Genre Fiction or Literary Fiction, that is the Question

In school all of you are made to study Literature, which is a pretty new subject to you, especially if you're in Sec One. If you look at your book list, you’ll see that you actually have to buy story books, or fiction, and study them in class. You teacher is the one who determines what makes up literature, so the books on the list have the qualities of what she thinks good literature must have. If you go to university to study literature, the books on your course are what your professor (and possibly the majority of the English department) thinks is literature, and that’s how a canon is formed.

Usually, a canon is something that a group of well read people (usually with Ph.Ds) get together to determine what (serious) literature is and what isn’t. Most of the time, they are right, and sometimes, they are not. In university, I learned that this sexist bastard called Ian Watt wrote a book called The Rise of the Novel, and he purposely excluded women writers who were writing in the 18^th Century because he thought men could only be writers. Though he made observations that showed how the novel came to be popular, he was also wrong because he was being a sexist prick. Now, the canon is being modified to include more women writers like Aphra Behn, a playwright, and so people are still modifying the canon (the serious books that one should read according to well-read people) because it needs to cast as wide a net as possible

So who makes up the canon in Singapore? I’m going to argue that Singapore Literature is insular in nature, because most Singapore writers have been educated in NUS, and have had professors who have pushed them in their literary endeavours to get them published. KK Seet and Kirpal Singh are such people who have endorsed local writing, and local writers have had mentorships with their professors or other more experienced writers. They network and their work gets published, accepted and recognized by the academics. This means that only one kind of literature – realist and patriotic literature that gets accepted by all these professors gets published.

So far, I have shown you how a canon is formed, and the limitations of a canon. One of the limitations of the Singapore literary canon is that the older generation is less accepting of genre fiction. Many believe that local literature should go hand in hand with a political agenda – something George Orwell agrees with. They also believe that local literature should be patriotic in nature, but I call it propaganda.

All right. So what do these people have against genre fiction, and why is literary fiction so good?

First, let’s start off defining literary fiction. Most of the time, literary fiction gets included in the canon because it tells you what it’s like to live in a certain period of time. For example, Charlotte Bronte (who wrote Jane Eyre) and Charles’ Dickens (who wrote Oliver Twist) are mostly realist writers because they wrote about how crappy it was to live in London during the 1800s, or Victorian times. These more realist works are considered to be literature because they talk about large issues, and make keen observations of life. They have also become classics over time, because you can always learn something about life from these books.

In comes genre fiction. If you have read Lord of the Rings, you have read genre fiction. If you have read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, you have read genre fiction. Different types of genre fiction originated differently. For example, detective fiction was called pulp fiction because it used to be published in pulp magazines. They usually contain tropes, which are elements of that genre. Many science fiction books use time travel, and hence, time travel is a trope. When used too often, these tropes became clichés, and it’s fair to say that time travel is a staple or a cliché in Science Fiction because we encounter it so many times.

Does that make genre fiction boring? No. While genre fiction uses tropes, the writer uses his or her imagination to create a fantastic world that is not quite like the real world. Fairies can exist, androids have feelings, and the secret agent always has a trick that lets him complete the mission. Genre fiction opens up possibilities of other worlds, other playgrounds in which the reader can exist in, which is why it’s so appealing.

Sometimes, the boundary between serious literary fiction and genre fiction is not as clear, though. In Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte uses a telepathic connection to reunite Jane with Mr Rochester – a cop out ending, if you ask me. Similarly, in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Philip K. Dick can realistically portray a failing marriage as his protagonist tires of his wife. Each ‘serious’ book may have fantastic elements and vice versa; literature is fluid, and these categories are only created for peoples’ convenience when they browse through a bookstore.

So where do I stand? I stand with the orcs, the fairies, the witches. I stand with the jetpacks, the cyborgs, and time travel. I dine with the secret agent and go for drinks with the trickster. Even the literary fiction I like has fantastic elements in it. Gabriel Garcia Marquez makes ice look like it came from a spell book. Milan Kundera makes people fly into the air and disappear. Why? Because the point of fiction to escape. I want to get out of a classroom and into a hovercar. I don’t want to get out of the classroom and go into another. I read genre fiction to imagine solutions to problems, I read it because it makes me creative.

There is no right or wrong answer, of course. There are good reasons for liking realist fiction because it allows you to see through history, even though I maintain the idea that it is difficult to portray anything realistically because memory distorts it. The books you will read will shape you into the person you are, even though you don’t notice it. Little by little, each book will influence you, teach you, guide you. And that is enough reason to read fiction of any kind.