There’s a difference, I think, between “Literary fiction”, “literary” fiction and literature.
‘Literary fiction’ is a term to guide a market for novels. Typically that market prefers stories about the internal struggles of characters. Typically the story will allow significant scope for readers to work out the gaps or develop their own interpretations.
Whereas, from experience I’d say ‘Literary’ novels tend to be those where particular significance is given to textual/written-word features.
And as for “Literature” well – like many I went on a bit of journey and a love/hate relationship with that and the other phrases here, and it was probably a fairly typical one…
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I once went looking for a book, sometime around 1990. I was exhausted from travels across the Australian outback and on the horizon loomed a town that had the first bookshop we’d seen in days.
It wasn’t a big shop but ‘what kind of book are you looking for…?’ came pretty quickly to test whether stinky traveller was likely to be a browser rather than a buyer. It hadn’t been an especially literary-friendly bit of the gap year. Getting out books in the last place had been met with drunken drawls of ‘yous lot all poofters then?’ from the bloated and blistered b-league Croc Dundees.
But, I steeled myself and dug deep for my beliefs. ‘Literature’ I said to the bookseller. I’d done my BA and was applying for PhD and it was the only term I had. I noticed his scowl and had some names of canonical classics to help the description, and added, hopefully, ‘or their modern equivalent…’ The response was ‘for the modern equivalent you’d best come back in fifty years.’
It’s only thirty years, but I’m still not confident in plucking an equivalent of Swift or Austen or Hardy out from the material published between ‘85 and ‘95. There’s famous people, sure. There’s weighty books that intellectuals like to have on their bookshelves and scratch their chins over. There’s a wide-spread feeling that writing as a craft, art or science is now the best it’s ever been. Novels that won prizes and readers and are still bought and enjoyed from that period. But in my mind as a naïve young thing with books on the brain, it wasn’t just a read that I wanted. It was Literature.
Printed fiction has for generations helped form the dialogues between society and its individuals. Much of what was once enjoyable to many and promised to be memorable is now recollected by but a few. Careers teaching “literature” are based around keeping some of the little-read publications alive – from the eighties as with any other period. It feels to me though that the inevitable fragmentation and proliferation of taste tribes has led us to a world where literature as we may once have defined it has no relevance – perhaps no meaning.
So what are you “Literature”? I know what Eagleton has to say, I know how book groups work it out, I know what creative writing classes want us to believe and I know what degree courses were teaching in the eighties and how teaching colleagues are encouraged to frame it now. Some deny literature. Some doubt literature. Some believe.
I used to believe in it too – I think. Or at least I believed in The Classics and somehow equated the two.
Classics stand as the early moves in one direction or another, clever departures that spawn followers and get accepted as milestones in history. The test of time is the key and the directional zigzagging of society’s fickle tastes.
I used to believe that a great book would always be a great book. I used to keep myself happy believing, like Jude the Obscure, that there were books you had to read and they were the key to some magical sense that the world was a good thing and was developing in the right way. These were Literature and it was a finite if impossibly large world with kindly gatekeepers that had only allowed the best things in.
(I also used to believe that politicians and the heads of industry had achieved their positions of power because they deserved them that they were competent and had displayed special gifts. And I believed that publishing was an industry that worked in the favour of a gradual refining and ultimate perfection of literature… oh dear!)
Of course I know now that what’s a Classic for one generation may have vanished for the next. But there was a time when it seemed there was a collectible set of the must-reads and the must-knows. Literature. For a child who wanted to write, and then a bumbling disaffected adolescent who wanted to write, classics and literature and literary works were something to cling to in a turbulent world of rivalrous authors, absent readers and sneering publishers.
Unaware of the mutability of that goddess Literature, I was one of those who felt a need to join the quest to write “literary” works, and for no other reason than that seemed the best possible goal, one that was the most valuable to the sanctity of the collective written word.
I left seven-years of literary study, pondering classics in poetry and prose, with the sense that I would then have everything necessary to (1) know what a good literary work was and (2) to replicate that model with my own enlightened ideas and twists.
Oh dear!
I’m still not sure I can use the term ‘literary’ without bushing and mumbling.
One turning point on the grand road to enlightenment came when I recognised that literature was not a goddess and that storytelling was a noble science, that words could be slaves not masters and that reaching out to others was more rewarding than pleasing yourself. And as that clicked into place I got a slightly improved notion of what ‘literary’ might mean and came across that mysterious term ‘literary fiction’
So, what is literary fiction?
‘Literary’ has had a bit of a boom. It has some snobbery around it and it’s applied to all sorts. But when I have to answer a question like – what are you writing? – or – what’s your stuff like? – we’re supposed to puff out the phrase ‘literary’ because the other options are crime or romance or noir or YA. But, as with any dodgy inflatable, you’re as likely to sink with it as to swim. Leaky, full of holes – how do you use the term ‘literary’ novel? And can you use it without mumbling and blushing.
The way I’ve heard it used, there seems to be something about “literary” when applied to fiction that is different from when “literary fiction” is used in the marketplace.
For works after about 1895, “Literary” works might reveal themselves as those where a reader’s attention is expected to fall to some extent on the written word.
If poetry is the untranslateable in literature, literary works are the unfilmable in fiction.
If, when you’re telling a story, you’re aiming to conjure a stream of pictures/smells/sounds into the mind of the reader, you are normally advised never to draw attention to the writing or writerly techniques. There are many different places on the scales of emotional and intellectual value that this kind of material could hit – it could be serious it could be lengthy it could be political it could be primally evocative.
If we’re approaching something as literary though, there is – I believe – an expectation that the words, the stuff of literature, are (1) important and (2) expected to be perceived as such.
This still gives a very wide scope of course. Words might be notable because they are poetic, descriptive, newly arranged, broken, devised to follow Anglo-Saxon verse rules, backwards, mellifluous, esoteric etc. I’d argue that they are a primary feature of ‘literary works’ though and secondary or even absent in ‘other written works.’
It doesn’t mean that those words are or should be difficult to read. Some of the worst (and first) literary efforts are simply too busy trying to communicate nothing to no-one except the message of “see how clever I am – you’ll never share my top-dog view of the word.”
But those who go to ‘literary’ texts are likely to be there because words charm us and because we respect the use of them. We like to find them used in new ways. We like to take them on board and play with them ourselves. As Winterson hopes to convince us in her preface to later additions of Oranges, what was good about the book wasn’t its warmth, it was its new way with words.
Trouble is these things don’t just work on their own and Winterson’s insistence that she “doesn’t do middles” conflicts with a number of best senses of what a good story is. (Again, we need to wonder whether content or form have a part to play in any understanding of this tricky term.)
You mean, “literary” works don’t have a story?
Hang on – I didn’t say that. At least I didn’t say it and mean it… or rather, that was probably what we were taught in literature degrees long ago and what as a wannabe intellectual you’d like to believe. But I don’t think it’s true.
Could that whole idea – common to university courses in my day – even be a hang-over from some moment of Modernist madness early in the twentieth century. Just as someone sly and believable told everyone that paintings were only intellectually viable if they broke free of representation, at which point the world instantly said yes please Picasso and no thank-you Sorolla, someone hinted that stories were not what literary texts were about. Experiments with words took over from the building of satisfying narrative, with satisfactions coming instead from an “oh now I get it!”
The sharp end of these experiments in literature may be notorious to elite readers, especially those with university literature backgrounds. They’re literary all right, so literary it’s painful. But they don’t seem not to have majorly altered the society with whom they were supposed to be having the dialogue – or its literary tastes. Even the ‘experimental’ prize winners today aren’t publishing particularly heavy experiments. The experiments with word form and estoteric structures now largely find their way into odd passages for special effect rather than informing a whole piece. Either that or they’re books that don’t get any readers and sit dusty and proud of the fact.
Literary fiction, then, doesn’t (necessarily) mean that it’s at the cutting edge of new ways to produce narrative or new ways to display the written word.
So, what is “literary fiction”?
“Literary fiction” is easier as it’s a practicable industry term. It’s the term used by buyers, agents and all the mentors and gatekeepers who prosper on the dark business of placing writing in the public domain and vying for popularity.
“Literary fiction” for many is a binary opposition to “genre fiction”
“Literary fiction” – when approaching an agent or publisher or when proclaimed at a drinks party or stated at the introductions to creative writing classmates – is… is what?
- Literary fiction is serious.
- Literary fiction means I’m not bound by the rules.
- Literary fiction shows I’m intellectual.
- Literary fiction means I don’t just tell stories.
- Literary fiction gives me permission to have no readers.
- Literary fiction shows I’m really a philosopher and a poet.
- Literary fiction means you wouldn’t get me.
- Literary fiction shows I’m valuable.
What will an agent/reader want from literary fiction?
Often if your book is standalone, if it’s meant to be read without a smile, if it has more thoughts than deeds from the characters then it could be called literary fiction for that purpose.
But hang on:
This seems to suggest that there is a higher proportion of intellectual engagement expected than with other books.
It may also suggest that this intellectual engagement will be at the expense of some of the likely emotional engagement.
This seems to play too far into the hands of po-facedness and an excuse for suppressing emotional reactions to art as unworthy.
Surely this is not the case. We read stories rather than histories because they work on the intellect and the emotion. If we wanted to understand intellectually what psychologies are at play in a love triangle, or what the repercussions of autistic solitude are, then there are journal articles galore. We can read or watch the results of intellectual investigations into anything.
Yet we still want stories.
Why? Because we want the emotional as well as the intellectual force they bring.
Is Literary Fiction a genre then?
Literary fiction is used as a term by publishers, reviewers and visitors to book stores so, at some level, it’s used in place of other words that would be called “genres.”
Is it its own genre or is it somehow ‘outside genre’? Or maybe it really is the opposite to genre.
If it’s a genre, that makes it part of a contract with the reader. A promise to deliver.
Genres – as Storygrid tells us constantly in an effort to get the world back into storytelling after the poison of ‘storytelling isn’t the most important thing’ – genres are what people go to a book for, and a ‘story that works’ is a story that satisfies the readers who know they usually enjoy that particular kind of book.
Genre gives us a sense of the values that are at stake. Genre tells us what ‘pay off’ we can expect for the set up. It often tells us what emotions we can expect to feel. It often tells us what atmosphere and characterisation we can expect.
The trouble is that if literary fiction is its own genre or defies it – if it is in binary opposition to ‘genre fiction’ then this suggests that thriller or romance plots/characters/atmospheres/payoffs are less well-written or that they are not intellectually stimulating – even that they are in some way written by people who cannot write in ‘literary’ ways and by association that means in educated ways, finely-crafted ways, conscientious and careful ways.
Surely Coyne’s demonstration of equally impressive grids for Silence of the Lambs and for Pride and Prejudice says something very meaningful in answer to that suggestion. As do the salaries of professional storytellers scripting our favourite on-screen dramas.
The usefulness of the words we use for genre – romance, fantasy, horror, western, sci-fi, coming-of-age, thriller, war, society – is that it’s shorthand for an experience you can expect and to some extent depend on. This is the shelf it goes on in the library.
Does ‘literary’ have the same useful elevator pitch succinctness and accuracy as those other words?
Perhaps not. There are hundreds of historic examples of literary romance, literary coming-of-age, literary war and literary saga or society novels, particularly from before 1910 but also after it: Siege of Krishnapur, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Possession, Atonement.
Does the ‘literary’ tag stand the test of ‘reality’ versus ‘non-reality’ as a setting? Have we accepted some books into a literary club simply because one reality feels more of an intellectual’s territory: grimly political works based on true stories taking precedence over the fantastical inventions of one brain? Are we less likely to welcome into a literary-novels-only club anything that also has the dust on their feet from a trip through the worlds common in fantasy, horror and western?
There are those clamouring to make the claim and change the attitude. We’re more likely to accept literary crime of late – also literary sci-fi, and many would claim that sci-fi has invites some of the most intellectual ‘mind-bending’ authors and interests. Distopian fiction has become its own flourishing genre with literary roots that include 1984. Was Brokeback Mountain a story for the literary western genre?
New claims for what’s allowed to be tagged as literary seem to show more than ever that it’s not a genre but instead is a kind of hallmark of style and substance.
It’s also a dodgy hallmark. We know that to align with ‘Literary fiction’ requires poo-pooing Agatha Christie and Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Steven King. It’s likely to require sniffiness in the presence of Philip K Dick, Mario Puzo, Thomas Harris and many others whose well-crafted and intelligently delivered fiction fails to have the right bow-tie to enter the club.
Norman Friedman’s Forms of the Plot has set down a reasonably solid platform for genre. And ‘literary’ offers a characteristic that is not a sense of setting, character or obligatory scenes.
If I enjoyed a literary novel that centred on a difficult society love triangle and the status issues it provoked what is my next read? Is it another novel advertising itself as literary? Will that scratch the same itch? Or am I better looking for another love and society novel that has been stamped as quality in one way or another [and being labelled ‘literary’ is not the only way]?
‘Literary fiction’ may be more of a sensibility than a comment on genre or genre-freeness.
I need two separate terms then. I need literary or its opposite. Then I need genre. A literary romance, a literary coming-of age. But what is its opposite? Those who are in the poo-pooing camp would probably feel as I did in my days as a book-hunting traveller, that the opposite is something pejorative – ‘popular’ ‘populist’ ‘common-or-garden’ ‘pulp’ ‘mass-market’ – after a while, literary is not a term for finding an enjoyable read but one which works like exclusive fashion brands as a status marker for those who are lost and lonely and confused by the need both to belong and to be understood as superior, acknowledged by society but somehow above it.
Snobbery may be the word.
And so… literary fiction is…?
To sum up, there’s a term ‘literary’ which means ‘about words/letters’ and that in its purest and most helpful use is, for me, to describe a novel in which the words themselves are used consciously and conscientiously as part of the appeal.
This isn’t to say that it is a use of special words, but that the fabric (literally – aka the ‘text’ as in ‘textile’) of the work is of value to the effect being sought. This is different, I believe, from works that are more agnostic in the transportation of the ideas and there are plenty of great stories that know they could just as easily be great tv mini-series.
And don’t get me wrong. We love and admire that kind of writing more than any other. Writing that makes you forget the words and makes you feel you could be just bathing in cinema’s richness or tv’s bingey-ness are amazing. It’s tough to write anywhere near well enough to get that effect.
We’re surely doing it more and more, too. I’d be interested to see research outcomes that had investigated how writing styles had changed during the evolution of cinema. We know that in the visual arts, realism and strictly observational practice became less popular at the high-finance high-brow end when photography became increasingly accessible. Have writers become more likely to write what they imagine a filmic treatment would look like? Do readers expect this more? I don’t know of research being done for this, but I’m sure many would be interested in what it told us.
Am I writing literary fiction? – a quick test
I sit down now with people and we wonder if we’re writing literary fiction – if that’s what we’ll tell people who ask, or agents who didn’t ask but still have to get our stuff and send it back as part of the whirligig.
Answer the following and make up your own mark scheme – then add some questions of your own.
- Mine is a work of
- largely internal plot arcs and turning points
- physically manifested plot arcs and turning points
- My protagonists’ wants and needs are
- at the pointy end of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: self-actuation, self-transcendence
- at the wide end of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: food, security,
- My characters have
- troubling moral dilemmas
- enemies
- My characters
- Explore the fluidity of Mars/Venus characteristics
- Are beefy guys/gals helping vulnerable beauties.
- My action scenes have
- Passive aggressive moodiness
- Car chases, prat falls and spatter fests
- When I write I wear
- A black polo-neck
- A Star Wars t-shirt
Etc. But by writing a few quiz questions of that sort – humourous or serious – it might help you find your own balance-point on the see-saw.
If you’re writing literary fiction, you’re not necessarily expecting to write ‘literature’, but if your using it as a term be prepared to also use supplementary genre phrases, romance, coming-of-age, society etc.
I’d argue that ‘literary’ informs us more properly of sensibility, and has a scale of sensibilities that might go from quietly serious to rip-roaring.
Intelligent writing though, that’s something else.
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