Richard P. Terra
A General Framework for Familiar Concepts
Thomas J. Roberts. An
Aesthetics of Junk Fiction. Athens: Georgia UP, 1990. 284pp. $30.00
This is an interesting and thought-provoking study, in which Roberts presents a
theoretical approach to popular literature, SF included, that seems both promising and
useful--although to many critics and scholars of SF it will not seem particularly novel or
original. What this study does provide is an articulate exploration of some critical and
theoretical concepts that have been in general circulation for some years, at least within
the SF community, and puts them into a useful general framework of application. While at
times a bit diffuse and perhaps inconsistent, it is a stimulating work, engagingly
written, and filled with many well-chosen examples from popular literature of all kinds.
Roberts begins with a presentation of the traditional, generally accepted
categorization of literature into four classes: canonical fiction ("the classics"),
serious fiction that emulates the canonical and seeks admission into the canon; plain
fiction ("best sellers" or general works); and junk fiction: popular vernacular genre
fiction (mysteries, thrillers, westerns, romances, fantasy, and SF). Despite (or perhaps
because of) its general acceptance, this scheme is of dubious utility. The categories are
fluid, overlapping, and Roberts goes a long way toward undermining them in this book. As
he himself points out, "much of what I...read does indeed deserve to be called junk. This
includes much of paperback fiction as well as some canonical fiction, some serious
fiction, and much plain fiction" (3-4). But it is a scheme that provides an adequate
starting point for the central question of his inquiry: Why, given the popular perceptions
that some works are more serious, more valuable, more enlightening and worthwhile, do we
all--at least occasionally--choose to read works considered inferior and worthless?
In a series of well-developed arguments, Roberts presents his central thesis: that
so-called junk fiction, far from being trash, is in fact as fully rich and rewarding for
readers as classic and "serious" literature. But popular works differ in a variety of
significant, perhaps fundamental characteristics that defy access via the traditional
("academic") methods of analysis. Junk fiction is read--and experienced--differently
from serious fiction, and consequently requires a different theoretical and aesthetic
approach.
First of all, Roberts maintains, popular works are uniquely time-bound; they are
reflections of the era in which they are produced, re-creations and representations of the
events, attitudes, and concerns of the people and the times in which they are written.
While some works--serious or popular--may eventually transcend their origins to become
classics, junk fiction does not. But popular works do carry on a sort of dialogue, at
times an argument or refutation, with the literatures of the past, both canonical and
vernacular. While serious works also make such responses, carry on such dialogues, it is
often not an essential ingredient to their lasting worth. But for popular works, Roberts
asserts, this dialogue is a distinctive characteristic. Popular works "are not
self-sufficient, monumental....[No story] is much of anything in itself, but it does not
stand by itself. When a group of writers are working successfully against and off one
another, the simple stories they write create something larger, something which may be
monumental" (18).
Roberts spends considerable time exploring how readers approach fiction, how they
categorize it, how they develop their reading habits. The habits, the reading facilities,
required for junk fiction, differ significantly from those of literary fiction. That is,
"every vernacular genre does produce stories that are slightly or deeply unintelligible
to the newcomer,...just as there is a skill and lore required to read literature, there is
for each genre a genre competency" (60).
Genre fiction is (deliberately or unconsciously) self-referential and interconnected.
Roberts suggests that, unlike serious reading in which well-defined individual works are
intently studied, "the reading of genre fiction is...text superior. The reader is reading
not the text but the genre by means of the text" (63). Indeed, it is possible to consider
genre fiction as a "literature without texts." But to read a genre rather than
individual works requires a high tolerance of poor or inept writing--in essence, low
taste--in order to be able read through the requisite number of works to acquire
competency in that genre.
But given the popular conception of genre fiction as "junk," why work to acquire such
a facility? What rewards does anyone find in such reading? Roberts devotes a chapter to a
consideration of just who the readers of popular fiction might be, and how they might be
classified, before moving on to explore their motivations to such reading.
In one of the book's most valuable chapters, Roberts attempts--fairly successfully--to
dispel the popular conceptions that junk fiction is read because it is "fun," or is an
"escape," or provides "surrogate daydreams." Although he admits these labels contain a
kernel of truth, they do so in a greatly distorted fashion.
Roberts points out the obvious fallacy in the assumption that because the reading of
junk fiction is "fun" (pleasurable), reading serious fiction is not fun--an obvious
contradiction, given the enormous pleasure readers do derive from serious
fiction. And if the meaning of "fun" is restricted to a more dictionary-like denotation
of "euphoric happiness," then we find that much of popular fiction is most definitely not
fun. What popular works do provide, he maintains, is a sense of tension--a tension most
often generated by playing against the readers' expectations and the genre's conventions
and forms.
As for the use of the term "escape" when applied in a pejorative sense to imply
avoidance or flight, Roberts quotes C.S. Lewis (in his An Experiment in Criticism):
"All such escape is from the same thing--immediate, concrete actuality. The important
question is what we escape to" (97). Reading, in all categories but most
especially in popular genres, provides access to alternative, virtual realities which
readers explore for their benefit and pleasure. Similarly, these explorations can be quite
serious and profound (although at times perhaps unconscious), and therefore can hardly be
qualified as idle daydreams.
Given the inapplicability of the usual throw-away epithets used to describe the rewards
of "junk reading," what is it readers find in popular genres? In addition to the
intellectual tensions and virtual explorations mentioned above, Roberts also suggests that
readers of popular fiction find great satisfaction in its formal qualities, such as verbal
texture and narrative design. While such qualities may also intrigue readers of serious
literature, he maintains that junk readers are especially appreciative of formal textures:
Paperback fiction is form-intensive. It is as form-intensive as the sonnet,
the villanelle, the English ode. So prominent is the interest in verbal textures, in the
construction of brightly individual scenes, and in the designs of both the narratives and
the stories...[that all are] evidence of a sharing among writers and readers of intensely
formal pleasures. (126)
Although his presentation is somewhat diffuse, Roberts here makes a valid distinction:
"the structuralist identifies the labyrinth of design for us; the formalist anatomizes
the pleasure we are taking in that design as we are led through it" (125). He asserts
that there is no body of critical work for exploring the formal pleasures offered by any
kind of prose fiction such as exists for painting or sculpture.
Junk fiction also offers rewards for its content that appeal to the intellect.
"It is
a familiar charge that readers turn to paperbacks as a refuge from thought, and yet it is
an odd one" (127). Although readers may not bring their full intellectual powers to bear
on popular works, Roberts suggests they still find great pleasure in the information they
find there, and particularly in the presentation of such data in dynamic situations,
affecting (usually) human lives. Junk fiction offers models of behavior--normal and
exemplary as well as exotic and extreme. It presents thought experiments and sets up
problems without demanding a fully alert concentration. In short, popular works provide an
arena for mental play, of stimulation and experimentation upon a variety of moral,
intellectual, and aesthetic themes.
Most if not all of these concepts--even many of the specific arguments-- will be quite
familiar to the majority of the readers of SFS. It will come as no great surprise, then,
that Roberts sums up his arguments so: "Genre reading is system reading. That is, as we
are reading the stories, we are exploring the system that created them" (151).
Strangers to any given genre (i.e., readers lacking competency with the system) often
criticize popular works as simple-minded, predictable, and absurd. But the simple stories
take on greater depth, interest, and meaning when they are interpreted, consciously or
not, as being only a small part of a much larger network of related stories (with all the
attendant conventions, clichés, and apparatus) in that genre. It is this interplay that
provides complexity and richness, and transcends simplicity.
As for the predictability in the pattern of junk-fiction stories, Roberts suggests that
"the pattern seems to play much the same role in vernacular fiction that the metrical
scheme plays in a poem. In both cases, readers sense the formal scheme as the norm that
permits them to appreciate the figural variations" (165-66), which are often quite
intricate and original. The unsophisticated genre reader's impression of absurdity lasts
only as long as it takes to become familiar with the genre's conventions and
clichés; as
one's competency with these conventions grows, so does one's pleasure in seeing how they
are employed. "There is a special pleasure that we take in watching a genre's stock of
conventions change over time, a pleasure denied people who do not read with a genre
focus" (181).
Genres rise and fall in public popularity, and as they recede they leave behind only
their best works, their most monumental achievements which, if they are of truly lasting
value, eventually become part of canonical literature, standing independent of any genre
or system that may have produced them. Roberts compares the two landscapes of literary and
popular fiction: "the paperback bookscape is a literature without texts and the literary
bookscape is a literature without genres" (186). The literary bookscape is comprised of
individual text-objects, isolated monumental works accompanied by a body of critical and
scholarly commentary, called "variorum texts." By comparison, individual junk works seem
"thin" and insubstantial--but only when read as one reads monumental, serious work in
glorious isolation, a methodology Roberts labels study reading.
When read as part of a system, however, as a function rather than an object,
junk work becomes equally rewarding. Roberts does not say that individual genre works
cannot be read as distinct and special text-objects, but rather that they can also,
and much more rewardingly, be read as functions, as part of a dynamic system or network
that is a living genre. In the junk-fiction bookscape works are seldom monumental, and
variorum texts are rare. The individual texts are simpler; the reader encounters more of
them and uses them as means of exploring and then constructing a mental map of the genre
system. It is this interplay within a system--the network of texts, writers, readers, as
well as fandom and critical responses--that Roberts cites as the essence of genre reading.
He labels this approach thick reading.
Study reading and thick reading are not mutually exclusive; it is, rather, a matter of
emphasis, of noting the variation in the rewards and satisfaction that can be obtained by
applying one method or another in reading any given work. Junk works are most rewardingly
and satisfyingly read when read "thickly."
This theoretical apparatus, and the conclusions Roberts draws from it, will seem quite
familiar to those who are aware of the extensive critical work of Samuel R. Delany, most
notably in the essays collected in Starboard Wine and the book-length study The
American Shore, which anticipates much of Roberts' presentation. Roberts' notion of
"thick reading" echoes Delany's concept of the development of "reading protocols," in
either case referring to the development of a certain competency and sophistication in
reading works in a given genre. One learns to read a system that is otherwise
inaccessible. Delany's work draws more deeply on linguistic and cognitive responses to the
texts--his focus is more fine than Roberts' general study.
Indeed, one of the major flaws of Roberts' book, from the SF critical viewpoint, is
that he seems unaware of much of the SF-related critical and scholarly work that relates
directly to his thesis. Roberts seems to have relied primarily upon his own reading
experience (which, to be fair, is extensive and well-considered) and only a few general
critical works by James Gunn and John J. Pierce. No mention is made of Delany's work, save
for a brief (and in this context irrelevant) reference to The Einstein Intersection.
Likewise, when he turns to consider the formal pleasures to be found in popular
fiction, there is no reference to the numerous studies by SF critics and scholars that
bear on this very question, from considerations of such basic matters as the merits and
limitations of the novel, novella, and short-story forms to the complexities of cognition
and self-awareness in the reading process. Even brief consideration of these materials
would perhaps have added greater force to Roberts' arguments, and certainly enhance their
utility to SF studies.
Roberts also fails to address the influences of commercial publishing and marketing on
popular and literary fiction, considering them of relatively little import. This seems
strangely inconsistent with his cogent, thought-provoking discussion of the role of
writers and their audiences within both genre and literary systems. As an example, his
comments on the use of and reader reaction to pseudonyms, collaborative efforts, ghost
writers working under borrowed or house names, and "jam sessions" (i.e., "shared-world" group works) are interesting and useful, and could have been quite
productively extended by examining how these works have come to be published and marketed.
This study also suffers somewhat from the broad scope of its subject: at times the
generalizations are too sweeping, the attempt to build categories still a bit unrefined to
be of real utility. Roberts casts a wide net, and at times the mesh is a bit too wide to
land so many slippery ideas. Yet its flaws are far outweighed by its many virtues. His
discussions are amiable and engaging, his examples generally well-chosen, and his
arguments developed in an articulate, elegantly structured progression. He provides a
workable general framework for familiar concepts and demonstrates their applicability, and
offers many choice nuggets as food for thought. All told, this is an interesting and
valuable book.
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