"Literary fiction" and its antonyms

I was reminded of some issues surrounding "literary fiction" - what defines it, how much of it do we want in our culture-consuming lives, is it "improving" in a way that other fiction isn't? - by Lizard_King's Neal Stephenson thread.

Preliminarily, here's a partly clumsy, partly helpful wikipedia page that takes a few stabs at defining literary fiction and its putative "opposites." Those opposites being either "non-literary" or "paraliterary" writing, or else, more commonly but more problematically, "genre writing."*

In terms of a crude empirical "is this literary fiction or not" checklist, most of what the article suggests makes some sense - subordination of plot and action to theme or complex character study, often dark/serious tone, and as, heh, Neal Stephenson is cited to say, it's aimed (by a more amateur/academic auhor) at a critical audience rather than a mass readership, which is perhaps a more pragmatic way of saying it puts aesthetic aims above commercial ones. Lev Grossman's quick-and-dirty list-of-what-gets-called-literary also works pretty well - literary classics (most of which don't really resemble modern "literary fiction"), realism, and post-modernism, to which one could add other hyphenated -realisms and "genre fiction" that's been canonized through critical acclaim (Le Carre etc)

If I'd been writing some of the bullet points I'd probably have substituted "bleak" for "dark" tone, given the popularity of grimdarkness in entertainment-oriented fiction. And the emphasized subordination of other story features to theme, rather than to characterization seems like a literary fiction thing to me. Certainly literary fiction often has pensive elaborate interior life narration and character development, but it also seems to me that literary fiction is often willing to subordinate character development - and characters as entities - to either a theme, or a mood, or a literary effect. In contrast, I'd say a doting emphasis on characters as central focuses, and a willingness to subordinate theme to characters' stories is a characteristic of non-literary fiction - hence its tendency to have "happy (or morally intelligible) endings."

*By problematically I basically mean it's a bullshit dichotomy given the amount of literary genre writing and not-so-literary literary fiction. But the dichotomy, and the implied deprecation of genre-writing, are still pretty commonly understood as valid-ish, as seen every time we explain that genre fiction XYZ "has some literary merit." Also as seen by the weird mutant hybrids that sometimes result when people try to do self-consciously literary genre writing.

Required reading on this subject is Maps and Legends by Michael Chabon, but to sum up: what we call "literary fiction" is a genre, and it's no better or worse than any of the other ones. There's plenty of bad fiction in that genre and there's plenty of great fiction in other genres, and casting off the notion that literary fiction is somehow the best one not only liberates readers but gets them to read a lot of amazing books that they may have overlooked.

The phenomenon that you observe of dividing literary from genre fiction based on whether it puts story or theme first is redundant. All great novels work on all levels, and no novel even worthy of the word "good" ever had well-developed themes but poorly-drawn characters and a bad story. And as you say, most classic literature would not be classified as "literary fiction" were it published today--it would be classified instead as mystery, fantasy, science fiction, romance, and so forth. That we've arbitrarily decided that, as of the early 20th century or so, serious fiction means realism or else postmodernism is a lazy travesty, and to hell with it.

Meanwhile, there's an unpleasant side effect: since authors of so-called "genre" fiction are ghettoized in this way and very rarely given the respect they deserve, many people don't develop sophisticated reading palates when it comes to those genres. It's especially bad with sci-fi and fantasy, where a great many true hacks are perfectly well-regarded by fans who have been told that they might as well read anything that comes along because those genres are all crap anyway.

If you're interested in this topic I again can't recommend that Chabon book highly enough. I used to be exactly the kind of dumb snob who would only deign to read the most highfalutin literary fiction, and that book utterly changed the way I thought about fiction. Since I read it, I've read more and better books, enjoyed my reading more, and been exposed to a great deal more interesting and insightful ideas courtesy of authors who first and foremost spin a fantastic yarn in their chosen field.

I'm broadly in sympathy with what you're saying but I'm not sure that there's one tidy succinct rebuttal to one tidy succinct "tyranny of literary fiction," as it were - that wikipedia article for example, while a bit singsong-highschool-essay looking in places, offers a few different ways to categorize literary fiction, and they're not all about snobby genre vs. genre-calling-itself-not-genre pigeonholing.

Is there a difference between movies and film? Between storytelling that is principally about entertainment and storytelling that's principally about creating a unique and striking aesthetic experience? We're on the same side, for what it's worth, in that I respect (and have an affinity for) the tradition of telling stories that are enjoyable and not just about some austere aesthetic appreciation/snobbery. But I feel like there actually is a non-illlusory divide between books/film/culture that aims to entertain and that which aims to be art for art's sake.

(Of course it's possible to entirely reject the concept of art for art's sake - I don't, even if I'm not totally sure what it means - part of the point of thread - and even thought I don't set it up on much of a pedestal or consume that much of it. Think of books, films or art - films are what really leap out at me - that weren't that great as conventional storytelling pieces [or where those aspects were very minimalistic] but in whatever weird arty way struck you as being beautiful and poignant and meritorious.)

Fuck you for stealing my post.

That being said, the best I can offer is that there's a sort of pornography style know-it-when-you-see-it attribute to literary fiction. That doesn't mean that genre fic can't have literary merit! But we all know there's a fair amount of perfectly enjoyable genre fiction that's basically kind of garbage.

"All [forum posts] are sequels." - Michael Chabon

This is true, but I tend to think that even the term "literary" is pretty tainted at this point. That's why I used the phrase "serious fiction" in my post to be a catchall for fiction in any genre that has artistic merit (or however you like to phrase it), to avoid any confusion with the genre called literary.

Also, Marged is too lazy to post it herself but she reminded me of another big problem with the ghettoization of genre fiction, identified by Ursula Le Guin and others: that the lack of respect comes with a lack of the serious criticism that can help push both authors and readers to aspire to better and more meritorious work overall.

OK let me take a better stab at this.

For me, what constitutes literature is a a pretty basic question: am I better off for having read it? I think the first reading experience I had that brought this phenomenon to my attention was reading Infinite Jest for the first time in 2009. Sidenote: I'm probably the forum's biggest David Foster Wallace fan; I'm That Guy. Sorry. Anyway, Infinite Jest had some no-shit profound impact on me in terms of how I view myself in relation to other people. And thinking about other literary books that I've read - stuff like Lolita and White Noise - they've also had a similar impact on me. Much smaller (seriously I can't overstate the degree to which reading Infinite Jest changed my life), but significant.

At the same time, I've consumed a ton of genre fiction. My favorite books ever are Tad Williams's series Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn. It's pretty much stock by the numbers fantasy but because of the point in my life at which I first read them I love them to death. I also recognize that they've had basically no impact on who I am or how I approach the world.

Anyway as inherently subjective as all this is I'm not sure it provides any actual useful insight in terms of guidance on separating literature from other genres (if, as exterbags points out, such a separation is even appropriate). I mean, I'm sure we can find at least a few hundred thousand people who will claim that Twilight changed their lives. Maybe the difference is just a matter of snootiness.

That's a good point, and let me reiterate that I 100% agree with you and Chabon about the ghettoization of genre fiction.

That is a long and ancient battle. It definitely feels that those opposed to art for art's sake have had the upper hand for quite some time in the way that public opinion is shaped. That enjoying art/entertainment for aesthetic reasons is assumed to be a snobbish activity by default, especially in regards to film and the visual arts, is evidence to me of those assholes' victory.

Read that as "Maps and Legends by Michael Crichton", did not realize my error until following posts, and let me tell you, that made that post a lot more brain-breaking the first time through.

I know exactly what you mean but I'm not quite happy with leaving it there. It's odd to me that there are, in certain ways, a checklist of literary vs. not-literary ways of doing things. Take a technically competent non-cliched writer who'd definitely be identified as working in a genre but not in a pulpy way - Iain Rankin's mystery novels, say.

Now imagine he writes a mystery novel but goes through the literary/nonliterary checklist: decentralize the murder-mystery plot, subordinate the pacing of the story so that it's as languid/arbitrarily paced as one sometimes sees in realist fiction. Scuff up any non-realist dialogue. Make the story outcomes and in-universe moral desserts arbitrary, as they tend to be in literary storytelling and tend much less often to be in genre writing. I'm betting, assuming it all came off well, that people would go, "hmm, not a bad novel, bit of a departure from genre tradition, literary aspirations."

My point - much as it kind of sounds like it - is not to say literary fiction = realism or postmodernist fiction = just another genre that's been dignified as the king-genre. It's just to say that I think there is a rough and ready sort of checklist of Ways To Make Fiction Literary, and it's partly why self-concious literary/genre hybrid fiction can sound weird. (Book review that was dropped in that wiki article.)

But at the same time it is taken for granted that real literature is contemporary realist (or hyphenated realist or postmodernist) non-genre fiction and if you want to pitch an historical novel or science fiction or thriller or something as genuinely excellent art you have to start out by apologizing for it as genre fiction but with literary merit. While I don't quite agree with Extarbags and I assume Chabon's contention as I'm reading it, it's certainly got some real truth to it.

I tend to classify literary fiction as anything that doesn't fit neatly into any of my other fiction pigeon-holes. Sometimes it's possibly historical fiction where the place it's set doesn't matter, or it's a classic.

Jason T: You've pretty much identified the genre tropes of literary fiction. From what little I gather*, they're somewhat due to the tyranny of academic literary types. If you want to be taken seriously at most top MFA program, them's the hoops you're jumping through.



* very very little. Huge grain of salt, etc.

The whole "Penguin Classics" section of "literary fiction" is kind of an awkward appendix added to what I'd figure is the "art and aesthetic striving privileged above entertaining (especially a wide) readership" core of what's meant by it?

Honestly I realize that it'll always be more rule of thumb than tidy logic-based categorizations, but when I'm thinking "Is Iain Banks' stuff "literary" because of aspects of it that resemble "literary fiction," I'm thinking about "contemporary literary fiction," not Alexandre Dumas.

When you get into classic lit, all bets seem to be off. That stuff seems to be mostly coasting on inertia and groupthink as much as anything else.

Actually, here's an interesting question: we've got some history nerds in here, and I think we're all aware of the degree to which historical thinking changes. Jason T you posted recently about the evolution of our understanding of Reconstruction, for example. Has our understanding of - for lack of a better term - historical literature undergone the same level of re-assessment? I know the canon (such as it is) has changed here and there around the margins, but mostly those changes seem to be exclusive. Have there been any "great" works where folks have said that, in retrospect, they were garbage?

Thing is, it's up to you to decide what you mean by "literary." I've already indicated that I think that, as the word is typically used, it refers to a style or genre and not a measure of quality, and while I haven't read Banks's work I'd be surprised if it fit that bill. I don't think that's a qualitative judgment or even an interesting one, though; genre classification isn't a hair I love to split and if something is probably in one genre but has aspects of another I'm not especially interested in what comes out.

But if what you mean is, do Iain Banks's novels have artistic merit... well, I still don't know, but you can make the case yourself if you feel its warranted. That he writes mysteries does not in any way hamper or detract from whatever level of artistry is present in his work.

I think you'd honestly have to go to a literature major and hope you got the right one. Even in history there's no such thing as a big Almanac of Meta-historiography that warns everybody that in the 1990s people started thinking about the Wehrmacht in a different way - generally it's just the people grubbing around in the history of some subfield organically become aware that new authors demolished the claims of old authors, unless the process becomes flashy. (As, actually, the history of the Wehrmacht did, because of some public politics in Germany.)

The humanities in general also got a bit intellectually factional over stuff like the "critical turn" and postmodernism; in the case of history a lot of the discipline kind of trundled on underneath the faddy fireworks of that stuff doing "empirical" nose to the ground historical research that wasn't really revolutionized one way or the other by theoretical trends. From the outside looking in I was sort of pessimistic about whether English departments had fared quite as well. Certain things are easier for historians; one can say scholar X relied too much on sources A B and C which are now considered suspect; I'm not sure that one can, in the 2010s, suddenly realize that John Donne's sonnets are no good or something. But certainly certain types of poetry, music and painting have been deprecated over time... just usually some ways in the past? And sometimes people are plucked from obscurity after their deaths and so on. Again I really feel my ignorance on the subject.

Banks writes good sci fi, Rankin writes good mystery novels. I spelled them both Iain because they're Scots but Rankin in fact goes by the far more sensible Ian. On no account fail to try Banks just because he (slightly) fits the realist-fiction stylesheet in certain respects - his stuff certainly doesn't read like literary vegetables the average NYRB/LRB latest and greatest do and I recommend it highly.

Told you I wasn't familiar with their work. ;) I think I have at least seen a BBC adaptation of something by Rankin and the dialogue gave off a serious Chandler vibe, so probably I would like him. Needless to say my point applies to both equally.

If I summarized Rankin it'd be non-stylzed (so not that Chandlerian?) builders-tea-drinking police procedural with likeable characters and enjoyable plots. Some borderline pandering to fans of Edinburgh's coolness which I totally am having loved living there.

Some things just stop getting read outside the academy. Why do we read Shakespeare for fun but not Pilgrim's Progress or Aphra Behn? Can you say there's a quality distinction or is it changing tastes (o tempora o mores)? If a book falls in a forest and no one reads it, what genre is it?

You would probably read The Pilgrim's Progress and be bored to fucking tears but it's one of the most important and influential works in English literature. Quality in literature is a shifty thing.

Me (I qualify as a folk) on Dickens.

I don't think enough people care for it to matter even if that happened. The number of people who give a shit about Literature and are willing to educate about themselves on the State of Literature or not phone it in in college lit classes is getting lower every day it seems. It's probably pretty similar to the general decline of the humanities that so many people think is taking place.

I sometimes wonder if that sort of thing is largely acclimatization though. Not that it matters if no one happens to bother getting acclimatized.

I maintain that people hate Dickens because they were forced to read Dickens in school, and that the same applies to Melville. On his own merits, in a context in which I was actually allowed to enjoy Dickens, I absolutely loved his work.

This goes double for Moby-Dick, a playful book that gets flogged to death by classroom drudgery. IDENTIFY TEN PIECES OF SYMBOLISM IN THIS CHAPTER WHERE MELVILLE IS BASICALLY SCREWING AROUND. WHAT ARE THE MAIN THEMES?

I think to an extent Dickens has taken hits for being too sentimental in style and theme? I remember being very pleasantly surprised by a Tale of Two Cities in high school but I was also a sappy drip and not to be trusted. Moby Dick is terrific but shifting gears from the smartphone era to walking into page after page of turpentine-thick rose is pretty brutal.

I think you're right. I was kinda joking, though I agree with Jason that his sentimentality is something I actively despise. I do like a good stage version of a A Christmas Carol, and I certainly respect Dickens' activist slant of many of his works.

I had a similar experience with Hawthorne. I had to read House of Seven Gables when I was 13 and all I could do was make fun of it, but a few short years later The Scarlet Letter really impressed me.

Does primary education really fuck with kids ability to enjoy reading or is it unrelated? Cuz reading Romeo and Juliet in jr high bored the hell out of me (and all my classmates) but at the end of high school in a smaller lit class we read The Tempest and then in college I read half his stuff and fell in love (it probably also has to do with the quality of learning environment).

Every year around the holidays WNYC puts on a radio drama version of A Christmas Carol, and you want to tell me it's anything other than awesome you can go to hell!

I actually think it does, and I wrote a (brief, shitty) essay to that effect for a class a couple of years ago. There's this weird emphasis on hey let's give you some great literature without any context as to what makes it great. That and I don't think your average high schooler has the life experience to be able to relate to that sort of thing. I do think an ability to identify with whatever it is being presented thematically is pretty crucial.

Giving teenagers stuff written for dissolute 30 year old upper crust types centuries ago does, in retrospect, seem pretty fucking odd.

Shakespeare is the exception; properly translated teenagers eat that shit up.

O balls I want a radio drama version. It used to be a tradition in my family to see a stage version every Christmas at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis and I regret none of it (I actually miss it a lot).

Since I moved out to NJ it's become a thing for me to listen to the radio drama the weekend before Xmas. It's only an hour long, but man I do enjoy it!

Back on track: I think this thread would benefit from someone who's in a graduate writing program to report back to us. Anyone want to volunteer? Sadly my grad school future is already spoken for.

I think the difference is in the quality of the writing not the intent of the endeavor. Genre fiction is badly written. In literature you will find romance, mystery, action/adventure, sci-fi/fantasy, etc. Genre fiction can claim for itself drab prose, flat characters, theme-less plots, and heat without light. When I read literature i get the sense that I am in the presence of greatness. Genre fiction is the work of house painters.

I believe it was Wilde who said, on the The Old Curiosity Shop, "One would have to have a heart of stone not to read the death of little Nell without laughing." Or something to that effect. Dickens can definitely be overly sentimental. That said David Copperfield must rank among the novels of which I'm most fond.

On topic, I'm distrustful of attempts to define what's "literature" or what have you on purely structural or thematic grounds. Simply put this is because while those aspects are interesting and informative, they tell you very little about the value of a work. Take art: there's an endless debate to be had over what qualifies as art and, if a given work does, which category or genre it then fits into. But deciding that a piece of graffiti is art - moreover an example of conceptual street art - based on various judgements about style and intention tells you little to nothing about what meaning or value we can derive from it. The reason we care about literary works at all is, generally speaking, because of how they can inform us, in the broadest sense, about life, the human condition, and so forth.

EDIT: Oh and as an afterthought, it might be said that the quality of prose is a necessary feature apart from the meaning contained within. But I think that's a false dichotomy: style and substance are the same thing, and the meaning would not be the same with a cruder pen, as it were.

I have to say that, really, Shakespeare should be SEEN and not just read. A lot of what might be hard for kids to understand is made clear when seen in some form (movie, on stage, stage recording, whatever). Everything about Shakespeare is improved by seeing it done.

I was fortunate to have teachers that understand that and this is one reason I enjoy Shakespeare, I can't imagine just reading the plays.

Oh, and get the graphic novel of King Lear if you fancy a bit of Will, it is super!

Oh, come on. That's just silly. I can think of three "genre" novels off the top of my head that are on my shelves right now, all published in the last ten years alone, that have stunning prose, complex characters, plots dripping with theme, and depth enough for a thesis or a dozen. Don't go all One True Scotsman about it and claim that any good genre novel thereby stops being genre and starts being "literary." Kurt Vonnegut was writing fucking genre, even if he avoided being labeled as such because he knew there were idiots who'd believe exactly what you've written above.

You've also conflated "literary" and "literature," and I'd like to say, in the midst of my class on where the beginnings of literature were right now, I will take The Count of Monte Christo in all its wacky genre glory over Cato's De Agricultura any day, if we want to talk about prose, characters, plots, themes, and "heat" and "light" metaphors.

Actually Neal Stephenson himself has some things to say about literary fiction in this Slashdot interview. He attributes it to who the writer is accountable to. He calls them Beowulf writers and Dante writers.

Part of the problem with Shakespeare is that it isn't meant to be just read, it really only comes alive when it's performed.

Er, what Calistas said.

I noted that briefly in the OP but there were a lot of bases to cover. It's not a bad kludge, but I think he takes his economic model a bit too seriously, as we're not living in the Renaissance anymore and Cormac McCarthy, Don DeLillo and John Updike (who certainly sold a shitload of books and didn't subsist off academic sinecure, unless you're counting the New Yorker) can't really be regarded as American literary outliers.

Calistas, Athryn: I agree but I find the "translation" issue frustrating. As much as non-nerds can enjoy the hell out of Shakespeare "edited for linguistic difficulty," part of the joy for nerds is watching Shakespeare performed with the versy, 1600 English that they - nerds - have to pay serious attention to to avoid losing the sense of.

Truth. Also, there are so many great reworkings of his plays too. I love Richard III with Ian McKellan, where Richard is a fascist in 30's Britain.

Jason, once you get an ear for Elizabethan English I don't think it is too hard to get most of the meaning out of the text. It's part of the fun.

It's part of the fun but kids doing part-readings in secondary and high school are often probably muddling through rather than getting an ear for the English. And my experience of unabridged performances of stuff I've never seen before is that I at times have to hang on with both hands. When I have other friends with me who aren't language nerds I sometimes wonder if they're losing some of the sense, or at least the fun.