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The Wood and the Trees Popular Fictions Between Literary and Cultural Studies Sara Martín (Universitat Autònoma De Barcelona, Spain)

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The Wood and the Trees Popular Fictions Between Literary and Cultural Studies Sara Martín (Universitat Autònoma De Barcelona, Spain) The European English Messenger, 15.1 (2006) The Wood and the Trees Popular Fictions between Literary and Cultural Studies Sara Martín (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain) The inclusion of the study of popular culture ways. Popular film-makers are regularly belittled within Cultural Studies has stranded the study by film critics of an artistic inclination, which is of popular fiction in an uncomfortable position, why Steven Spielberg has fallen into his routine especially as regards novels, short fiction and of making a popular summer movie followed cinema. By ‘popular fiction’ I mean all the by an artistically inclined film: box-office success storytelling found in novels, short stories, radio is the most positive kind of endorsement a film- plays, TV programmes, movies, comics and maker can get in Hollywood but it still rankles computer games that we call ‘popular’ even him that snobbish critics do not acknowledge though in many cases it doesn’t actually reach his talent. Still, he gained some kind of satisfaction a big audience; the ‘popular’ is paradoxically on both accounts when in the year 1993 an quite often a minority pursuit and may even be artistic film and a popular movie that he had a tiny ‘cult’. What causes this discomfort is that made won Oscars and became huge money while media such as TV or radio are makers: Jurassic Park and Schindler’s List. homogeneously popular – has anyone ever used Stephen King suffers from the same the phrase ‘artistic TV’ in the same sense we schizophrenic malaise but has so far avoided refer to an ‘artistic novel’? – fiction in print and trying his hand at writing artistic fiction, which on the big screen is far more heterogeneous, wasn’t an obstacle to his being given the ranging from the brazenly formulaic to the boldly National Book Award in 2003 to the scandal of artistic. many. Thus, whereas the Emmy awards honour the Honouring King in this way would the best in the whole medium of (American) TV, equivalent of Spielberg’s getting a Palm d’Or films and printed fiction in English compete for for The War of the Worlds – a strange faux different awards depending on whether they are pas. It is also proof of the same kind of confused regarded as artistic or popular. The Oscars, thinking that resulted in the entrance of Spanish which might seem to be as homogeneous as popular writer Arturo Pérez-Reverte in the elitist the Emmys, tend in fact to patronize popular Real Academia de la Lengua and in the films, especially if they deal with fantasy, awarding of the prestige Príncipe de Asturias awarding them prizes only for technical Prize – the Spanish Nobel Prize – to J. K. achievements. The major Oscars inevitably go Rowling in the same year 2003. While King and to films with a realistic subject matter and, it is Reverte at least were granted literary honours, implied, a higher artistic content, pace the Rowling got the Príncipe de Asturias for Oscars reaped by Peter Jackson’s trilogy The Concord on the grounds that she has reached a Lord of the Rings in 2005. Any cinema fan wide, universal readership with her books, praise knows at any rate that winning an Oscar is which is quite ironic considering that she’s significantly different from getting a Palme d’Or narrating the horrifying confrontation between at the Cannes Film Festival or a Golden Bear a boy and a bloodthirsty villain bent on killing at the Berlinale, awards that confer a halo of him. The 2003 corresponding award for artistic prestige that the Oscars still lack. Literature went to Fatima Mernissi and Susan Novelists and short story writers are far more Sontag, two feminist, intellectual, literary writers sharply divided into the two fields of the artistic who have certainly worked for concord far more and the popular because the achievements of committedly than Rowling. popular fiction in print are never acknowledged All this disorientation arises, as I’m arguing, by the literary establishment or only in confusing from an inability to acknowledge the merits of 46 popular fiction per se in a way that can be as culture.... There was a gigantic leap we had to satisfactory for its creators and its audiences make, from a specific text to the mass media. as artistic prestige. It also arises from the failure Now, with the recognition of the importance to see that some writers and film-makers of genres, we have an intermediary stage – regarded as popular because of the subject one that enlarges and enhances our matter they deal with are also gifted artists. One understanding of the way texts function and thing is not incompatible with the other since of the way that texts relate to one another, the there’s no radical difference between the media, and society. (1992: xiii) popular and the artistic but, rather, a continuum. The label ‘genre fiction’ is not, however, an The wrong belief that there is a sharp difference adequate synonym for popular fiction. ‘Genre’ has seriously distorted the academic organization is a notoriously unstable concept but if we agree of the study of fiction, arbitrarily split between for the sake of the argument that stories are Literary Studies and Cultural Studies in a way categorized into genres on the basis of their main that complicates enormously the task of making topic, as the list above suggests, it doesn’t make sense of the whole map of storytelling in English. sense to suppose particular types of story Genre theory is one of the main roots of this escape genre labelling. mix-up but also the insistence on the idea that If we truly want to map the whole territory of popular fiction is a subset of popular culture storytelling in English we should arrange all rather than a sibling of artistic fiction. It is more fiction by subject, regardless of artistic quality likely for an essay on Michael Crichton to and even narrative medium (printed words, live appear published next to one on Madonna – as performance, drawings, moving pictures). icons of popular culture – than for it to appear While in so-called genre fiction this is done next to one on any artistic American novelist. constantly so that some consumers (readers, While academic publications on film tend to viewers, players) specialize in narrowly defined progressively erase the barrier between sub-genres like cyberpunk, feminist crime Hollywood and artistic film-making, perhaps fiction, lad-lit or military technothrillers, in artistic because independent film-makers are fiction this categorization is generally ignored themselves pulling it down, the equivalent on the supposition that what defines the literary publications on fiction in print only focus on the is not primarily the subject matter but the stylistic literary. If one can only call him- or herself a quality of the medium it uses, whether it is prose, film specialist by claiming to know all about the spoken word of drama or the images in film. movies, from Spielberg to Lars von Trier, why Thus, on the one hand, most academics in the should academics interested in fiction be free field of Literary Studies suppose that certain to ignore popular writers? And the other way topics can never make good literary fiction and round: shouldn’t Cultural Studies specialists in those in Cultural Studies assume that there are detective fiction see that this is part of the field no artists among the ranks of the creators of of fiction within Literary Studies? popular fiction: all of them generate trash, even Depending on the topic it deals with, popular though it’s trash worth studying. Both attitudes, fiction is subdivided into genres: westerns, I believe, are wrong. thrillers (legal, political, technological, spy), Literary Studies specialists have no doubts pseudo-historical fantasy, science fiction, horror, about what kind of fiction they prefer studying; romance (in all its varieties, including sex-and- quite another matter is whether they’re mainly shopping fiction, chick lit and erotica), historical interested in Literature or simply in fiction (how fiction and crime fiction. Arthur Asa Berger many actually read poetry?). Basically, the explains that subject of Literary Studies is fiction with a strong Before the development of genre theory we emphasis on style, by which I mean not only were more or less limited to discussing texts, the literary quality of the prose but also all the such as a spy novel like Dr. No and then relating strategies to enhance the role of how the tale is these texts to the mass media, society and told over what it is about; it is also preferably 47 The European English Messenger, 15.1 (2006) fiction about a realist subject matter outside the high time to move away from those stale range of topics defined by genre theory as definitions and consider new angles rather than exclusive of the so-called popular genres. run the risk, as Dominic Strinati warns us, of Instinctively, this tells us that Martin Amis is insisting on a populism that shows its “critical the kind of author Literary Studies favours and failings” because it’s nothing but “a mirror that Danielle Steele is not. Instinct, however, image of elitism.” (1996: 259) opens up a vast gap when it comes to studying, The canon wars fought in Literary Studies on the one hand, realist writers with a less for the expansion of the range of writers that elaborate style (ranging from the failures of might be granted canonical status in spite of writers who do have artistic ambitions to the not being white, European, dead and male, raised plain middlebrow who don’t) and, on the other no major issues in relation to how to incorporate hand, writers with artistic talent as shown in popular fictions within Literary Studies – which their achievements in style, who write on topics is not at all the same as integrating them into considered only appropriate for popular fiction.
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