The thirty-six years from the release of John Ford’s Stagecoach in 1939 through the final season of Gunsmoke in 1975 were the apogee of the cowboy in American iconography, mostly on film but also in popular fiction. This popular phenomenon, particularly as an overt fiction genre, collapsed fairly abruptly with the historical events and social, cultural, and economic changes of the late 1970s, but even as a reliquary of the American Myth, the Western retains a disproportionate hold on popular and critical imagination world-wide, a hold widely acknowledged, particularly among western writers, as “a trap” (Kittredge, 1987).
In Memory of John Le Carré: Listening to the opening of The Mission Song
David Cornwell, writing as John Le Carré, published his first novel in 1961, when he was 30 and I was 15. More than any other fiction writer of consistent popularity and literary merit that I know of, he was the consciousness and conscience of the post-World War II world. At the time of his death on December 13, 2020, 59 years and 25 novels later, he was still going strong. His last two novels, A Legacy of Spies and Agent Running in the Field, are as boldly and insightfully critical of the individual psychological underpinnings of modern geopolitical crime and doublethink and as subtle in their literary virtuosity as any of his earlier works.
Rudyard Kipling’s Animal Stories
For those interested in what in the classicist and literary critic Mark Payne calls “the transactional nature of the encounter” between humans and non-humans, four of Rudyard Kipling’s earlier short stories offer insights into artistic aspects of this encounter in terms distinct from the humanist approach typical of most European literature up to his time. Unrelated to Kipling’s later and much better known Just So Stories, his “Moti Guj-Mutineer” (1891), “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi” (1893), “The Undertakers” (1894), and “The Maltese Cat” (1895) reveal his efforts to cross the boundaries between the human and non-human experience in ways that can seem astonishingly contemporary to readers willing to set aside for a time strict notions of what we now call “genre” versus “literary” writing.
Hyperspace between literary and genre fiction?
Is there any place for a blog about the hyperspace (?hype-space) between literary and genre fiction when you can (and should) Google “Michael Chabon on genre fiction” and read it? Like much in this life, I don’t know.
But I live in that space and would love to have you explore it with me. I will try to avoid ranting (DON’T get me started on Cormac McCarthy), will occasionally gush (OMG the opening paragraph of Martin Cruz Smith’s Polar Star!!), and will probably offend. (I have lived in so many worlds for so long and can fumble around in so many languages, I often forget that I hold a valid passport in only one, little-old-hetero-XX-WASP-lady.)
Please be patient with me as others may never have been patient with you. And let’s have a little fun. That’s the best thing about the pendentive between genre and literary fiction (other than as proof that you can get a square peg in a round hole). It’s a curved space where you can learn from a new perspective with, at least for a little while, a safe wall at your back.