I was just getting around to adding Neil Gaiman’s weblog to the Horrorblog Update Page when I came across this entry about some sort of contretemps involving Terry Pratchet, J.K. Rowling, and the pre- and post-Potter fantasy landscape. It includes this extremely astute observation from Gaiman:
Mostly what it makes me think of is the poem in Kingsley Amis and Robert Conquest’s NEW MAPS OF HELL, which went, from memory,
“SF’s no good!” they bellow till we’re deaf.
“But this is good.” “Well, then it’s not SF.”
And it’s an odd double-standard that applies to all genre work as much as to SF. It’s always been easier for journalists to go for the black and white simplicities of beginning with the assumption that the entire body of SF (or Fantasy, or Comics, or Horror, or whatever the area is under discussion) is and always has been fundamentally without merit — which means that if you like someone’s work, whether it’s J.G. Ballard or Bill Gibson or Peter Straub or Alan Moore or Susanna Clarke or J.K. Rowling — or Terry Pratchett — it’s easier simply to depict them as not being part of that subset.
This is something I’ve railed against for ages; I best remember discussing it in terms of 28 Days Later, the excellent non-zombie zombie movie that was touted hither and yon as a horror movie too good, therefore, to actually be horror…
Anyone who refers to any movie of any genre as “a genre-busting vision” is an asshole who doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about. If a movie of a particular genre is good, it hasn’t “busted” the genre or “transcended” the genre or any other dopey pseudoeducated cliche–it IS the genre, insofar as it’s the best the genre has to offer.
The topic comes up often in superhero-comic circles as well, as in this post‘s brief examination of the notion of “transcending the genre”:
Listen, folks: If a given work is of a particular genre, and it’s really good, it hasn’t transcended the genre–it epitomizes the genre. It shows you what the genre is capable of. To say it transcends the genre is to write the potential for greatness out of that genre by definition!
Great works “transcend their genre” only if that genre is defined in terms of its hoariest cliches and worst excesses. Dig?