about because the 2011 jury desired readability as a major criteria: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/oct/17/booker-prize-populism-backfire.
  Of course, Julian Barnes eventually did go on to win the prize, but if the choice of judges for the Man Booker 2012 is anything to go by, the concerns/campaign to counter the notion of readability as a valid Booker criteria has been taken seriously.

  Personally, I don’t find this debate very useful. Certainly, genre fiction is imperative in any market or reading culture and I see its worth. (For me, Walter R. Mosley’s crime fiction added another language and another point of access to African American narratives, outside of writers like Tony Morrison et al).
  However, I feel that literary and political fiction has a definitive place, and without it, we are a poorer reading culture and country.
  As a reader, I regard these books as important barometers on a range of matters – and oftentimes reflective of the status quo of a country. As it stands I am grateful that these matters are raised in crime fiction in particular, but I think political and literary fiction should be necessary fixtures to a county’s (hopefully wide and diverse) narratives.

  I am not entirely sure that political literary works are out of fashion internationally. When considering some of the more contemporary main stream writers, I can think of several who confront politics – Orhan Pamuk, Salman Rushdie, Hari Kunzru, Kiran Desai . Even Zadie Smith looks at race and class from a singular perspective (which I think broadened the debate on race and mixed race families in the UK and the USA, but then White Teeth became a television series).

  Of course all of these writers sell books by the truckload. But they also write in/for countries with far higher literacy rates where all manner of books are consumed more readily. So I find it rather depressing that we are implored to look primarily at the economics of book publishing. As if this is all that matters. Notwithstanding, an industry cannot survive without this attention to the bottom line, but surely it is a failure of imagination to turn away from literary fiction? (Jacana’s NFP Jacana Literary Foundation is an innovative and interesting development). And surely it should be an objective to grow readership on all levels and within all genres? I personally, and perhaps naively, believe that we should aim for the day when we can sell literary fiction. But that does mean we should attempt, at least, to grow such a market and develop readers by maintaining and nurturing these works. Hence continue publishing even the unlovable lit fiction (while hopefully being subsidised by genre fiction).

  
  
• 
  Margie
  January 20th, 2012 @01:01 #
   
  
  

  'Most characters in the ­modern commercial genre called "­literary fiction" take for granted a certain unexamined metaphysics and worry exclusively about the higher-level complexities of circumstance and relationships.' From a Guardian review of Murakmi's new novel.
  http://mg.co.za/article/2012-01-20-the-cult-of-murakami
  Just to say that things might not so cut and dried in terms of who sees what as genre...

  
  
• 
  Helen
  January 20th, 2012 @02:05 #
   
  
  

  This made me feel much better and much worse at the same time (given that it assumes that the true art will only be recognised after the artist's death): "The poet or the revolutionary is there to articulate the necessity, but until the people themselves apprehend it, nothing can happen ... Perhaps it can't be done without the poet, but it certainly can't be done without the people. The poet and the people get on generally very badly, and yet they need each other. The poet knows it sooner than the people do. The people usually know it after the poet is dead; but that's all right. The point is to get your work done, and your work is to change the world.”― James Baldwin

  [full disclosure; I didn't have this at my fingertips, I stumbled across it entirely serendipitously on Facebook, and thought how well it fitted.]

  
  
• 
  Kelwyn Sole
  January 20th, 2012 @16:46 #
   
  
  

  Hmmm. What Baldwin says, myns insiens, is yet another artist from recent times agonising over a problem that has probably always been there, but in a much more obvious and extreme form during and since modernism. As far as I understand, the early modernist avant-gardes were trying to make people see/hear/read/understand differently to what they had before - a new mode of perceiving and thinking and being. It's now a struggle that's over a hundred years old, certainly into the post-modernist epoch (although one of the brands of post-modernism would see this attempt as one of the problems of modernism - opinion's divided among the pomos). I identify with Baldwin's view, but it feels that it's not been hugely successful: and I think this has made a huge number of twentieth century artists glum, both good and bad ones, because it seems to be increasingly insurmountable. Maybe not?

  Still, to me one of the demands of consuming (so to say) art is that you have to struggle - as a reader, or listener, or viewer - to come to terms with it, and understand it. There's not a lot that's complex that reveals itself too readily, maybe.You need to do work, and that process itself is valuable, as much as how and what you 'get' eventually....IMO, of course. But it's a buzz, when youy get into it.

  But let's face it, there's a problem here which we share with the world, and with many decades (interestingly enough, it was one of the major talking points among BC artists in the 1970s e.g. Mango Tshabangu criticising BC plays for only accommodating the articulate and conscientized few ... but there it was perception of ideas first and foremost).

  I thought no one bought Peter Drucker any more, not after the waves of structural crises that have affected capitalism in the last five-ten years. (Although I suppose Druckerites would see this simply as the old form of capitalism under druck).

  
  
• 
  Kelwyn Sole
  January 21st, 2012 @09:55 #
   
  
  

  Margie, I don't think it's true that 'literary fiction' takes for granted 'a certain unexamined metaphysics'. Authors and critics do this all the time, in this field. I am less sure that purveyors of 'genre fiction' (here I go again) are as assiduous - but maybe I haven't seen the places where they do.

  And it's more than a metaphysics - it's the physical issues as well, that need to be thought over. CA's points are well taken, and I think astute. Moreover, race card aside, John Eppel's point about murungus IS an issue - is this a trend fuelled by a small, articulate group?....this surely must worry the authors and publishers too? - re what is the likelihood that this will have a wider cultural resonance (or, if you're even only worried about economy) a sustainable reading public over time - in South Africa?

  CA, these questions may seem mere carping: after all, yes, there should be a substratum of 'genres' available for people in any literary culture, people should be able to read what they want to, and dismissal-via-the-race-card is a not-so-subtle form of bullying. But I think I started asking questions in the beginning more because of the claims being made for the new SA horror, fantasy, esp crime fiction - the 'new political fiction' etc.- as well as the tendency for any criticism of what it was doing - by Leon, Kavish and others - to be met with suspicion and, occasionally, hostility and anti-intellectualism.

  To my mind, it cannot 'stand in' for other genres in South Africa, or other forms. It's there, and it makes some people happy. First and foremost, it's what it is - although, yes, it does work as a barometer, and raises fascinating questions that need to (start to) be answered.

  Murakami is an interesting barometer re these discussions, both here and overseas (I've just read the thing in the M&G). There's been a discussion about him here before - I seem to remember Maya and Louis involved. Personally, I can't see the fuss - IMO he's an amalgam of more able Western and Japanese writers and tropes, and he pretty much does the same thing again and again (oh-oh; now I'm in trouble!). To me, Kawabata and others do the oblique, astripped-down kind of prose better; he's got a kind of watered-down kinkiness that other current Japanese writers are less weak-stomached about (the other Murakami, Kanehara, Kirino), and his elements of fantasy feel very derivative. Apologies for saying this.

  
  
• 
  CA
  January 21st, 2012 @13:09 #
   
  
  

  Hello Kelwyn – I understand why you raised the questions you have. I think all writing and thinking (especially in the public realm) should be open to criticism, else we are falling prey to a form of anti-intellectualism.

  I don’t see any fundamental differences between what is being said on this blog. No one has denied the importance and relevance of genre. And it seems counterintuitive to say that there are different approaches to writing: those who consider the word and form an art, requiring some (perhaps exhaustive) effort/thinking in reading their novels. There are also writers who wish to entertain primarily. These are equally noble premises to my mind. And there is a whole world between these definitions. The countless genre writers who are considered amongst the best like Margaret Atwood, Aldous Huxley, Walter E. Mosley(for me at least) and I love me some Alexander McCall Smith. There is also a new generation following in this tradition: China Mieville and Lauren Beukes. But honestly, so what if there is a different emphasis on intent and yes, quality. Isn’t there ego in pursuing either angle in this argument?

  I wasn’t sure Kelwyn if you were referring to me re Drucker. I don’t subscribe to him at all – but as someone who worked in marketing in the arts, I can honestly say that the only way more avande garde theatre and dance works have survived is through being subsidised by a) philanthropy b) government c) popular theatre. A musical will pay for the more quietly cerebral theatrical pieces if no other money has been raised. The same method is used in the U.S. A where I also worked in theatre and experienced the same financial constraints – in the U.S. however there is (was) lots more private and public money/awards for the arts broadly. But then this has always been the state of the arts. And only with pragmatism do we still have philharmonic orchestras and various kinds of theatre. I feel this same attitude should be applied to the publishing industry.

  I also feel that if we can (reasonably) make the assertion that Media 24 could have taken the knock financially (and a tiny one it would have been) by keeping Boeke Huis open for the, well, good of society, then we can assert the same with publishing houses, who traditionally have done this and taken risks by publishing less popular works. Perhaps with all those political biographies on EB's top 10 list …

  
  
• 
  Kelwyn Sole
  January 21st, 2012 @15:27 #
   
  
  

  Hi CA - there does seem to be something at stake here, if for no other reason than because it has given rise to quite a bit of discussion. And as with all debate, it hopefully allows a bit more than ego-strutting ... maybe greater understanding of where people are coming from, and what more precisely are the terms/issues of (dis)agreement? (e.g. Margie's blog "One of the things I have tried to figure it..." explained a huge amount to me). Plus there does seem to be claimers and disclaimers re some issues, like 'quality of writing', for instance, that surface regularly, and still just dangle there ... (and re which personally I'd have to read a whole lot more of contemporary SA crime fiction to know where I stand. It's often been used as a put-down in SA ... I mean, in the early 1950s Guy Butler got attacked by other Profs of SA universities for suggesting that ALL SA lit wasn't inferior, and that there might be some worth studying!).

  If Murakami is attracting young readers because of his 'philosophsical' outlook and characters (as the review Margie alludes to suggests) then all power to him - my worry would be, if it's accurate, why aren't at least some contemporary 'mainstrean' writers having the same effect?

  My remark re Drucker was about the concept of 'post-capitalism'...not aimed you-wards.

  Having been argumentative

  
  
• 
  CA
  January 22nd, 2012 @11:26 #
   
  
  

  I think contemporary mainstream writers do attract a younger readership in certain reading cultures/places. I don’t have facts to substantiate but anecdotally all events at two Pen American World Voices Festivals I attended, were populated with university aged people (and older people were by far the minority).

  Just for interest – here is the 2009 US’s National Endowment of the Arts report, presenting evidence for the REVERSAL of declining readership of literature in the USA, including amongst youth readers: http://arts.gov/news/news09/ReadingonRise.html

  
  
• 
  Kelwyn Sole
  January 22nd, 2012 @16:22 #
   
  
  

  Would be interesting to see if/what sort of stats exist for SA.

  There has I think been a trend over the last decade or so for even those students studying literature in SA at tertiary level to be pretty knowledge-impairing when it comes to literature; both coming in, and going out. Lots of concern expressed re the lack of reading, the lack of knowledge about literary history, and (dare I say it) the laziness students show. Partly the teachers fault; post the Madonna Studies era we're scared to ask undergrads to read e.g. any doorstops at all, even third years.

  
  

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