THE RAJ QUARTET

On 2blowhards.com one of recurring popular topics is the idea that genre fiction is being discounted, confined and sabotoged by the mandarins of such entities as The New York Book Review. This discussion runs alongside a larger concern across the publishing and reading world that the book review sections are themselves withering and dying. We’re down to five review sections now, but maybe there are no more than five major newspapers in the country by previous standards.

Here are Friedrich von Blowhards suggestions about what is hurting “genre books” as opposed to the big culture-approved novel.

1) The Henry James / Edith Wharton effect. James and Wharton both wanted to take the novel -- which at the time was viewed as a trashy and shapeless form -- and turn it into something more respectable, something more like "art."

2) The impact of movies. Movies hit the culture hard, and the novel-writing world especially hard. With the advent of movies, the popular taste for storytelling was being serviced by a, let's face it, far easier and more convenient medium. Some novel-writers responded to this new state of affairs by relinquishing story to the movies and trying to come up with something else to peddle in its place. So they came up with ... "writin'."

3) The post-WWII education-explosion. Thanks to the GI Bill and the dramatic expansion of public universities, courses in art-appreciation and creative-writing became popular. Many people lost their wits. They lost track of enjoyment and of their own direct responses and tuned into art-appreciation instead.

4) Databases in bookstores. As bookstores came to rely more on in-house databases and on interlinked databases, they started slicing and dicing their inventories in ways they never had before. Prior to computers, a bookstore probably divvied its fiction up into at most two or three categories. With databases came the need to put everything into a category. As a result: sci-fi, romance, erotica ... And "literary fiction" too.

Michael Blowhard chooses to quote a Norton Anthology essay:

The modern distinction between literary fiction and trash seems to echo the distinction between court culture and bourgeois culture in Early Modern Europe. From The Norton Anthology of English Literature essay on the Sixteenth Century:

"During Elizabeth's reign partronage was a social institution of the first importance, a major force in transforming the great nobles and gentry from independently powerful local magnates into courtiers dependent on the monarch. The queen's chief ministers and favorites (Cecil, Leicester, and Essex) were the primary channels through which patronage was dispensed to courtiers who wanted offices in the court, the government bureaucracies, the royal household, the army, the church, or the universities or who sought titles, grants of land, leases or similar favors...Literary patronage was part of the interlocking patronage system whereby grants, offices and honors were exchanged for service and praise. We must recognize that the career of a professional man or woman of letters did not exist: literature was regarded as an adjunct activity, not a primary occupation, and there were comparatively few readers, purchasers, and publishers of books. Elizabethan writers of higher rank, like Sidney, thought of themselves as courtiers, statesmen, and landowners; they considered poetry a social grace and a courtly pastime. Writers of lower rank, such as Samuel Daniel and Michael Drayton, sought careers as civil servants, secretaries, tutors and divines...[Meanwhile, the] printing presses were in London, and the mass of the middle-class population that set the style for literature written for ordinary people was also in London. And although Nashe scornfully rejected the claim of the bourgeoisie to have any literary taste at all or any ability to produce literarture, that class had its own writers, for example, Thomas Deloney, and it knew what it liked--books of instruction, romances, religious tracts, conduct books, and sensational ballads."

Michael himself continues:

"The relationship between the contemporary literary establishment (including the NYTBR) and the modern governing class seems rather similar to the one that existed in Elizabeth's time between courtier-writers and the increasingly powerful state. That business about seeking "offices in the court, the government bureaucracies, the royal household, the army, the church, or the universities or who sought titles, grants of land, leases or similar favors" certainly sounds rather familiar, once its translated into foundation grants and university posts, no?"

PM again:

I suppose what we're talking about here is "meta-narrativity," story-telling regardless of the media involved. And I'm aware that the culture manages these narratives, whether it was war-stories told by a minstrel playing a loot, romances in drive-ins, or big fat novels on college reading lists.

I’ve always been interested in the “conversation” between books and movies, and now movies in DVD form have become far more like books as they are moved from the theatre to the private home where they can be consumed in chapters on the “reader's” time-frame. This is especially true of a nearly new genre: the television series, which can extend into many hours of story -- far beyond the traditional hour-and-a-half movie. One can watch all evening certainly -- and possibly all day. One can go back to review previous parts or even take a look at footnotes.

The huge work I’ve been considering for a while now is “The Raj Quartet” by Paul Scott: the book, the series on DVD, and the biography of the author by Hilary Spurling.

Scott was a publishing “insider,” working as an editor to find, groom, encourage and shape writers. And yet his own writing didn’t take off until this massive four-part effort. Two factors seem most relevant. First, for decades he was plagued by amoebiasis, an infection of the intestines contracted in India during WWII. It’s the sort of nasty infection that doctors are happy to define as “psychological” but it was eventually cured by a specialist in tropical diseases using methods rather like chemotherapy for cancer: that is, poisoning the body to the edge of death in hopes that the disease will be more vulnerable than the patient. This cure gave Scott a sudden leap of vitality, energy and optimism.

(In the meantime Scott had been “self-medicating” with alcohol and even after the disease was cured, the alcohol addiction continued and finally killed him -- but it seemed to make him better able to write. Certainly he took his bottle alongside his typewriter. It’s interesting that Scott’s wife, a nurse, had a small success of her own in writing while Scott was at his most anguished, but when he became more self-sufficient and confident, so that the weight came off her, she stopped. It’s often suggested that people write in an attempt to search for answers and to comfort themselves for the lack of them. She left him, but came back at the end when he was dying.)

This specific book was also a product of a visit to India that Scott took later in life and in particular a sojourn with one of his Indian subordinates in the war, a man of great honor and personal affection for Scott who lived in a comparative hovel in rural India. Scott so deeply hated the primitive conditions combined with ordure and disease that he became abusive, racist, unreasonable, and a total shit. Afterwards, he faced this in himself and was able through honesty and courage to come up with the memorable character of Merrick, the English officer with a secret life.

Spurling makes a good deal of Scott’s supposed latent homosexuality, which is nearly explicit in Merrick, and though she makes a believable case, I always resist simplistic imputations of the sort. I don’t like the dyadic categories of homo/hetero and their use to manage power, wealth, reputation and aesthetics. I am persuaded that individual sexuality is shaped by genes and hormones, but also by infant dynamics with parents, by adolescent development, by opportunity and conditioning, happenstance and success or failure. I think that the object of “affection” is not the same as the object of “lust,” and that matters of intensity, vulnerablility, opportunity, and social context are highly relevant. Anyway, the latent homosexuality of Merrick -- mixed with the British fascination with “caning” -- is a major plot force. Sexuality, class, and human force of intention are mixed in this story and that's part of what makes it powerful.

No doubt Scott's society accepted his "Quartet" in part because they themselves were ready to face their darker side (in more sense than one). Of course, I see the social dimension of India and Britain through the politics of Red and White here in Montana. (Don’t think there aren’t untouchables. Don’t think there aren’t Rajas.) The missionizing impulse has raised hell here as well as actually saving people. I have only the most shallow understanding of Hindu and Muslim but I see that both have been exploited and misunderstood in very much the same way as Plains Indian Eco-wholism, which still doesn’t even have a decent name. (“Sun Worship” won’t do.)

Much to reflect upon. I’ll be back to this subject.