Ashley Salter

LITR 5738

Final Exam

Popular Writing vs. Literature: Problems and Potential with the Literature of Space

“It’s all about the characters.  If the characters are interesting, we’ll go along with it.”  This was the majority, if not the consensus, opinion of the class about a few of the texts we read this semester. 

Class discussions of The Sparrow kept returning to the notion that Russell’s characters, despite their obvious two dimensionality, make the story.  Emilio, Sofia, Anne, Askama, and the others – they capture our interest and keep us turning pages.  The “action-hero” character of John Carter in A Princess of Mars undeniably has this kind of appeal – the book has never been out of print, and ten-year-old boys are not likely to stop enjoying Burroughs’s Mars tales any time soon. 

Even the nonfiction work Of a Fire on the Moon relies on interesting characterization to draw the reader in.  In Mailer’s text, the interesting character is, however, the author himself and the slightly schizophrenic way he writes about himself as “Aquarius” and in the third person.

The fact that these characters can fascinate us highlights one of the inherent difficulties of studying the literature of space.  The texts included in the genre are predominantly (almost entirely?) popular writing of one sort or another.  Yet the very idea of literature can be antithetical to popular writing.  Literature is studied, analyzed, debated, researched, and deconstructed.  The primary goal of popular writing is to entertain the reader.  An unstated assumption of much popular writing is that the reader will not examine the work too closely.

Traditionally, texts which most lend themselves to careful scrutiny – and yield rewarding insights when scrutinized – are not necessarily easy, delightful, enjoyable texts.  Pym, for example, is a potentially rewarding text for literary analysis.  It could be compared to Poe’s other writings or to other texts of polar exploration or to several other canonical things. 

On the other side of the popular to literary continuum, those texts which are most enjoyable to read often collapse under careful examination.  We experienced this in class when we were watching “The Day the Earth Stood Still.”  Watching the film in fifteen or twenty minute segments tends to draw attention to small discrepancies or places where the story line demands too much suspension of disbelief.

I think our reactions – mixed reactions, usually – to the texts we read in the last half of this course have a great deal to do with dichotomous thinking about popular writing and literary writing.  We think of these categories as separate and exclusive.  We have divergent methods for approaching the two types of writing.  As graduate literature students, we’re at ease with analysis of canonical works or texts that have been demonstrated to have literary merit.  We’re a bit unsure of what analysis to do with science fiction novels or with Mailer’s chatty 1960s journalistic style or with films.  As readers of science fiction (some of us anyway), we’re also a little confused about how to subject this popular genre we read in our spare time to a serious literary inquiry.

We tried at least once to discuss potential literary techniques in A Princess of Mars.  I believe we were considering Carter’s instant transportation to Mars from the cave in Arizona.  Carter has just spotted a red star, Mars, in the sky, and is thinking of Mars the god of war who holds a special significance for him as “a fighting man.”  He narrates the experience of moving from Earth to Mars: “I closed my eyes, stretched out my arms toward the god of my vocation and felt myself drawn with the suddenness of thought through the trackless immensity of space.  There was an instant of extreme cold and utter darkness” (10).  Then, of course, he opens his eyes on “a strange and weird landscape” and innately knows that he is on the red planet.  The reader – that would generally be the popular reader – is expected to go along with this because she is supposed to be enjoying the read, relaxing somewhere with a pleasant book.  She is not usually sitting in a fluorescent-lit classroom with a dozen other people picking the narrative apart.

Russell asks her readers to make some similar suspensions of good judgment while reading The Sparrow.  She presents as plausible a chain of events that bring several good friends together as the crew of the Stella Maris.  This is, of course, the way things often work in films and in popular novels.  The writer or director presents her audience with a group of characters, gets the audience to care about those characters, and then places them in some remarkable situation together.  We typically get caught up in the momentum of the story and don’t really mind.  The reader is also asked to accept the possibilities of extraterrestrial life as close as Alpha Centauri and the ability to use meteors to travel into space being only a few decades away.  These are other things that don’t bother readers too much if they don’t slow down and scrutinize the text.

Of a Fire on the Moon, as a nonfiction text about actual events, doesn’t ask for the same suspension of disbelief as the two novels.  Mailer, however, implicitly asks the reader to go along with his personal framing of the moon landing story.  His interjections of information about himself – the impending dissolution of his marriage, his East Coast hipster image of himself, his struggles as a writer – are mostly charming.  And they’re supposed to be.  Mailer cultivates an underdog persona that draws us into his story more than the story of the moon landing.  When he begins meeting people at NASA and decides they’re all Wasps and he’s out of place, my automatic response as a reader is to sympathize with him, to root for him in whatever plot is about to unfold.  “It is no accident,” he tells us, “that the Wasps were, in the view of Aquarius, the most Faustian, barbaric, draconian, progress-oriented, and root-destroying people on earth” (10).  Well, of course, we’re identifying with Mailer instead of people that he characterizes in that manner!  This strategy of the author’s represents the human element, the characters superseding the data – elements that make nonfiction more palatable.  But Mailer’s personal framework ultimately does nothing to elevate Of a Fire on the Moon into the same orbit as canonical works.  It merely gives popular readers a means of identifying with an otherwise distant story.

So far, I’ve extrapolated only the difficulties of reading popular literature in a classroom, the pitfalls of identifying and studying a literature of space.  But I don’t believe Burroughs’s, Russell’s, and Mailer’s texts are without literary value.  Metaphorically speaking, we probably have to examine these texts through different lenses than we would use to study Faulkner or Joyce or Twain if we are to glean any insights from studying them. 

The main way I see this course using different lenses is obvious from the objectives on the syllabus.  There are a couple of objectives focusing on form or style, but most of the ideas are extra-literary.  They cover culture, psychology, religion, and gender, for example.  These are our points of entry for studying popular works in a serious way.  It’s unlikely that we could ever take a popular novel and explore its innovative use of dialect, narrative structure, or stream of consciousness – its formal qualities.  We can, however, talk about the psychological journey of Sandoz, the religious overtones of missions to the moon, or the parallels between Burroughs’s “Red Martians” and “Red Indians.” 

I have to point out a partial exception to what I just stated.  Space literature works fairly well in analyses that compare the texts to Romantic writing.  It generates some interesting thoughts about the period issues.  Space literature is a natural fit with Romanticism, because exploration inherently involves a journey.  The quest or journey is also prominent characteristic of much Romantic writing.  We might even find correspondence in some of the space texts, but it’s a stretch to find evidence of the Sublime in Russell or Burroughs.  At least we don’t find it executed with the same subtlety as we might in a classic Romantic text.

The possibility of fruitful period analysis aside, the literature of space cannot typically be approached the same way that classic literature can.  And its value probably lies in the differences, in the aspects that make space writing almost exclusively popular writing.

Technology is a major presence in space literature. Russell’s asteroids, Mailer’s Lem, even the mining operation in Burroughs’s tale.  Contemporary readers are also surrounded by technology in their everyday lives.  It pervades school, work, leisure activities, and more.  For class, we study mostly print materials, but I’ll be submitting this essay by email.  I used an e-book source in my essay for this class. At work, I am a tutor in a writing lab at a community college.  Yet, in a given day, I answer far more questions about Microsoft Word and how to save files on a floppy disk than about passive voice or run-on sentences.  I often need to know more about the Macintosh OS than about MLA style.  And at the end of a tiring day with the Macs, I’m likely to flop on the couch and watch reruns or pull up a game on my home PC.  On Friday, maybe I go see a movie. 

My point is that we’re inundated with technology and with various media – films, television, video games, the internet, and so on.  I think the presence of technology and the availability of content in so many mediums parallels a trend in literature to study things that wouldn’t typically be considered texts.  Potentially, horror movies and sitcoms and video games could all be subjected to literary analysis.  They’re so much a part of our culture – as is popular writing – that it would be ill-advised for a progressive student of literature to ignore them. 

I was reminded of this last week at work.  I overheard a young man asking someone for advice about how to approach an assigned essay topic for his composition class. The assignment required students to explore the difference between popular fiction and literary fiction.  The student was stumped; the faculty member he asked for help wasn’t much more articulate on the subject.  I realized then that about half of the essays I am asked to look at as a writing tutor don’t cover canonical texts.  Many are about films the students have watched in class. 

This started me thinking about popular writing and “texts” in other mediums as sort of a bridge between those of us who dig around in musty, lumbering old texts because we enjoy them and people (most people) who only read “literature” when it’s assigned.  I also thought about the way we literature folks sometimes have to justify the very existence of our field of study.  After all, it doesn’t do anything practical like develop cures for diseases or build bridges; don’t we just dig around in musty, lumbering old texts?  Perhaps if we’re able to interrogate poplar forms of writing and yield interesting analyses, it somehow breathes new life into the field.  We can study science fiction, romance novels, and horror movies, and analyze them similar to how we would a canonical work.  Amongst ourselves, we can always voice reservations about whether Russell, Burroughs, and Mailer (or Stephen King, Anne Rice, and other popular writers) are actually producing “literature.”