I recently taught a class on Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2005 novel “Never Let Me Go” at the university. If you are unfamiliar with the book, be warned. This article will ruin the experience of reading it or watching the film version. One issue that “Never Let Me Go” tends to raise, whether in literature classes or in print reviews, is the problem of how to classify it in terms of genre. The story concerns three British youngsters who attend a peculiar school together and grow up as part of a special social caste – the full ramifications of which are revealed slowly and carefully by the narrator, a character named Kathy H. Despite the narrative being rife with uncertain reminiscences, omissions and delaying tactics, Kathyn comes across as a relatively reliable and sympathetic speaker. Ishiguro, born in Japan but culturally English, seems to have drawn his storytelling style here from a rich vein in British literature (works like Conrad’s “Lord Jim” and Maddox Ford’s “The Good Soldier” come to mind) as we are not given the full story – at least not directly or immediately – but t not because of some self-serving motive on Kathy’s part. Rather, it’s because she presumes that a shared context of understanding exists between her and the ‘you’ she addresses. Lacking this context, we must learn the truth of her and her friends’ predicament through digressions and casual slippages.
There are a number of reasons for this disconnect between the narrator and reader. The most obvious is that “Never Let Me Go” is set in alternative-universe version of 1970s and 80s UK. Kathy is part of a group of people that are cloned in order to donate their organs during their twenties. They continue this process until they ‘complete’ allowing the rest of society, with whom they have almost no contact, to extend their lifespans beyond normal human limits. Kathy is ‘one of the lucky ones’ not because her early demise is avoidable but because she is raised in relatively humane conditions. She attends a school named Halisham, where she can enjoy the company of other donors, can be properly cared for and educated by a group of ‘guardians.’ Halisham is not an overtly sinister place; there are no jumpsuits and armed guards or even explicit forms of surveillance. But it becomes clear that the school is little more than experiment in watered-down liberalism, an attempt to show how donors might be ethically treated. Ultimately, the experiment illustrates how many modern liberals wish to do just enough to offset their guilt at being beneficiaries of the exploitation of others. The unjust system remains intact and unchallenged. Even the donors submit to it completely, barely even dreaming of escape or resistance.

The premise of the novel is to examine how Kathy and her two friends find meaning and happiness in the face of doom, having known and accepted from an early age that they will not be allowed to grow old. Metaphorically, this struggle is a heightened treatment of real world issues altogether more basic than our views on social justice or bioethics; the donors, like all of us, must cope with the knowledge that they have limited time. What do we do with this knowledge? Do we live in a bubble of denial, distracting ourselves from this certainty? Do we find ways to try and defer our fate for as long as possible? Do we seek meaningful relationships and activity to carve out a sense of purpose? Ishiguro wants to dramatize these themes. He claims that the invention of an alternate universe where the dimension of science fiction or speculative fiction comes into play was not of interest to him. It was a way to thrust his characters into a precise set of circumstances. It is meant to represent the universal challenges that all human beings face. His contention was that the generic plot devices of dystopian SF were drawn on only to give a suitable background to traditional literary themes. For Ishiguro, SF tropes provided “the final piece of the puzzle.”

Of course, its worth noting that his comments suggest that many writers of SF genre fiction operate in the opposite manner: they create colourful alternative worlds or speculate on possible futures and develop the plots, characters and themes that these settings and situations imply. And indeed, it may be true that most long-running speculative fiction and fantasy books series do begin as exercises in world-building before inhabiting these places with characters and conflicts. Nevertheless, Ishiguro denies any familiarity with SF writers who do not work this way, such as Philip K. Dick or JG Ballard. In a sense, his assumption depicts SF writers as creators for whom the actual literary stuff (characters, themes and so on) come second to the process of make-believe. Given that he does not appreciate the more iconoclastic people working in the genre, his views can be seen as a bit of a reductive caricature of SF, adding perhaps to the acute inferiority complex felt by many of its fans, whether hard line or causal.

His statements regarding “Never Let Me Go” and his latest book “The Buried Giant” (a sword and sorcery tale) are rather controversial despite the fact that Ishiguro did not, as far as I could see, ever actually claim that his work as “literary fiction” has greater artistic than standard pieces of “genre fiction” like SF or fantasy. The actual problem is that the assumed difference between “literary” and “genre fiction” continues to be fiercely disputed. Ishiguro’s assertion that “Never Let Me Go” and “The Buried Giant” should be classified as the former not the latter has raised the ire of writers who feel that such distinctions are archaic – not only because they are seldom based on fair criteria but also because they usually serve to delegitimize genre fiction by placing it in the sphere of pop culture rather than art. The fact that some people have taken issue with Ishiguro’s description of his own work signals that so-called ‘post-modernism’ did not automatically erase the belief that there is a barrier between high and low art.

In a way, it is refreshing to see that this debate persists even if it usually rather dull. It reminds us we cannot pretend that the historical concept of “cultural value” was simply wrong and did not make an important contribution. It must be problematized, sure, but I think both supporters and detractors of the idea that “literary fiction” can be consider its own special category might take an opportunity to look closely at their assumptions. I don’t think we should treat artistic value and popularity (or sales) as equivalent concepts. At the same time, cloistered intellectual types have had a privileged authority over this territory for too long, attributing philistinism to all parties who have taste that differs from their own. Without broaching all of these topics at once, let’s take a look at the angry response of the great writer of fantasies Ursula Le Guin to Ishiguro’s “Buried Giant” which became available in May 2015. In a blog post, Le Guin took exception to a remark Ishiguro made in an interview concerning “The Buried Giant.” She wrote:

Mr Ishiguro said to the interviewer, “Will readers follow me into this? Will they understand what I’m trying to do, or will they be prejudiced against the surface elements? Are they going to say this is fantasy?”

Well, yes, they probably will. Why not?
It appears that the author takes the word for an insult.
To me that is so insulting, it reflects such thoughtless prejudice, that I had to write this piece in response.
Fantasy is probably the oldest literary device for talking about reality… Familiar folktale and legendary ‘surface elements’ in Mr Ishiguro’s novel are too obvious to blink away, but since he is a very famous novelist, I am sure reviewers who share his prejudice will never suggest that he has polluted his authorial gravitas with the childish whims of fantasy. Respect for his readers should assure him that, whatever the book is, they will honestly try to follow him and understand what he was trying to do.

Le Guin’s sensitivity to the underlying prejudice of Ishiguro’s comment isn’t surprising. She questions Ishiguro’s fear that the surface or genre elements of fantasy might make his work seem lowbrow. Fans and writers of genre fiction are quick to characterize those who perpetuate this perception as pompous, elitist snobs – hence Le Guin’s sarcastic talk of Ishiguro’s authorial gravitas having to survive the ‘childish whims of fantasy.’ Since day-dreaming and mythology are, for many people, most captivating in their childhood years and youth, it is a commonplace injustice to characterize books that contain otherworldly features as suited primarily to children and teenagers. Le Guin makes a strong case for the enduring significance of folklore, quest narrative and myth as major forms of literary creativity. Despite the stratospheric popularity and sales of fantasy series, many still set it apart from the serious, adult world of ‘proper’ literature. SF and fantasy sometimes come across like a former social outcast who goes to their high school reunion armed with the knowledge that they have been the most successful person from their graduating year. At the reunion, they find that they still are not welcomed into the old cliques. Of course, the outcast is, in a way, crazy to continue to desire approval from those they do not actually think of as their superiors. Since Ishiguro’s comments were ambiguous, he is able to simply disagree with the motivations that Le Guin ascribes to him. He responds in an article published in The Guardian books section.

At a Guardian event held at the Royal Institution in London on Sunday, Ishiguro said that veteran author Ursula K. Le Guin was “a little bit hasty in nominating me as the latest enemy for her own agenda,” after she had written a blog post accusing him of “despising” the fantasy genre. “If there is some sort of battle line being drawn for and against ogres and pixies appearing in books, I am on the side of ogres and pixies,” he said. “I had no idea this was going to be such an issue. Everything I read about [The Buried Giant], it’s all ‘Oh, he’s got a dragon in his book’ or ‘I so liked his previous books but I don’t know if I’ll like this one’. [Le Guin]’s entitled to like my book or not like my book, but as far as I am concerned, she’s got the wrong person. I am on the side of the pixies and the dragons.”

Ishiguro’s stance is not that he wants to avoid identifying himself with the fantasy genre. He is not very interested in labelling his books in terms of genre, which he considers to be a porous thing anyway. He suspects that this kind of classification would have too much influence on how readers engaged with his book. Since he is best known for period, realist works like “Remains of the Day”, he wondered whether a departure from that format would cause his audience to assume there would be a corresponding change in the style and themes of his books. He wants to reassure them that he is “still Ishiguro”, beyond the arrival of pixies and dragons. More to the point, he wants to sell books. He wants readers who liked his stuff in the past not to be put off by the fact that he is deviating from earlier formulas. In light of this defence, it seems a little harsh to conclude that he ‘despises fantasy.’

Except, Ishiguro has been through this all before with “Never Let Me Go” and he has chosen to repeat certain dubious claims about the difference between ‘surface’ and ‘core’ elements. In this respect, as hyperbolic as it may be, Le Guin’s critique makes a valid point. I don’t think it is useful for writers and readers to separate what they see as the core elements of a story from what they see as devices or embellishments. If we take “Never Let Me Go” as an example, we should not say that the feature of the story that portrays the individual character’s psychological responses to death are more important or essential than the construction of the ‘fantastical’ situation that they’re placed in. The two go together and operate in concert. If the setting and situation is interesting and well-established then it will have bearing on how we engage with characters. The belief that we can abstract a pure ‘message’ or point from a story is stuffy, old-fashioned, formalist thinking. We do not extract a kernel of emotional or intellectual truth when we read, leaving the fictional contrivances and inventions behind as sickly effluent. For Ishiguro, a text that has this kind of pure artistic kernel can be defined as ‘literary fiction’ irrespective of whether it provides it through the medium of noir, ghost story, SF, fantasy etc. In theory, this answer may sound sensible but it does not seem to resemble how we actually experience fiction.

While I think it is acceptable to speak of surface and depth, I think that to say that one can achieve depth regardless of the facets of the surface is misleading. Ishiguro’s new novel features dragons but he is afraid that this will make it seem equivalent to the endless proliferation of Tolkien rip-off paperbacks that appeal to teenage boys. Both might feature knights and magic but Ishiguro wants to suggest that his story will have something those paperbacks don’t have: a depth and profundity beyond the swords and incantation. He may be right in this conclusion but his argument does not stand up to much scrutiny. If “Never Let Me Go” lacked the so-called ‘surface’ traits borrowed from speculative fiction, it would not be able to express its deeper preoccupations in the same way. Readers would not feel the same things. A change in surface would necessity a difference in depth just as alterations in form have consequences for content, or vice-versa. Far from being interchangeable, the tropes and images that belong to certain genres have great inherent power especially when used in unconventional ways. They can multiply the power of an idea, provided that the writer does not become derivative and predictable. In this structural sense, we cannot ignore the concept of genre though we should avoid defining genre fiction simply as fiction that lacks depth. Genre is a specialized context for communication. Fantasy, for instance, can serve as a platform for readers to explore the pre-modern concerns of ancient legend and romanticism from new points of view. If Ishiguro does not want his work to be read in a specific way that’s a fair sentiment. But it was his choice to evoke the tropes that created this context of reception. The way his writing is labelled by others is not the decisive factor. According to The Guardian

Ishiguro  said The Buried Giant’s fantasy setting served as a neutral environment to explore the idea of collective memory and how societies heal after atrocities by forgetting the past. He revealed that he considered Bosnia, America and post-second world war Japan and France as potential settings, but worried that sort of a recent historical scenario would make the story too political.

If this way of thinking works for Ishiguro, a highly accomplished writer, I suppose that lends it a degree of validity but I find talk of ‘neutral’ environments hard to swallow. I imagine he would concede at least that once the environment has been chosen, the way the ideas are dealt with evolves alongside them. The overriding implication, however, remains that “The Buried Giant” is set in Saxon Britain rather than the modern world only to avoid taking on contemporary political issues. As a whole, the article promotes a point of view that can be compared with ‘auteur’ theory in film. Lesser directors’ efforts in genre film-making belong to the genre. Master filmmakers (who are better known, more individualistic, more subversive perhaps) make films that belong to their oeuvre. There seems to be a tug of war between whether to think of “The Buried Giant” as an Ishiguro novel (with all the baggage that goes with that) or as a fantasy novel. Perhaps Le Guin is right to question, albeit in such a combative manner, why it cannot be considered both. Do writers that exclusively work in one genre not have individual styles and themes of their own? The Guardian adds fuel to this debate in his use of a comment from David Mitchell, a popular writer of literary science fiction and fantasy:

Mitchell himself appeared in Ishiguro’s New York Times interview, telling the newspaper by email that he hoped The Buried Giant would “de-stigmatise” fantasy. “Fantasy plus literary fiction can achieve things that frank blank realism can’t,” Mitchell wrote. “Bending the laws of what we call reality in a novel doesn’t necessarily lead to elves saying ‘Make haste! These woods will be swarming with orcs by nightfall.’”

These remarks, with their unnecessary skewing of Tolkien and his acolytes, certainly do not help Ishiguro’s case. Has anyone else been brave or foolish enough to call for the “de-stigmatisation of fantasy”? It is not difficult to see how the Ursula Le Guins of this world would take umbrage at this. In the end, does a genre that has such clout both in terms of its long history, vast readership and sales need this validation? Why should it convert anyone? Is there a more cultured audience out there that has yet to bestow its blessing on fantasy writers? Ishiguro has not asserted, without qualification, that SF and fantasy are valuable forms of literature. Perhaps he should, given that he is in a position to prove whether – if sides must be taken – he really is on the side of dragons and pixies.

PART TWO

Those who proudly identify themselves as geeks have been in a state of ascendency for years, though anyone older than 20 or so will no doubt remember a time when geeks were compelled to hide their unfashionable interests in cellars, attics or behind anoraks and closed-doors. Somewhere in the last two decades, the ideal consumer of entertainment changed from an aspiration logic (that is, companies tried to sell to the person you wanted to be) to a realist acceptance that people like what they like and want to spend their money on their actual interests. This phenomenon has been widely addressed by many smart people and columns so I don’t want to get into the particular reasons for this shift. As a start, I just want to say what everyone already knows: consumer products related to comic books, video games, ‘pulp fiction’ and so on have become some of the highest earning and most beloved cultural properties in the history of the world. While in-depth pieces on the ‘rise of geek-culture’ or ‘fandom’ often go into detail regarding the social-economic conditions that made various brands so amazingly lucrative, I’m more interested in the types of relationship that develop between the individual work and its audience. In general, I think this relationship has changed in some respects since fringe tastes began to take over the mainstream. As mentioned in the previous article, tastes that were once marginalized have swiftly taken over the popular imagination. Self-identifying geeks often have enormous power to decide what succeeds and what fails.
Yet many continue to view themselves as an unfairly marginalized and overlooked group whenever someone expresses dissent. Before I proceed, let me pre-empt a few points:

• Fandom is nothing new. Before Trekkies, there were people who acted like Holden Caulfield or Young Werther even if their fandom was not monetized in the same way.
• Just because something is a franchise and can appeal to children doesn’t necessarily entail that it lacks a political angle or intellectual heft. I covered this to an extent in the previous post. While I agree with it, generally, I would add that one cannot ignore the surface elements and only focus on the underlying ‘serious’ message. The Dark Knight Rises is neither a ‘pure’ superhero film nor a treatise on political philosophy. It’s a mixture. So if you’re only interested in politics, you should beware that there’s a fair amount of comic book stuff in it!

• Making critical comments (especially generalizations) of something means to disparage it or say it is worthless; it is smallminded and arrogant to disparage something that others value. This comment is ad hominem. It wants to focus attention on the motivations and personality of the person who is being judgmental. This leaves specific criticisms unanswered. Some judgmental remarks deserve a proper reply.

Putting those aside let’s get back to the basic problem: is being a fan the best way to engage with something? What is at stake is not merely matter of what one likes but how one likes. This is not a profound point, in fact, it’s ridiculously banal. But I am surprised at how often it is simply not considered. Certainly, the Ishiguro-Le Guin argument was about how to classify different types of literature and how to proportion value to these categories. The argument paid almost no attention to how we read different types of text.

The actor Simon Pegg received something of a backslash this year when he made a few chiding comments about geeks on a radio show. From his early series Spaced (about 90s geeks) to his involvement in the new Star Trek movies, Simon Pegg is known as the ‘king of geeks’ in some quarters. It would seem, however, that he has issues not only with this title but with the state of his kingdom:

Obviously I’m very much a self-confessed fan of science fiction and genre cinema but part of me looks at society as it is now and just thinks we’ve been infantilised by our own taste. Now we’re essentially all consuming very childish things – comic books, superheroes. Adults are watching this stuff, and taking it seriously. It is a kind of dumbing down, in a way, because it’s taking our focus away from real-world issues. Films used to be about challenging, emotional journeys or moral questions that might make you walk away and re-evaluate how you felt about … whatever. Now we’re walking out of the cinema really not thinking about anything, other than the fact that the Hulk just had a fight with a robot.

Sometimes (I) feel like I miss grown-up things. And I honestly thought the other day that I’m gonna retire from geekdom.
I’ve become the poster child for that generation, and it’s not necessarily something I particularly want to be. I’d quite like to go off and do some serious acting.

Naturally, these words sparked something of a controversy especially considering that they were spoken by the reigning monarch of geekdom. The royal opinion seemed to be that ‘society’ had lost its interest in grown-up ideas. He worried that many people have chosen to indulge in escapism rather than to manfully stand and up and revaluate ‘whatever.’ As a whole, we had become dumber and more childish than audiences had been in the golden age (he probably had 1970s Hollywood in mind.) It goes without saying that Pegg was swiftly chastised by his outraged subjects, notably by an online writer named Katharine Trendacosta in much cited response:

Not to play armchair psychiatrist to Pegg or anything, but this does sound dangerously as though he didn’t take anything away from The Avengers, Star Wars, or Star Trek — and now wonders if he’s thrown his whole life away on them. And that he thinks he’s been infantilized by his association with the genre.

The hyperbolic use of the word ‘dangerous’ notwithstanding, I don’t think this is playing armchair psychiatrist at all. This is pretty much what Pegg said in the interview. Fearing, if not regicide then at the very least calls for his abdication, Pegg counterattacked with a thorough statement. His article, rather simpering entitled ‘Big Mouth Strikes Again’ included references not only to DC Comics, Star Trek and Mad Max but to Jean Baudrillard (everyone’s favourite Gallic paranoid from the era of humongous shoulder pads.) Pegg starts by putting the idea of an extended adolescence into a historical context, framing Star Wars – the crown jewels of fandom – as a simplification of the Cold War era into a Manichean moral fairy tale. Where the New Hollywood auteurs sought to fashion compelling drama from darker, more sophisticated material, Star Wars used spectacle and special effects to pull us into its orbit. The human cost of violence and warfare as presented in the very adult films of Coppola, Peckinpah or Scorsese is simplified in Star Wars to good guys slashing at faceless Stormtroopers with lightsabers. Of course, this is not a new reading of American film history. The same observations have been made before, such as in Peter Biskind’s notorious ‘Easy Riders, Raging Bulls.’

Biskind cast Lucas-Spielberg as pioneers of a truly commercial film style that is rife with easy moral platitudes rather than provocation. In his narrative, they not only invented the summer blockbuster but helped create the mall culture that ruled America for decades. Pegg should be applauded for expressing an opinion that he did not need to say out loud, given that he himself continues to be involved with megablockbuster geek franchises like Star Trek. To his credit, arrested development is perhaps the main theme grappled with in the movies he has made with Edgar Wright. While I like Pegg and a much of his work well enough, his argument sounds rather like a college student who has read Althusser for the first time. He doesn’t follow through on his ideas to any kind of conclusion. He attributes near impotence to dark forces that somehow bend us to their will:

We are made passionate about the things that occupied us as children as a means of drawing our attentions away from the things we really should be invested in, inequality, corruption, economic injustice etc. It makes sense that when faced with the awfulness of the world, the harsh realities that surround us, our instinct is to seek comfort, and where else were the majority of us most comfortable than our youth? A time when we were shielded from painful truths by our recreational passions, the toys we played with, the games we played, the comics we read. There was probably more discussion on Twitter about the The Force Awakens and the Batman vs Superman trailers than there was about the Nepalese earthquake or the British general election.

Pegg does not feel explain how we are made passionate about things or who is responsible for this (probably corporations through advertising, which is, as well know, impossible to resist.) Nor does he see any irony in his practice of using social media discussions as an indicator of how much we care. People can care about several things at the same time, ranging in importance from global crisis to matters that really matter only to us alone: like getting hiccups or forgetting one’s lunch at home. In a way, he is making a rather Ishiguro-like call for a return to a type of ‘seriousness’ which is far more difficult to pin down than infantilism is. Does Pegg actually think discussing the Nepalese earthquake on twitter confronts the awfulness of the world? A reader of Baudrillard might surmise that this is another symptom of our modern self-absorption. We believe, without evidence, that our contemplation of the universe’s miseries is productive. In 99% of cases, our well-meaning angst is just as much of a solipsistic bubble as is a late-night screening of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Pegg passionately watches and makes SF fantasy films. If he can be the king of geeks while still finding time to feel compassion for others then he can’t deny that this balance may be achievable for others.

Still, I think we can be a bit more generous to people like Simon Pegg or Kazuo Ishiguro. Once again, let us remember that neither of them claims that genre or ‘geek’ culture is less worthwhile than True Art. Nor do they insist that geeky preoccupations necessarily turn good, conscientious individuals into spoilt children. What they are saying, perhaps, is we can afford to be less passive and more critical even when are partaking in our geekier interests. Pegg gets at this indirectly when he says:

I’m not out of the fold, my passions and preoccupations remain. Sometimes it’s good to look at the state of the union and make sure we’re getting the best we can get. On one hand it’s a wonderful thing, having what used to be fringe concerns, suddenly ruling the mainstream but at the same time, these concerns have also been monetised and marketed and the things that made them precious to us, aren’t always the primary concern (right, Star Trek TOS fans?) Also, it’s good to ask why we like this stuff, what makes it so alluring, so discussed, so sacred. Do we channel our passion and indignation into ephemera, rather than reality? Not just science fiction and fantasy but gossip and talent shows and nostalgia and people’s arses. Is it right? Is it dangerous?

Again, Pegg’s point seems to be that we are neglecting serious concerns because we devote an inordinate amount of attention to things that are relatively insignificant. He suggests that we have a limited amount of passion that can be channelled only into certain things. This is somewhat unfair. After all, even Trekkies can have meaningful demanding relationships with other lifeforms. They still can work and bathe and read the newspaper. In general, however, he is calling for fans to have higher standards, encouraging them to think about their habits of consumption with greater rigor. But can a fan be objective? Can their attachment to actions figures or comic books be put into context with the rest of the world?

Fans share the contentment of having their collective desires and appetites met. Or, if that proves impossible, they can comfort each other by sharing feelings of cathartic outrage and disappointment. These relationships, between fan and work, between fan and fellow fan, are insulating and communal in equal measure. Like any tribe, imposition from the outside is met with defensiveness. Writers that make snide comments about fantasy fiction incur the wrath of genre aficionados; actors who disrespect superheroes infuriate comic book fans. The tribe grows larger without acquiring largess. Cycles of investment and payoff (to some extent) keep them tied to universes of immense possibility. The fact that these universes often are quite unlike our own lives is, in all fairness, more of a black mark against reality than it is against fantasy. Big franchises build up anticipation exponentially. They depend on loyal customers. For our part, we want to know what we are going to get. We know what we like. Sameness is self-replicating and habit-forming. Even genre conventions tend to operate according to basic Pavlovian principles.

That said, I’m reluctant to invent some pathology to try and explain the modern impulse towards geekiness. As extreme as it might be nowadays, I can’t agree with those who think fandom is bad for society. I’m not sure that the alleged conflict between social consciousness and childish pastimes really exists. People are good at compartmentalizing. On the other hand, the fact that public figures are forced to defend themselves for making glib comments concerning people’s tastes illustrates the degree to which we all have taken our identification with the things we like a little too far. This cuts both ways. It is as futile to believe you have good taste for avoiding entire genres as it is to invest exclusively in one. Thankfully, it is not necessary for everything to be analysed and evaluated. Enjoy whatever you like. Just don’t assume that your private enjoyment is universally shared. Above all, don’t forget you are not what you love.