“Literature” – Page 3

Howard Jacobson’s pathological need to be persecuted

Published on August 30, 2011

There’s a disease that strikes English novelists of a certain age and fame, that makes them think whatever small talent they have at creating Times reviewed stories means they have an unique insight into human nature and the political realities of 21st century Britain. This usually manifest in rightwing babble about the problems of the day, as exclusively revealed to whichever newspaper with spare column inches to fill, as well as through novels that suddenly tackle big political issues in the way literary writers normally reserve for dabbling in science fiction: naively and ploddingly reinventing cliches better writers had long since abandoned and being proud of it. Martin Amis and Ian McEwan are the best examples of this disease, but Howard Jacobson seems determined to join them.

Jacobson is “best known for writing comic novels that often revolve around the dilemmas of British Jewish characters” as Wikipedia puts it. Not one to hide his Jewishness under a bushell and keen to let you know how his background makes him uniquely able to provide insights into the Israel/Palestinian conflict, he has been making a nuisance of himself for years in opinion pieces. As with Amis and McEwan, his politics also infected his fiction, metastasising in The Finkler Question, made unreadable by his politics.

So it comes as no surprise that when he saw the images of Asian shopkeepers defending their communities against the riots in London two weeks ago he saw something quite different from the rest of us:

The good thing that came out of the riots was a renewed sense of community. “How does one put this without sounding gross … it was terrific to see the Asian communities on telly and not to have to think about terrorism, and not to have to think about the thing I’m always thinking about… do they want to kill Jews?”

A remark on par with Amis’ similar ones on wanting to make Muslims suffer for 9/11. But there seems to be more going on with Jacobson, he seems convinced that pogroms could break out in London any minute and that like any good Jew he needs to be prepared. It’s not a mindset that’s not unique to him; I’ve stopped being surprised at the number of middleclass Jewish people living in England or America, never having suffered any discrimination in their lifetimes, convinced that it’s only a matter of time before the killings start again. If the most important event in your history is the Holocaust, it’s not surprising some people get a bit paranoid.

With Jacobson however it almost seems as if he would welcome persecution, that he feels agrieved that there are no pogroms in England and the number of real anti-semitic incidents (as opposed to people being accused of anti-semitism because they disagree with Israeli policies) is low and has remained low for decades. Hence remarks like the above, as to him it’s inconcievable that Asian people would not want to oppress him. Call it victim envy.

The unbearably whiteness of British literature

Published on February 27, 20114 Comments

The 12 best new novelists look frighteningly white

The BBC is doing another of its tedious “reading is cool and hip and you should read more too or at least watch our programmes about books” promotions. In the process The Culture Show also chose its top twelve new writers and, well, there’s something off about them. It’s not just the facepalmingly awfulness of how the chair of the jury describes what literary fiction is in The Guardian:

What is literary fiction? It is not genre fiction. Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall is a historical novel. Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go was shortlisted for the Arthur C Clarke Award, the leading British prize for science fiction. Yet you only have to think about these two examples to see how they escape their genres. Mantel’s novel revisits the favourite stamping ground of historical fiction – Henry VIII and his wives – in order to rethink what it might be to see events filtered through the consciousness of a person from a distant age. Ishiguro takes a dystopian hypothesis – human clones being bred for their organs – and then declines to put in place any of the sci-fi framework that would allow us to understand how this could be. Indeed, the whole interest of his story is in the limits placed upon its narrator. These are both “literary” novels because they ask us to attend to the manner of their telling. And, despite their narrative demands, they have both found hundreds of thousands of readers willing to do so.

But well, doesn’t that group of up and coming literary fiction writers look a bit white to you? Granted, they all look awfully middle class as well, but BBC and Guardian, so let it go. Is the state of literature in Britain so bad that no promising writer of colour could be found?

(Found via BLCKDGRD.)

Reassuring to know Martin Amis remains a knob

Published on February 14, 20111 Comment

Wild horses couldn’t drag me in front of the television to watch Sebastian Ffaulks on fiction and fortunately it’s also forbidden under the Genevea Conventions to force people to watch his self-satisfied smug face, which is why I missed Martin Amis being a knob again. When asked if he would ever write a children’s book he said “‘If I had a serious brain injury I might well write a children’s book”:

Remarks about children’s books made by Martin Amis on the BBC’s new book programme Faulks on Fiction, broadcast this week, have caused anger and offence among children’s writers.

“People ask me if I ever thought of writing a children’s book,” Amis said, in a sideways excursion from a chat about John Self, the antihero of his 1984 novel Money. “I say, ‘If I had a serious brain injury I might well write a children’s book’, but otherwise the idea of being conscious of who you’re directing the story to is anathema to me, because, in my view, fiction is freedom and any restraints on that are intolerable.”

“I would never write about someone that forced me to write at a lower register than what I can write,” he added.

These remarks led to the usual (justified) outrage by those he targeted, but they’re really nothing more than unthinking snobbism from a has-been, a somewhat desperate attempt to remain “controversial”. Of course Amis would be disdainful of children’s books: he wouldn’t be Amis if he didn’t look down on anything that wasn’t written by him or his mates like Ian McEwan. It’s pointless to get angry at him or try to reason him out of his prejudices; he only says these things for the publicity and the image.

Unsuccesful minor writer in literature snobbery shock

Published on December 12, 2010

One Edward “my surname is not a Microsoft trademark” Docx gets the opportunity in The Guardian today to moan about those horrid, horrid bestselling genre writers taking away readers that belong to proper literaty writers. Ho-hum. It’s nothing you haven’t seen before and done better, an insipid bit of literary trolling a cynical man might think was done to get the Guardian some hits and our Docx friend some publicity just in time for the publication of his next novel. Pointless to respond to it, to either defend genre writing or to show where he stacked the deck, that would just take him much more seriously than he deserves.

Remains just to note that the p.r. blurb for his latest work does make it sound awfully like a genre novel:

Dr Forle is a scientist living on a river station deep in the South American jungle. Founded by his mysterious mentor, Quinn, his is the last manned post before the impassable interior. Forle’s small band of colleagues are an international crew, working with locals to study the eerie forest glades – created by poison ants – that the Indians call ‘devil’s gardens’. When a strange canoe docks at the jetty one afternoon and offloads not just their usual supplies but an unannounced Colonel and a sinister Judge, life on the station is thrown into chaos. These men claim to be registering the local Indian tribes to vote. But on the night of their arrival, Forle witnesses a terrible act of torture. Unable to ignore what he has seen and yet unwilling to abandon his work, he is drawn deeper and deeper into a world of brutality and corruption: a small war involving remote tribes, the army, cocaine growers and even Sole, the half-Indian woman whom he had come to love. When one of his assistants is murdered, Forle is forced to abandon his life’s work and take sides. But what kind of a man is he? In the tradition of such classics as “The Heart of Darkness” and “The Lord of the Flies”, “The Devil’s Garden” is a contemporary and mesmeric study of power and corruption from one of our rising literary stars.

Racefail: not just for science fiction anymore

Published on December 8, 2010

Roxane Gay reads this years Best American Short Stories, finds almost every story in the anthology was about rich or nearly rich white people:

What I felt most while reading BASS was a profound sense of absence. Sure there was a story about black people (written by Danielle Evans, coincidentally) and there was a story about a mechanic, to bring in that working class perspective and there was a story set in Africa, but most of the stories were uniformly about rich white people (often rich, white old men) doing rich white people things like going on safari or playing poker and learning a painful lesson or lamenting old age in Naples. Each of these stories was wonderful and I don’t regret reading them, but the demographic narrowness is troubling. It’s not right that anyone who isn’t white, straight, or a man, reading a book like this, which is fairly representative of the work being published by the “major” journals, is going to have a hard time finding experiences that might, in some way, mirror their own. It’s not right that the best writing in the country, each year, is writing about white people by white people with a few splashes of color or globalism (Africa! Japan! the hood!) for good effect. Things have certainly improved over the years but that’s not saying much.

At the same time, she also find her own succes being questioned for the usual reasons:

Anytime you achieve even a little bit of success there’s going to be someone who suggests you earned that success because you’re a person of color (or a woman, or both). Even though you might know you achieved your success because you’re awesome, because you worked hard for years, because you beat down doors until one fell down, you are stuck with the niggling doubt that they’re right. You worry that everyone thinks that way so you can never really enjoy your success, you always push yourself to do better, to do more, to be the best, to be so good they have to stop saying it’s just because you’re a person of color. It is exhausting.

All of which confirms the superiority of science fiction and fantasy fandom, as

Most of 2009, the science fiction/fantasy community was embroiled in a contentious debate about race that was so extensive and ongoing that it even got its own name and wiki: RaceFail, but hey, at least the SF/F community is talking about these issues which cannot be said for other writing communities.

Which is surely the most important point to take away from these two posts. More seriously, it’s strangely heartening to see that the problems sf and fantasy struggle with (the representation of non-white/male/straight voices and viewpoints, the problems with appopriation, systemic racism and underrepresentation of people of colour and so on) are not unique to it. It means that it’s not impossible for science fiction/fantasy to change for the better.