Within the past couple of weeks, four writers I’d thought genre authors have stated that they write literary fiction.
What does that mean to you, literary fiction? Do you think it exclusive or inclusive of genre tropes, spec fic elements, or story patterns usually found in genre?
For many hearing that, I suspect, the knee-jerk reaction is What a pretentious claim but that’s only if you assume that ‘literary fiction’ is superior to category fiction. (Or assume that the writers are claiming a superiority over everything else published.)
So what is literary fiction? On some lists, Anne Rice is now listed as literary fiction, but (speaking just for me) I find her fiction unreadably awful. At one time Norman Mailer was considered literary—superior—at least, according to criticism I read during the sixties, when I was a kid. A few years ago I saw him denigrated as a sixties hack.
I sometimes wonder if, to a person learning English, ‘literary fiction’ sounds like a redundancy. Yet we know what it means: the word ‘literary’ is supposed to signal works with merit superior to other types of reading. But what does that really mean, literary merit?
Definitions I see most often include the words Serious. Critically acclaimed. Dealing with universal dilemmas.
Writers can, and do, set out to write novels with those aims. They are published, they win awards.
I think that goal can also work against a writer when the urge to say something important supersedes the story. And this isn’t an issue confined to new writers; I can think of many authors who, on finding themselves famed and acclaimed, could not resist writing their one masterwork, the serious, important one that would stand as their greatest achievement . . .
And just about all those works are forgotten, while the one that gained them fame still persists: Mary Shelley, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Anthony Hope, Fanny Burney, just to name four whose great masterworks I tried in turn, to find them tedious, stodgy, dreary. Fanny Burney, in her attempt to reach the cerebral pinnacle of prose, forced her narrative voice from its natural, vivid and sprightly expression to tortured, long-windedly twee. The others could not resist stepping out from behind the story to earnestly lecture the reader on the verities of life.
Then again, someone can set out to write the literary novel, and it might languish at its time, but it ends up speaking to another generation. That certainly happened to Herman Melville, with Moby-Dick. Or a book might indeed speak to its generation, and then gradually slide from edgy to old-fashioned to quaint to no one reading it outside of college courses, except for the curious. I think Trilby, by du Maurier, fits this pattern.
Writers and books fall in and out of fashion . . . and so do the arbiters of taste in literary fiction. But I do think it’s interesting to delve into readers’ discussions now and in the past to see what they mean by literary.
It took me a long time to realise that ‘literary fiction’ is a genre. Before that insight, I had seen it as a mark of respect – books that are very well written (however you want to define that) would get the ‘literary fiction’ label. But that’s only part of it: yes, we do describe well-written books as ‘literary’ but the ‘genre’ part means that ‘litfic’ has its own conventions. Just as Romance has h/H meeting early and doubting their relationship and coming together at the end, and ‘mystery’ has a puzzle that is solved by the end, ‘litfic’ has its own set of conventions, of reader expectations.
Take, say, Alma Alexander’s ‘Midnight at Spanish Gardens’. She’s an SF writer, and the book has undoubtedly speculative elements – the whole plot hinges on supernatural beings and events – but it has very little in common with the majority of ‘genre SF’ novels: there’s no antagonist, no three-act structure, the characters don’t want anything (and certainly don’t get that thing at the end of the book), the world isn’t saved or even changed much, there’s no high concept…
At the same time, it deals with the personal stories of five people and how their lives intermesh – their _lives_ don’t change much, on the whole, the characters are a little wiser by the end (and the reader, at least this reader, spent an awful lot of time reflecting on life and the meaning thereof and choices, and…). What I’m trying to say here is that the book fits much more into the ‘literary’ genre in its scope, concerns, and reading protocols than it does into ‘genre sf’.
Personally, I feel that SF is becoming fairly narrow, and I welcome books that stretch the boundaries, that use different structures and stories, but I can also see that readers who expect a story of type x will be very disappointed to get a story of type y.
Good thoughts. I suspect that literary fiction did indeed evolve to mean ‘not that dime novel stuff’ –there was a term ‘highbrow’ used a lot when I was young. Not only about literature, but music, art, etc. The connotation was ‘for the elite.’ Highbrow and literary fiction were synonymous, as far as I could tell.
Midnight at the Spanish Gardens (what I read of it) is an interesting example–I have to admit I got bogged down. The book seemed to be trying to look at the complexity of character from the standpoint of litfic whose ‘action’ is all inward, but the prose veered solidly into genre, at least for me. I do mean to finish it, as it hinted at a numinous resolution, something I find all too rarely.
I was and wasn’t disappointed. (Alma is a friend, and I admire her writing skills greatly). I admit to stopping somewhere halfway and putting the book down because Nothing Much Happened, and the conflicts that are hinted at don’t [spoiler] get resolved in the timeline. I also had one ‘no, you can’t!!!!’ moment, which means the writer got it right.
Overall, it made me reflect a lot, and sent my mind spinning along ‘what-if’ tracks, and I will definitely re-read the book and ponder it again. I think this might be a book that will grow on me as I gain life experience, I don’t think I will ever love it, but my life is richer for reading it.
Which, overall, is very much a ‘literary fiction’ kind of experience.
For me it’s a bunch of different interrelated books – there is at least one I love, a couple I like, a couple that are meh. Not sure if it entirely succeeded, but it struck me as an experiment that was very much worth doing. Maybe that’s part of what makes it seem “literary”, that experimentalism.
I think even if books like this don’t succeed – or only succeed for a small number of readers – they’re exceedingly important, because they stretch the range of available books and challenge ‘how books should be written’. As a person who is exceedingly tired of the Hero’s Journey in thousands of repetitions (if I can work out what the book will be like by page five, I don’t want to read it) that matters to me – I want books to surprise me, to force me to read them in order to know the story.
in the interior monologue, i’ve been saying it is a genre. editors had very specific requirements and would reject complexity, of POV for an example…and for loads of other deviations. this term “lit fiction” might be all right now…but before some works were not good enough for the “literary editors” because such stories had weird or strong genre elements. now these are acceptable. the same thing in xian lit verses secular. a kind of catch 22–it won’t fit here nor there.
…and, then, there was “mainstream…”
Yeah. Weird elements seem to be all right if the book can be called magical realism, but NOT if it’s that lowbrow fantasy stuff.
One of the things that stands out in my memory of my time at Clarion West is Samuel Delany saying, “Literary is a genre.”
I think it has become one, yes.
I don’t think genre and literary are mutually exclusive, but I also think that being conscious of being “literary” is comparatively modern–say mid nineteenth century?
Fanny Burney was much earlier–and she seemed to be consciously trying to elevate her stories. Also, reading Sir Walter Scott’s introductions to his novels, and some memoirs, reminds me that the 1700s novel was basically about as raffish as stage plays. Novels were not “serious” like poetry. But a lot of those early novelists seemed to be aiming for what we would call literary chops.
When Bulwer Lytton rewrote his novels, he seems to have seen himself as the father of English Literature, writing books to endure . . . and Trollope, in his autobiography, placed him among the top six writers of that century. There was a change in how the novel was regarded going on from one end of the nineteenth century to the other, as far as I can tell.
Did you know that there’s a theory that Fanny Burney, who spent a summer living near the Austens, may have been the model for Mrs Eliot. At any rate, she apparently called her husband “caro sposo”!
Possible fact gleaned from (I think) Margaret Forster’s book on how marriage has changed over time.
I’ve seen caro sposo in a couple of memoirs, but still that’s a fascinating idea. Though Mrs. Eliot . . . Anne’s mother? Maybe Mrs. Elton? But I can’t believe Jane Austen, who certainly read and was influenced by Evelina, would do that to Fanny Burney. (Nor does Mrs. Elton jive with Fanny’s voice in her letters/journals, at least the early ones. Maybe her excruciatingly dull years at Court wrung all the sense of humor out of her? But she held her own at Talleyrand et al’s English ‘court’ which argues that she kept her wits . . .) Hmmm… puzzling!
I think of “mainstream” as a genre; “literary” often seems to be used as shorthand for “something you wouldn’t be ashamed to be seen reading on the bus.”
Heh! though in that, fashions change . . . I suspect it’s okay to be seen reading mysteries, frex. But pink and purple clinch romance covers? The book inside can be an excellent read, but those covers . . .
I don’t know, I would be pretty ashamed to be seen reading Lolita on the bus…
. . . by someone who’s never read the book? Because it’s brilliant, though the characters are all unpleasant. (Nabokov considered that a literary feature, almost a ‘must’.)
The majority have never read it, let’s remember, and for some reason, a fair portion of the ones who have miss that Humbert is an unreliable narrator, and take everything he says about that little temptress at face value (oy).
Nabokov and I have to agree to disagree about whether it’s a good thing to identify with characters…
Yep. I do love reading his essays, even if we are utterly different kinds of readers.
I feel that ‘mainstream’ has a different feel to it than ‘literary’ – ‘mainstream’, to me, implies ‘very broad appeal’, whereas ‘literary’ books are not afraid to experiment, to say ‘there may only be five hundred people on the planet who will love this, but by gods, they will LOVE it.’ Also, ‘literary’ includes books that are written as puzzles (rather than stories), which would not be mainstream at all. (Different reading protocol.)
Sherwood, I think you have a point about Fanny Burney. I remember how hard she tried with Camilla. Still a good story though.
Yep! And there were no editors in those days, so nobody to tell her, “Um, cut about ten gallons of Purple, and this will be much better. . .”
I think that perhaps this is collapsing two things: being Littachur, and being Serious. SF and fantasy writers who try to Lecture in their works without shedding the stigma of genre still can go to pot.
Littachur is probably a subset, not an exhaustive set of the Serious.
These are my thoughts.
Literary fiction seems to be made of the stuff that people (well, author and editor at least) *consciously hope* will become classics. Literary fiction stretches the boundaries into places that people find uncomfortable, whether it’s through the prose, the subject matter, the shape of the plot, the action/lack of action, or some combination of these things. And yes, “universal dilemma” or “truth” helps, although sometimes it seems the “universal thing” crops up in a strange case study scenario, and is not representative of how it will be experienced by the human race as a whole… (Statistics language creeps in!)
So, what about books that did not *aim* to be classics, but are so beloved that they become so, like Harry Potter (a genre/mainstream piece of work)? Are they honorary literary fiction? No; I think we resist putting them in that category. In the public’s mind, I think there is a difference between beloved classics (which endure popularly) and thought-provoking, thought-shaping classics (which end up in English classes and put the next generation to sleep, because the “revolutionary” ideas have permeated the culture and they are Difficult). Read for the reading’s sake, or read for analysis. Literary fiction leans heavily on the “needs analysis” side—not that this is a bad thing, but I don’t go looking for it often—perhaps once a year or every six months.
Caroline Stevermer’s “A College of Magics” and its sequels seem to straddle that genre/literary fiction boundary for me. It *is* awkward. It does make you think. The characters’ thoughts are so very different, and their choices are so difficult that you hurt for them. The books are difficult to understand, particularly in how they relate to each other (what ties them together?— The universe, and the college; but what else?) Should I meet anyone else who has read them, I would like to discuss them to sort out the material which needs unpacking to understand. Alas I do not think they are very popular, perhaps for these reasons…
I would venture to say that every writer wants their book to be remembered. And many, if not most, think their book is special stuff and has unique things to say. Also, what gets marked as genre can make a shift–as Tolkien did, and Anne Rice, and I think Jasper Fforde is also making that switch. Also . . . Harry Potter hit the world like a ton of bricks, but memorable in a generation or two? I wonder. My own prediction is that it’s going to be a lot like Trilby: the power was in it being the first fantasy to dazzle mainstream readers through kids. None of its elements are original, the characters are largely one dimensional, and the prose is pedestrian in places. But the combination was just right, and reached the world at the right time . . . as did Trilby.
I totally agree about Caroline Stevermer.
One inevitable thing I noticed during our Great Library Purge this summer was just how much literary fiction was weeded–stuff that was highly acclaimed at the time, but who are now authors that most folks today have never heard of. A.J. Cronin was among the first to go, for instance–and this came a year or so after the local public library pulled his works too. (Du Maurier has gone from both as well.)
I say that there is simply no way to write literary fiction if you’re shooting to become a classic on purpose–our mindset is not our parents’ is not our children’s, and certainly not generations beyond. We do all have universals, but the best we can do is write in the way that comes most naturally to us. After all, look how much American literature was regarded (and often derided) as “popular” when it was new: Cooper, Hawthorne, Clemens, Hemingway, and Faulkner all come to mind.
Yes. I doubt very much that Jane Austen thought her books would be read much beyond their immediate publication.
It’s also important to remember that “literary” is not a distinction of quality. That is to say, no one should feel bad for disliking a literary book. There’s a lot of writing out there, you’re not going to love it all.
Anyhow I define literary as being generally concerned with characters and their internal lives. Thus you can have literary SF and it would make sense as a crossover. But I also try not to get too worked up about definitions and genre categorizations; I spent too much time in college arguing about the definitions of “indie” that I now have little patience for assigning everything an appropriate classification. We all have a general sense of what literary means, of what SF means, and so on. You can argue over the finer points of their boundaries, but I’m going to be over here, moving on with my life. (I’m not speaking about this post by the way, which I took to be a reaction to people discussing genres.)
Good points. And definitions do change!
At VP, Uncle Jim accused me of being a literary cowbird in the midst of genre writers. Lovingly, of course. But as someone who went through an MFA program and felt entirely out of place due to my genre proclivities, I’d rather keep the genre label, thankyouverymuch.
Over time, I’ve come to see the distinction to be one about the primacy of audience reaction over writer intention. Most literary writers I know don’t care as much about what readers think as whether their lofty artistic goals are achieved, which shows, I think, in the plotting and such of many literary works. Not that they can’t be brilliant, but they lack any sort of reader-centricity and often deliberately eschew accessibility and the like.
I’ve also seen the opposite, but this is still a worthwhile distinction to make. I think it illustrates yet again just how many motivations, goals, and so forth writers have . . . and yet writers have no control over how readers will define their works. (Not to mention attribute motivations for their creation!)
Pesky readers!
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