Literary, the classics, and how pragmatic is that for the rest of us?
December 21, 2011 10 Comments
The classics were commercial genre in their day. I’m imagining myself pretty out there with such a claim, but I’m hunting for the exception. For example, Melville was Van Gogh’s literature. He wrote about working stiffs, in a day when more institutionally respected writers wrote about God and king. There probably are exceptions to my observation, but I’m guessing those exceptions are modern anomalies.
This brings us to the form ordained for greatness, literary. One’s book cannot become a classic without being literary, can it? And yet, I repeat, I can’t think of many classics that weren’t pushing back the favorite literary forms of their day, and that thought goes all the way back to the bawdy houses of Shakespeare. My assertion that yesterday’s commercial genre is how the classics were made, seems to confront all the assumptions that literary is superior. I kind of like banging that drum, not because of what it says about pipe-smoking professors wearing cardigan sweaters, but because of what it says about the potential within genre literature; more on that later.
Let’s look at a common definition of this thing called literary: ‘Literary fiction is a term that came into common usage during the early 1960s. The term is principally used to distinguish “serious fiction” which is a work that claims to hold literary merit, compared to genre fiction and popular fiction. In broad terms, literary fiction focuses more upon style, psychological depth, and character. This is in contrast to mainstream commercial fiction (what I’m loosely calling genre in this post), which focuses more on narrative and plot. Literary fiction may also be characterized as lasting fiction (destined to be the source of future classics).’
Now, let’s just take a moment to look at all the assumptions in that definition. First, the definition starts off with circular reasoning. Literary is serious fiction and has merit. Why? Well, because the way it is written has more merit than any other way of working, and therefore is serious. This means genre fiction is not serious and has no merit, or at least by comparison. Those who are serious, and who have merit, claim it so from the bell towers.
We are also told that literary fiction can be identified as having style, psychological depth and focus on characters. Oh, and if it has significant plot, that’s a big no-no.
As a writer, this kind of pompous crap just blows me away because it has been a very long time since I’ve thought it optional to neglect the very basics of good story. You should have great style, internal depth and vivid characters in every story. It isn’t optional.
There are two silly positions born from this claptrap. One is the assertion that one writing form holds ownership over style, psychological depth and characterization. Some on the other side suggest that, as a genre writer, there’s a pass on these concerns if the external plot is interesting. The latter I hate even worse than the former because it dumbs down our work and gives the critics all the excuse they need to continue with the claims that literary is “serious fiction” worthy of “classic status,” someday, and by comparison, our work isn’t, in spite of the fact that nearly everything ever declared a classic was genre in its day.
I’m reminded of a very nice lady in one of my writers groups several years back. I told her, “You know, you need to decide what your story is about, given it is leaning several directions. I suggest a romance, considering the type of relationships you are spending all your time building in the first fifty pages.”
Her response was an aghast, “Oh no! I’m writing literary.”
This sort of assumed superiority of form leaves me feeling a little insulted, but we genre writers are used to that, and the lady didn’t have a mean bone in her body.
If you put a couple of romantic scenes in a book that obviously screams for them, you’ve somehow reduced yourself to the slag-heap of poor writers by writing a romance and joining half the bookstore’s inferior commercial offerings. In the minds of some, that’s unconscionable. But I ask: what about a couple of romantic scenes automatically make it trivial literature lacking in style, depth and characterization, even though everything else in the work is supposedly literary? God forbid I should have suggested making a main character a vampire. That would have doomed it, regardless of the style, depth and characterization. Give it a better plot, and off with her head. Let’s be real, a moment, here. Did Moby Dick have a plot? It did? Oh, never mind.
About Gary Wedlund
The no no of the plot explains a heck of a lot about one of my creative writing classes. *facepalm* Good grief.
Frankenstein is read in many literature courses. It’s often called a classic, and it’s science fiction. The Brontes, Cervantes and Jane Austin wrote romance, Poe wrote horror and Oscar Wilde did as well. These are all ‘classic’ authors. Many classics are technically romances, but the term romance has become to mean a formulaic love story, because of the narrow framework demanded by many romance publishers. Try selling a love story without an alpha male hero. God forbid the hero or heroine should stray.
MacBeth was about witches and prophesy. Hamlet was a ghost story. Hawthorn gets no credit for the fantastic horror he wrote (Young Goodman Brown). Poe wrote science fiction (Descent into the Maelstrom). Now that I think of it, Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and others had the ring of James Michener about them.
I think you are on to something. I really can’t thing of a classic that wouldn’t fit onto a genre shelves at the bookstore if written today.
Maybe some Dickens (though we know he wrote ghost stories too.)
Perhaps if your vampire was a survivor of incest – had suppressed it for years and then went back to his old stomping grounds and faced up to how his past contributed to who he is today, then that would make it literary.
I don’t know, but that would be an awesome internal problem. Add to it his own need to victimize others in order to survive. Wow. Maybe I need to get writing.
Having been with the English Department at OSU, I have seen and argued this with professorial types. The determination of ‘Literature’ is a matter of elitism and academic power. If you need someone to decipher the meaning of the text, it means job security to the priests of the word. It worked for lawyers, so why not literature critics? The sixties was also when progressive/liberal thought took over the colleges. The liberal/progressive professors were just coming onto the campuses durimg the fifties and attrition gave them leading positions in the sixties. The idea that art would be done for money, that commercial success could have artistic merit, was antithetical to the higher goals of the collective. Money and capitalism was dirty, man. Peace and love and seeking your inner guru was where it was at. Once in, it kind of stuck.
Some will indicate it’s the content and theme that can boost ‘genre’ works to classic staus. In any case, I think for a writer, it depends on the audience they’re targeting. Will Harry Potter be deemd a classic in the sense that A Tale of Two Cities is often touted? Probably not. But the readership of the Potter series, especially today, certainly dwarfs that and many other ‘classics’, even if they are required reading at the high school or university level.
I write my stories and novels to entertain the reader, and yes, there’s always a plot. Guess that gets me nixed for the next Nobel Prize for Literature.
I think you’re onto something, Terry. The means of evaluating seem to have changed.
For example, I’m currently watching a movie about horror films, and two of the films getting some play are the Shining and Carrie. The combination of popular appeal and crossing over to film, to me, basically make it hands-down that Stephan King has a classic in the box when the day is done. In fact, with Carrie I can point to a lot of dimensions across which that’s a special product worth study and longevity. And yet, those in the know suggest King is a hack, dismissed, without an ounce to time spent on the subject, nor a need to explain why.
I think that as time goes on, those in the know will have less and less influence upon the ultimate status because they will be swamped by the multitude of new avenues of appreciation. One thing we should all accept about art is how works that are evaluated have continually enjoyed new sources of validation. Long ago, the Church told us what was acceptable. Just last week, a writer was executed by a foreign tribunal because he’d messed with the system.
I want to give academia an excuse, though. They are given the mandate to teach certain concepts, and often an additional mandate to promote social concerns (fair enough). If pressed for time (15 weeks and 30 students) what do you want to bang into the heads? I know what I’d bang into the heads if I only had time to communicate one concept: Deep characterization. In that sense, they’re perfectly on target, bringing me to the most important component of my post. Instead of worrying too much about what they are doing, we genre writers need to listen to what they’re saying. My point all along is that all good literature needs style and deep characterization; these things do not belong to them. They belong to us all. And, come to think of it, that’s why Carrie is a classic.
Aperpication for this information is over 9000-thank you!
J0cTcD prgelzzkrimd
bDZ2mx agkornpyelic