In Which I Respond to Edward Docx

I've been absent from the blog for quite a while now.  Honestly, I'm kinda depressed about the state of the world in several respects and haven't wanted to unleash a torrent of bile here.  So I'm steering clear of the state of the world and writing about the latest literary tempest in a teapot!

Some guy I never heard of named Edward Docx wrote this piece in the Guardian. 

It's yet another retread of the tired "genre fiction vs. literary fiction"  false dichotomy piece, though this one does have a few interesting nuances.

Docx (Really. Why the hell would anyone adopt as their last name the name of a file format that everyone hates and that is making life difficult in workplaces around the world?  And don't tell me he was born with that name. The guy's English.  That's not a consonant cluster we have in this language.) basically says that Stieg Larsson and Dan Brown are bad writers.  I've never read either one, but that matches up pretty neatly with everything I've heard from people I know who've read them.  

But, unlike the usual literary fiction sulk ("we don't sell, but we're better than you"), this one does recognize that there are good genre writers.  

(Genre writers have their own cliche'd sulk that they raise from time to time that goes like this: "nobody respects us, but they really should because people read us." )

Docx further says that bad genre writing is better than bad literary writing because at least bad genre writing delivers the satisfaction of adhering to the conventions the reader expects.  (mystery gets solved, nuclear armegeddon gets averted, couple falls in love, etc.) Bad literary novels deliver just about nothing.

So far I don't really have a problem with anything this dude has said.  

But then we get to the dumb part: Mainly this: that even good genre (not Larsson or Brown) is by definition a constrained form of writing. There are conventions and these limit the material. 

Yeah, like the way that Shakespeare guy kept working within the conventions of comedy and tragedy.  His work is fundamentally constrained by those conventions and therefore really not as deep as, say, your average aimless Paul Auster novel. 

But it doesn't stop there.  Docx implicitly condemns pretty much everything ever written in any kind of format.  Sonnets?  Adhering to a format.  Inherently constrained. Pop songs, symphonies, concertos, operas, portraits, landscapes...well, you get the idea.  

For me, the most satisfying and profoundly moving art does adhere to some conventions.  Working within a format really seems to bring out the genius in certain artists.  This is why, for example, Steve Miller's 4-minute  "Swingtown" is a genius pop song, while his 16-minute "Macho City" is an unlistenable piece of crap.  Philip K. Dick's science fiction novels are amazing. His literary novels...eh, not so much.  I could go on, but the point is, having boundaries and conventions can actually free an artist. When every element of what you can create is on the table for you to decide, where do you even start?  

Docx has written a more thoughtful and nuanced version of the same old dumb false dichotomy. Can we just agree that we all like some books and dislike others and put the tired convention of the genre vs. literary essay to bed forever?