Miker,
Re your comments below:
"Genius is not the point. That's correct. It is an analogy,
something that is dissimilar in many respects but similar in
at least one. Let me spell out the analogy. If we are
considering intelligence in people and point out some as
geniuses, there is a parallel between that and considering
the enduring qualities of writing and pointing out some as
literature. There is your analogy."
But it's an analogy that misses the point!
To say that Einstein is a genius and some other physicist is
not, is the same as saying Shakespeare is a genius and some
other playwright is not. It's an objective judgment of
quality. It's a judgment based on the high quality of the
work produced.
To say that one kind of writing is literature and another is
not is whole other kind of judgment, one in which quality has
no real bearing.
It would be akin to saying that Einstein was a genius, but
since nuclear physics isn't "real" science, Einstein wasted
his genius.
Or, to take a real world example that relates to the actual
discussion, to say (as some high potentate of English
literature recently said) that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle made no
"significant" contribution to British letters, despite the
quality, not just the popularity, but the QUALITY of the
Sherlock Holmes stories.
To judge a person's genius or lack of it, or a person's
virtue or lack of it, or a person's talent of lack of it, is
not to be dismissive of all other people. TO judge a person's
work on the basis of whether or not the work "counts" as
worthwhile based on a false premise of worth, is
dismissive.
On the other hand, as William has pointed out, if some people
are too small-minded to see the worth of a Hammett, or a
Chandler, or a Conan Doyle, or, for that matter, a Spillane,
so what?
Why should we care? As far as I'm concerned, the whole
question of whether or not crime fiction is literature is
settled. We won.
JIM DOHERTY
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