Panel Discussion with Mark Greif, Heidi Julavits, and Justin Taylor Genre Ghettos and Writers of Greatish, Literaryish Fiction
Mark Greif: . . . The question becomes, "How does Barthelme manage to be, for some period of time, a highbrow writer, a high literary writer?" He manages to be published in the New Yorker, and most crucially . . . he manages to get New Yorker readers to unsubscribe to the New Yorker. And that was his gambit. That is to say, if you can produce a category of people who find your work unreadable, then you manage to credential yourself as a highbrow. If your work is at the same time accessible, then you've produced an essentially winning strategy. You have all the necessary cachet of the highbrow, and yet you produce a much wider readership—including those who say, "I am not among the boobs who will unsubscribe because of the challenging nature of this story about nuclear war."Heidi Julavits: It's interesting what you were saying about "great-ish, literary-ish." It seems like we're talking about this weird sliding scale that exists between middle and high. The danger is when "great-ish, literary-ish" writers are spoken of as "high." Then, suddenly, what was formerly high gets knocked out of the cultural conversation all together. Our notion of what qualifies as high gets recalibrated. And possibly that's caused a little bit of alarm, "around town," let's say.
Mark Greif: . . . I wonder about the people that you were talking about, Heidi, the people "around town," who in some way belong to the "high-high," as it were, and who can fear that they are being pushed out of sight by this kind of hybrid between "literary" fiction and "genre" fiction that has recently pressed for legitimacy as high literature. Who are they? Can we put them on the table?
