When I started this newsletter, I held in my heart a strong aversion to commenting on culture matters. I told myself, out of one side of my mouth, that what did such “debates” in literature or music or what-have-you matter when one-third of Pakistan is underwater, girls and women are still being murdered brutally by Iran’s security forces amidst widespread protest, and the Mississippi River is drying up? Out of the other side of my mouth was a reticence towards being drawn into “discourse” where a lack of reading comprehension and an incentive towards being the first to comment on a thing fertilizes the soil for all sorts of absurdity and rancor. When the disk horse bucks and brays, people tend to forget that the folks on whom they’re slinging their mud could, in an alternate universe, be potential collaborators. Or bosses. Additionally, having lived alongside and with nurses and medical professionals through the beginning of the pandemic turns out to have been a titanic exercise in perspective.
Add to that the fact that the thing on my mind, when put a certain way, can come across as complaining or the sometimes pitiful tone that “notice me, senpai” can take when it loses its playfulness.
Namely, I’ve been thinking about the persistent segregation of speculative fiction out of literature-talk. I came across two state-of-literature pieces recently that emptied a clip in recent hopes I’d nursed that, as far as books are concerned, some of the ramparts between the speculative and the realist had at least begun to come down.1
My angst, this time around, doesn’t come from those traditional markers of excellence like awards consideration or things like that; or from the tendency of speculative fiction to most often be included in conversations about Literature when it comes from a writer operating from the platform of a non-specfic imprint. In this instance, my angst takes the form of “you have these questions and concerns about certain trends in Literature but those questions are answered and those concerns addressed by genre books right within reach.”
Enough beating around the bush. I’m referring specifically to two essays.
“On the Cult of Craftism” by GD Dess has, in its target reticle, the primacy of the sentence over the substance of a story.
A definition of craftism might be: a focus on style over substance, a fetishization of sentences themselves, a striving to put words in just the right order, rewriting and rewriting until the prose is perfectly crafted. And it’s had deleterious consequences for contemporary writers and literary production.
Dess notes that this isn’t necessarily a recent phenomenon. Flaubert was a proponent of le mot juste and much has been made of his obsessive sentence-tinkering. Hemingway gets a moment in the essay’s spotlight, as do George Saunders, John Hawkes, and Gordon Lish; their crime: acting as prophets in the Sect of the Sentence. But the one who gets it the worst is Anthony Doerr.
On his Pulitzer-winning All the Light We Cannot See:
But in his obsession with craft, Doerr has relieved himself from the writerly responsibility to say something true about his characters. Neither of his protagonists exhibit any interiority—they exist merely as beautifully painted marionettes whose strings Doerr pulls to move the plot along. The closest the Nazi Warner comes to showing us an emotion is when he reflects on the bad choices and murderous path he has followed: “It seems to Werner that in the space between whatever has happened already and whatever is to come hovers an invisible borderland, the known on one side and the unknown on the other.” Another beautiful sentence but as far as self-examination goes, it is uninformative and banal and purports to tell us what we already know about every situation: there is what we know, and there is what we don’t know. Doerr’s craftism can’t penetrate the inner mind of Werner, or Marie-Laure, or anyone: throughout the entire novel we only meet characters without character.
I don’t disagree with Dess, here with this example and more generally in the essay. I enjoyed All the Light but only because every single sentence in it seemed to sing. I’d even made a note at the time I read it of the sequence:
"The candle rolls gently. Toward the window. Toward the curtains."
On a sentence level, the novel is a jewel. A diamond. Leitmotifs are expertly deployed. Scenes build in a way meant to tug the heartstrings. Chapters end with kickers that gorgeously pull together the linguistic moment built up from each chapter's start. In the end, however, I was left cold. I don’t know that my reason for bouncing off the characters was the inaccessibility of their interiority. I intuited much from them. Indeed, the book came across as immensely sentimental. Verging on saccharine. But I could only enjoy those characters in the midst of the gilded lyrical field in which they roamed. Expertly written, All the Light We Cannot See left me with the feeling that I had just watched the machinations of an impossibly detailed and crafted clock, rather than having watched the sun and the shadows it cast in my efforts to discern the passage of time.
I admired the book greatly. There are parts of it to which I aspire as a craftsman. But it was the Sentence that made me “shudder,” not the Soul.
Dess goes on to detail their diagnosis and the effects of craftism on the diminution of subject matter.
Among a coterie of writers, craft and the perfecting of sentences have largely replaced the necessity of imagining and creating novels of ambition and substance. The result has been the kinds of investigations into interiority that lead nowhere. As editor and writer John Merrick has noted, “Our novels and films are filled with the solipsistic tales of middle-class strivers recounting their attempts to be good bourgeois subjects—with the occasional knowing nod towards Marx thrown in if we’re lucky.” Or, as journalist Ben Judah recently tweeted, “beautifully crafted but challengeless stories of modern interiority.”
Yes, absolutely, yes.
Except that such declarations when ostensibly applied to modern literature writ large are, by their nature, blinkered. Now, I’m largely illiterate when it comes to contemporary realist literature, but it becomes more and more difficult to abide the diagnosis of widespread craftism when Jesmyn Ward’s still out here doing her thing or when faced with Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown. Let’s exclude books that have recently been garlanded with the National Book Award for Fiction. We’re still left with Imbolo Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were, Home Remedies by Xuan Juliana Wang, the works of Viet Thanh Nguyen, and Omar El-Akkad’s criminally underrated American War.
Now, Dess might count these as counterexamples, “engaging fiction” with “sympathetic protagonists who play out the drama of their lives in the world in which they find themselves”. But, like, I cannot find a single subpar sentence in Sing, Unburied, Sing. Let’s extend ourselves beyond the boundaries of the North American continent. Kamila Shamsie’s Antigone-retelling Home Fire did for me all the things All the Light didn’t while having one of the highest beautiful sentence per capita percentage I’ve ever seen.
But I think the weakness or, rather, the myopia of the diagnosis goes deeper.
If the problem is a prizing of the sentence over any semblance of plot or social engagement, then the solution—the bridging of the two—has long resided in speculative fiction.
Cue my armchair psychoanalysis: While speculative fiction on the big and small screens is now recognized as an arena wherein profound themes can be grappled with in sophisticated fashion, indeed, with aplomb and grace2, a literati's perception of literature from science fiction and fantasy imprints and publishing houses is still stuck in the Dark Ages.3 Maybe a dalliance with H.G. Wells, maybe a childhood deep-dive into Dune, perhaps some even some grimdark fantasy or some breakthrough works like Cixin Liu’s The Three Body Problem. Increasingly, it’ll be the screen adaptation that drives folks to the source material. At least, that’s the hope on the part of publishing houses, their novelists, and short story writers.4
So when a lamentation on the death of substance (or, for the sake of simplicity, plot) for the sake of lyrical felicity goes wide, it takes every bone in my body not to shout “but what about John Crowley?” If that man had begun and ended with Little, Big, he would’ve been able to hang his jersey in the rafters. But he persists in blessing us with erudite, euphonious works. E. Lily Yu’s On Fragile Waves shows us a work wherein deep consideration is given to the plot, the sentences, and the subject matter. Though increasing attention is being paid to the superlative writing of Ted Chiang, I don’t know that appreciation for the chameleonic nature of his writing has risen to suitable levels. “Omphalos” is a very different story from “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate,” both of which distinguish themselves greatly from “The Lifecycle of Software Objects.”5 Pick a short story collection by Elizabeth Bear off a shelf and witness incredible versatility from a writer whose novels are equally at ease on the second-world Central Asian steppe, on the deck of a generation ship, and out in the expanse of the wild west.
I don’t want to assume that “craftism” in Dess’s essay is shorthand for “beautiful sentences,” because my understanding of craft extends beyond the sentence level. I think “craft” applies equally to structural considerations, act breaks, the binding-together of a book, how much or how little a setting is painted, how character relationships are fashioned and refashioned. Craft is dramatic irony and reveal. Craft is also readability. Using “craftism” to mean sentence-level construction might restrict our understanding of the misguided “purpose” of craft to be that of ornate subject-verb arrangement. Like a John Banville novel is the Platonic Ideal or something. But craft is just as much at work in a Laura Lippman or George Pelecanos novel, same with anything out of Ian McDonald.
If there is an epidemic of “craftism,” its antidote is This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. And if Dess’s essay has the feel of a funeral dirge, then Time War is the resurrection hymn. Only, the thing it’s singing back to life never died in the first place.
A question Dess's references in their essay is “When did American literary fiction lose the plot?” Must be two Americas.
I’m sure there is plenty being written now that I would bounce off of like a ball hurled at a glacier, stuff allegedly infected by the MFA imperative towards gorgeous sentences at all costs, but maybe that’s why I’m still hearing stories of MFA students who want to write speculative fiction being rudely rebuffed by their professors.6
When celebrating recent works such as Raven Leilani’s Luster and Teenager by Bud Smith, Dess says:
The sentences in these books are not all perfect. And in the imperfections a certain air rushes in. A syntactic mobility more akin to consciousness, truer to thought, truer to life.
Here’s me extending a hand to Dess, offering to bring them over the fence into foreign lands with plenty of thought, plenty of life, and plenty of perfect sentences too.
The second piece that got my gears turning if not grinding was a recent New York Times essay on the cage of Black representation in modern literature (and literature past).
In Ismail Muhammad’s take on the state of affairs, there is the familiar leaving-out of genre fiction, but its absence wounds his points even more deeply than those absences did the Dess essay.
The center of Muhammad’s piece is as follows:
Our current problem isn’t an insufficient amount of Black representation in literature but a surfeit of it. And in many cases that means simply another marketing opportunity, a way to sell familiar images of Blackness to as broad an audience as possible. In early 2020, the critic Lauren Michele Jackson argued that representation had essentially become a meaningless rallying cry that could encompass, yes, the publication of worthy Black voices but also the ridiculousness of corporate responsibility pledges and diversity initiatives. Insofar as there is a market for Blackness, it generates a series of conventions for telling stories about race — most often nothing more than updated versions of themes that Black literature has tangled with from its inception. The critic and novelist Elaine Castillo describes mainstream literary publishing as seeking out “writers of color for the gooey heart-porn of the ethnographic: to learn about forgotten history, harrowing tragedy, community-destroying political upheaval, genocide [and] trauma.” This is representation’s trap — the whittling down of Black life’s full scope into marketable, digestible facsimiles that are then thrust onto Black writers. As a new generation of debut novelists tries to tell its stories amid this new consensus, they are encountering the pressures of easy legibility that Black writers have always faced in America.
I wrote a similar paragraph in June 2020:
Since before Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, narratives by Black Americans about Black Americans have performed a sort of zoological function. In conjunction with or perhaps with utter disregard for a work’s literary merits (depending on its audience), a reader might approach such a book the way they might watch a documentary. Smooth narration, structurally sound. A chance to learn something new about seahorses. “A window into the condition of contemporary Black America” reads the breathless blurb or pull-quote on the cover. And in that book are likely breathtaking sentences, arresting paragraphs, gorgeous scene-endings depicting the worst day of a Black character’s life. The sentences will sing in a story about slavery. The hunger for this sort of story exists outside the Black writer. After all, it was William Styron, descended from slaveowners, who won the Pulitzer for The Confessions of Nat Turner. But publishing is so often a closed ecosystem, and when that hunger is in the air, that air cannot help but enter the lungs of a Black writer let in through the doors. The White Gaze is the Eye of Sauron twice. Whether or not as a conscious decision, you write in or through or around that hunger. And maybe you give them Illmatic. You give them reportage in the form of fiction. You give them drama and beatific prose and, for the non-Black audience, that transcendent sense of transport that good fiction always offers. You also give them an education.
Where I disagree with Muhammad is in a subsequent paragraph where he puts several recent novels in the quicksand pit at the center of which is the “representation trap.” Of Raven Leilani, Zakiya Harris, Brandon Taylor, Kiley Reid, Candice Carty-Williams, and Jo Hamya,7 Muhammad says: “These writers play into representation’s trap even as they express an anxiety about its limits and what it demands.”
The representation trap is posited as a thing that has infected the very novel-writing process. Idea gestation, prose styling, character crafting, all of it in anticipation of market appetites for delectable Black life. Except that this has the feel here of a framework imposed on self-extant works out in the air already, independent of each other or anything really having to do with making Black life “digestible.” Any life depicted in any novel is digestible. Even Don DeLillo’s Underworld, as capacious as it is, is filled with morsel-sized simulacra of life. Novels aren’t reality and they’re not even reality rendered in snow-globe miniature. They’re stories. If the novels written by the authors in the previous paragraph strike a reader as the product of “the pressures of easy legibility that Black writers have always faced in America” and not as, well, books about lives being lived, maybe that smell is coming from the reader’s baggage.
All of that said, the structural faults of the “representation trap” argument presented here are not why this piece stuck with me.8
If Muhammad were looking for books absent the “the double consciousness that white supremacy imposes on the Black writer’s psyche,” he could’ve done worse than pick up N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy. Or P. Djélì Clark’s Ring Shout or the novellas of Kai Ashante Wilson or the novels of Alaya Dawn Johnson or Bethany C. Morrow or, well, you get the point.
I’m in no one’s head but my own, yet each of those authors’ efforts feel like the product of someone writing whatever the hell it is they want to write. And doing it well.
I think that if adult speculative fiction endured an anxiety of representation period, it had more to do with who was doing the writing, and less with what was being written. White writers writing Black or Black-coded characters and whatnot. By the time I entered the game and found myself amidst a throng of working (and excelling) Black writers, however, we all seemed to just be doing our thing. Look over your shoulder and cast your gaze into the past and you’ll see Octavia Butler. You’ll see Samuel Delany’s Dhalgren.9 Nnedi Okorafor is both my predecessor and peer.
Children and grandchildren of empire have long been operating within this foundationally colonialist set of genres, turning it inside out, making it our own, climbing the ramparts and waving our flags. And being feted for it. So maybe there’s something about the genre itself that has helped writers elide certain concerns re the representation trap.
Muhammad has this paragraph towards the middle of his essay:
Toni Morrison would later characterize this as a worry about the “Africanist presence” in American literature. Morrison spoke of the way that Black characters had become metaphors, a compilation of the “assumptions, readings and misreadings that characterize these peoples in Eurocentric eyes,” in literature that lacked concern for Black people’s actual lives. To me, it is important to acknowledge that this tendency wasn’t particular just to white writers. Black writers, too, fell prey to processing their own experiences through these distorted views, in which Blackness was “sometimes allegorical, sometimes metaphorical but always choked by representation.”
Science fiction and fantasy operate on two levels simultaneously. Reality and metaphor. Reality and allegory. There’s the worldbuilding of the story, where and how the characters are set, but then there’s the parable of Parable. Metaphors being further metaphorized, allegorized Black life being rendered as allegory squared, it all collapses on itself like a white dwarf to the point where you get fully-realized Black characters with the power to break the world in the mind-bending and heart-breaking The Fifth Season.
I think the novels Muhammad chose for his analysis, he chose for a reason. And I assume (rightly or wrongly, he’ll be the one to tell me) that part of the reason is their popularity. Their titles are brought up often enough in conversation, enough people have bought those books, they’ve shown up on enough lists. Their heads have poked above the crowd, so to speak. And sometimes that makes you a target.
Outside of that, what do they have in common? Black writers wrote them, and there are white characters in them too. Are they about Blackness? What does that question even mean? Are they about Black people? Well, they’re about those Black people.
Trend-spotting is an exercise in apophenia. Look at a slice of bread long enough and see Virgin Mary in silhouette.
There is no there there, and even if there were, there’s a whole other genre or set of genres walking through, by, around that trap as though it weren’t even there. Maybe that’s just superpowers. Or magic. Or science.
There is a trap here, but it’s not the representation trap. It’s the Litfic Trap.10 Wherein, again, the author, believing they’ve taken the pulse of Literature has instead touched a tit.
Nobody can have read everything. But incompleteness harms the thesis.
I don’t mean for any of this to come across as Little Brother shouting “take me seriously” at the older sibling, pointing at Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus or Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and keening “you invited them to the party, so invite me.” I truly don’t mean to whine. But gears grind whenever I come across a grand pronouncement (especially when it’s well-written) and find it missing an appendage. Look at that beautiful sculpture you’ve built, now if only you’d remembered the arms!
Sometimes, I can sound like the guy with the coat full of stolen watches accosting you on the sidewalk. Hey, you want a social novel? I gotcha. How ‘bout something pregnant with poetic prose? This one’s your bet. Oh, you want a Black writer who has successfully elided the White Gaze? Well, this one right here is what you’re looking for. No one stops long enough to actually pay that guy any mind. And his hair’s always too messy, his voice too manic. Surely he’s trying to pull one over on me.
Maybe I’ve mistaken the declarative tone of both pieces for an injunction against comment. Even online, the stentorian timbre disinvites disagreement. But I won’t even say that disagreement is where I’m positioned here. It is more invitation. How much richer might both critiques have been were they to have integrated speculative fiction into their analyses? Maybe the issue is word count.
Scifi and fantasy novels do tend to be longer.
Currently reading: Nada by Jean-Patrick Manchette
Currently listening: Balenciaga - T3nzu
There’s this beautiful Gene Wolfe appreciation from 2015 in The New Yorker, and Marlon James’s Black Leopard, Red Wolf being named a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction. Also, Amal El-Mohtar’s reviews in the New York Times are a persistent source of joy and awe. I’ve rarely felt more in love with a person’s writing than I have with hers.
See Arrival, Game of Thrones, the recent AMC series Pantheon, Ex Machina, the Battlestar Galactica reboot, After Yang, et cetera et cetera et fraking cetera
I’m being intentionally careful with my wording here. Works like The Road, The Underground Railroad, Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West, Station Eleven, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, and the Dark Star trilogy from Marlon James are all firmly works of speculative fiction. What distinguishes them, however, is that none of them were published by publishing houses or imprints dedicated to SFFH (science fiction, fantasy, horror). They all came from so-called “literary” imprints. What’s implied by that is that what may seem like cross-pollination between genre and realist literature is actually a one-way passage. “Literary” (which is, to me, more a stylistic distinction than a content-based one) writers can write works of speculative fiction (see, also Hanya Yanagihara’s latest) to much coverage and acclaim, but writers from imprints or houses specializing in speculative fiction—like Tor, Del Rey, Orbit, etc.—cross less often into the realist sphere. What do I mean by “cross”? Less a matter of speculative writers writing works of realist fiction (a writer can write whatever a writer wants), than them finding similar spotlight in a literary ecosystem comprised of critics and judging committees and culture publications that celebrates the aforementioned.
A caveat: genre novels in the aggregate are most definitely not replete with the types of sentences you might find in modern realist fiction. In many instances, prose style may feel like an afterthought, but that is often because it is seen for the tool it is. The sentence serves a purpose rather than embodies it. So you may find a bevy of well-built houses with just about everything you’d need to live safely and comfortably in, but you wouldn’t pop a picture of it on a postcard. This newsletter isn’t saying that SFF is where you routinely go for the rhapsodic sentence-verb sequence, but, you know, some of us have read Madame Bovary too.
A very important note a dear friend pointed out to me is how Chiang manages to create characters that exist outside of race. I tried to picture the protagonist of Chiang’s “Hell Is the Absence of God” over dinner, and, instead of even seeing a factory settings white face, I saw a silhouette filled with static. An avatar for ideas. This isn’t a mark against Chiang. In fact, it is the opposite. The characters in Chiang’s stories operate the same way that characters in Christopher Nolan movies do, in that you could cast anyone in any role. The characters feel devoid of demographic data not in a way that renders them flat but rather opens them up. Any identitarian reading of a Ted Chiang story is an imposed framework, squaring a circle, as it were. His stories are a masterclass in the feather-touch. And yet these stories of ideas manage to squeeze the heart to produce tears. The gasp, the shudder, these things are all part of the experience of reading a Ted Chiang story. At least, they have been for me. Anyway, deracination in Ted Chiang stories is too big a topic for a mere footnote and actually deserves a whole essay.
I’ve been the recipient of much fortune during my somewhat brief career. (My first novel came out 5 years ago this month.) But one of the luckiest things to happen to me before I started publishing in earnest was having John Crowley as a writing professor in college. For his class, I wrote a short story about a detective chasing a renegade alchemist through a collapsing USSR. That short story grew into a novella that became my first published piece of long fiction. It’s titled Dust to Dust. I was out here writing my dinky little stories about Kosovar Albanian arms dealers and Eastern European alchemists, and he was nothing but encouraging. God bless him.
Authors, respectively, of Luster, The Other Black Girl, Real Life, Such a Fun Age, Queenie, and Three Rooms.
Don’t get me wrong: intersecting questions/commandments surrounding depiction of marginality, market forces, the whiteness of publishing, etc are very real issues and the “representation trap” hypothesis might find greater purchase in Young Adult (SFF) literature than here. But perhaps the better attack-question into the morass would be, not what writing by Black writers does get published, but rather what writing by Black writers doesn’t get published.
That book broke my brain. It’s the trippiest thing I’ve ever read. I think James Joyce might’ve enjoyed it. TS Eliot too.
I’ve tried my best not to use the moniker “literary fiction,” because, again, “literary” to me is a stylistic distinction. “Realist” speaks more to market specificities while remaining truer to the genre’s genealogy re the social novels of the 19th century and all that. You can absolutely have literary science fiction, literary fantasy, all that. See Gene Wolfe. See also John Crowley.
You probably don't need random internet agreement, but I still feel compelled to say that I agree wholeheartedly with all of what you've said. I'm a PhD student and my dissertation is about speculative fiction. When I entered the program I didn't even know someone could write about specfic in an academic setting! So much of the bellyaching about the state of literature is amply answered by existing speculative fiction, without even needing to think of some obscure titles. But people still refuse to read it, claiming they don't like "magic". I suspect they're envisioning something specific when they say that, but I don't know what it is. Anyway, I appreciate this edition of the newsletter very much!