h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Hmm, you say you don't like genre fiction yet reference Arthur Clarke in your u-space. Naughty Edward!

As far as the difference in storytellers goes, I think that Twain and Dickens background as journalists is key, but also the way in which people approach the material. Melville at some stage stated to Hawthorne that was he was seeking was a more honest way of telling the truth (I paraphrase - the exact phrase he used is one I used for the title of my dissertation was 'the great art of telling the truth').

What he of course meant was not just telling the truth of events (the journalists supposed stock in trade, though one does wonder these days) but the telling of the great eternal truths. I think wghat marks Dickens apart from Melville is the intent. Dickens was a very good writer who indulged, essentially in hack work - monthly serialisation. He had a brilliant eye for character and a great ear for dialogue, but his interest wlay not in writing about great eternal truths, but in writing about things in the world around him. Mostly things that outraged him - the workhouses, crime - the great debates, essentially, of Victorian society. Twain shared much of that. (And please don't think I detract from either of them. Great Expectations and Huckleberry Finn are two of the greatest works of 19th century literature.)

Melville, Thoreau, Hawthorne (I think to a lesser extent) and Conrad are possibly concerned with a 'bigger picture' - man's relation to God/the universe. Melville is an interesting case study because he went from being a not very good 'realist' (Typee, Omoo, Redburn) to being one of the greatest symbolists of his or any other age.

(No one has really held a camera to Melville since. Pynchon has clearly been hugely influenced but his novels lack the background 'experience' of Moby Dick.

I think you are unfair on genre literature, btw. Chandler and Hammett were the first to make genre respectable, and Chandler's noir tales of a corrupt Los Angeles are possibly the great novels of the American Experience of his time. Certainly as much as Steinbeck and Faulkner. And today we have writers like Ballard and Moorcock who are doing the same thing (and of course Moorcock is looking back to a much older tradituion in English literature when there was no genre. No one accuses Will of being boring because Oberon is a faerie, or that he was a hack ghost story writer because of Macbeth). Just as crime and corruption in Chandler reflect the massive growth of urban populatiuons in the thirties and forties,and the experience of those who lived there (he is brilliant on the growth of a multi-racial society, for example), so Science Fiction (particularly in the case of Ballard and many of his contemporaries) becamew the natural literature of an age dominated by future shock.

I've absolutely nothing against genre fiction. It's just that I'm not someone who defines himself as a reader of Crime Fiction/ SF/ whatever. I used to read all that Clarke/Asimov stuff when I was wee. My discovery of 'litratcha' started when I bought a Vonnegut under the illusion that he was SF - and thet took me on to other 20thC Americans. I'm led to believe that there's a lot of exciting stuff in Vrime especially - and I really like Leonard, Elroy, George V. Higgins (who Grey Gowrie once called 'the greatest living writer in English'). SF - I'm convinced that Dick and Bradbury ('the poet of the space age') will be remembered in years to come. I've not read much cutting-edge SF lately. Curious the snobbery between 'literary' SF (Lessing, Aldiss, Ballard) and 'the other stuff'. Any recommendations?

Yes - Hawthorne, Melville, Conrad were dealing with 'The Big Themes', aka 'The Human Condition'. That's part of what I'm getting at. But what I really mean is that they use their narrative to *illustrate* the underlying theme, rather than telling you as they go along. Does this make any sense? I guess I'd put James in the same category, albeit on a smaller canvas. (and in watercolour?) But then in the Dickens category you'd put Steinbeck.

A Contention:
Q. Who was the towering genius of 20thC American literature?















A. James Baldwin.

Baldwin? I'd say Faulkner, though he can be very difficult to read.

I'd also suggest that the single greatest work of 20th Century American Fiction is a tie between Ellison's 'Invisible Man' and Heller's Catch 22.

I don't think it's coincidental that one never wrote agin and one only wrote garbage after the first attempt, either.

I'll come back to the rest later when I'm not quite so busy.

Oh, I'll not disagree with you on either of those. I've not read Ellison in years. Much overlooked!

But I'd still like to fight Baldwin's corner...