I found an interview between Neil Gaiman and Kazuo Ishiguro talking about genre, although not directly related to escapism they talk about the genre snobbery in literature which I think could shine a light on the causes of negative feeling towards escapist fiction. The opening dialogue straight away tackles to invisible boundaries that genres create and the way that the age of a book changes how it is perceived. Kazuo Ishiguro asks "Why are people so preoccupied? What is genre in the first place? Who invented it? Why am I perceived to have crossed a kind of boundary?". Genres are a useful way for people to find similar books to the ones they know they like, but they seem to have become a constraint on writers. Genres create preconceptions about what a book should contain which takes away a writers ability to write freely.
Neil Gaiman makes the point that "if you were a novelist writing in 1920 or 1930, you would simply be perceived as having written another novel. When Dickens published A Christmas Carol nobody went, “Ah, this respectable social novelist has suddenly become a fantasy novelist: look, there are ghosts and magic.” It may well be the case that it is writers that have dared to cross the boundaries have created the most interesting, thought provoking work. Genres seem to have developed from a way to distinguish between different subjects to a format that writers must adhere to.
What seems to be apparent is that genres are most useful to publishers and book shops as a way to market their product to a specific audience and that over time genres change to reflect the market. Neil Gaiman metions talking to someone who worked in Borders whose job it was to find where to put books that were in the horror section when they got rid of the genre from the stores. The market for horror was dying out and books previously placed in this section were spread out between science fiction, fantasy and thriller. This had a nock on effect on the authors who had to market themselves to their new target audience.
Neil Gaiman talks about the sudden commercial success of fantasy in the 1960's when Lord of the Rings became very popular with a wide audience of people that would not necessarily be pre existing fans of fiction. This popularity caused the major publishers to trawl their archiver for anything that was written in a similar way. As well as this there were new authors that started to write very similar stories.
"By the time fantasy had its own area in the bookshop, it was deemed inferior to mimetic, realistic fiction. I think reviewers and editors did not know how to speak fantasy; were not familiar with the language, did not recognise it." NG
The negative view of fantasy caused various authors to feel the need to defend the credibility of the works and their authors. Neil Gaiman picks out two quotes from famous authors reacting to these views.
A S Byatt said "These are real books, they’re saying important things and they are beautifully crafted,”
Terry Pratchett said “You know, you can do all you want, but you put in one fucking dragon and they call you a fantasy writer.”
A S Byatts quote possibly has more weight to it as she was not a labelled as a fantasy writer. The fact that a well established writer who won the Booker Prize and has been named in lists of great British writers shows haw widespread the negative view of fantasy has spread and how the genre defines the novels rather than the other way round. Once an negative association has been made it can be hard to shake, a genre could contain numerous works worthy of praise that are overlooked due to the way they are labelled.
In the interview Kazuo Ishiguro mentions something interesting.
"it probably wouldn’t have occurred to me to use the science-fiction dimension for Never Let Me Go ten or 15 years earlier. I actually tried to write that same story twice in the Nineties but I just couldn’t find a way to make it work. And it was only the third time I tried, around 2001, that this idea came to me: if I made them clones, who were being harvested for organ donation, the story would work.
Before that, in a more realist setting, I was really struggling: how can I get young people to go through the experience of old people, how can I contrive this situation? I was coming up with not very good ideas, like they’ve all got a disease, or they came across nuclear materials and so they were doomed to a shorter lifespan."
By opening up a new world with new possibilities an author is armed with an almost endless array of ways to tell their story. Concepts that are hard to communicate using 'traditional fiction' can be brought to life. Fantasy opens up a whole new world where the authors imagination is not confined by what happens in 'real life'. In the same way the reader is free to explore this world and use it to make sense of complex issues that have implications in their own lives. Genre has become a constraint and so has the negative view of escapism.
Neil Gaiman talks about the sudden commercial success of fantasy in the 1960's when Lord of the Rings became very popular with a wide audience of people that would not necessarily be pre existing fans of fiction. This popularity caused the major publishers to trawl their archiver for anything that was written in a similar way. As well as this there were new authors that started to write very similar stories.
"By the time fantasy had its own area in the bookshop, it was deemed inferior to mimetic, realistic fiction. I think reviewers and editors did not know how to speak fantasy; were not familiar with the language, did not recognise it." NG
The negative view of fantasy caused various authors to feel the need to defend the credibility of the works and their authors. Neil Gaiman picks out two quotes from famous authors reacting to these views.
A S Byatt said "These are real books, they’re saying important things and they are beautifully crafted,”
Terry Pratchett said “You know, you can do all you want, but you put in one fucking dragon and they call you a fantasy writer.”
A S Byatts quote possibly has more weight to it as she was not a labelled as a fantasy writer. The fact that a well established writer who won the Booker Prize and has been named in lists of great British writers shows haw widespread the negative view of fantasy has spread and how the genre defines the novels rather than the other way round. Once an negative association has been made it can be hard to shake, a genre could contain numerous works worthy of praise that are overlooked due to the way they are labelled.
In the interview Kazuo Ishiguro mentions something interesting.
"it probably wouldn’t have occurred to me to use the science-fiction dimension for Never Let Me Go ten or 15 years earlier. I actually tried to write that same story twice in the Nineties but I just couldn’t find a way to make it work. And it was only the third time I tried, around 2001, that this idea came to me: if I made them clones, who were being harvested for organ donation, the story would work.
Before that, in a more realist setting, I was really struggling: how can I get young people to go through the experience of old people, how can I contrive this situation? I was coming up with not very good ideas, like they’ve all got a disease, or they came across nuclear materials and so they were doomed to a shorter lifespan."
By opening up a new world with new possibilities an author is armed with an almost endless array of ways to tell their story. Concepts that are hard to communicate using 'traditional fiction' can be brought to life. Fantasy opens up a whole new world where the authors imagination is not confined by what happens in 'real life'. In the same way the reader is free to explore this world and use it to make sense of complex issues that have implications in their own lives. Genre has become a constraint and so has the negative view of escapism.
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