Reading and Writing Along The Borderlands

How I stopped worrying about whether or not it's 'Literature' and just write.

I once took a trip to Arizona, and I brought with me a book of essays called Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands by Michael Chabon, a writer I’ve never read before, to read on the long flight. I bought it while I was in Minneapolis, kicking around the local Barnes & Noble and bought it because, one, there were two particular essays I really wanted to read and, two, I’ve heard so much about this author, I thought it was time that I read him. (I also picked up his novel Wonder Boys in order to sample his fiction).

It was a long flight to Arizona from New York — four and a half to five hours to be exact — and I thought perhaps reading this small book of essays would help pass the time. I was also interested, after a cursory glance inside the store, in what he had to say. From start I found myself highly impressed, as well as relating to a lot to what Chabon had to say about writing and particularly the way fiction is often perceived, whether it’s just the general reader or those in the Ivory Tower. I knew I was in for a very interesting read once I read the first few paragraphs of A Trickster in a Suit of Lights, Chabon’s thoughts on the modern short story.

The very first thing that struck me was how he noted that ‘entertainment’ has been given a bum rap. ‘Entertainment’, he argues, is often associated with ‘Coppertone and a dripping Creamsicle, the fake butter miasma of a movie-house lobby, of Karaoke and Jägermeister, Jerry Bruckheimer movies, a Street Fighter machine grunting solipsistically in the corner of an ice-rink arcade. Entertainment trades in cliché and product placement. It engages regions of the brain far from the centers of discernment, critical thinking, ontological speculation {...} Intelligent people must keep a certain distance from its productions. They must handle the things that entertain them with gloves of irony and postmodern tongs. Entertainment, in short, means junk, and too much junk is bad for you — bad for your heart, your arteries, your mind, your soul.’

Once I read this passage I knew where he was going with this, and I immediately felt something of an artistic kinship. I didn’t even get a chance to formulate my own thoughts about it when he had already written the words out of my head: ‘Maybe the reason for the junkiness of so much of what pretends to entertain us is that we accepted — indeed, we helped articulate — such a narrow, debased concept of entertainment.’ He goes on to say that he reads for entertainment as well as write his novels with the hopes to entertain, but his definition of what ‘entertainment’ is with regard to reading and writing is, ‘the engagement of the interior ear by the rhythm and pitch of a fine prose style; the dawning awareness that giant mutant rat people dwell in the walls of a ruined abbey in England; two hours spent bushwhacking through a densely packed argument about structures of power as embodied in nineteenth century prison architecture; the consummation of a great love aboard a lost Amazon riverboat…’ You get the idea. I know I did, as soon as my eyes ran over these words.

All of this is leading up to his thoughts on the modern short story. He writes that, until about as late as 1950, if one referred to ‘short fiction’ you would have been talking about one of these kinds of stories: the ghost story, the horror story, the detective story, of the macabre, the sea, adventure, spy, war or historical story; the romance story — arguing that all these types of stories have rich traditions in American fiction going all the way back to Poe and Hawthorne. At some point, he argues, the short story went from these ‘genre’ type stories to that of ‘contemporary, quotidian, plotless, moment-of-truth revelatory’ stories, stories he admits he had written himself. One could argue about the merits of both kinds of stories, but I think he’s essentially correct. All one has to do is read the current literary journals and they are filled with this kind of story. I’ve even written a number of stories like these as well, as I’m sure most writers born after a certain time has.

He then approaches a topic which I’ve read all too often over the years — the never ending battle between what is considered ‘genre fiction’ and ‘literary fiction.’ I’m not here to argue this. He notes that genre fiction often has its ‘rules’ in which a writer can’t stray from, a notion I disagree with entirely (most of the time it’s the readers themselves that won’t allow for writers to break out of the framework of typical genre fiction), but he also goes on to say how Literary fiction has its own set of rules and parameters: ‘Whether through willfulness, ignorance, or simple amour propre, what tends to get ignored by ‘serious’ writers and critics alike is that the genre known (more imprecisely than any other) as ‘Literary Fiction’ has rules, conventions, and formulas of its own: the primacy of the unified point of view, for example; letters and their liability to being read or intercepted; the dance of adulterous partners; the buried family secret that curses generations to come; the ordinary heroism of an unsung life.’ Just a quick glance at what novels released today under the banner of ‘Literary Fiction’ will show you that it does indeed have a certain sensibility, sameness, feel, and subject matter. But all of this made me think of one thing and one thing only, and it has nothing to do with the merits of either style or whether or not a writer should be producing one kind of fiction over another. It reminded me of a time in one’s reading life when none of this mattered.

Reading Chabon’s essay — as well as some of the others in this wonderful book (where he writes about comic books and artists, Cormac McCarthy, fantasy stories and writers, Arthur Conan Doyle, etc) — brought to mind one thing: that time in our lives when we chose what we read and enjoyed before we got older and all the theory came in and gummed up the works. He writes with such pleasure about all the different kinds of writing he enjoyed throughout his life that it brought back that very same feeling I had when I was young, picking up and reading anything that looked interesting to me, totally unconcerned with what ‘type’ of book it was. It didn’t matter then. All that mattered was how a particular book or story moved me, and it was read for the sheer pleasure of reading them on their own terms. It reminded me of a time — I was 12 years old — when there used to be a local bookstore in my neighborhood in Flushing, New York, the Paperbound Book Shop, which I frequented all the time, always looking for something to read next, and those choices always varied. Whether it was The Lord of the Rings or something by Ray Bradbury or Isaac Asimov, or some other kind of book, I would take them home and devour them for the stories that these authors had to tell. When I got a little bit older (and Papaerbound Books made way for a health food store) I began exploring other places such as Walden Books, B. Dalton, Barnes and Noble, The Strand, and especially Coliseum Books on 57th Street, and found pleasure in the works of George Orwell, Tadeusz Konwicki, Milan Kundera, Jack Kerouac and a host of others. I began to formulate my personal preferences in reading. Not that I now dismissed these old genre books (during this same period I read a healthy dose of Hardboiled Detective/Noir fiction as well) but it was clear to me what kind of authors and books I preferred. I enjoyed what I enjoyed and enjoyed them for what they were, based on their own merit. Simple enough.

Then came the time when I began to take my writing more seriously, and of course, when that happens, you often come across others who share your passion for writing and you begin to explore more Literary theory and other books and articles on ‘the craft’. It started with poetry and then morphed into the desire to write fiction. That innocence was gone now, of course, and now armed not only with a steady diet of ‘serious’ fiction, as well as heaps of literary theory and advice, I had to decide what kind of writer I wanted to be and what kind of books I wanted to write. Naturally, the more ‘literary’ style would be what I would gravitate towards, though I struggled for years to write that first ‘serious’ novel. It was when I embarked on my second novel that I hit the brick wall, feeling stymied by all the things I thought I was ‘supposed’ to do to be considered a ‘serious’ writer. I’ve since learned that being a ‘serious’ writer and being serious about your writing are two different things.

‘Serious’ writers, to me, are authors such as Milan Kundera, Salman Rushdie, Mario Vargas Llosa, Louis Ferdinand-Cèline, and Cormac McCarthy. According to my definition, I do not consider myself a ‘serious’ writer. However, I do claim to be very serious about my writing, meaning that I try to make what I do the best it can possibly be, within the parameters of my own abilities. To me, the writers stated above (among others) are the heavyweights, extremely gifted and talented writers who deserve the accolades and critical acclaim they earned, and I don’t ever feel I would be gifted enough to stand on the same stage as them. I found that although I felt a drive, a desire to write about certain things, in a certain way, I wasn’t allowing myself to because I felt that if I wanted to be taken ‘seriously’ as a writer, then I would have to write ‘serious works’, like the writers stated above. I constantly asked myself, ‘Is this literature?’ whenever I sat down at the keyboard to write a novel or short story, and I felt something was holding me back. It was during the writing of my second novel that I thought about what it was I was doing and what it was that was holding me back from doing it, and that was this — worrying about whether or not what I was writing was ‘literature’ with a capital L. I had the desire to incorporate all the different influences into my own work, to perhaps even write a book that wasn’t necessarily ‘literary’ in nature. Why shouldn’t I write a detective novel if I so desire? Why not dabble in a little Sci-fi if I wanted to? In other words, why not throw it all into the pot and try to come up with something that is uniquely my own, forget the labels and perceptions and just sit down and fucking write what you want to, with the caveat of trying to make it as interesting and as uniquely mine as possible? Besides, in the end, no one really cares anyway. We only believe they do, or want to believe they do.

Chabon notes, more than once, that some ‘serious’ writers have done just that. In his essay on Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, he writes how this writer of serious fiction ‘dared’ to take a turn towards science fiction, set in a post-apocalyptic America, it’s feel somewhat (in my humble opinion) very much in the science fiction mode. He writes how critics and dedicated readers of ‘serious’ fiction tended to dismiss this turn toward genre fiction and regard it as a ‘parable’. He also notes how McCarthy’s Blood Meridian has its basis in Westerns. He also notes that Vladimir Nabakov’s novel Ada, or Ardor contained a plot concerning alternate-world and time theories, and it was also a key early example of the retro-futuristic sub-genre of science fiction that years later became known as ‘Steampunk’. True, these authors took these genres and pushed them into the stratosphere, pushing the boundaries further than your average genre fiction would, but somehow, due to their literary reputations, the critics would never define these novels as either ‘Science Fiction’ or a ‘Western’, but in essence, that’s exactly what they are.

It is Chabon’s willingness to sort through the pretentiousness often associated with literature, and writers and writing, that greatly appealed to me, since, for a long while now, I have felt the same way about it. Once I decided to stop worrying about what I was writing was ‘literature’ with a capital L, I feel creatively free, more inclined to experiment with different ideas, narrative possibilities, stories, plots, conventions, what have you, and it’s opened up a new creative front for me. Reading these essays only validated something I’d been feeling and thinking about with regard to my own work, and as I move forward I will continue to just write what I feel like writing, without a care in the world for labels, perceptions or expectations that so often come along with telling people that you are a writer of fiction but do not write genre novels. I think it’s high time for writers — or artists of any medium — to get back to that time before theory and expectations stymy their growth, their ability to move forward, and actually work joyously on whatever it is they decide to do. The only thing anyone should worry about when delving into this world is to write the best book you can, tell the story you want to tell, tell it how you want to tell it, and forget the ‘watchful eyes’ you believe are watching you — they aren’t — and be free to create, and most importantly, enjoy it.