Jack,
Re your comments below:
"I'm not sure who 'we' is, but I'm also not sure that whether
Crime Fiction can be literature has been our question. The
question is, I think, WHICH pieces of crime fiction are
literature, and which authors do others as well as we on Rara
consider literature?"
"We" are devotees of mystery fiction. And it's NOT a question
here. It has been in the groves of academe, as the reference
to Edmund Wilson's two anti-mystery shows. In fact, for many
years, it wasn't really a question in the groves of academe.
Crime fiction was trash, whatever its intrinsic literary
qualities.
And if it wasn't, it, in some mysterious way, wasn't really
crime fiction at all. In the second of his two articles, "Who
Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd," Wilson admitted that he
found Chandler worthwhile, but insisted that, in spite of the
plots involving the investigation of and solution to a crime,
Chandler wasn't really a mystery writer at all.
Silly comments like this led to that famous phrase so beloved
of academics, "transcends the genre!"
"Remember that part of the m-w definition of literature:
'Writings having excellence of form or expression and
expressing ideas of permanent or universal interest.'"
Fine, let's say we use that definition, instead of the more
general one. To this day, you still get some mucky-muck in
British letters declaring that Conan Doyle, who didn't do
anything but but create the most famous and enduring
character in all of fiction, to be not a significant
contributor to the tradition of British letters.
The first part of my point is that there's still a resistance
to the idea that mystery writing, or any genre writing, can
have "excellence of form" or that it can "express ideas of
permanent of universal interest." That, by its nature, genre
fiction, no matter how good, is incapable of this. And if it
does manage reach these heights, then it somehow stops being
part of the genre.
Since this is clearly silly on its face, the second part of
my point is why do we still care what they think? Despite the
still-enduring attitude towards genre fiction among a
shrinking number of academics, the fact is that the number IS
shrinking. Enough academics have been converted that we ought
to be able to declare victory and stop worrying about
it.
"Hammett and Chandler have already made the grade, at least I
think they have. I'd bet dollars to dimes, that most on Rara
consider them lierature."
What most on Rara considered them wasn't the point. Obviously
we care about the genre or we wouldn't be on this list.
JIM DOHERTY
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