MAALIS–HUHTIKUU 2008
Beetles and Whales: Proper Subjects for Serious Literature
KEVIN FRAZIER
What are the proper subjects for serious literature?
It is, of course, a self-defeating question – like asking how many cats it takes to build a doctor. Flaubert always said that the subject matter of literature is far less important than what the writer does with the subject. Melville, in contrast, said that literary subjects must be grand and important, and asserted that no enduring work of literature could, for instance, ever be written about an insect. Yet years later, as if to prove that Moby Dick wasn’t the final word on the issue, Kafka went ahead and wrote a great work about a beetle, The Metamorphosis.
Borges once speculated that “the purpose of the universe may be variety.” In his vision of the Total Library, a concept that obsessed him, Borges pictures all the collected writings of the past coming together to “affirm everything, deny everything, and confuse everything – like a raving god.”
Borges gives the notion his usual touch of the uncanny, but certainly anyone who reads literature eventually develops a dizzying and often exhilarating sense that serious writing throughout history seems to be available on just about any subject imaginable, using just about any style or approach. Even if nothing had ever been written except Shakespeare’s plays, we would still have to admit that serious literature can be comic or tragic, heavy or light, satirical or earnest, romantic or stoic, idealistic or cynical, personal or political – or indeed, as in the case of Hamlet or Antony & Cleopatra or Troilus & Cressida, all of these things at once.
So any attempt to define which subjects are proper for serious writing quickly comes up against the sheer range of great literature from the past. It is tempting to say that the current Chick Lit genre is unlikely to produce a serious work of art – except that Jane Austen is the original Chick Lit novelist, and her place as a serious writer is undeniable. Besides, how many of the people who look down on Chick Lit have bothered to read Melissa Bank, marketed as a Chick Lit author but possessing a talent that clearly goes beyond what we would usually expect from this genre? And aren’t most of the novels of Edith Wharton and Henry James concerned with the same subjects that Chick Lit favors?
It is also tempting to reject relationship stories about middle-class people with middle-class problems, but this would put us in the odd position of throwing out novelists like George Eliot and James Joyce. Middlemarch deals with the romantic, marital and professional lives of a group of rather commonplace people in a fairly mundane town. Ulysses is about a man whose wife seems to be having an affair – the very definition of frivolous subject matter in the minds of many critics. Yet it works for Joyce, just as this basic situation works for Flaubert in Madame Bovary and for Tolstoy in Anna Karenina.
Coming at the problem from another angle, critics who admire elegant relationship-oriented writers like Henry James and Virginia Woolf often show great disdain for what they think of as boys’ adventure stories – books where the subject matter is big and flashy and violent. These books are easy to dismiss if you take the latest John Grisham or Tom Clancy novel as your reference point. But any honest critic has to admit that this area includes James Ellroy and Cormac McCarthy and Joyce Carol Oates and Toni Morrison and Junot Diaz and Dave Eggers, who have all handled violent and adventurous material with artistry and grace. For that matter, it also includes Moby Dick, War & Peace, Crime & Punishment and The Odyssey, plus just about everything written by Joseph Conrad and Graham Greene.
In addition, we all know certain critics who confuse seriousness with grimness. For these people, comedy can never be serious literature – laughing is always less exalted than frowning. But this is their problem and not literature’s problem, since any discussion of serious writing sooner or later has to recognize the comic tradition of books like Voltaire’s Candide and Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated, as well as the sophisticated Japanese comic legacy stretching from The Tale of Genji to Tanizaki’s Diary of a Mad Old Man.
For the most part, the impulse to attack a novel for its subject matter has less to do with genuine literary criticism than with childish bullying. You sometimes see this among academics in my home country of the United States, where university professors and creative writing teachers can reach ludicrous levels of hostility and narrow-mindedness in their battles for tenure. Yet as Edmund White has noted, serious readers are seldom looking for ways to set artificial limits on possible literary subjects. Instead, they are often looking for more good novels to read, on as many different topics as possible. The issue of proper literary subjects makes sense if you are fighting for your turf in a humanities department or trying to sabotage the career of a rival writer. But for many of us, it is simply the wrong question, and takes us further away from the richness of literature. After all, you’re not cheating on Zadie Smith if you decide to take William T. Vollmann home to bed with you tonight, and Proust doesn’t need to know about it if you sneak in a bit of Akhmatova on the sly. The choice is yours.
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