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adderbolt - Jack posted an update Wednesday, Oct 26, 2011, 3:28am EDT, 14 years ago
How Zombies Conquered Highbrow Fiction
Something is happening in literature, thanks to writers like Justin Cronin, Benjamin Percy, and Colson Whitehead. The trappings of genre fiction: monsters, masked marvels, and gumshoes are no longer just popular fiction. Horror, mystery and science-fiction books have moved to the literature section.
To understand why this is significant, it's important to stress how rare this was in late 20th-century fiction when serious writers trafficked in realistic tales, simply told. Led by Raymond Carver, Grace Paley, Amy Hempel, Richard Ford, Anne Beattie, and Tobias Wolff, these authors explored the everyday problems of everyday people.
That literature unfolded in diners, automobiles, and living rooms with the writing about modern-day people in believable situations. But eleven years into this new century our literary culture has undergone a change. A group of writers have fled this place we call "real life”. Literature shelves now commonly feature: zombies, werewolves, vampires; and space aliens.
Colson Whitehead is just one example of a good writer going rogue. Zone One is his crack at the zombie mythology. In Whitehead's story, a plague disrupts civilization in the very near future, spreading rabidly and transforming victims into cannibals. In the course of one long and blood-drenched night, civilization as we know it ends.
Raymond Carver, he isn't yet Zone One was heralded with equal eagerness in "serious" venues such as New York Magazine. How did we get here? The seeds of realist discontent can be seen in two recent genre-bending fiction anthologies, published by McSweeney's that included work from both Michael Crichton and Aimee Bender. In his introduction to McSweeney's Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories, Michael Chabon argues that "serious" fiction had become sterile through too much inbreeding. He called for a new American literature that would "haunt the boundaries and secret shelves between the sections in the bookstore."
Then, the Pulitzer was awarded to works of fiction with strong genre overtones. Cormac McCarthy's The Road unfolds in the ash pit of a nuked-out future. In Junot Diaz's The Brief Wonderous Life Of Oscar Wao, geekdom reached new heights. This is the first Pulitzer-winning novel to take its epigraph from a comic book.
One book in particular helped break the genre barrier. By now, everyone has heard of Justin Cronin's fantasy smash The Passage, which combines an apocalypse and bloodthirsty vampires with complex characters and top-flight prose. The book sparked an unprecedented bidding war between publishers and the movies. The era of the literary-genre hybrid novel has undeniably arrived:
Our are day-to-day lives are becoming more science-fictional
The world of personal computing makes leaps forward with every passing month. Dick Tracy's two-way video wristwatch—unfathomable in the 1950s—is now no further away than somebody's iPhone. If you look at what's been on bookshelves since 9/11, there's been an abundance of apocalyptic narratives. All of them have to do with our fear of disease, our fear of environmental devastation, our fear of nuclear annihilation. Maybe because the end of the world has never seemed so possible."
Pop culture influences are now important literary influences
Previous writers took their cues from the past. But now our literary landscapes are unprecedented vast and various. Not only that, but appropriation has become an important artistic currency. We define our cultural moment in terms of media consumption. We are seeing the first tremors in a seismic shift of influences. Novelists and short-story writers are no longer afraid to embrace the pop cultural influences that excited them as kids. Culture has changed. Look at the phenomenon of the blockbuster like Indiana Jones, or something like Star Wars and Star Trek. You're exposed to that pretty early. It's just one of many influences that makes the writer of today.
Literary tastes are becoming increasingly global
American literature has diversified in a broader pool of voices. Latin American magical realism, as well as Japanese horror and science-fiction have already had substantial effects on American art. The increased availability and viability of contemporary works in translation also opens up new avenues for exploration.
Stories with mythic dimensions are timeless
We've been telling monster, science-fiction stories, superhero, horror and apocalypse stories for a long long time. Perhaps the appearance of modern myths in mainstream publishing is just a return to form. Cronin insists that this is good for literature, and that the best mythic archetypes will continue to appeal..
Financially and aesthetically; genre pays.
It would be naive to say that modern writers aren't aware of the financial gains of embracing genre. What starving artist hasn't at least once looked at J.K. Rowling's massive royalties. But there was a vampire soap opera on television in the late '60s called Dark Shadows that everybody went home and watched after school. Vampire comic books, the original Bram Stoker, this stuff has never gone away. It never will.
In the worst of today’s genre fiction, you see hollow characters, you see transparent prose, you see the same themes and archetypes occurring. But if you look at the best of genre fiction, you see this incredible desire to discover what happens next. Genre will always have its critics. An original review of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five acknowledged, "You'll either love it, or you'll push it back into the science-fiction corner." This is a matter of taste; some audiences will bristle at the strange or otherworldly scenarios that other readers instinctively seek out. The same can be said for any book that contains readily identifiable character archetypes: detectives and spacemen, cowgirls and zombies.
If widespread genre cross-pollination results in a new breeds of literary chimera, our literature will benefit. Establishment writers will open up new worlds of possibility, and gain an ability to explore myth and magic. And genre writers with undeniable talent will earn a place in the annals of literature.
