The Madness of Art

I found reading Joyce Carol Oates’ essay “The Madness of Art” to be a very humbling experience. In a nutshell, here’s why.

Though I am in fact enrolled in a genre fiction MFA program, I’ve always been hesitant to label myself a writer of popular fiction. Call it elitism, call it what you will, but all my writing life I’ve striven to be what is generally termed a literary writer. This aspiration, I believe, has been revealed in most of the pieces I’ve written, be they works of fiction, poetry or non-fiction. For example, nowhere in my view have I employed more metaphors than in the monthly columns I wrote when I edited a newsmagazine. For the most part, it’s been my goal when writing to craft highly stylized pieces. On an occasion when an agent disdainfully referred to my work as “literary fiction”, I didn’t understand why that was an insult; in fact, I thought it high praise even if he didn’t.

Oates’ essay, however, made me reconsider the necessity of labeling myself as a writer of either literary or popular fiction. It is enough that I write and seek to write well, she postulates in statements like the following: “Yet talent, not excluding genius, may flourish any genre, provided it is not stigmatized by that deadly label ‘genre’.”

In the same essay, Oates points out that in this day and age, writers we consider great, such as Edgar Allen Poe, would be referred to as “mainsteam” writers. Personally speaking, to put it succinctly? If it’s good enough for Poe, it’s certainly good enough for me.

(As an aside, perhaps it is true as Oates maintains, that “to transcend categories others have invented for us, we have to be both dead – long dead – and classics.” Yes, I do think there’s validity to that statement.)

The same – that she is a “mainstream” writer – can be said of Oates herself, as she tells her audience when she interjects herself into the piece. She admits, unashamedly, she is “a writer predisposed to reading and frequently to writing what I call ‘Gothic’ work.” And she shouldn’t be ashamed, as she later posits: “Gothic fiction… is entertaining; it is unashamed to be entertaining.”

What a revolutionary idea, the notion that we as writers should seek to craft work that is entertaining as well as thoughtful! (Note the sarcasm.) This idea is at the very heart of Oates’ essay, as evidenced by passages like the following: “The standards for horror fiction should be no less than those for ‘serious, literary’ fiction in which originality of concept, depth of characters, and attentiveness to language are vitally important.”

After reading this piece, I realized what I feel is an important truth. Our ultimate goal as writers is to find readers, and then to engage the imaginations of our audience. If we accomplish this end, what does it matter what label is applied to us? Does it makes us any less writers if we are “mainstream” or “popular” than if we attain the heights I admittedly aspire to, to become “literary” writers?

According to Oates, with whom I largely agree, the answer to that is not at all. What matters in the end is that we are writers, and that we seek to do quality work regardless of genre considerations.