Genre and the Myth of the Vulgar Cage

Hey sports fans.

Genre fiction. Westerns. Fantasy. Swashbuckling tales of high adventure on the Spanish Main. Genre has always been a medium of set pieces, of stages and moods. A Western has six-shooters, fedoras, silent types and rotten-toothed gunslingers with hearts as black as coal. Westerns aren't about analytical functionalism.

The literary community has, traditionally, treated genre fiction as a kind of bastard cousin, a discipline the content of which is dictated by trappings. A few novels manage to escape this stigma(1984, Borges's ventures into Magical Realism, Ender's Game), but most genre pieces remain outside the world of modern literary criticism. Pointedly shunned by literature's "highest" circles and scholarly environments (with the partial and debatable example of Science Fiction, which has infiltrated modern literature to some extent thanks, in part, to its pedigree), genre fiction exists in a realm almost strictly cultic/commercial.

That genre fiction is nothing but its set pieces is what R. Scott Bakker, writer and philosopher, calls the Myth of the Vulgar Cage. Good genre transcends place and time to address themes of ontological and human importance. Great genre seizes on its component parts to create an even richer philosophical experience. The gnostic complexity of magic and sorcery, if utilized with skill and thought, provide a vehicle for complex questions of functionalism, realism and Nietzschian Will. The moral and eschatological underpinnings implied by pantheons of gods, the heavy yoke of feudal responsibility and its attendant injustices. The grim despair of the expansion-era West weighing down on the shoulders of penniless unfortunates (please, read Cormac McCarthy). Genre is at its best not when it leaves behind its attendant tropes, but when it novelizes and explores them.

Word of the Day: Calumny.
Book of the Day: Slaughterhouse Five by the late and much-lamented Kurt Vonnegut.
Author of the Day: Ernest Hemingway, writer of novels, screenplays and short stories in profusion. Lover of bullfighting and alcohol.
Author vs Author of the Day: Wallace Stevens vs Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Result: Stevens accidentally imbibes Hawthorne along with a pitcher of martinis. There is much rejoicing.