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From: wfi@rti-sel.UUCP (William Ingogly)
Newsgroups: net.sf-lovers
Subject: Re: Criticism
Message-ID: <237@rti-sel.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 7-Jun-85 18:42:56 EDT
Article-I.D.: rti-sel.237
Posted: Fri Jun  7 18:42:56 1985
Date-Received: Mon, 10-Jun-85 20:10:33 EDT
References: <228@rti-sel.UUCP> <5897@duke.UUCP> <234@rti-sel.UUCP> <5909@duke.UUCP>
Reply-To: wfi@rti-sel.UUCP (William Ingogly)
Distribution: net
Organization: Research Triangle Institute, NC
Lines: 182
Summary: 

In article <5909@duke.UUCP> crm@duke.UUCP (Charlie Martin) writes:

>note please that I am not replying only to you --  one reason that I
>wrote this as an essay in itself was that it was not only your criticism
>to which I intended to respond.  ...

I wasn't quite sure, since you were responding to more than one person
at once. Here are a few comments on your reply to my reply to my
reply ...

>I blush to admit that I haven't read much Nabokov, except for
>interviews with him.  When he was widely available, I was considered
>``too young,'' and there is now so much back stuff to read....

It's possible some of the people in this group might enjoy his
fiction. I didn't include Nabokov or some other people I enjoy and
admire on my list because they're dead. Nabokov, by the way, enjoyed
SF and all other 'popular' fiction, including things like comic strips
and detective magazines. He wrote a play, the Waltz Invention, which
is science-fictional in its subject matter. Also, most of his fiction 
has certain fantastical aspects. For example, Ada, or Ardour is set 
in a fictional earth in which Canada is apparently joined or close to
Russia in some way; certain philosophers on this alternate earth
believe that when people dream they're actually visiting a real place
in another universe or dimension called Terra (i.e., our own earth).

>Knowing you as a fan I took this as being (on your part) hyperbole.  I
>realize that you are partial to SF.  ...

For all those of you out there who still don't know it: yes, I do like
SF. Yes, my statements did involve hyperbole. Heh, heh ... I think all
of us can use a good shaking up once in a while.

>I firmly approve -- can't have a fun discussion unless you take a strong
>stance.

I think it HAS been a fun discussion (but I'm certainly not suggesting
it stop), and I feel I've learned some things from you, Charlie, and
from the other responders on this topics. Thanks to everyone.
 
>But you see, that is the same thing to which I am reacting --
>statements that SF readers don't know what ``good'' is, and refuse the
>``good stuff'' in favor of endless serial episodes masquerading as
>novels.  The statements to which I've been responding have been very
>strong -- not just ``there's a lot of crap out there'' but ``the reason
>there's so much crap out there is that you turkies can't tell the crap
>from good stuff.''  I know you know better, and I admit that your
>posting was not quite this strong (although I certainly felt the
>out-of-the-ghetto phrase suggests it -- but let that pass; hyperbole is
>fun, and other postings on this subject have certainly been that
>strong, or seemed to have been.)  I stick to my original point -- there
>is (in my mind) AT LEAST as much trash out there in Literature
>(proportionately) as there is in SF.

I've said it too. Unfortunately, I have to agree with you on some of
the postings on this topic. And the 'out of the ghetto' phrase WAS
intended to be hyperbole (hyperbolic?); I don't REALLY think SF is a
ghetto, but I still believe many SF fans I've met are narrow minded
about the values of fiction outside the genre. Many mainstream
readers, critics, and writers are narrow minded about the values of
SF, however; some of John Gardner's comments on SF in his book called
(I think) On Becoming A Writer are rather unfair, I thought, but
others are right to the point.
 
>Maybe so -- it's been nearly ten years since I was an English major, and
>that didn't last very long.  But it has been my experience, and has been
>an experience shared by many of my acquaintances who have been in the
>same position.  Hard to tell if a generalization is unfair unless you
>can examine the whole class about which you are generalizing.
>
>But my experience is at least partly based on the responses I've had
>from my near-stepmother, who is busily getting a Ph.D. at Drake, after
>having been at UI/Iowa City for some time.

Yeah, it can be an unfortunate experience. When I was an English Lit
major at Iowa City, I got bloody sick and tired of the graduate
students' constant toadying to the instructors. The instructor would
come up with a particularly juicy bon mot, and the grad students would
snigger appropriately. And many 'lit-crit' types ARE unbearably
arrogant snobs. A fellow I knew at Univ. of Virginia had finished his
PhD dissertation in English and was looking for a faculty position. He
told me he would only accept a position at a MAJOR department. After
two or three months, he told me he didn't know what to do because he
couldn't find a position worthy of his talents, and that sometimes he
was tempted to do away with himself. God's gift to academia, I guess.
This fellow also was convinced that EVERYTHING was trash except for
the two or three writers he had studied and admired: Walt Whitman and
Robert Lowell were two of them. We criticized each others' writing,
but he NEVER had anything good to say about anything I'd written.
Funny thing is, he never had anything good to say about his own stuff,
either.

Other English grad student friends of mine, on the other hand, have
been much more fun to be around, and many of them have been
admirers of a lot of SF. My experience is that the sour apples are
plentiful, but that in some English departments at least they haven't
managed to ruin the whole barrel. I'd even consider taking a graduate
course or two in English Lit to meet people and exchange ideas.

And that was one of the nicest things about being in a place like Iowa
City: there are kindred souls around if you take the trouble to go out
and meet them. Unfortunately, I think English departments do tend to
be cliqueish, but if you find the right clique: oh, it can be a great
experience.
 
> ...  I just think that the current ``direction'' of formal
>academic English and what is being called ``Literature'' is such that,
>to be respectable within these departments, an SF-fan/Lit Major had
>better praise the obscurity over _Dahlgren_ over the more clear style
>and form of something like _Ender's Game_.

Well, I think all departments have their rogue elephants. Somebody or
other tells a story about the time Nabokov was teaching at Cornell;
the teller was a junior faculty member (or something) at the time. One
day, Nabokov was talking to him and asked him if he'd been following
the action on one of the trashier soap operas on the tube. The
fellow's jaw dropped, needless to say (this story is related in the
preface to Appell's annotated edition of Lolita, by the way).

It's interesting to note that this story is important because of
what it says about the critic who repeated it as well as what it says
about Nabokov's own eclectic tastes. Appell (sp?) certainly wasn't
recounting it to put down Nabokov as an oddity. What you say may be
true of many (or even most) people in formal academic English, but it
certainly ain't true of all of them.
 
>>My feeling is that the 'lit-crit'
>>consensus is correct in many cases, and just plain wrong in others.
>
>And I agree.  But *my* feeling is that the consensus is often
>*compelled* by exactly those forces which encourage conformity.  ...
>                                                              And
>I see these ``up out of the gutters!  We're here to save you, and lead
>you to the true light of Good Literature'' sorts of statements as an
>attempt to get the consideration of SF to get in line.  My problem is
>that I suspect that they're standing in the wrong line, on what I feel
>are strong philosophical and literary grounds

Hmmm... I don't quite see what's going on here. Are you saying the
methods used to make statements about literature are invalid in
general, are invalid when applied to SF, or making some other point
entirely? I think academia tends to crank out conformists in all
fields, certainly, but I think there has been a WIDE range of
approaches to the criticism of literature tried out in the last fifty
years or so. Are they all bad? That is, are you rejecting the notion
of criticism entirely, rejecting certain schools, proposing reforms to
existing approaches, proposing a whole NEW way of looking at SF, or
something else? For example, are there any of the books of criticism
written specifically on SF that you admire (e.g., LeGuin's, Amis's,
etc.)?
 
>But I've proposed a VTGLM of my own (admittedly influenced by reading a
>number of EngLit people whom I admire, most notably John Gardner): does
>it encourage the reader to enter into the Dream with the dreamer?  By
>my measurements, more SF and fantasy (and mystery fiction, and
>thrillers, and 19th century novellists who were writing for a living,
>like Dickens) get a high rating than what has been offered to me as
>``literature.'' ...

The problem here, of course, is that the secret handshake that works
for your mind may do nothing for mine, and vice versa. But I do have
to agree that a lot of modern fiction is sterile for precisely this
reason: too many of us have forgotten the huddle around the fire, and
what the telling of the ancient tales told us about ourselves. A few
years back I read an article somewhere that talked about the death of
the mainstream novel (a death which has since failed to materialize,
of course) at least as a vehicle for 'serious' writers. The author
pointed out that the novel was alive and kicking in the SF genre,
because Story is the very essence of SF.

I think we both admire Italo Calvino, Charlie; he's certainly one
contemporary writer outside the SF genre who knows how to tell a hell
of a story. Readers of this group should check out Cosmicomics, T
Minus Zero, and the Baron In The Trees, for example.
 
>     ...  Instead, this was an attempt to point out that
>allowing ``sophistication'' to be a measure of Good Literature can be a
>two-bladed sword.

The point's well taken. Thanks for an excellent response to my
posting.
                         -- Cheers, Bill Ingogly