Wednesday, 19 October 2011

It's just a book about Indian history.

Earlier this week, Salman Rusdie told Haaretz:

Everybody loves The Wire and I think it's okay, but in the end it's just a police series. I love The Sopranos. Deadwood, which didn't last long, was a series I liked a lot; it had more filthy language than I've ever heard on television anywhere in my life, but it was brilliantly written. I like some of what is on now, like Breaking Bad and Dexter.

Ever since then, his Twitter feed's been mighty entertaining. In particular, he implicitly claims that The Wire is "just a police series" but Entourage is something more.  (I'm not sure exactly what that something is, but it must have to do with the fact that, as a celebrity himself, he could relate to the Vince and his crew on a profound level inaccessible to those of us who found the show and its characters vapid and humorless.) Rushdie's dismissal of The Wire as "mere" genre fiction couldn't be more poorly timed, coming as it does on the tail end of Colson Whitehead's dismissal of genre fiction as an operative category in contemporary literature. Genre only matters, Whitehead argues, to people incapable of seeing past it. One would assume that a magic realist like Rushdie would understand that.

But no.

He'll watch Game of Thrones, but only because it qualifies as research:

I watched all that because if I am going to work in this field, I need to know what it is going on. I have been making myself have whole-series marathons to get the point of how it goes. I will soon start writing my little series.

What's his "little series" about?

It's a sort of paranoid science-fiction series, people disappearing and being replaced by other people.

Sounds like just another science fiction series to me.

Oct 19, 2011 7:20:49 PM | Literary Theory, Literature, The Wire

9 Comments

Rich Puchalsky

Oh great. A large number of major literature-genre male novelists of the late 20th century have tried their hand at SF while knowing nothing about it, and their works have been uniformly awful. Time's Arrow, The Plot Against America, anyone?

Posted by: Rich Puchalsky | Wednesday, 19 October 2011 at 07:51 PM

Ahistoricality

Rich is right.

Genre may not be "an operative category" because writers don't feel constrained by genres as much as they used to, but genres have histories which writers ignore at their peril.

Posted by: Ahistoricality | Wednesday, 19 October 2011 at 08:32 PM

SEK

Rich is right: I don't expect much in the way of innovation from someone like Rushdie who has little to no knowledge of the genre. That's why Whitehead's dismissal moves me: he's someone who knows the history and isn't about to ignore it. I haven't read his latest, but The Intuitionist is one of my favorite novels of the past two decades precisely because it taps into that Dickian paranoia in a knowing way.

Posted by: SEK | Thursday, 20 October 2011 at 01:04 AM

jake

Rushdie comes off a cynical opportunist here.

Posted by: jake | Thursday, 20 October 2011 at 02:15 PM

Gareth Rees

Rushdie's no newcomer to science fiction and fantasy. His first novel, Grimus, is straight-up science fiction in the David Lindsay/Doris Lessing vein (famously, the publishers refused to allow it to be nominated for a science fiction prize because they were afraid of it being ghettoized in the genre); many of his novels have fantastic elements (telepathy Midnight's Children, the allegorical monsters in Shame, the eschatological figures in The Satanic Verses); and Haroun and the Sea of Stories is a fairy tale.

He's written some rubbish recently (e.g. Fury), but I think an epic fantasy series would suit him.

Posted by: Gareth Rees | Friday, 21 October 2011 at 11:55 AM

Number Six

What would really be interesting is a sci-fi series with echoes of the grittiness in The Wire. Outland had its moments in this respect. Why can't Rushdie write something like that? Maybe just as well, his effete sensibilities might get in the way...

Posted by: Number Six | Sunday, 23 October 2011 at 12:33 AM

Gareth Rees

The BBC tried to film a TV miniseries of Midnight's Children but their permit to film in Sri Lanka was revoked. But there is an upcoming film of the novel, written and directed by Deepa Mehta.

Posted by: Gareth Rees | Sunday, 23 October 2011 at 02:31 PM

Richard

Rich's comment is dumb. The notion that those writers merely "tried their hand[s] at SF" is silly. They wrote the novels they wanted to write, for whatever their own reasons were. That others felt compelled to call it SF, bad or otherwise, is quite beside the point. The extent to which The Plot Against America was good or bad has nothing do with whether it "succeeds" at being SF, and vice versa. (For me, the alternative history fails because his grasp of the real history is too poor.)

Posted by: Richard | Sunday, 30 October 2011 at 06:41 PM

Joseph Kugelmass

Leapin' lizards, Scott, how in God's name does one actually use that TrackBack function? Why, now that I'm on the emails I thought I had this here Internet thing dag-near figgered out, but apparently not.

Posted by: Joseph Kugelmass | Thursday, 03 November 2011 at 05:11 PM

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Form and Content in Grant Morrison's All-Star Superman Before I begin, I would like to re-admit that I don't "get" Grant Morrison. I understand and, to some extent, can appreciate what others find interesting about his work, but for me reading Morrison is akin to arguing with someone who believes that, after death, we enter "the Supercontext ... a fifth-dimensional, informational continuum where things that we don't quite understand go on." (Because that's exactly what it is.) In other words, I don't disapprove of Morrison's grand scheme so much as I think its philosophical underpinnings are as sound and stable as those of anyone else who drops too much acid and claims communion with unseen entities of vast esoteric power. They—being the philosophical underpinnings, not the unseen entities of vast esoteric power—are there, certainly, but they're there to be accepted as revelation, not to be argued with. That said, I decided to teach All-Star Superman anyway and will attempt to do it justice. Fortunately for me, that's not too difficult to do if I concentrate on the opening pages of the first issue. To wit: Absent from these four panels is any hint that "[t]hat 'S' is the radiant emblem of divinity we reveal when we rip off our stuffy shirts, our social masks, our neuroses, our constructed selves, and become who we truly are." (We're not, truly or otherwise, anything we see on that page.) Instead, Morrison presents the familiar origin of Superman with a narrative economy as impressive as it is moving. (Or because, despite its familiarity, it is moving.) In eight words evenly distributed over four panels, Morrison captures the oft-forgotten pathos of the character. How does Morrison effect this? By creating an alternating rhythm to the panels. The first depicts a world-historical catastrophe; the second, a medium close-up of two people caught in it; the third, the catastrophe again; the fourth, a first-person extreme close-up of two people whose lives are changed by it. The balance created by alternating between the catastrophic scale in the first and third panels emphasizes, by putting into relief, the personal scale evident in the second and fourth. Put differently: the pained faces in the second panel are both magnified and humanized by the events depicted in the panels bookending it. Similarly, the inquisitive faces in the fourth panel are made meaningful both by the third and the splash page that follows: The second and third pages aren't typically considered part of the opening sequence, but they seem to me vital to understanding the rhythm Morrison establishes. It's almost as if the Kents' curiosity on the previous page is answered by the magnificance depicted on the two subsequent ones. (The visual impact of the second and third pages is diminished by the necessities of blog-columns, but if you click on the images they should open in their original sizes.) In short, the book opens with symmetry (page one) and transitions to sublime grace (pages two and three), which perfectly prepares the reader for this: I'm going to avoid plot-points...
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Less human than human. Alyssa's post on the sentimental core of Grant Morrison's All-Star Superman is spot on: I was surprised by how incredibly sweet the comic is. I wasn’t really expecting that. The basic premise, for those not in the know, is Lex Luthor finds a way to essentially give Superman fast-developing cancer, leaving Superman to do a lot of bucket-list things: give Lois Lane the chance to experience his powers for the day; nail one last scoop for the Daily Planet; go back and visit the grave of Jonathan Kent, his adopted father; save the world one last time. However, the hallmarks of Morrison's work, according to renowned comic scholar (and Alyssa's occasional interlocutor) Douglas Wolk, are: reality-bending metaphysical freakouts dressed up in action-adventure drag; metaphors that make visible the process by which language creates an image that in turn becomes narrative; a touch of feel-good self-improvement rhetoric; faith in the the power of pop and popularity to do magic; and skinny bald men who are stand-ins for Morrison himself, heroically conquering sadness and making the world evolve. (Reading Comics 258) If those two descriptions seem at odds, that's because they are. Morrison is a talented but unintegrated artist. What do I mean? He can be as aggressively annoying as Wolk's flattering account of him suggests. Incorporating proxies of himself into narratives about the nature of narratives and claiming that magic makes these metaphorical selves visible? That is, to quote my advisor, pure "postmodern gee-whiz wankery." It's cleverness for the sake of being hailed as King Clever, and it grates on my every last nerve because it's so clinical and intellectualized. AND YET. I came to graduate school to study the works of James Joyce, whose complex wankery far outstrips anything Morrison's attempted, much less accomplished. So why does Morrison bother me in a manner Joyce doesn't? The short answer is that, at his best, Morrison doesn't bother me at all. When is he at his best? As Alyssa notes, it's when he's stripped a story to its emotional core and presented its complexities not as worthy subjects in and of themselves, but as natural consequences of a human narrative. Of course, the protagonists of these "human" narratives are rarely human: in All-Star Superman, it's Superman; in We3, it's a trio of weaponized house-pets. That is to say: Morrison seems to have a problem elevating actual humans to a position worthy of simple human sympathy. A kidnapped pet or an orphaned alien are worthy of sympathy because they aspire to be more than their outsider status allows them to be. But an average human being? He or she is what he or she is—short of a magical authorial intervention that's as likely to land him or her in Sade's castle as provide anything resembling hope or help. The only transcendence average people can acquire is by proxy, e.g. Lois's "acquisition" of Superman's powers on her birthday. In short, I don't find in Morrison much in the way of human sympathy for ordinary...

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