Literary writers often cherrypick tropes and topoi from pulp to spark plot, then fail to follow through. The Witches of Eastwick by John Updike is a good first third of a Stephen King novel, but he didn’t follow through on the plot implications for fear of straying out of academic favor. Smilla’s Sense of Snow by Peter Høeg has a science fiction thread running through the novel that, at the end, he ducks, balking at entering actual science fiction territory. This vitiates the whole story. (It’s corrected somewhat in the film.)
These examples emphasize how demonized pulp has become. Despite many fine writers now considered great literary beacons having come up through pulp and genre writing, anything smacking of genre is derided or ignored by academic critique, thus slamming the door against cross-pollinating.
To make it more galling, exceptions abound. Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale received academic blessings despite having a near-future setting and many tropes taken from genre. It’s science fiction, yet the critics refused to see it that way and call it literature. Why?
Science fiction writers, outraged at the slight, pointed out dozens of works as good as Atwood’s or better and asked how come those books weren’t elevated to the status of literature? Those works go begging and are dismissed as crap by sneering, willfully-ignorant academics.
This has the real-world effect of pretty much guaranteeing obscurity, while academic blessings can bestow lasting interest over generations.
Vonnegut took pains to shake off the science fiction flecks, even though he wrote SF outright, and shamelessly borrowed tropes and topoi for his best-regarded novel, Slaughterhouse-5. He even invented a satirical character, Kilgore Trout, who is the world’s greatest science fiction writer whose books are ill-published and never kept in print. Utter failure despite being brilliant because he inhabited a ghetto category of literature.
Vonnegut’s Kilgore Trout was a strong echo of Theodore Sturgeon, a superb writer whose work never escaped the SF ghetto, and who, consequently, died impoverished and without health insurance. Kurt Vonnegut’s Trout character is a depiction of what Vonnegut avoided by climbing out of the fish tank.
Again, in a galling exception, the work of Philip K. Dick, considered bilge when he was alive, got noticed for its brilliant conceptual content and philosophical underpinnings by academics, who by now have lifted PKD into a cultural phenomenon.
How many other writers of stature have been refused recognition simply because they wrote a kind of story dismissed by the narrow minds slithering through the dark halls of academia?
Write what you want how you want. Read the same way. Even those books that last across generations will be gone along with all else in a blink of geological or cosmic time, after all, so brevity of impact doesn’t matter.
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