Up from the gutter-forms

I like this summation—grabbed real-time from a chat with Neil Gaiman over at the New Yorker:

Authors like Michael Chabon have been cru­sad­ing for awhile to break down the bar­ri­ers between so-called ‘lit­er­ary fic­tion’ and ‘genre fic­tion’. Do you have any idea why lit­er­a­ture remains so com­part­men­tal­ized? Is there any end in sight?

Neil Gaiman: Hon­estly, I think the bar­ri­ers are imag­i­nary, the walls have already been breached and the key to lit­er­a­ture in the early 21st cen­tury is one of con­flu­ence. There’s not much high and low cul­ture any more: there’s just min­gling streams of art and what mat­ters is whether it’s good art or bad art. But then, I come from comics, and miss the days when it was a gut­ter art-form in which nobody was expected to make art; and think that SF was much more vibrant and rel­e­vant before they taught it in uni­ver­si­ties. Either way, Michael Chabon is a very wise man.

Mostly I like this part: “the key to lit­er­a­ture in the early 21st cen­tury is one of confluence.”

One Response

High and low, real and tiny « Snarkmarket says:
January 22, 2010 at 5:24 pm
[…] torn. On the one hand, you’ve got the Neal Gaiman quote Robin pulled: [T]he bar­ri­ers [between so-called ‘lit­er­ary fic­tion’ and ‘genre fic­tion’] are […]
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