Social Dimensions of the Turn to Genre: Junot Díaz’s Oscar Wao and Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant

The list of prizewinning writers who combine high literary registers with elements of genre fiction has become so impressive in the past ten years — Michael Cunningham, Junot Díaz, Jennifer Egan, Kazuo Ishiguro, Chang-rae Lee, Ben Marcus, Cormac McCarthy, David Mitchell, Gary Shteyngart, Colson Whitehead1 — that even remarking on this as a new literary trend has been said to have become a cliché of sorts.2 As reviewers rehearse familiar questions about literary value — Is genre fiction art? Does it differ from high literature? Why is there a "genre ghetto"? Whence the snobbism against science fiction or fantasy? — critics and writers on both sides of the Atlantic find themselves in an increasingly self-reflexive debate about what is going on.3 This debate, I will argue, could profit from a closer look at the asymmetries involved when credentialed novelists with literary ambitions cross over into genre fiction territory.4 If these asymmetries are sometimes hard to see, this is because the high-cultural embrace of genre fiction concerns three dimensions of literary practice we often fail to keep apart: (I) a mode of representation (genre fiction has a higher tolerance of the fantastic or the speculative); (II) a practice space of writing and reading (genre fiction has greater stakes in commercial entertainment); and (III) a socio-aesthetic atmosphere (genre fiction tends to circulate among lower-status audiences and lifeworlds).

Distinguishing these three dimensions helps us to recognize the conflicting value systems at the root of literary production: in order to remain in the market for literary prizes, writers have to appropriate genre fiction's modes of representation while evading the contact stigma of commercial entertainment and lower-status readerships. Genre mixing in this case does not indicate the breakdown of old cultural hierarchies — a "revolution from below, coming up from the supermarket aisles," as the novelist Lev Grossman claims5 — but rather a new constellation within the high-cultural literary field. This new constellation might well be prompted, as Jeffrey Williams suggests, by the generational rise of "the genre geek"6 born after 1960, a "high-status omnivore,"7 to be sure, who occupies a prominent position in the program-era "culture of the school"8 — the transatlantic network of credentialed institutions, artworlds, and prize-economies that dominate the public sense of what counts as new directions in the novel.9 Genre-turn writers resemble the artists and MFA graduates who moved into the low-status neighborhoods of early 1990s Williamsburg to create a "grit aesthetic," in Sharon Zukin's terms, that became all the rage in the more polished art world of Manhattan.10 A grit aesthetic attempts to revitalize conventions with elements previously considered inartistic ("inappropriate," "low," "primitive" or the like), and if it catches on, it can make established artistic practice look tame or shallow. In what follows, I will explore how the turn to genre produces its specific literary feel through interaction with varied socio-institutional spaces (non-realistic modes, commercial entertainment, low-status atmospheres). Juno Díaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) and Kazuo Ishiguro's The Buried Giant (2015) will provide my main literary examples.

Genre I: Non-Realist Lenses

The most visible dimension of the turn to genre, a penchant for non-realistic modes of representation, seems central when we see Colson Whitehead writing about zombies, Kazuo Ishiguro incorporating dragons and ogres, Junot Díaz structuring his magic-realism around an Elvish-speaking "sci-fi-reading nerd," Cormac McCarthy turning to an apocalyptic scenario or Jennifer Egan to a gothic castle.11 It seems that sci-fi and fantasy tropes create more compelling grit effects than genre fiction with stronger realist leanings. Westerns, romances, spy-novels, detective stories, and police procedurals can more easily lose their genre-flavor when they are grafted onto prizewinning fiction — a high-brow zombi novel is still a zombie novel; a high-brow romance becomes Madame Bovary.

Writers and readers invested in science fiction have always felt that the fantastic is a highly relevant element of serious literature, that the sci-fi novel has produced writers worthy of the Nobel Prize, even though a jaded literary establishment continues to overlook them. The appropriating novelists, by contrast, like to justify their move as a liberation from realist conventions. Junot Díaz argued, for example, that when he was writing The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao — a family saga that combines a political history of the Dominican Republic with the life of Latino immigrants in New Jersey — turning to popular science fiction seemed indispensable to grasping the fantastic realities of diaspora and race.12 "What more sci-fi than the Santo Domingo? What more fantasy than the Antilles?" Oscar, the novel's protagonist, asks, and the narrator-figure exclaims: "You really want to know what being an X-Man feels like? Just be a smart bookish boy of color in a contemporary U.S. ghetto. Mamma mia! Like having bat wings or a pair of tentacles growing out of your chest" (6, 22, n.6). Political readings of the turn to genre suggest that it provides important insights into the present state of society. Ramón Saldívar, for example, praises Oscar Wao for its "speculative realism" that attempts "to explain aesthetically" why "race in the twenty-first century still matters" under "postrace" conditions.13

If literature and genre fiction differed only in their modes of representation or epistemologies (the realistic vs. the fantastic, the actual vs. the speculative or counterfactual), insisting on hard borders would seem an unnecessary act of gatekeeping. "Tyrion Lannister [of Games of Thrones] isn't real, but then again neither is Mrs. Dalloway," Lev Grossman points out.14 And in a recent interview about the genre elements of The Buried Giant, Ishiguro asked the fantasy writer Neil Gaiman: "Why am I perceived to have crossed a kind of boundary?" "Is it possible," he continued, "that what we think of as genre boundaries are things that have been invented fairly recently by the publishing industry?"15

Genre II: Practice Spaces

The genre fiction label, however, makes writers and critics uncomfortable on a level deeper than superficial marketing categories. The characteristic feel of this dimension has to do with genre fiction's connection with a specific practice space, shaped predominantly by the experience of light entertainment. Practice spaces organize the "background" of reading16 — the stylistic repertoires, embodied dispositions, and material regimes that relate literary practices to suitable purposes (entertainment, professional labor, instruction, self-help, etc.) and modes (absorptive vs. conceptualizing, identificatory vs. distanced reading, and so on).17

Of course, there is nothing wrong with entertainment per se; it is an integral part of our everyday lives that we like to defend against disparagement. Michael Chabon, one of the pioneers of the turn to genre in the 1990s, declares, in the direction of academic snobs, "I read for entertainment, and I write to entertain. Period."18 But Chabon knows that the matter is not that simple, for he immediately qualifies his role as an entertainer by rejecting the "junkiness of so much that pretends to entertain us" but that in fact, he says, encourages "passive" acts of consumption: "vacantly munching great big salty handfuls right from the foil bag."19 Chabon's binge-eating image is slightly misleading, however: within the context of the everyday, certain passive pleasures can suit our purposes and become situationally appropriate. While too much salty junk food is objectively unhealthy, our awareness of harmful literary consumption requires the presence of moral economies that enable us to distinguish between "higher" and "lower" desires, according to Charles Taylor, and hence between "weak" and "strong" values.20

Taylor's binaries of moral practice enable us to see how literary artifacts potentially participate in two parallel value systems at the same time — one rooted in the everyday, the other within a more charismatic economy. When people experience literary artifacts primarily as weak-value objects for quotidian uses, their choices remain outside the high-low polarities available in the field. The literary market is then a non-hierarchical space of commodity choices, a huge bookshop, as it were, whose labelled aisles offer an array of genres that are all equally valuable as long as they deliver individual satisfaction. In such a flat topography, capital-L Literature is merely one option among many (on a par with Mystery & Crime, Romance, Science Fiction & Fantasy, Thrillers, Westerns, and Self-Help). Here, genre labels are primarily markers of consumer orientation, telling us "where to look in a bookstore," according to Neil Gaiman, or indeed "what aisles not to bother going down."21

But literary artifacts can also embody strong values in Taylor's sense, in which case our reading experience becomes more relevant to our sense of moral-cultural identity ("How should a person be?") and more closely tied up with a public sense of more or less attractive lifeforms. If we become attuned to strong-value aspects of literature, genre labels do not just explicate content in the way Gaiman suggests ("Western" if you like gunfights, "spy novels" if you like spies, "musicals" if you wish to hear songs), but they also connect us with higher and lower regions within an identity-defining cultural landscape.22 The horizontal array of labeled aisles in your local bookshop then acquires a vertical tension: some sections suddenly strike us as closer to the higher moral-political life of the culture than others.

The literary field is not the only source of high-low polarization here, to be sure. A reader's sense of a higher moral-political life is largely defined in social fields outside the literary domain, such as the religious, political, or civil spheres in the US, each with its own authorized expert networks, institutional sites, normative hierarchies, and rites of valuation. And it is possible for a novel to draw a great deal of cultural relevance primarily from its resonance with such social fields.23 Prizewinning writers, however, even if they are known for outspoken moral-political stances or investments (Toni Morrison's civil rights advocacy, say, or Marilynne Robinson's Calvinist theology), owe their cultural relevance to literary field-specific currencies of strong value that emerge not from society at large, but from market-sheltered cultural institutions (i.e., program-era art worlds, literary establishments, and public-sphere-based and academic-artistic networks that dominate a literary "economy of prestige").24 These strong-value currencies can refract moral-political influences because they define not only standards of high literary expression but also which kinds of moral-political propositions and modes of delivery are acceptable for that expression.25

Strong literary value, of course, is hard to pin down. Rather than establishing hard distinctions between higher and lower genres, it can enhance the reading experience more subtly, as when the purchase of a bottle of mineral water seems slightly more redemptive if it contributes to saving the environment.26 Whereas "saving the environment" is a statable moral purpose, strong value can promise what Taylor calls a hypergood, a deeply felt association, for example, with "something larger" that eludes the statable beliefs or rational propositions we expect from moral-political arguments.27 And the distinction between weak- and strong-valued perceptional horizons can be quite fluid: the same novel we appreciate as "fulfilling" in moments of leisure-oriented consumption might, during moments of more professional reading, strike us as too formulaic (a cheaply made police procedural), too invested in emotional kitsch (a mass-market romance), too sensationalist (HBO's "sexposition").

The trouble with "passive" entertainment is thus not that it would be bad for us per se, like Chabon's salty snack, but that it can transgress its allocated borders, threatening to undermine our strong-valued sites of practice. The worry that "easy" pleasure might "infect" the serious domains of our lives is not exclusive to moralist despisers but also colors avant-gardist mindsets not normally known for squeamishness. Consider David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest (1996), where the theme of addiction revolves around a film that Canadian terrorists want to unleash on the US public, a medium so pleasurable that its viewers cannot stop watching it; they just sit there in rapture, wetting their pants, until they die smiling. Wallace links this film to a scientific experiment with laboratory rats that have learned to activate a pleasure-giving mechanism through an electrode linked to their brain. The rodents in this experiment self-activate this mechanism so obsessively that they forget everything else around them, until they die of exhaustion and "dehydration."28 Wallace's image recalls familiar anxieties about the hypnotic effects of the "culture industry," but also the more quotidian worry of having wasted another afternoon with a meaningless piece of entertainment (cat videos?). In this spirit, Edmund Wilson has called reading mysteries and detective stories "simply a kind of vice that, for silliness and minor harmfulness, ranks somewhere between smoking and crossword puzzles."29

To be sure, "minor harmfulness" will strike writers aiming for literary recognition as insufficient justification of their labor. Margaret Atwood's insistence that The Handmaid's Tale is "speculative fiction" rather than "science fiction" ("talking squids in outer space") irked the sci-fi community.30 But it shows that for writers and readers who are attuned to the strong values of the literary field, easy pleasure is only acceptable if it is connected to strong values or hypergoods that turn mere into higher entertainment.

What counts as "higher entertainment" is of course subject to change, and often the criteria for strong values seem arbitrary, contingent upon the idiosyncracies of historical taste formations and biased prize juries. Upon a closer look, if we consider the recent history of the literary field, we can recognize three larger hypergoods in the field of cultural production that seem relatively stable. Writers become "literary" when the authorities honor them for stylistic or formal innovations that expand a novel's aesthetic possibilities, a "privileged" imagination or intellectual distinction resulting in "world-disclosing" new visions, or an expressive representativeness that captures a cultural or historical moment or the way a culture thinks and feels about itself. And the more successful participants of the genre turn tend to tick all three of these boxes.

In the case of Oscar Wao, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, reviewers have praised how Díaz plays with narrative structure, joins the political history of the Dominican Republic with a history of popular culture, and fashions a trademark voice by mixing Spanglish and American slang in a way that endows the magical-realist allusions in the novel with a new vitality ("Gabriel García Márquez on speed," as one reviewer put it).31 Many of Díaz's peers find that the way he transposes sci-fi and fantasy into a high literary register is all the more impressive as the novel reveals the conditions and cultural moment of an ethnic diaspora in the US. These achievements are also said to make Díaz's work representative: the San Francisco Chronicle called Oscar Wao "a book in which a new America can recognize itself."32 Due to the novel's credentials as highly literary, it can safely be praised for being a fast read (the New York Times speaks of "adrenaline-powered prose," which Díaz's publisher, Riverside, quotes on the front cover of the trade paperback edition).33 While in genre fiction novels, binge-readability can seem meretricious (easy access for hurried readers), in prizewinning works it comes across as evidence of higher artistry.

Kazuo Ishiguro's The Buried Giant establishes its strong literary value within the genre of historical fantasy. This territory is mapped out, for example, by Marion Zimmer Bradley's King Arthur romance The Mists of Avalon (1983), Ken Follett's medieval-cathedral-builder saga The Pillars of the Earth (first published in 1989 but revived as a 2007 Oprah's Book Club pick), and George Martin's neo-medievalist fantasy epic A Song of Ice and Fire (1996-present, prominent through HBO's "quality-TV" adaptation, Game of Thrones, 2011-present). Ishiguro alludes to the King Arthur myth with appearances by Merlin and Sir Gawain, the protagonist's former involvement with the roundtable fellowship, and a depiction of death as a journey to an Avalon-like island conducted by an obscure ferryman. Neo-medievalist fantasy is represented by sword fights, ogres, ferocious pixies, a dragon called Querig, and a secret tunnel guarded by a beast "the size and shape of a bull," with a "wolf-like" head, and "reptilian" eyes.34

But Ishiguro also purges his text of genre-typical modes of delivery. For example, The Buried Giant refuses to produce the pleasurable and sublime medieval landscapes (shining castles, virtuous heroes, true lovers, devious villains) that connect Follett's work to the iconic medievalism of afternoon-televised Walter Scott. "You would have searched a long time for the sort of winding lane or tranquil meadow for which England later became celebrated" (3), the novel drily opens, sketching instead a foggy scene of craggy moors, muddy housing, frail old age, and domestic boredom. The central love story — between Axl and the appropriately named Beatrice — remains an almost total absence, a memory of youth the now elderly couple struggles to recall in the manner of Alzheimer patients. Unlike The Mists of Avalon, the Arthur-myth is not fleshed out but merely serves as an evocative plot device, one of Ishiguro's many mythological allusions. Most important, The Buried Giant eschews the sensationalism generic to the Game of Thrones variety of neo-medievalist fantasy. Ishiguro's prose is distanced and devoid of erotic representations, and the novel's sword fights remain casual affairs: long conversations between the duelists are followed by a brief scuffle and a character's matter-of-fact report about the outcome that leaves the gory details largely undescribed.35 The dragon-slaying incident, built up as a major plot moment, is an anticlimax of sorts: the beast is killed mainly off-camera, a sad and emaciated creature that was on the brink of dying anyway.36

Actively "desensationalizing" the novel's genre materials, Ishiguro ties the element of the fantastic to an intellectually challenging vision whose contemporary political relevance unfolds quietly. For example, when we learn that Merlin put a spell on Querig so the dragon's breath will produce a mist of forgetfulness that renders Saxons and Britons oblivious to their traumatic past, this encourages us to reflect upon the uses of cultural memory. How does remembering and forgetting affect the spiral of violence between antagonistic groups? The gaps and stops in Ishiguro's evocative prose invite allegorical readings: what is the purpose of cultural memory in today's vicious circles of warfare and terrorism? How does Axl and Beatrice's love story — the fate of an elderly couple whose quest to find their son becomes absurd because they have forgotten not only their son's death but also their mutual acts of betrayal that made this quest necessary in the first place — explore the personal costs of intercultural conflict? The Buried Giant wants to transfigure its genre elements within a high literary framework centering around allegories of the political present.

Genre III: Socio-Aesthetic Atmospheres

Advocates of genre fiction will point out that complex political allegory is not exclusive to high-cultural fiction. What about Martin's ambitious treatment of religious fundamentalism (the bigoted "faith militant" movement in seasons 5 and 6 of Game of Thrones, say)? Lev Grossman argues that "to dismiss genre fiction as escapism is to seriously under-think what happens when someone opens a genre novel." Readers who transport themselves to Martin's "Westeros," Grossman insists, do not just practice escapism ("sucking on a literary pacifier") but "re-encounter" real-life problems "in transfigured form, in an unfamiliar guise" that helps them to "understand" these problems "more completely, and feel them more deeply."37

Grossman's defense recalls Janice Radway's groundbreaking work on the genre fiction romance. Radway, too, stressed the seriousness with which the readers she studied (the "Smithton women") approach apparently entertainment-driven novels. One of the takeaway points of her research is that people who consume large quantities of popular romances need not in fact be practicing light entertainment — it might not occur to them that they are consuming weak-valued "easy pleasures" at all. For in the hands of a suitable lay reader, as Radway showed, a genre fiction novel can yield complex meanings and strong values even if it strikes professional readers as formulaic kitsch.38 The distinction between "light entertainment" and "serious literature" is thus not only about differing practice spaces (reading for pleasure vs. reading for strong-valued allegory); it also concerns institutionalized status differences — some readers' moral-aesthetic binaries have greater weight in the public sphere and its taste-making institutions than others.

Such status differences concern the third dimension of the genre-fiction label, the socio-aesthetic atmospheres of stigmatized readerships, which become clearer if we compare the location of genre fiction in the public sphere to an urban space that loses authority when it is increasingly connected to people and things low in social and cultural assets.39 Like an urban ghetto, a "genre ghetto" suffers from a loss of institutional charisma, as the place-making social networks are drained of social status and wealth. Unlike urban ghetto dwellers, stigmatized reader communities need not be poor in social assets; they may simply lack field-specific authority. Social assets do play an indirect role, to be sure, as the tastemakers in the public sphere predominately belong to high-status groups.40

Radway's genre-fiction romance is an instructive case here, since its socio-aesthetic atmosphere is so much harder to gentrify than other types of genre fiction, given the public sense that relegates romance readers to the bottom of the hierarchy of strong literary value. But what legitimates such a consensus? If the field of cultural production were a representative democracy, Radway's Smithton women would be entitled to demand equal recognition and representation. They might ask, for example: "What about the spaces of cultural production that we experience as sources of strong literary value? Why does Oprah Winfrey not count as a serious literary tastemaker despite the massive readerships that follow her judgment?" Radway has portrayed her own transition from genre-fiction reader to professional academic as a traumatic experience of self-colonization, where the high-cultural establishment in graduate school pressured her "to keep my voracious taste for bestsellers, mysteries, cookbooks, and popular nature books a secret" from "everyone, including the more cultured and educated self I was trying to become."41

Surely one of the reasons that the high/low distinction can feel as wrongheaded as Radway, Grossman, and many others suggest, is that Western representative democracies associate questions of literary preference either with weak-value consumption (readers are free to choose the commodities they want) or strong-value-expressive identity (readers have a right to literary representations that accord with their cultural particularity). The consumption model makes hierarchies of taste seem unnecessary (micromanaging consumer choices); the cultural identity model makes them seem unjust (a denial of the equal dignity of all cultures). We might say that our commitment to the civil sphere, as a social field that enforces a strict hierarchy of good and bad democrats, requires us to have a non-hierarchical attitude to literary taste.42 At the same time, however, our commitment to the strong-value dimension of cultural production (where the Booker or the Pulitzer outrank the Nebula Award) furthers a hierarchical sensibility that is structurally similar to our sense of strong moral values. In contrast to representative democracy (one reader one vote), the strong-value hierarchies in cultural production create an intrinsic inequality (votes emerging from consecrated space count more than ordinary ones).

We might be tempted to dismiss the literary-cultural field and its vertical distribution of institutional charisma as an illusion that a more rational approach could overcome — Janice Radway criticizes academic gatekeepers for being obsessed with "a few sacralized books as objects to be revered or fetishized."43 But symbolic hierarchies are social things with real material consequences. As adherents to the democratic civil sphere, we have ingrained reservations regarding high/low distinctions, and hence want to view Radway's Smithton women as just one among many equally worthy "reading cultures." But once we move to the performative realities of reading and writing — the tangible effects of trust-inducing public institutions that hand out literary prizes, for example — we cannot help but feel how a public sense drains the genre territory of social and symbolic power and makes it undesirable as a permanent neighborhood. Even if we regret this (as we must needs regret the stigmatization of urban ghettos), it is hard to feel at home in a desacralized place, and it is not clear that a completely non-hierarchical space of cultural production (one that is stripped of strong literary value) would be possible or desirable. This does not mean that we cannot spend the whole summer reading commercial romances or medievalist fantasy novels without feeling any shame. On the contrary, our immersion in weak-value entertainment does not undermine the manifest pull of strong-valued space that defines our sense of cultural belonging. In order to be oriented in cultural space, we do not have to inhabit a strong-valued literary culture permanently. Orientation merely requires a sense of direction, an awareness where strong value is placed (as in the Christian etymology of "to orient," having the altar of your church pointing eastward).

In order to embody strong values, Oscar Wao and The Buried Giant had to catch on with cultural authority, a form of symbolic power that is unequally distributed across the social landscape, concentrated among the taste-making groups with the greatest capability to shape public standards. Thus the community that may be said "to recognize itself" in Díaz's Oscar Wao is not simply "a new America," but a social network centering around "the culture of the school." It is precisely because Díaz feels so at home in this socio-institutional region (his professional biography resembles the CV of successful academics) that he writes for an audience receptive to Wikipedia-parodying metafictional footnotes, bookish references (Proust's "madeleine" [273], Yeats's "terrible beauty" [91], Garcia Márquez's "Macondo" [7]), and even baroque jokes about academic professionalism — while Oscar is beaten to death by thugs in a sugar cane field, his sense of temporal expansion reminds the narrator of "one of those nightmare eight-a.m. MLA panels: endless" (299).

Ishiguro's socio-aesthetic atmospheres are differently shaped by program-era economies of prestige. Consider, for example, The Buried Giant's intricate ending: When Axl realizes that he will never see the terminally ill Beatrice again, Ishiguro mediates the emotional effect with a texture of mythical allusions, narrated through the interior monologue of a mysterious "boatman," a kind of Charon figure who (like many of Ishiguro's narrators) seems unaware of his larger role. The scene begins when the boatman offers to bring Axl and the ailing Beatrice to the island where they believe their son lives. Against rumors that such a journey can separate less loyal lovers forever, the boatman reassures them that due to their "extraordinary devotion" they are "fit to walk the island unseparated" (335-6). He will have to ask them a few questions as part of a "foolish ritual" that his "duty" as a ferryman demands, but then he will row them across (336). With the fog of forgetfulness slowly lifting, Axl and Beatrice seem to remember a black shadow in their past: she once betrayed him (he might have given her cause to do so); and in the ensuing conflict, their son left them in anger and soon died of the plague. Axl punished Beatrice for her betrayal by forbidding her to visit their son's grave. All these wounds are now "healed," Axl tells the boatman, who thanks him for his frankness and reassures him that he can now ferry them over "with a carefree contentment" (341, 340). Once Beatrice takes her seat, however, the "small vessel," it turns out, cannot "carry more than one passenger at a time" (342). The boatman says he will carry them across in two trips, but Axl insists angrily that they must travel to the island "unseparated." Beatrice, who seems to have lost her fear, asks the boatman for a moment of privacy, then tells Axl to be calm ("this is no time to quarrel with" a "boatman who looks so favourably upon us") as she is sure he will be picked up shortly ("I trust him, Axl") (343). "Farewell, my one true love," Axl replies. The finality of the scene becomes apparent in the boatman's interior-monologue description of Axl's return to the shore, a moment before the boat's departure: "he [Axl] does not look my way, only to the land and the low sun on the cove. And neither do I search for his eye. He wades on past me, not glancing back. Wait for me on the shore, friend, I say quietly, but he does not hear and he wades on" (345). Arguably, the reader's access to the emotional core of the story's materials (true love, the finality of death, the guilt of betrayal) requires a willingness to unpack a series of "objective correlatives" linked to one another in leitmotif fashion.

Grit Aesthetic

If we consider the three dimensions of genre fiction analyzed above, we can see how the practice space of entertainment (genre II) and the low status socio-aesthetic atmosphere (genre III) produce a kind of "grit aesthetic," as Sharon Zukin has described the work of artists who moved into the urban wastelands of Williamsburg during the 1990s.44 A grit aesthetic can revitalize conventional literary practice if its use of materials formerly stigmatized as inartistic or low produces a powerful sense of new direction among its tastemaking practitioners. And just as MFA graduates moving into factory lofts in a crime-ridden and derelict urban space can bring forth a new "geography of cool," followed by a process of urban gentrification, a specific form of literary grittiness can over time become acceptable and embody new forms of the authentic or the real.45

As Zukin's analyses show, the gentrification of grit happens only when the appropriation of stigmatized materials appeals to central consecrating institutions ("Brooklyn cool" emerged as a brand of urban authenticity when Williamsburg galleries drew the attention of Manhattan and received positive write-ups in The New York Times art section).46 Writers who live too close to the genre-fiction badlands remain largely invisible to the sphere of literary prestige, a fate shared even by blockbuster authors with some crossover appeal: Justin Cronin's 2010 vampire-epic The Passage, Max Brooks' 2006 zombie apocalypse World War Z, even Neil Gaiman's Nebula Award-winning, pop-Wagnerian Homeric epic American Gods (2001), all of these works owe their high-cultural presence to the varied institutional charisma of TV adaptations.47 The symbolic inequality within the literary field gives prizewinning writers a form of agency that seems non-reciprocal: the capability to elevate generic ghetto tropes — zombies, vampires, dragons, X-Men — to a prestigious world-literary sphere. To say that The Buried Giant has been influenced by genre fiction is thus only true in the abstract sense in which fire-breathing dragons used to be creatures of the genre ghetto that have now entered the sphere of major literary awards. Contra to Grossman's "revolution from below," the standards that define whether and how, and indeed which kind of fire-breathing dragons (emaciated, anti-climactic, desensationalized, in Ishiguro's case) can inform prizewinning fiction with an aesthetic sense of grit, trickle down from high-cultural institutions in which the genre territories (Grossman's "supermarket aisles") have little say.

Ironically, the authority of prizewinning novelists accelerates the cycles of obsolescence that impose an almost predictable half-life on all successful avant-gardes. Since strong value hinges on the people and things to which an aesthetic practice is connected, once a high-cultural taste formation is embraced by a growing mainstream, it loses its "cool" for the pioneering "innovators" and "early adopters."48 In Zukin's account, when the large-scale success of the Williamsburg artists made "Brooklyn cool" a nationally visible brand, the original hipster-colony art world was gradually displaced by a less edgy variety of grit, one that sits more easily with weak-valued leisure and lifestyle activities (weekend shopping, gourmet restaurant tourism, gallery hopping, faux-hipster latte bars). The popularity of the Brooklyn brand has ruined the grit aesthetic of the 1990s waterfront warehouses for subsequent avant-gardes.49

It would be surprising, I think, if the literary turn to genre did not face similar ageing effects in the very near future. Zadie Smith has characterized conventionalized writing as a literary practice that "seems perfectly done" in a problematic sense: "so precisely the image of what we have been taught to value in fiction" that we respond to it with "a dispiriting sense of recognition."50 To what extent, I wonder, does Smith's "dispiriting sense of recognition" describe how early adopters of the turn to genre respond to such latecomers as Emily St John Mandel's award-winning Shakespearean apocalypse Station Eleven (2014)? It takes nothing away from Mandel's qualities as a writer to say that the familiarity of genre grit in the literary system has given her well-made novel a degree of predictability, at least in the eyes of readers who were baffled and charmed by earlier high-cultural apocalypses (McCarthy's The Road, 2006, or Whitehead's Zone One, 2011) but now see Station Eleven as a belated if teachable example of "what the turn to genre was." All of which is to say that the cycles of consecration and dissemination systemic to the production of strong literary value require novelists who wish to remain at the cutting edge to be unusually ready for change: "I try to keep each different book different from the last," Colson Whitehead said after publishing Zone One, so as "to keep things rich for me creatively and for the readers who follow me."51

Given these complexities in the making of strong literary value, we should beware of identifying a singular "politics" behind the larger phenomenon. Like all new directions in the novel — including the use of sincerity talk by which the Knausgaardian "reality hunger" framework, a parallel universe in the literary field, seeks to gain distance from conventional fiction — the turn to genre is subject to varied rhythms of exhaustion and renewal, as well as to the shifting borders between stronger and weaker kinds of valuation.52 The politics of genre-crossing therefore depends on each individual novel's "social life" within varied practice spaces and social atmospheres. Our vocabularies of blanket political critiques — Does a literary trend resist or manifest neoliberal or conservative figurations? Does it express conservative nostalgia rather than "true grit"? — do not begin to describe the multiple value differentials to which genre fiction elements have become attached. 

 

Günter Leypoldt is a Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of Heidelberg, the author of Cultural Authority in the Age of Whitman: A Transatlantic Perspective (2009), and editor of Intellectual Authority and Literary Culture in the US, 1790-1900 (2013) and Reading Practices (2015).

 

References

My sincere thanks to Palmer Rampell, Anna Shechtman, and the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful criticism, and to the participants of "Novel-Seeming Goods" (Mainz, 2016) and "Novel Institutions" (Stanford, 2017) for their generous comments on earlier versions of this essay.