I’ve decided to open this new thread because most members of the Forum don’t like this kind of shit. It bores them. It’s the hop-te-doodle of posting.
Anyway, John McFetridge was saying in the ‘genre/literary’ thread that he was in a punk band called the Pseuds. I didn’t know they had punk-rock in Canada. I know they have country there, though, because of the Cowboy Junkies. Why did you re-name the band the Three O’Clock Train for Chrissake? You should’ve gone with the Good Ole Pseuds or the Nashville Pseuds. Yeah, I think the Nashville Pseuds would’ve made it. You wouldn’t have been destined to hang around discussion forums like this.
In any case you were lucky; I wasn’t allowed in any bands because I was a pseud. That was in the ‘sixties. I’ve been called a pseud ever since. Because of Raymond Chandler, Jacques Derrida, Richard Wagner, Stéphane Mallarmé, the Ramones… imagine being in 1976 & people call you a pseud because you like the Ramones’ first album, they think you’re pretending to like it for some reason they can’t see. That was when I started feeling confortable being called a pseud; I knew History would vindicate me. My asshole brother-in-law even calls me a pseud now, because I talk about the influence of the Bauhaus on the work of Dr. Ing, F. A. Porsche (I told him to go fuck himself & so he isn’t lending me his Porsche for the summer this year, & I’m having to try to scrape up the money to buy another one for myself again. Can anyone help me out?)
So, thinking about my differences with McF, I realise we don’t really understand each other’s language. What’s wrong with Genre? It’s a French word, means ‘type’ or ‘kind’. As in What kind of writer is Elmore Leonard? Well, he writes mostly about crime. What kind of writer is William Gibson? Sci-fi, but it seems really real, you know. And John Updike, what kind of writer is he? He you know kind of writes about American neuroses.
See? To me, Genre isn’t a kind of dirty word. ‘Literary’, though, really makes me want to shit. The Eng. Lit. faculty will deny this, but I believe that some of what attracts so many people to literature is that they see it as a kind of source of the Wisdom of the Ages: philosophy/theology/sociology/psychology/fuckology. And what interests me is Fiction as a basic human behavior & I think this Wisdom of the Ages idea is a dangerous idea. Consider the proposition Das Kapital is a work of fiction
Of course, most of us feel that Elmore Leonard doesn’t go in for this kind of thing at all. But now, as a life-long pseud, I can’t help wondering: first, this thing about the story that tells itself; what’s this supposed to mean? Then there’s Elmore & Realism; it has all kinds of epistemological implications. And we have Elmore’s little skit about Redemption, eternal values. And that meta-fiction, Get Shorty.
It doesn’t have to matter. I’ve always enjoyed reading Elmore & always will. The ‘Everyman’ skit was quite fun, he must’ve had his tongue in his cheek, same as I did calling him a pseud. Relax, read the story, go with the flow, have some fun on the Forum, it’s only fiction.
& yet & yet… what our nervous system perceives of our environment is a consensual construct that all kinds of things join in creating, & Fiction is a major player. Any certified pseud can’t resist trying to peek behind the screen, see what’s going on round there. What are these writers up to?
This Jones guy (the D is silent) is either nuts or he’s a friggin’ genious. I don’t know what the hell he’s talking about, but I feel I should be paying money to read it. Absolutely spellbinding!
Yeah, I think the Nashville Pseuds would’ve made it. You wouldn’t have been destined to hang around discussion forums like this.
Why does anyone quit a band? You start to get a little successful and the leeches show up—the managers and agents and lawyers all looking to make money off you and the first thing that gets tossed is the musical integrity. And you start sleeping with the drummer’s girlfriend.
Now I can understand liking the Ramones—what a great live show. But the actual album? Anyway, that’s what this is really about, isn’t the artistic integrity—and the Ramones sure kept their integrity, so yeah, you got vindicated. Too bad about those poor Quentin Tarantino fanboys, but what are ya gonna do? In any case, I don’t think there’s a single Elmore Leonard piece of fiction writing that would cause you to question the integrity of the work (essays and articles and stuff I don’t know about).
Yes, genre is just type. Personally I don’t think there’s enough crime in EL novels to call them crime fiction (and certainly there’s never any mystery so that genre’s just out). I think they are another type, a kind of American experience genre a lot closer to John Updike or Tom Wolfe or even Mordecai Richler. But, of course, there’s a lot of overlap in genres or types. I satisfied this question for myself a long time ago by deciding that literature was just another genre and its hardcore fans were just as annoying as any hardcore Star Wars fans except they had tenure and the language that goes with it. I don’t care at all about a writer’s personal life (was it Derrida who taught me that, I forget) but it does comfort me to know that Elmore Leonard was never an academic like so (so, so, so) many so-called writers today.
And yeah, there’s some wisdom of the ages stuff and also some sought-after legitimacy to be attatched to institutions of “higher learning.” Let’s face it, not many kids’ parents would pony up that kind of dough to sit in the park and talk about poetry, so if you want to get a professor’s salary, you’d better be able to give out a degree.
Now, Djones, you said, “Of course, most of us feel that Elmore Leonard doesn’t go in for this kind of thing at all.” But c’mon, he’s been writing for, what, sixty years? And never compromising his integrity. He must think about it, it’s his profession. He may write stuff like “Everyman” to poke people a little. He may even feel the way you do about the “literary types,” he just expresses it differently (someone pointed out the scene in Tishomingo Blues where the casino manager climbs the ladder and jumps into the pool - after saying it looks bigger than a half dollar, more like a teacup - and breaks his collarbone is really Elmore saying to his critics, sure the books read smooth, just like people talking but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to do. I don’t know. Maybe).
Maybe the “& yet, & yet” shows up because we like these books so much (and we take this stuff seriously, so you were right to start a seperate thread that reasonable people can ignore) we hold them to a higher standard - the non-sell-out standard.
The ridicule and diminishment inferred and out-rightly stated in the body of the text is the inescapable evidence to launch an all out attack on the other as he sits there peacefully minding his own business. How easy it is to squander the time and effort expended by hard working people for the sole purpose of wasting time. While the latter certainly is truly a given right the former is a privilege of which we should be more respectful. The bare truth of the matter is a glorification of the inane for its own sake, whereas the spirit of the author is tied to the act as well as the implied meaning, thus the touchstones of the great. Here I find a lie tarted up to remind us of the truth. Danger of forgetting the music playing in our brains. http://www.helium.com/tm/128482
Cut it out, you two. If you can’t think of anything pretentious to say, stay off this thread.
Let’s get back to the Wisdom of the Ages stuff we were discussing in post 2.
McF & I are obviously talking at cross-purposes again. I don’t doubt at all the wisdom that accrues to EL because of his skill as a storyteller. But for the purposes of this argument I’m making an arbitrary & provisional division between technique (EL’s is perfect) or style (sometimes called anti-style in EL’s case) on one hand and content on the other.
What I’m suggesting is that in ‘literary’ fiction the content contains - or seems to contain - something other than a simple story. Something that addresses what might be called The Human Condition, if I succeed in making my meaning clear.
I’ll give a couple of examples. Don Delillo in Underworld cleverly draws analogies between the human condition & that of garbage. Temporary, processed, unstable, recyclable & so on. I feel that a certain kind of literary person is going to read this & take it to heart. Is really going to start thinking Wow! the human condition is really like that. We’re all just… garbage!
Then there’s Albert Camus’ L’Etranger, published in the 1950’s. This is a story of a man called Meursault, who feels alienated from his fellow creatures, finds it impossible to take other people’s values seriously, and only feels fully alive in an ultimate life-or-death situation.
Now, millions of readers around the world have come to identify - have even been taught to identify - with Meursault’s outlook on life. It just seems to have coincided with the fashion that started at about that time of feeling alienated, of hardly ever feeling fully alive, of questioning everyone else’s values. I am maintaining here that this is the kind of content in books that is thought to be ‘literary’ . This is the ‘Wisdom of the Ages’. And it’s important, because there is also a murder in L’Etranger. But it would be thought perverse to call the book a crime novel. (Perverse but not difficult: say L’Etranger is a murder story where the perp is the central character.) No, it’s about the human condition, about human values with which we can identify. If we are literary enough, that is.
Except that there is one big problem with this guy Meursault. He is a sociopath. A text-book case.
A lot of people who love L’Etranger as a literary work can’t see this (believe me, I have argued with a lot of them). But step back, look at the character objectively; he has all the symptoms. He is pathologically incapable of feeling anything for anyone except himself. He shoots a man dead & thinks nothing of it; can’t even understand why a fuss is being made. Camus could’ve written the book right after attending Criminal Psychology 101. Meursault is a pure sociopath. (And this might not be a simple question of literary analysis, of categorising a work of fiction. If there exists a certain number of readers who see Meursault as a hero, or who empathise or sympathise with him, then this is perhaps an important fact about the world.)
Of course the value of the book, the literary value, is in how Meursault the sociopath is presented, how Camus ‘gets inside his head’. And his success in doing so can be measured by all the readers who end up identifying with Meursault - who can’t see that they’re reading about a sociopath.
Now let’s turn to Elmore’s greatest portrait of a sociopath: Teddy Magyk in Glitz. Nothing would make me accept the idea that EL’s portrait of Teddy is in any way inferior to Camus’ portrait of Meursault, as a piece of writing or as a description of a sociopath. With Teddy, in fact, we get more. We get the near-pathological paranoia, Teddy feeling that the cop Vincent can see into his head. We get the reminder that you can run into a sociopath anywhere; Teddy looks like an ice-cream man. We even identify with Teddy on occasion, if we laugh at one of his gruesome jokes (laugh, then feel queasy having done so).
So what is the difference between the ‘literary’ sociopath Meursault & the crime-novel sociopath Teddy Magyk? I am assuming that McF would say None. They’re both works of fiction of a certain merit. Genre doesn’t come into it. Maybe that Glitz is simply a better book than L’Etranger, considered as literature.
I’d agree 100% with the last proposition. But I also maintain that there’s a world of difference between these two kinds of book & that the notion of genre is essential in understanding that difference. I believe that what is presented as ‘literary’ has an in-built tendency to produce phenomena like Meursault, the sociopathic killer in whom Camus’ readers see something of the HumanCondition, of their own condition. A tendency to produce zany ideas like Underworld for an ‘enlightened’ elite to identify with, or, worse, to identify with everyone else, the ‘unenlightened’.
Whereas in the American Realist Crime tradition these things just don’t stand up to close scrutiny…
So what is the difference between the ‘literary’ sociopath Meursault & the crime-novel sociopath Teddy Magyk? I am assuming that McF would say None.
You’re right, I’d say none. Not in the way they are presented by the writers.
Now, when I worked in the movie business, a director said to me, “It’s important to be a good director, but because no one knows what that really means, it’s important to tell people you’re a good director.”
There’s a lot of that in literature, too.
djones - 17 April 2007 04:08 PM
I believe that what is presented as ‘literary’ has an in-built tendency to produce phenomena like Meursault, the sociopathic killer in whom Camus’ readers see something of the Human Condition, of their own condition. A tendency to produce zany ideas like Underworld for an ‘enlightened’ elite to identify with, or, worse, to identify with everyone else, the ‘unenlightened’.
It’s unlikely that it’s “in-built,” that it’s based on the work alone. Camus is a good example, because like my director friend (and the French New Wave he so admired) his whole life was part of what was “presented” as his literature - they couldn’t really be seperated, could they? I liked The Plague (we always translate over here, we even call it The Stranger), it was almost as good as Stephen King. Then some professor told me it was really about Nazis and how fascism spread through Europe like a virus that couldn’t be stopped. Wow. I was impressed. This Camus guy didn’t use the word Nazi or fascism in his book at all. Good thing that professor was around to explain it to me. But did Camus build it in? Is the book really a puzzle to be figured out so you can feel “enlightened” when you do?
Really, all this genre stuff is about what the readers see, it’s based on what’s received, not what’s presented. You can tell, when they start calling the book, “the text,” it’s all about how it’s received.
djones - 17 April 2007 04:08 PM
... the value of the book, the literary value, is in how Meursault the sociopath is presented, how Camus ‘gets inside his head’. And his success in doing so can be measured by all the readers who end up identifying with Meursault - who can’t see that they’re reading about a sociopath.
Well, we can certainly measure, “all the readers,” who like the book but we can’t ever know for sure if it’s the way it’s presented or the way they receive it. Maybe a lot of them had nice professors explain it to them like I did.
You seperated style and content, which certainly makes the discussion academic, but is also telling. I would say that for Elmore Leonard novels style and content cannot be seperated. The stories are always told from the character’s point of view - no writer sticking his nose in - which is stylistic, but also affects the content. Unless one of the characters sees something or feels something it’s not in the story.
And maybe some writers do try and write for what I’d call the literary genre. Look at how mad that Franzen guy got when Oprah suggested maybe even housewives would be able to understand his book.
Now I think Elmore Leonard is making fun when he says Scott Frank tells him what his books are really about. I think he knows how often the literati get it wrong and he might even be amused a little by the fact that some guy from England had to point out what he was writing could stand up to any scrutiny, that he in fact, invented a new tense to tell his stories in (or really, is simply the best ever at getting the real voice on the page).
But really, it is all just marketing. Some people only shop in one section of the book store.
I think we might have arrived at a consensus (very unpretentious, pseud-proof) here. But first let’s recapitulate: Gregg Sutter posted a question on February 9th 2007, Are the plots just glue for the characters? (Back to the Ramones, here: Carbona not glue, carbona not glue, carbona not glue…) But some days after this, Gregg tampered with his original post & added what he described as ‘the big question’ (note lower case letters). In retrospect it seems a little strange that the webmaster, who is also EL’s assistant, should set the cat among the pigeons in this way, & I think that in all fairness Gregg should let us know what he thinks about the matter. And also, because the answer depends on them, publish the sales figures for all EL’s books in the 12 months following publication.
Because the question was (after emendation), Is Elmore a Literary or Genre writer? (Again, note the cases)
So, genres are like clubs and there’s a little Groucho Marx in all this, something about being a member of a club that would have me.
It seems like, if anyting, Elmore Leonard has a little fun with it from time to time, but doesn’t take it too seriously. He really does let his writing to his talking.
If you look back a few decades, the bestseller lists were dominated by writers like James Michener, Harold Robbins, and Jackie Susann. They wrote about sex, movie stars, wars, and exotic foreign lands, but not about crime - crime novels were still “genre fiction,” often published as paperback originals. All that has changed. Look at the American bestseller lists any Sunday and you’ll find that at least half of the novels listed are thrillers of one sort or another. Some are writers I admire (Michael Connelly, Elmore Leonard, Sue Grafton) and some are writers I deplore (James Patterson, Patricia Cornwell) but, either way, they are what America is buying.
I dunno, I don’t really see Elmore Leonard in the same category as Sue Grafton and Michael Connelly. And, to be honest, I think Djones had more interesting things to say about this stuff. Still, this guy did mention John Burdett’s two Bangkok novels which are really good.
I’ve read a number of reviews of the book mentioned by John McF. Like a lot of discussions it concentrates on the last 20 years & entirely on publishing, when a longer & wider view is indicated: crime on film & on TV, in comics & the funny pages, and going back:
- to the late 60’s, when the Western suddenly died (Alias Smith & Djones & HighChapparal the late stragglers) and all those detectives arrived on TV (Colombo, Kojak). This was a worldwide phenomenon. Every country capable of making its own TV shows now has at least one cop show as well as the usual soaps.
- before that, you can pick out Hitchcock, a hugely respected artist who specialised in crime.
- then, in the 30’s & 40’s, filmnoir, owing its whole texture to the crimewriting of the era, books & magazines.
- & then to the grandaddy of it all, Hammett; his greatness was that he recognised the screen as his rival. You read the Falcon or The Glass Key, you’re reading descriptions of close-ups on the characters’ faces, and of course Hammett had the advantage (for a short time) of doing dialog as well. And then later, his work was fed back into the Hollywood machine. That’s the way it goes.
So that the people who are really moving product now, Grisham, T. Harris, Connelly, are standing on the shoulders of giants, the readership primed & ready to buy.
And the test of the characters is what they’re like when they fall into crime (murder especially) or what they’re like when they have to dish out justice.
(I actually finished my brother-in-law’s collection of Michael Connelly books. The man is simply a plot-inventing machine. How is he able to come up with all this stuff? Most of the plots don’t stand close scrutiny (improbabilities etc.), but if you keep churning them out, 15, 16 books, something’s bound to stick. I thought Chasing the dime & The Lincoln Lawyer to be of good quality. And the NYT serial. But in all those books only about 3 characters are developed. I’m talking about the whole collection, not 3 per book. The rule seems to be, If they’re not the good guys they might as well stay 2-dimensional. Also, Connelly has somehow failed to notice that nobody talks the way they write. He was a reporter when he had a day-job…)
Of course all of this might be something of a straw man. A hardboiled-snob like me is always vulnerable to argument that emphasises the Conan Doyle-Agatha Christie tradition. But for me, that would put plot (& over-writing) before character, & I believe Crime tends to be more about Everyman than about logical types in tennis whites scrutinising cigaret ash. This itself is an old argument. Robert Graves (the English writer & one of the greatest pseuds ever to live) was making it in the 1920’s.
The truth is that formalisms (serial killer-geniuses, vast conspiracies, Dick Tracy-like lawmen: Carl Webster?) attach themselves to the realist tradition quite naturally, & sell a lot of books.
One formalism, or perhaps theme, that drives much crime-fiction is the worse-than-uselessness of official organisations; how inefficient, even corrupt people are in the hierarchy of the FBI or the big-city police dept. The series 24 is a part of this phenomenon, bringing The War on Terror into the picture. The existence of Jack Bauer in 24 implies that even Homeland Security is hopeless; and who wants to buy that? Even among thinking people 24 is unacceptable, the sheer amount of torture going on in it even drawing criticism from high-ups in the U.S. military. The point is not that 24 is unsuccessful, it’s where do you go from there? (Writing a realist down to earth story on the subject would be quite a challenge. How do you get into the head of a guy, to portray him how it should be, if it’s a guy who is sincerely thinking of how he is going to pass directly into paradise the moment he blows himself up in a crowded café?)
Anyway, enough of that shit. What I really want to do is complain about the crappy deal dogs get if they’re in an Elmore Leonard story. I’ve just read The Moonshine War. 2 perfectly decent animals get offed - gunshot - gratuitously, & their master doesn’t even blink. Imagine being a dog in an Elmore Leonard book. You’re happily trotting around, pissing here & there, hoping vaguely for a titbit or a morsel from the Man, maybe even a piece of cheese, & suddenly you realise you’re in a book. You can tell, the sky has numbers on the bottom & the name of the Man, the Dude, written big on the top. And it says Elmore fucking Leonard. And you know the dude isn’t going to be giving you any morsel. No piece of cheese, no way with this dude. You’re lucky if it’s not you who’s going to get et. By a huge hungry ‘gator. Doesn’t even chew on you as you go down. Or a coyote, in the one where the dogs are made out to be assholes or airheads. Or shot or your neck wrung by a hillbilly. Shit. I’m coming to Detroit & I’m gonna take a dump in some swimming-pools.
Oh, yes, I keep forgetting to mention it: the guy in Tishamingo Blues, the one Robert sees on TV. The guy fucks with snakes. He died a little while ago, fucking with a stingray (not the car, the fish). In Australia it was a national tragedy. Robert’s take on the guy was keep away, fool.
One formalism, or perhaps theme, that drives much crime-fiction is the worse-than-uselessness of official organisations; how inefficient, even corrupt people are in the hierarchy of the FBI or the big-city police dept. The series 24 is a part of this phenomenon, bringing The War on Terror into the picture. The existence of Jack Bauer in 24 implies that even Homeland Security is hopeless; and who wants to buy that? Even among thinking people 24 is unacceptable, the sheer amount of torture going on in it even drawing criticism from high-ups in the U.S. military. The point is not that 24 is unsuccessful, it’s where do you go from there? (Writing a realist down to earth story on the subject would be quite a challenge. How do you get into the head of a guy, to portray him how it should be, if it’s a guy who is sincerely thinking of how he is going to pass directly into paradise the moment he blows himself up in a crowded café?)
There’s a very good BBC production called The Hamburg Cell which does what you’re talking about, portrays guys sincerly who are about to hijack airplanes.
I notice when the Americans focus on this they tend to spend a lot of time on that official agency inefficiancy or corruption you mention. As if it’s always possible to catch the bad guy. Or, as all the conspiracy theories like to claim, “it’s really all about US.”
I do wonder why there are so many Michael Connellys and Dennis Lehanes, so many writers who want to follow in that formulaic tradition and so few (though so many claim) following in the Elmore Leonard tradition of character development, storytelling voice and realisism.
djones - 22 May 2007 03:56 PM
Anyway, enough of that shit. What I really want to do is complain about the crappy deal dogs get if they’re in an Elmore Leonard story.
It’s true, even that dog in Tishamingo Blues gets it. It’s something most writers are warned to stay away from by publishers. I never would have really noticed, but last week I got a dog. Changes my whole view.
