Taking Things for Granted

Continue? When I was studying physics, the section on optical illusions in my textbook had an illustration that was either a white wine glass against a dark background or two dark human profiles against a white background. You only saw one or the other, and as a student I took it for granted that only one of the two images was genuine, although to this day I still can't say which.

—Stanislas Lem, The Investigation

I start with a quote from Stanislas Lem because he's one of those tricky literary figures who is hard to classify. For some he's a science fiction writer and belongs to a ghetto labeled "genre writing." For others he's a literary writer whose science fiction roots can be justified or dismissed. Lem's straddling of categories is more evident than most, but he represents something that is the case with all writers. A writer is always both part of several categories of writers and not part of them. There are moments in your interaction with the larger world when you're a little surprised, and maybe a little resentful, of where critics and readers want to put you: where you saw yourself an acolyte of Beckett, they're comparing you to Poe; when you worried that everybody would see your indebtedness to Henry Green, they're mentioning instead John Bunyan.

Writers seem to belong to different categories depending on what you key on in their work; as a writer, you can probably see why people identify you in the different ways they do, can sometimes accept the logic of those definitions, but you're also cautious about buying into any proffered identity. What are you really? Are you what people call you? Well, you are and you aren't. A writer is like the man in Sartre's Being and Nothingness caught staring through the peephole: he feels the other's gaze fixing his identity in one category (voyeur) in a way that makes him squirm, makes him feel that so much of what he really is is being ignored.

Categories for writers—be they defined generically, modally, stylistically, or by something else entirely—are useful primarily for critics and readers, as a means of figuring ways into the work. It should be understood that these categories are always provisional and that ultimately they limit both the writer and the work. Take the case of Herman Melville, who critics felt for years fit snugly into the category labeled "adventure writer." As a result his works weren't literary until three decades after his death when people began to reconsider his category.

Obviously, categories are problematic not only for critics and readers but for writers themselves. When writers rely too heavily on categories to define how they write, when they start saying in advance what the work is rather than letting it develop in its own terms, they end up mangling their fiction to make it fit the extra-literary packaging they're hoping it will be wrapped in. I personally feel that classifications should be things writers reference in regard to their own work mainly in 30-second cocktail party conversations or with their parents' friends.

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With that caveat, I'm very much in support of Ben Marcus' Harper's essay. I'm glad it was written and published. Although some of the essay feels topical because of the focus on Franzen (who is already in the process of being forgotten), I think the ideas and attitudes of the essay continue to be relevant. Indeed, I have only two slight quibbles with Marcus, and these are less correctives than attempts to push forward certain aspects of his argument.

First, Marcus suggests, "The notion that reality can be represented only through a certain kind of narrative attention is a desperate argument by realists themselves, who seem to have decided that any movement away from their well-tested approach toward representing the lives and minds of people would be a compromise" (41-2). I agree with the sentiment here: conventional realism is limited in the way it chooses to represent reality. On the other...