What is Literary Fiction, Part 4

By Also · Feb 7, 2022 ·
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  1. This post and its series have been consolidated into and superseded by:

    https://www.writingforums.org/entry/literary-fiction-a-consolidated-practical-view.66349/

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    So we're in the process of looking at Literary Fiction through the contemporary book-trade definition of not conforming to the restrictions, expectations, conventions, etc, of Popular Fiction.

    The previous post outlined a number of the elements that shape Popular Fiction.

    It's really tempting to go through the differences in the order of their significance in Literary Fiction. For instance, LF is often defined outside LF circles as character-driven instead of plot-driven. And surely a preference for artful telling lies at the heart of LF culture. And plot is seldom paramount, serving instead as a backdrop on which to paint more interesting things. And literary fiction is often full of digressions and extended discourse on one topic or another. But it's probably less confusing (if not necessarily more enlightening) to go through the same reference points I used for Popular Fiction in the same order, to wit Length, Readership, Language, Showing, Resolutions, Characters, Plots, and Conventions-and-Templates.

    Length

    It's all over the place. Literary Fiction can be short when it wants to be. But it can also be long. Somerset Maugham's 1915 Of Human Bondage (now elevated to literature, of course) is 260,000 words. But wait—Herman Wouk's 1971 War and Remembrance is 443,000. Some would call W&R a war epic rather than literary (not that the two must be exclusive), and Wouk himself probably preferred that description. But by a contemporary definition, he's not Popular Fiction and is therefore Literary Fiction. (Though James Michener insisted on and rightly belongs to Popular Fiction even when surpassing the wordcounts of Wouk's war epics.)

    John Fowles was a golden boy of mid-1900s literary fiction, and his 1965 The Magus came in at 240,000 words. William Styron's 1979 Sophie's Choice was 245,000. Of course these were well-established authors in a time very different from our own, but literary readers do not in the least mind long works, as long as they find them well-written. Literary agents may be another matter.

    Readership

    Readers of literary fiction seek novelty and unconventionality. They have high reading levels regardless of formal education. They differ from archetypal readers of popular fiction in other ways that are best highlighted in reference to other elements downpost.

    Of course they may enjoy popular fiction as well, much the way some people enjoy both popular and cultural-legacy music, but they appreciate them for different qualities.

    Language

    Literary fiction tends to use more complex language than popular fiction. It tends to use a much larger vocabulary. Particularly John Fowles (1926-2005), William Styron (1925-2006), and Anthony Burgess (1917-1993) were known for sending readers to their dictionaries—and their readers loved encountering and learning these carefully descriptive mots justes. Unlike the archetypal reader of popular fiction who—and I've often seen this as well among writers in critique groups—expresses overt irritation at having to look up a word, the archetypal reader of literary fiction looks forward to the experience. More contemporary writers of literary fiction like Margaret Atwood are perhaps less prone to exotic vocabulary, but often delight with the complexity of their sentences and the elegance of their syntax.

    Literary language has as many moods as impressionist painting. It may be muted and subtle in one place, rhythmic and snappy in another… What it rarely is is artificially vivid in the way that some authors of popular fiction teach themselves to write counter to plain language.

    Lingering, even poetic descriptions that would undoubtedly be cut from a work of popular fiction are perfectly at home in literary fiction. Neither a sophisticated peer, an agent, nor an editor would cut such a thing if well-written. There's a high tolerance for stylized language and for authenticity of dialect—though a literary writer might be more inclined to describe dialect eloquently than to reproduce it literally.

    Literary readers follow a writer wherever he or she goes, as long as they're rewarded with delightful finds.

    Show-don't-tell and In-the-moment narration

    Artful telling is the essence of much literary fiction, supported with a sufficiency of showing. A typical literary reader does not need or want to see everything enacted. Indirect dialogue or a mixture of direct and indirect dialogue is common. The mood or larger meaning of a scene is often lost in its details. That's a difficult lesson for writers of popular fiction to learn when they attempt literary fiction. They've been taught to show as much as possible. Literary fiction simply does not do that often. When it does rely heavily on dialogue, it's often a distilled kind of dialogue, simpler than real life, in which smaller statements stand for larger meanings.

    Literary fiction often uses artful telling in indirect narration of periods of time. It may characterize the passage of time, it may use brief vignettes and the like… Such things are possible in popular fiction, but they're often mainstays of literary fiction. Literary readers enjoy learning about the essence of a period of time, or its effect on a character, in ways that simply cannot be conveyed by showing in detail. An analogy from painting is a semi-literal depiction of for instance a street scene, in which trees, people, houses, automobiles, etc, are still recognizable as themselves, but parts of the paper or canvas are blank, and the subjects are not so much literally depicted as characterized in lines and colors. Another analogy from painting would be a scene reflected off a wet sidewalk.

    Of course there are no true rules about literary fiction. For every characterization like this one, it's easy to find counter-examples. But artful telling, non-literal description, and more indirect dialogue are differences one commonly finds.

    Resolutions

    Literary fiction frequently has ambiguous resolutions that leave loose ends. Poignancy and authenticity to real life are two of the motivations for such an approach, and literary readers expect and welcome ambiguity's emotional complexity. Many literary readers are suspicious of traditional resolutions that tie everything up in a neat little bow.

    Characters

    Literary fiction is often described as character-driven narrative. That's both a simplification and an overgeneralization, but true in a sense. To overgeneralize about popular genre fiction, one can say that each of the common templates requires certain character-roles. The author then devises details to fill out the role of Hero Commencing A Journey, etc. Literary fiction more often begins with ideas of certain characters not devised to fill a role, just people with certain characteristics that interest the author, who then puts them together in his or her mind and imagines how they would interact authentically, in real life—not according to tropes or narrative models. Of course that's only a single approach. The point is that rules and models are usually not the guiding principle. If a literary author follows a template, expect to see impish things happen to the template. Mostly they try to make up things outside the run of the mill.

    Literary fiction is full of vicarious protagonists like Jay Gatsby in The Great Gatsby, and Sebastian Flyte (and his sister Julia as well, for that matter) in Brideshead Revisited, both stories in which the first-person narrator and nominal protagonist is not an active, story-shaping force but a witness to some story being driven by events and inexorability outside his control.

    Literary fiction can be principally about character, but it can also be principally about milieu or about something meta to the story.

    There are very few rules a literary writer is unwilling to break, or which a literary reader is unwilling to accept seeing broken.

    Plots

    If in popular fiction, everything else exists in service of plot, it's often accurate to say that in literary fiction, plot exists in service of everything else, or at least something else. In my impression, that's more often true than not. Plot in literary fiction is a trellis, a framework on which to hang something else—the something varies widely, but plot is rarely paramount. It merely needs to be serviceable to the real point of the novel or story, which is often to illustrate character.

    Religious painting is a good analogy. At least in theory, everyone knows the story of Jesus, particularly once he goes to Jerusalem. There are no plot surprises in religious paintings. If they tell a story, they lead to crucifixion and resurrection, or sometimes to Salome and John the Baptist, or to Delilah and Samson in the Temple. So for modern viewers, what is their point? The point is their details, the little pieces here and there. The plot point the painting illustrates is a pretext for the painting itself, and figures that at first glance appear incidental in such a painting may in fact be masterpieces in miniature.

    Plot as pretext explains much literary writing. Look for what the book is really about besides its synopsis.

    Literary writers may cut material when editing (don't we all?), but rarely because it "doesn't advance the action," the most common reason for cutting in a draft of popular fiction. The relationship of action to meaning is just not that simple. About any paragraph or passage, the appropriate question is "Does it add to or distract from the overall focus and impression?" A religious or other narrative painter would be unlikely to paint over a side figure merely because it didn't "advance the plot" of the visual narrative, but would do so in the interest of overall balance in the painting.

    Chekhovian parsimony rarely applies. Even the famously minimalist Ernest Hemingway deliberately included occasional details that went nowhere, and was dismissive of the Chekhovian edict.

    Digression is common in literary fiction, and literary readers love it when it's done well. They're curious to learn about things that a writer of popular fiction would consider incidental details; it's like opening the door to a room along a hallway and lingering for a moment to admire its interior. Extended discourse on a non-incidental detail is also common and accepted.

    Literary writers often explore forces other than interpersonal conflict, or even conflict at all, that can pull a chapter forward. Discovery is one such force. Suspense is another. Revelation is another. On the scale of the entire novel, there's often a traditional, if perhaps token or diversionary, quest or conflict to resolve. But be wary of looking for the meaning of the book in it.

    Conventions

    Literary readers are drawn to unconventionality. That's why they're reading often eccentric and "overlong" books far outside the stream of popular fiction. If a literary author follows for instance a genre convention, his or her intent is likely either to extend it or to parody it.

    It's hard for a literary author to constrain themself to convention. David Cornwell (1931-2020), better known as John leCarré, more-or-less did so for practice in a few short books, but then spectacularly broke out to invent the "literary spy thriller" with his much more complex Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and The Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley's People.

    Whatever conventional form a literary writer may choose to write in, it's likely to serve as a trellis for something larger and not necessarily of interest to an archetypal reader of the popular form.

    Conclusions

    Of course the "archetypal reader of popular fiction" and the "archetypal reader of literary fiction," and even the respective authors themselves, are hypothetical constructs. There are many real people who meet the definition of at least popular fiction's archetypal reader, who lack the reading level or interest to enjoy literary fiction, but there are also many whose reading taste extends across the full gamut or at least from popular or literary fiction to one of the middle points of upmarket or hybrid fiction.

    The point here is that there's not a single standard for "good storytelling" regardless of type. There are a number of ways in which what's good in popular fiction is not good in literary fiction, and vice versa. Each needs to be read on its own terms.
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