Trenchwork

On Monday, I had the opportunity to do something I’ve not been able to do in a very long time—and which I frankly miss.  I had the chance to sit in on a guest lecture about American literature.  Specifically, professor Clark  Blaise dropped in to deliver a chat titled, “Varieties of English Fiction: Canada, USA, Australia, India.”  In reality, that’s not really what he talked about, but there were two thing which came up in the discussion that have been hanging around the corners of my mind.

The first was his notion that while writers of English overlap specialty areas in other countries—in other words, a fiction writer may also write poetry, and a poet also write fiction—that doesn’t seem to happen in American literature.  But that’s not really correct.  We have a number of American writers who have and do write across the genre, and I frankly suspect that Dr. Blaise would remember some of them if he stopped to think about it.  But, there’s also a grain of truth here in that we seem to classify our writers a bit simplistically, and I’m wondering if we don’t minimize secondary fields.  For instance, Gretel Ehrlich is a poet, but she has also developed a reputation for outstanding creative nonfiction. Louise Erdrich writes fiction, but she’s also published in other areas.  Rita Dove is a recognized poet, but that is certainly not the only thing she’s written.  If we move back to an historical perspective, Edgar Allan Poe wrote a bit of everything.

We absolutely cannot make general sweeping statements (such as that American writers don’t write in more than one genre), but Dr. Blaise may well have an unplanned point in that our writing programs place a divisionary emphasis on genre.  We seem to suggest that our students need to specialize in fiction or poetry, and occasionally include creative nonfiction and drama.  But rarely do we seem to offer them the option of doing more than one genre or specialization.  I think the option is there for, for instance, a dual-genre thesis or dissertation, but somehow we seem to not so much discourage it as simply not consider it.

The second point he suggested was another I disagree with, but where there may again be some degree of truth.  He suggested that American fiction deviates from other forms of fiction in that it always has a nearly apocalyptic and violent conflict resolution.  Here too, I think general statements are problematic and in this case, they fail on both sides.  There are stories which have their resolution founded in peaceful means, and which have more open endings.  There are also non-American fiction pieces which do exactly the opposite and do have violent resolutions.  And, of course, some of that is connected to the genre.  For instance, I would expect a more violent resolution in a crime or detective story.  I need to think about this, but it seems to me that the more cataclysmic resolutions seem to happen in genre texts more often than in literary fiction writings.

But it raises a question I’ve seen time and time again with my own students as they consider literary fiction.  If the ending is not conclusive, they’re frustrated.  They don’t like that openness, and I’m convinced that the problem is two-fold.  First, most of them aren’t accustomed to reading outside of genre writing, and much as academic might like to suggest otherwise, literary fiction does not rule the world.  Nor will I even allow suggestion that one is better than the other.  That’s frankly nonsense.  They’re different with different skill sets, vehicles, and techniques.  Period.  But if students have only read genre fiction, they’ve not learned how to adjust their expectations to a different set of approaches.  They still want the ending to be neat and tidy and all the bad guys put in prison or buried, the good guys rewarded and sent off to live happily ever after, and all to be right with the world.

It seems to me that perhaps it’s not just a matter of broadening horizons, but adjusting real-life expectations.  It strikes me that they want their literature to do what they want their lives to do:  to have nice, neat, happy endings.

Life isn’t like that.

Literature need not necessarily be so either.