The Gulf Of Literaria

The Wonders Of Literary Snobbery

Once upon a long time ago, I was a member of a literary group, 'The Nubs' and co-edited their newsletter while it was extant. 'The Nubs' were an off-shoot of the old Sydney University Poetry Society in the late 1980s and gathered pretty much all of the known suspects in writing that were active on campus back then. Some have gone on to success, others have ascended the difficult steps of Australian literary Academia while others have passed on into the other world. Lesser lights like me quickly fell to the wayside as most major literary magazines of Australia simply refused to publish my short fiction back then and I gave up. Thank you editors of Meanjin, may you all rot in hell. :)

Besides which I was at film school and my writing was heading more in a dramatic direction through necessity. I figure I've always been a better writer of drama than purple prose, and I was never a poet so god only knows how I got co-opted into 'The Nubs', but there you go. Still, it's not like I'd ever go snobby on literature itself. Heaven only knows there's a shortage of good lit in this country as it is. Why not nurture it rather than burn it to the ground as the editors and publishers have?

Today's SMH had this article which caught my eye:

Perhaps my middle brow is showing but this novel, and the criticisms of it, make me wonder about the way we think about what is literary, as if plot is gauche. As if literary fiction should be about creating a mood. As if creating a story with twists and turns should be left to popular fiction. Reflecting this division, it seems to me that the adjectives applied to literary fiction are unduly stationary - "haunting", "spare", "beautiful", "bleak" - while adjectives implying pace and movement are reserved for potboilers - "rollicking", "page turning", "sweeping".

That's a pretty interesting carricature of the gulf between 'serious' lit and popular lit. I don't know if this is true for practitioners more than the audience who are the self-appointed critics with narrow criteria for judgment.