Culture in the Corner

You cannot revivify the culture in a corner. You must begin in the center.

I received news recently of the founding of a new literary magazine in my little corner of the culture. I know many of the people involved, a couple personally, more by reputation. I congratulate them, and I wish them well. But I can’t help noting that some of them are or have been involved in another very similar literary magazine in the same space with broadly the same stated mission, and that that magazine regularly goes cap-in-hand to its readership trying to raise sufficient funds to keep going, just like virtually every other literary magazine. Why then seek to start another?

Like every other of its kind, this new entrant proclaims grand goals about building and sustaining a thriving literary culture: goals that no literary magazine in the entire history of literary magazines has ever accomplished. Because literary magazines, whatever their merits, do culture in the corner. And when you do culture in the corner, you may put on all the affects of culture, but you do not create an actual culture. Actual culture does not hide in the corner.

Or perhaps it would be more fair to say that actual cultures may retreat into a corner under duress, but they seldom flower there. They turn in on themselves. Their focus becomes not growth but preservation. Their concern is not what might be found and built but what can be kept safe and protected from decay. Their hope lies not in encouraging new shoots but in keeping old roots from dying.

Perhaps a culture so preserved may one day be able to come out of its corner again and be a living, thriving thing once more, new shoots at last springing from that treasured old root. Perhaps it can be a seed of the old tree kept to be planted when fresh soil and sun and rain can be found again. But even when the weather changes, the habit of preservation can be very hard to break once established. The new saplings tend to be weeded out ruthlessly for not having the hoary bark of the old tree.

But this kind of cultural seedbank is not what newly-founded literary magazines promise they will be. They claim that they will be the fresh soil, the sun, and the rain from which a new culture will grow. But they won’t. Just as the next socialist utopia promises that it will be the one that does not eat its own children, so the next literary magazine promises that it will be the one that creates the next great cultural flowering. And they won’t. No matter how grand their vision and sincere their intention, they will do culture in the corner like every literary magazine before them. Because outside that corner, no one knows or cares what a literary magazine even is.

The literary magazine is defined by its particular combination of items: short stories (literary fiction), criticism, and poetry. Artworks are an optional addition to the mix. This combination maps to a particular set of interests. It is for people who enjoy the study of literature, as opposed to those who just want to read good stories. Its fiction is the kind that invites being studied rather than simply read. Its audience is inherently narrow.

Literary magazines are largely the product of the academy today. Perhaps there is something of a ghetto mentality in the academy and the academy-adjacent folks who start, write for, and patronize literary magazines. In a technology-obsessed culture that has little time or concern for the niceties of literary art, this is perhaps understandable. But ghettos create ghetto cultures, cultures defined more or less by their exclusion from the wider world. And far from seeking to tear down those walls, ghettos tend to build walls of their own, the imprisoned creating for themselves the more dignified persona of the besieged. But in this case, the only walls are those constructed by the ghetto itself. The wider culture did not imprison the culture of the academy; it simply ignored it.

The product of this self-made ghetto is literary fiction. Literary fiction is something quite new. It may profess to admire Shakespeare and Austen and Dickens, but Shakespeare and Austen and Dickens had never heard of literary fiction. They just wrote stories for the people of their day. Their distinction is simply that they did it really well.

The problem with imagining oneself to be working in the tradition of Shakespeare and Austen and Dickens is that it is vanishingly unlikely that you are going to be as good at telling stories as they were. How then to distinguish yourself? One way, and the way that literary fiction seems to have chosen, is to systematize part of the technique of the literary greats and reduce it to a teachable formula.

Because the essential function of this formula is to build a wall around the ghetto, it must be a formula not to be found in the wider popular literature of the day. It would be presumptuous of me to dismiss the MFA formula in a couple of lines, especially as I am not an MFA graduate and so cannot say with certainty what MFA programs teach, but the impression I have from the outside is that one of the key tropes, perhaps the key trope of the formula is the minute examination of quotidian things in exquisite prose.

There is nothing wrong with the minute examination of quotidian things in exquisite prose. It is a perfectly valid literary ornament. One can, without doubt, find examples of it in the great literature of the past. Equally, one will find relatively few examples of it in the genre fiction of the present. Thus it possesses a significant power of discrimination to set the genre apart from all others.

But the minute examination of quotidian things in exquisite prose is simply a literary technique, appropriate in certain instances in certain kinds of stories, and not in others. The use of this technique does not in itself make a literary work better or worse than any other. It is not the hallmark of greatness. It will not make you a significant writer any more than wearing all black will make you Steve Jobs or wearing all green will make you Robin Hood.

There is, however, a segment of the reading public that enjoys this technique above other techniques, and perhaps to the exclusion of other techniques. There is nothing unique about this. There is a large segment of the reading public today that values worldbuilding and feigned history above other fiction techniques, perhaps to the exclusion of other fiction techniques. They constitute another culture in another corner, complete with their own conventions and societies.

The people who live in the fantasy corner will hasten to tell you that their literature is just as good and just as valid as literary fiction. And they are right. Both fantasy and literary fiction are cultures in corners, defined by a dedication to particular literary techniques and particular tropes. Neither produces much, if any, work worthy of comparison to the greats, precisely because they operate in the corners and not the center. Working in the center won’t automatically make you great either. But working in the corner never will.

Was there ever really a culture in the center, a grand unified literary culture, so to speak? Certainly, there was never a time in which everyone read exactly the same books. But there was, I think, a time in which it would be fair to say that most literary works were branches of the same tree, and that while that tree may have had branches that barely knew of each other’s existence, the important work, the work that flourished and produced fruit, was of the center. Most significantly perhaps, the authors who produced the work on the furthest branches had all read and admired Shakespeare, Austen, and Dickens, and had admired them for the whole of their accomplishments, not for slivers of their technique.

Dickens was the most famous and successful author of his day: the JK Rowling of the Victorian age, if you like. But I trust that not even the most ardent Harry Potter fan would suggest that Rowling is an author of the calibre or significance of Dickens. Nor, I think, would anyone seriously suggest that Harry Potter is somehow the root and trunk of a grand literary culture of the present age. As much as it dominates the sales charts, it is a product of one corner of the culture.

You might argue that it cannot be otherwise, that our culture has become too large and too diverse to support one grand unified literary culture, even one of many spreading branches. The old tree is dead, you might say, but it has seeded a forest. Perhaps that is true, though if it is so, it is sad that most people never leave the shade of one particular tree to wander through the forest end to end. It is sad, too, that the trees growing in the corners are all the stunted half-formed growths that they are.

But if the old taproot is indeed dead, that means that the ambition of any literary magazine to revivify the culture is in vain. If culture today exists, and can only exist, in corners, then it would be better for a new literary magazine to promise only to illuminate its own corner of the culture. That would at least be achievable in principle, if difficult in execution.

But if so, then literary fiction is not my corner of the culture, not because I don’t love Shakespeare and Dickens and Austen, but because I do, and those greats that I love did not live or work in that particular corner of the culture, or in any corner at all, but in the center. And it is not at all true that the corner that is literary fiction today is all that remains of what once was the center, much as it might like to think so. It is rather that each of the corners has taken a small piece of what was the center and grown it into something strange and incomplete.

In Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen, a magic mirror is smashed, and tiny shards of it fly through the world, lodging in people’s eyes and making them see the world in warped ways. The literary culture of the past has been broken into fragments that have lodged in the eyes of authors and readers in every separated corner of the literary landscape, making them see the world in warped and limited ways. This is as true of literary fiction as it is of fantasy or science fiction or mystery or romance. They all possess fragments of something that was once whole. They are all the heirs of the greats, but the inheritance has been fragmented and squandered. My beef is not with any of the fragments in particular, but with the fragmentation itself.

The result of this fragmentation is that genres develop in their readers not the love of story but the love of a certain set of tropes. The repetition of those tropes becomes the key function of works within each genre, increasingly divorced from the world, from reality, and from story. Anders Vane describes how one genre died in his essay, The Death of Fantasy, but the process is the same for every genre. Culture in a corner huddles ever more closely into its corner. It repeats its defining tropes endlessly like an incantation to keep out the dark, though it is light, not darkness, that such practices exclude. Literary magazines are places that repeat the tropes of literary fiction like an incantation. By their nature and structure, they pull the genre more and more into its own corner.

Is there such a thing as mainstream fiction anymore? It used to be a category, but I haven’t heard much about it for a while. If it does still exist, would it be fair to call it the trunk of which all the corner cultures contain the branches? I don’t think so. The corner cultures all seem to be separate cultivars these days. Anything that grows is classified by whichever corner garden it most resembles and assigned there, where it will flourish or die as it resembles the particular foliage of the corner to which it is assigned.

Perhaps the people creating this new literary magazine are in fact only concerned with its own corner of the culture. Perhaps their boast should be understood from the beginning to apply only to the corner in which it is made, and not to the culture as a whole. Perhaps that is a right-sized ambition for the modern world, however broad the terms in which it is expressed. But if it is a thriving literary culture we want, we must hope and strive for more.

Many years ago I dropped out of the PhD program in history at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, because I did not want to spend my life writing monographs that would be read only by other academic historians. As a novelist, I am of the same mind. I don’t want to write fiction in the corner, not in the literary fiction corner, nor in any other corner. I want to write fiction in the center of a culture made whole again.

How we make it whole again, I don’t know. I only know that we won’t do it by staying in our corners, any of our corners. It will not grow out of one corner or another. Not out of fantasy. Not out of romance. Not out of literary fiction. If you want to revive a broad literary culture, don’t start a literary magazine. That would be to build in the corner, and what is built in the corner will remain in the corner.

If it is indeed possible to unify the fragments of literature once again, the work will have to begin in the center. What is the center? Where is it found? Simple: the centre is stories. We find the center by telling stories for the sake of telling stories, not for the sake of one form of ornamentation or another, one trope or another, but for the sake of the whole, for the sake of story itself. And on that suitably vague note, I hand the matter over to you. Am I unjust? Too pessimistic, Too optimistic? Simply ill-informed? School me. The comment section beckons.