You'd think that for how busy I've kept myself for the last 7 years, doing ONLY ONE THING would just be so relaxing and time would float by like a pea blossom borne aloft on a summer's breeze. Actual fact: Despite not being in school and despite not planning a wedding and despite not renovating a house and despite only working full-time, I feel like this past year has flown by with preternatural speed. TIME, man. It keeps HAPPENING.
As a result, there are quite a few people that I just haven't gotten around to seeing all year, and I finally cracked and broke my "post a blog post at least once a month please, slacker," routine.
I'm still plugging away at grad school research and whatnot, which is an anxiety attack for another day. I'm also still seeking a new church, which is just so much harder than I thought it was going to be. (That's not to say that I'm going back. I'm never going back.)
Today, I want to talk about ART again, because I've had further thoughts.
My shelf at home is full of YA, fantasy, and sci-fi - some of it good, some of it rubbish, most of it pretty fine, whatever. This collection was the start of the first argument I ever had with my husband, who wanted to organize our books according to the Library of Congress numbers. I refused. The LoC doesn't take sci-fi, fantasy, or YA seriously, and it seems that the classification of these various books depends on who was doing the filing on that day. Michael Crichton's books, for example, are shelved under 3 different categories, even though they're pretty much all the same schtick. I wasn't about to have my Michael Crichton collection (a whopping 3 books) scattered willy-nilly across my bookshelves. (I wanted to organize by genre, so that I could choose a book based on how I felt that day, and also because that's how school libraries and bookstores are arranged, but Husband wisely denied that, as we have a lot of genre-spanning or genre-defying books [a great deal of Neil Stephenson, for example]. As a result, we sorted alphabetically by author's last name. Then we fought over how books should be organized within an author - by publication date, or by in-world chronology, where those don't track [like with Lewis, or L'Engle. Or Tolkien. Or Jacques]. That one went on so long and furiously that we eventually had to seek the arbitration of a fake internet judge, who voted for publication date [a thing about which I am still somewhat bitter - this isn't the fake internet justice I needed, John Hodgman!]. BUT ANYWAY...)
My irritation with this dismissal of genre fiction is an old one. I understand that there is a lot of shit genre fiction out there, but there's plenty of "literary" fiction that's shit as well. LeGuin and Atwood are taken more seriously, and that's great (and well-deserved), but they're outliers in the big scheme of things. I mean, where do you get off just dismissing an entire genre as frivolity? With sci-fi and fantasy, for example, the good stuff explores humanity, society, identity, and beauty just as much as your vanilla fiction. It's often better equipped to deal with some of the more "modern" issues of identity, I think - the reliance of man on machines, a lot of gender and race issues that are difficult to tackle in a realistic story, etc. So a "literary" story might explore the troubles of dealing with a prosthetic limb, but when that is taken to the next step - of dealing with one's identity when you've uploaded your consciousness into a robot body (ok, maybe not the next step), it's suddenly ridiculous, irrelevant, and nothing that serious-minded people would think seriously about. What's so ridiculous about thinking of the future? A "literary" novel might use animals to question where the line is between humanity and the other, and what "humanity" really means - but why not use AI or alien life forms to achieve the same result? I'm not saying that one way is better than the other, I'm just not saying that one way is better than the other. Either genre might hit or miss its mark, but the issues at the heart of the stories are the same.
The weird thing about this is that "genre fiction," fantasy especially, has been around since the dawn of man. We still read old Greek myths, the Brothers Grimm, 1,001 Arabian Nights - all fantasy. They have staying power. They speak, in some way, to the humanity in all of us, that's why they're still around. Not many people class fairy stories as serious literature, but what about some other classical fantasy writers? We study Homer, Shakespeare, and Milton in "serious" literature courses in college, but try to introduce a class on fantasy, sci-fi, or any other "non-serious" literature, and people wonder whether the university is going to start offering underwater basket-weaving next year as well. Why this distinction between old imaginative literature and new imaginative literature?
The same applies to YA, or other "children's lit." Now I feel like I'm treading into murkier waters, but should I? I've been reading a couple of articles lately on the relevance of children's fiction, and they really resonated with me. There's a reason why I read YA, and there's a reason I occasionally go back to books from my childhood and am still able to appreciate them. I get new things out of them every time. For one thing, can anyone ever really say that they're "grown up?" I'm technically an adult now - I can vote, drink, even rent a car! (Oh god, I can rent a car. I'm SO OLD...). But I don't feel that much different. I'm wiser in many ways, and I have more power in many ways, but that certainly doesn't mean I'm DONE learning, DONE exploring, DONE discovering, DONE anything. I have some 50 and 60 year old friends who feel much the same way. Obviously, we aren't sitting up nights reading Goodnight Moon anymore, but there are plenty of children's books that I can go back to and still find new things to love, new relevancies to my life.
Here's an article about teaching YA in college-level classes. It's a good one. One of the more interesting and relevant sections was this:
Whatever you think of YA’s mixed-age readership, there is one thing you should know: there is no 3,000-year history of fiction written for adults. There is barely a 100-year history of such fiction. The adult novel is a relatively new invention, one that is not much older than YA itself. So all the adults now skulking or striding proudly down the ever-expanding YA aisle are not in fact breaking with a long tradition of adult reading. If we look back a couple of centuries, we find that in many ways YA’s mixed-age readership is perfectly normal for the Anglo-American novel. Fiction about young people triumphing over adversity in morally satisfying ways has long been default reading for people of any age who read fiction at all.She goes on to list a ton of examples, many of them required reading in elementary school for me, and many others on my list of favorites. Alice, for example, is one of my favorite books, and scholars are still coming out with interesting new ideas about it. It was really written as a story for children, though (albeit by a very intelligent man). The same divide between old children's literature and new children's literature exists. We can publish papers on Alice in Wonderland, but not on the Hunger Games, or whatever those young kids are reading nowadays.
The author in this one traces a lot of this to the changing views we have on the stages of life, which not only touches on what I was saying earlier about adulthood being a hoax, but takes the whole discussion into really interesting territory:
...And the apex of all these developmental schemes is adulthood, which in the 20th century became not only a key legal status, but also an always-out-of-reach personal aspiration — the golden moment when we transcend our lousy judgment, sexual confusion, self-centeredness, and other woes. And in this sense, far from being an egalitarian, leveling sort of idea, adulthood becomes a deliciously elite one: most adults, it turns out, are not adult at all.The idea that adulthood is somehow a socially constructed phenomenon (or really, that childhood is [you should read that link, it's fascinating. I think it's mostly wrong and draws entirely the wrong conclusions, but it does so from solid historical data and is just a mind-trip for folks who have been raised like me. Super cool, in its way.]) is not the sort of thing that would occur to most people, I think. It's a thing we take for granted. Adults are adult, it is different from being a child.
I'm not saying that's not true. Children's IQs have increased dramatically in just the last 20 years, probably in part because we are treating childhood differently than once we did - we're paying more attention to children as The Future, and acknowledging their cognitive differences in order to train them better. At the same time, that doesn't mean that they can't handle complex, morally ambiguous stories, or that morally definite stories are somehow worse or for children.
In my opinion, art exists to teach us what it is like to be human. If a book, movie, poem, song, painting, sculpture, dance performance, anything touches at the innate humanity of us, it deserves to be called art, and it deserves to be treated as such. So what if it's written for children? So what if it's a fantasy? So what if it's popular?
Nothing deserves our respect (or scorn) simply because it’s popular, no matter how popular. But literary critics almost never concern themselves with what people actually read. Sometimes there are good reasons not to. Faced with shrinking space for all sorts of reviews, I’d prefer for the novel of some unheralded new writer to get coverage rather than the latest hernia-inducer from Tom Clancy. But the literary novelists who get themselves worked up over popular fiction never stop to consider what it is that readers are responding to excep...to put it down to the stupidity of the masses...But enough literary fiction seems to have so little connection to the reasons people began reading — and keep reading — that it has to bear at least some of the blame for its own marginalization.
That marginalization is the very problem. "Serious," "literary," "realistic" fiction, of the kind we are allowed to study in university, to write papers on, to call ART, is, by its very nature, marginalizing. The increase in cultural studies is a reflection of that. Many people understand that the gatekeeping that goes on in institutions of higher learning is problematic. Perhaps universities are convinced to offer cultural studies as a way to draw more
As the culture becomes more global, we're starting to see how few things really are universal. We are increasingly aware that a "canon" full of white dudes is not there because white dudes are just so much better at writing. (Did you know that the first real novel was written by a Japanese lady? I sure never learned that in class!) So much of the world's culture is dictated by how much of it was colonized by Britain at some point (most of it). As Britain expanded its empire, it spread its influence over the world with as much surety as the Roman Empire did in its day. As much as western Judeo-Christian culture owes to the Roman Empire, just as mush is owed the British one. I guess that's obvious, but it rather astonished me to learn of it, since the British empire was mostly covered in my history classes when discussing the American Revolution or perhaps the "discovery" of the Americas, and not much more. The fact that areas like Africa and South America aren't even covered in core history classes until they are colonized is a whole other ball of badness that leads to people thinking that these places were just inhabited by tribes of savages before the Europeans showed up, rather than having meaningful cultural developments of their own. Anyway, the British empire had a homogenizing effect on a lot of the world, so it's difficult to even extricate the colonialized influences on a place from the culture that was already there. As a result, a lot more seems universal to us than it really is.
Consider music, the "universal language." Music makes us feel things. Minor chords are just inherently creepy. Certain musical effects have a near physical affect on our bodies. That's just a fact, right?
Wrong.
This story by NPR shows how a tribe of Pygmies in Africa don't have those emotional responses to music. They've never been exposed to it, so they have no cultural context to tell them how to feel. Music, then is cultural. (Reminds me of my dad, complaining about Gospel music, "They use all the wrong chords." Wrong? Excuse me? Fuck right off.)
What about something easier? Colors. Colors are universal, right? I mean, they're an established physical phenomenon, not all that subject to subjectivity. Except...NPR comes through again with a story about language and how it affects our perception of the world. They start with Homer's description of a "wine-dark sea." Wine-dark? Not...blue? It turns out lots of ancient languages lack a word for the color blue. (If you don't have time to listen to the whole episode, here's a nice summary of it, along with a neat experiment [a test that I passed!].) Ancient greek statues and buildings, lovely white as they are now, were once painted quite brightly, garishly even. This meshes with the theory in the radio show - that without proper words to distinguish between colors, it's more difficult to see them. So perhaps the reason that much ancient art is so garish is that the language, and thus perception, lacked the ability to make finer distinctions.
So if nothing is universal, how on earth does one go about setting up a canon? How on earth does one go about gatekeeping and defining what we can and can't think of as art? What is art anyway?
My answer: Who freaking cares? Seriously. Why do we argue about this? Why do we feel the need to pass judgment on other people's art? The only purpose it serves is to keep people out - to exclude them on the basis of education, race, gender, any damn thing we can think of. It's a big high-culture wank. Hooray for you! You write like a white guy! Or else: Hooray! You've explained to us all about how hard it is not to be a white guy! (Favorite TED talk of all time. OF ALL TIME.) Even when we try to diversify, in looking for "different" stories, the idea of what is "different" is determined through the contextual lens of the white guy. Ick.
Moral of the story: If I get into grad school it is my goal to use the word "masterbatory" in a serious academic setting. Since I probably couldn't get away with "circle jerk."
Oops! I went low brow. Surely no great author would stoop to cheap dick jokes. Just kidding. No serious literary critic would ever discount a book on account of dick jokes. There'd be no literature left at all.
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