The Grand Ballroom Theory of Literature

On literature as an unending conversation, genres as dialogues, and writing as adding your voice to the chat

[I was one of several writers interviewed by Constance Grady at Vox for an article on the state of literary Substack. Give it a read. One thing I said, that wasn’t quoted, is that I feel the main positive influence of Substack has been filling in some of the chasm left by disappearing review coverage in traditional media. Just last week, the AP said it was ending review coverage. On the other hand, my novel Metallic Realms has received more coverage on Substack than in traditional magazines. Can Substack alone replace traditional book coverage? No. But it is at least a positive development. Increasingly, the literary conversation is on here.]

Technically a great hall and not a ballroom, but close enough. (Joseph Nash, 1838)

My last article, “Why You Should Still Build Your Raft of Art in the Sea of Slop,” was a rant slash cri de coeur about avoiding all the noise and focusing on your art. It got a lovely response. I’m glad it resonated. A few comments brought up some topics I didn’t get into, such as how one thinks about art in relation to readers, your community, and other artists. It seems essential—or at least it has been essential to me—for one’s art to be something you enjoy and find enriching in itself, regardless of how it performs in “the market.” We can’t control the reaction to our work. We can only control the work and strive to make it as interesting, weird, funny, true, and beautiful as possible.

That said, the world exists. Art may be a way to enrich yourself, but it is also a means of communication. Most of us become artists because we want to share our work with others. To speak to them. Even Emily Dickinson shared her work with some friends and family. Publishing isn’t merely about money—there are many better paths to that—but communicating with both friends and strangers, and putting your work in conversation with other artists. I can’t cover all that in one newsletter, but I wanted to focus on the last part: being in conversation with other artists. So, this newsletter will be about my “Grand Ballroom Theory of Literature.”

I’ve mentioned this idea in my classes and interviews before, but have never spelled it out. I also have to credit Blake Lefray for amusingly illustrating it in our recent interview:

From the Below the Fray newsletter.

“The Grand Ballroom of Literature” is an only half-serious metaphor. Yet I do tend to think about these abstract questions with elaborate and somewhat silly metaphors. My Counter Craft drafts folder is filled with titles like “The Asshole Theory of Autofiction,” “The Solar System Model of a Story,” and “The Mirror in the Panopticon Method of Satire.” Hopefully I’ll get to all those at some point. For now, “The Grand Ballroom Theory of Literature.”

I like to think of literature as a grand party in an impossibly long ballroom that stretches back through time. Every author, alive or dead, is there. They’re talking, arguing, fighting, and laughing with each other. As with any party, groups cluster and form different conversations around different topics. Some of these groups are large, and others are small. These are your genres, styles, and movements. In one dark and cobwebbed corner, horror authors sip absinthe and debate ghosts with Edgar Allan Poe and Shirley Jackson. Sometimes they spin around to interject in the Gothic conversation happening beside them. Elsewhere, writers gather around the ancient Greeks or joke with Joyce or muse with Morrison. Maybe some are sitting in their wingchairs and grumbling vitriol.¹ Perhaps others huddle in tiny groups on balconies away from the party or stroll in the courtyard for private chats. Some authors park themselves in one conversation for the whole party, perhaps plopping down on the couches where Tolkien is holding court. Others need to move around and dip in and out of different conversations.

This is the grand ballroom of literature, and to be an author is to participate in these varied and unending conversations.

Often, the conversation between authors is obvious. Think of the way James Joyce’s Ulysses is in conversation with The Odyssey, Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea responds to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities takes inspiration from the diaries of Marco Polo, George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire subverts² expectations of Tolkienesque epic fantasy, or Percival Everett’s James retells Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Other times, the dialogue is more subtle, like the way any writer of a campus novel or a haunted house novel understands their work will be read in the context of those traditions. Any well-read writer knows the forms, tropes, and techniques associated with they type of fiction they are writing—whether it’s red herrings in a detective plot or page two flashbacks in a literary short story—and use these to meet or subvert the reader’s expectations. (Even if your goal is to be entirely original, you’re writing can only be original in the context of what has come before.) The conversation may even be invisible to readers, with authors simply taking inspiration from different sources and making private allusions and responses as a means of generating a story.

(These conversations aren’t limited to writers—literature can be in conversation with painting, music, and other forms of art. Let’s stretch the metaphor and say each art form has its own grand ballroom beside each other and artists can slip through the doors between them.)

The idea that books are in conversation with other books seems pretty standard in other cultures. Latin American and European authors are often very explicit about their conversation partners in their books. Americans enjoy the myth of the lone genius creating work out of nothing but their mind. Authors here seem more shy about making the connections explicit. Still, no matter how hidden or overt the conversation, I think all—or at least nearly all—great literature participates in it in some way. You can tell when an author hasn’t read widely, and babbles by themselves totally unaware that their bold ideas are old clichés.

What We Write About When We Write About Writers

In my last article, I used the metaphor of a raft to talk about the art I loved growing up. How art was a place where I could go to be alone and do my own thing. This is very true, in a sense. I mostly read books that no one else I knew read.³ Even when I swapped CDs or mixtapes with friends my experience of the music was largely solitary, poring over liner notes in my bedroom while the tracks blasted. However, in another sense this art was all about commination. It was communication with those artists. I felt kinship with Kafka, babbled with Babel, and shared thoughts with Surrealists. And being on one side of that conversation made me want to be on the other side. To create my own work that would speak with the work that inspired me, and (if I was lucky) have that work find readers and speak to them. If I was really lucky, to have my work inspire them to make their own art.

Other authors may feel differently about all this. This is merely one metaphor, one way of framing the ineffable.

But the sense of conversation between artists, the sense of traditions and ongoing dialogue, has become central to how I think of literature and a source of inspiration for my own work. When I was younger, I tried to hide my influences. I heard the calls to “find your voice” and “make it new” and internalized a sense that making art was about creating something unique, unrelated to anything else. But the older I’ve gotten, the more I’ve realized that how you find your voice is by listening to others and noticing the gaps in the conversation, or the connections that haven’t been made between ideas and styles. The way you make it new is by filling in those gaps and making those connections through your work.

I also used to feel shy about putting my fiction in conversation with my idols. How could my work live up to these great authors from history? These days I think, fuck it. Why hide? I’m not saying my work is as great as the titans of the past, but I don’t think there is much point in obscuring my influences. It is fun and energizing to homage, pastiche, and subvert what I love. Influence is generative. Between the anxiety of influence and the ecstasy of influence, I lean toward the latter. This is probably obvious to anyone who has read my novel Metallic Realms, which is fairly overt about taking inspiration from and making allusions to everything from Pale Fire and Ursula K. Le Guin to space adventure tales and fragmented autofiction.

In this way, I’m again following the conversation of the artists who moved me when I was younger. I loved the way authors like Jorge Luis Borges and Donald Barthelme would fill their work with references to other works (some real and some invented). One very short story felt like the first step into a labyrinthine library with different paths to follow. I found it delightful to read Hamlet and then see the story reinvented in Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Or to read Ursula K. Le Guin add anarchist thinking to space opera fiction in The Dispossessed. Or to see Angela Carter reinvent fairy tales as Gothic horror in The Bloody Chamber. Or to read Raymond Chandler and fall in love with hardboiled detective fiction and then see that style reconfigured by Paul Auster in The New York Trilogy, or combined with science fiction in William Gibson’s Neuromancer, or see how the idea of the cool and cool-talking detective figure could be complicated in Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn.

All of this excited me as a reader, even if it depressed me a little to realize that the conversation was so vast and unending that I could never read it all.

Conceiving literature as a grand conversation is also central to how I think of genre, and why I’ve always rolled my eyes at the people who look down on genre. Genres strike me as just one form these conversations take. What else is “cosmic horror” or “epic fantasy” if not a series of authors who are in dialogue, even if that dialogue sometimes consists of refuting and rebutting? The fact that genre writers are upfront about being in conversation with each other—and admittedly spend more time debating increasingly esoteric subgenre labels—doesn’t make the work qualitatively different. In fact, it doesn’t make it different at all. Much of what is labeled literary fiction is also obviously in dialogue with other work. Novels like Blood Meridian and In the Distance speak to the long tradition of Westerns. Writers of Southern Gothic fiction or postmodern systems novels or dirty realism are knowingly participating in those traditions.⁴ We just call these “styles” instead of “subgenres” when they get grouped with literary fiction.

Genres Are Historical and Cultural, Not Scientific

Understanding genres (or “styles”) as conversations between authors, critics included, explains the real-world delineations much better than the idea of genres as scientific categories with clear definitions. Why is magical realism grouped with literary fiction in America instead of fantasy? Well, magical realism has historically been published in literary magazines and by literary presses while many SFF authors dismissed magical realism as lacking rigorous worldbuilding. So, it was put in conversation with literary fiction more than fantasy. On the other hand, SFF world people often ask why Gene Wolfe—a writer I greatly admire—isn’t discussed much in literary circles despite being as lyrical, dense, and innovative as any literary fiction great? I would say it is because Wolfe’s works⁵ are very clearly in conversation with SFF traditions, sometimes to such a degree that an outsider to the conversation might find them impenetrable.

I’m not sure where I first clocked the idea that fiction was a conversation. It was certainly before I learned words like “intertextuality” or “dialogic.” I’d like to say my epiphany⁶ came from James Joyce’s Ulysses. Or when I picked John Gardner’s Grendel as my 12th-grade English presentation book. Or at least when I zipped through fantasy novels in middle school and realized how the authors were responding in different ways to Tolkien and Lewis. But I think it was earlier, when I found my first literary love: Calvin and Hobbes.

Calvin and Hobbes collections were the first books I pored over and reread. I’m not going to debate whether comic strips count as literature here. I bring up Calvin and Hobbes because some of my favorite parts of the comic, even as a young child, were Calvin’s alter egos slash genre parodies: Spaceman Spiff (a Flash Gordon-type space adventure character) and Tracer Bullet (hardboiled detective).⁷

Read that second panel. How is it that Calvin has the hardest Chandleresque line of all time?

I called these genre parodies, but parody implies mere mockery. I think Watterson—like many acclaimed novelists I would read when I was older—was creating something that blurred the lines between pastiche, homage, satire, and subversion. My own approach has been similar. I can’t help but poke a little fun at what I love, but I want to pay homage as I satirize. (Actually, typing this out makes me realize there is probably a lot of Spaceman Spiff in the space adventure parts of my novel Metallic Realms. And probably more than a dash of Tracer Bullet in the narrator of my SF-noir novel The Body Scout.) That is just one approach, one way of speaking to the conversation. Every author will have their own methods.

Why You Should Still Build Your Raft of Art in the Sea of Slop

One thing I enjoy about framing literature as a timeless party is that it reinforces the truth that great literature doesn’t die. Great art is always with us. As Italo Calvino once said: “A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.”⁸ And, I would add, a book we are never finished speaking to.

I also like that it underlines another important truth: you have to listen to be a useful part of a conversation. That is, you have to read. I know this is bizarrely controversial in some pockets of the internet, but sorry. You should read widely and deeply. Listening to more voices will only expand the range of your own. And if you don’t listen—if you don’t read widely—you risk repeating what has already been said or missing the point of the conversation entirely.

If this conception of literature clicks with you, then I encourage you to look for the books that speak about things in ways that inspire you. Put them in conversation with each other. That’s the magic of literature; you curate your own conversation. See where they resonate or overlap. Think about the gaps in the conversation that you might fill or the connections you can make in your work. Then get writing.

1. Bernie(hard) Bros know what I mean.

2. At the time. Today, the Martinesque gritty realism model of epic fantasy may feel like its own cliché ready to be toppled by another subversion. That’s how conversations go.

3. This was long before social media when the internet was barely a thing at all.

4. The good ones at least.

5. If you’re curious about Wolfe, I would recommend The Fifth Head of Cerberus as a good introduction. If you love that, move on to The Book of the New Sun series.

6. Dude did like his epiphanies…

7. Calvin had many other alter egos including Stupendous Man (superhero pastiche) and several satirical characters in the style of “serious” comics like Mary Worth. But Bullet and Spiff were my favorites.

8. From “Why Read the Classics?”

---

My new novel Metallic Realms is out in stores! Reviews have called the book “Brilliant” (Esquire), “riveting” (Publishers Weekly), “hilariously clever” (Elle), “a total blast” (Chicago Tribune), “unrelentingly smart and inventive” (Locus), and “just plain wonderful” (Booklist). My previous books are the science fiction noir novel The Body Scout and the genre-bending story collection Upright Beasts. If you enjoy this newsletter, perhaps you’ll enjoy one or more of those books too.