John Updike died on Tuesday. I liked a lot of his writing, especially the zany The Centaur. He could have been one of us fabulists, if fame and fortune hadn’t pulled him away. He said a simple and wise thing:
“The artist brings something into the world that didn’t exist before, and he does it without destroying something else.”
Of course political art—not always a contradiction in terms—can destroy institutions, or eat away at them. Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Guernica.
It’s fair to say that white America wouldn’t have elected an African-American president without the integrating effect of black music, from Louis Armstrong to hip-hop, and black drama and fiction, commercial as much as “serious.”
(Genre people are always wrestling with that word, because it’s a shorthand antonym for “commercial.” So what do you call commercial work that has serious consequences? Effective, I guess.)
When I first started working at MIT, back in the 80s, our writing department had a joint cocktail party with the Harvard writing department. It was kind of oil-and-water. One exchange stands out in my memory. A Harvard professor had said something dismissive about science fiction, and a colleague reminded her that she had taught The Left Hand of Darkness.
“That’s true,” she explained patiently, “but that’s not science fiction. It’s literature.”
So I went home and wrote about flying squids.
Keep the squids flying Joe!
I only read one Updike novel, and it was definitely in the realm of SF: Toward the end of time, a novel that seems as if it was written with the intention of producing something that is both undoubtedly SF, as it takes place in a post apocalyptic future, and includes emergent non-biological life forms, and undoubtedly literature, as it focuses on the inner life of an aging suburbanite nearing his own death.
It is an odd piece of work, but I liked it.
I missed that one, Michael, but admit I never followed him closely. The Rabbit books didn’t do much for me.
That one does sound more like my kind of light-heavy reading.
Joe
And things like that are why I have recently finished my application to MIT, and did not apply to Harvard.
I never read anything by Updike, but he was one of those authors that had so much press that I admired him anyway, hoping to get to reading his work someday.
But it’s so similar in the art world, Joe. “Mere illustration” versus “fine art.” If you make money in the art industry doing illustration, you’re a commercial hack. If you make money in the galleries, you are a fine artist.
I’ve signed contracts where the author was referred to as the artist, but I was the ‘illustrator.’ Even musicians are artists. Apparently, the only person that’s not an artist is the illustrator.
Oh…there goes another squid by the window….back to painting!
Thanks, Joe.
Updike gave some very entertaining and informative interviews about his craft over the years. Highlights of some of those can be heard on Terry Gross’s FRESH AIR show from 1/29 (podcast easily findable at WHHY or NPR sites). It always stuck out in my memory and annoyed me that Updike’s short story “Chaste Planet” was included in Hartwell’s 1989 WORLD TREASURY OF SCIENCE FICTION anthology. It was about the only sf that Updike ever wrote and it wasn’t a very good example of the genre or of Updike’s work in general. I always felt that the Updike piece was included just to add some sort of phony “mainstream” prestige to an anthology that had much better stories by the so-called genre writers and would have been a great book without inserting one-offs by “literary” people like Updike or “magic realists” like Borges. But while his kind of story isn’t really my bag, I have a lot of respect for Updike’s contribution in general to contemporary American writing, and it’s quite a loss that he’s gone now.
–Chris, M-BRANE SF
I’ve always admired your squids, Greg.
That is an annoying tic, Chris. Judy Merrill used to do it all the time in her first “best-of” anthologies, trying to expand spec fic’s sphere of influence.
Joe