Literary vs. Mainstream, in genre and out
david_de_beer linked to this fascinating riff about so-called literary fiction vs. science fiction, which includes some definitions of what many mean by "literary" and examples of what might be considered "literary science fiction." If you read the article, do take in the comments, though there are over a hundred. Most are short, and you won't want to miss the wisecrack about how adding "a novel" after a title (Frumiousb was talking about this very thing a week or two back) gains one five 'falutin' points. Then there is "teapunk"--which I would describe as "comedy of manners with the real emotions put in." Finally, you get the inevitable "X is literary, and Y is boring!" "No, Y is fabulous, and X is tedious!" duels, which are often really enlightening on people's viewpoints and tastes, even if they don't lead to any obvious conclusions.
What follows here are a few quick thoughts on what I identify as 'literary' (according to what I see as the generally accepted definition) as opposed to 'mainstream'--both of which are found in genre as well as outside.
First, I'm not going to go into style or prose--been there, and there are so many POVs--except to make a nod in the direction of 'mainstream' prose generally being considered easily accessible. Whether that means cliche-ridden or extraordinarily lucid, is up to the reader.
Mainstream Which can be found in all genres, including so-called literary. Mainstream I think of as accessible in story as well as in prose, perhaps even predictable. Easy to fall into, the pages keep turning. One may or may not find it forgettable, but one considers it a fun or fast read. Most everyone I know wants exactly that at times, and some readers want exactly that all the time--not just the Great Unwashed, but readers who are in their non-reading lives profoundly smart, sophisticated, with complicated lives and lethally important jobs. The latter two items may even explain why these readers open a mainstream book with relief, and leave the dense award winner "for another time" year after year.
Literary It's ironic because it used to mean 'pertaining to books'--which totally avoids the whole 'quality' question. When I was growing up, I saw constant references to highbrow and lowbrow, which developed into highbrow, middlebrow, and lowbrow. (I just loved the image of eyebrows jerked up to the hairline--you'd think that would be the descriptor for horror novels--in the middle of the forehead, and the lowering unibrow.) I asked my dad when I was about twelve what 'highbrow' meant, and he said, 'phony'. I knew what a phony was, it was someone who pretended to be something they weren't. Since I did that all the time at the playground (nowadays we'd call it cosplaying) I thought, woo, I'm a highbrow. But a year or two more of reading and I began to gain an idea of what was meant. Everyone seemed to agree that Gertrude Stein was highbrow, and Mickey Spillane was lowbrow. At school, you could do a book report on certain authors (those would be highbrow) but not others--including JRR Tolkien (fantasy was an automatic lowbrow). Where the total confusion came in was, who constituted middlebrow. Some said Michener, others tagged him as totally low. Truman Capote was middlebrow to some, highbrow to others, though I saw reviews after In Cold Blood came out that declared it was a disgusting pandering to lowbrow tastes.
I think my easy definition of literary is 'polysemous,' though I know that that can present problems of degree and definition. But, just as few ever appear to totally agrees on what is an archetype and what is a stereotype, though if you ask if people know what they are most hands go up, I hope that word will be taken as a generality.
What I'm going to throw down here are some aspects of novels that I think can divide either way.
Resolution. I think that one of the most powerful drives to storytelling is the human craving for resolution. A mainstream novel has resolutions big and small--they can be simple, they can be complicated, they can be incredibly tense. I think the literary novel veers away from resolution, and because some readers want their reading to mirror the muddle of real life, this becomes a virtue. A novel full of murky motivation, directionless conversation, meaningless actions, and a dangling ending seems a tour de force to some and a depressing, boring waste of trees to others.
I like resolution, but I like to feel it was earned. I feel cheated if there's a sense of deus ex machina, and I don't care for resolution being the reward for intense emotional suffering. (Many readers find that cathartic: heck, synedoche is built into our hindbrains, which we realize if we look at the history of human sacrifice. I tend to feel that because we don't believe in the efficacy of that any more, I find the "she suffered so extremely the entire kingdom was healed" stories to be a form of Mary Sue thinking. Again, there is a favored place for just such a story on many readers' shelves.)
Motivation In mainstream, characters tend to be . . . streamlined in motivation. In the simplest stories, each character has a single motivation, and crowds all have the same expression, reaction, and action--without being mobs. (Mob psychology being a different, and terrifyingly fascinating subject.) Those crowds are there as set decoration, and to serve as audience to the action. No one in these crowds has a mind, or a motivation, or an action of their own. In the science fiction stories I grew up with, there was always a 'science guy' who was ready and willing to lecture the heroes on science factoids, and to invent robots or futuristic machines out of tools in dad's garage, or the science lab at school, that the heroes then used to execute the action. The Science Guy didn't seem to have any hint of a private life. The heroes never asked their opinion on anything but science, yet supposedly they were friends with Science Guy.
Literary fiction tends to have such complicated motivation it can get murky, especially when there are pages and pages and pages of self-examination over one's complexity of emotional reactions to minutiae. Other times, the writer makes the reader work hard to gain clues to motivation, such as Hemingway's reporting on body language of characters, without letting the reader inside anyone's thoughts. Some books that are considered literary I find mainstream because everyone is predictably dysfunctional in ways I see over and over, as authors (consciously or unconsciously) dialog with one another.*
Meta-representation and levels of intent In the simplest mainstream novel, the narrative voice clues the reader what to think about the characters and sometimes about the story. The hero's "piercing eyes" are the instant clue that he's smart and a forceful character. The indolence and careless cruelty of the rich CEOs let us know that powerful business people are bad. A very easy example is, if the narrator tells you that a comet is flying toward Earth, then dives into the POVs of the characters, who have no idea about the comet about the strike. In a literary novel, meta-representation can be willfully tricky, or carefully neutral, depending on the characters to carry dramatic tension. By this I mean how the narrative voice lets you know things that the characters don't know.
Sometimes, when we agree with the implications of the narrative voice, we call such hints 'literary' while a reader who disagrees resents being told what to think. You can see that dividing line very sharply in Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials stories, for example. Cultural assumptions leap out when one reads very old novels that were invisible in their day. In a mainstream novel, the narrative voice seems unaware of cultural assumptions; often in a literary novel, these are examined in various ways, or at least highlighted.
Levels of intent can be the fun part of storytelling, especially as we get older. This is tied tightly with motivation, emotion, and reaction, but the levels come in with our recognition of who knows what. Part of the pleasure of reading is our cognitive adaptation--our trying on different states of mind, without having actual responsibility for them. What can intensify that (but we need to learn how to do it) is when we start keeping track of who knows what. Lisa knows that Brian is aware of Tom's secret hankering for Lisa, but Tom isn't aware that Brian knows, and Brian isn't sure how much Lisa is aware of. So the story can turn on Tom's and Brian's conversation with Lisa, in which exchanges have several meanings below the surface. Mainstream novels usually only go to one or two levels, maybe three. Seldom beyond that. Literary novels can get quite complicated, both with complex levels of knowledge, and with how they are conveyed.
Okay, I think this has gotten long enough--and anyway my timer went off ten minutes ago. Gotta get to work, but I hope someone will want to talk this stuff over. I just love thinking about it.
*I remember a story that was highly lauded one year in genre, back in the eighties. This story was considered highly literary--it had no resolution, and all the characters were motivated by a mixture of cynicism and sexual desire, with a heavy implication of "that's all there is." A number of writers all seemed from this distance to be writing versions of that story for the next six or seven years, and admiring one another for so doing.)
What follows here are a few quick thoughts on what I identify as 'literary' (according to what I see as the generally accepted definition) as opposed to 'mainstream'--both of which are found in genre as well as outside.
First, I'm not going to go into style or prose--been there, and there are so many POVs--except to make a nod in the direction of 'mainstream' prose generally being considered easily accessible. Whether that means cliche-ridden or extraordinarily lucid, is up to the reader.
Mainstream Which can be found in all genres, including so-called literary. Mainstream I think of as accessible in story as well as in prose, perhaps even predictable. Easy to fall into, the pages keep turning. One may or may not find it forgettable, but one considers it a fun or fast read. Most everyone I know wants exactly that at times, and some readers want exactly that all the time--not just the Great Unwashed, but readers who are in their non-reading lives profoundly smart, sophisticated, with complicated lives and lethally important jobs. The latter two items may even explain why these readers open a mainstream book with relief, and leave the dense award winner "for another time" year after year.
Literary It's ironic because it used to mean 'pertaining to books'--which totally avoids the whole 'quality' question. When I was growing up, I saw constant references to highbrow and lowbrow, which developed into highbrow, middlebrow, and lowbrow. (I just loved the image of eyebrows jerked up to the hairline--you'd think that would be the descriptor for horror novels--in the middle of the forehead, and the lowering unibrow.) I asked my dad when I was about twelve what 'highbrow' meant, and he said, 'phony'. I knew what a phony was, it was someone who pretended to be something they weren't. Since I did that all the time at the playground (nowadays we'd call it cosplaying) I thought, woo, I'm a highbrow. But a year or two more of reading and I began to gain an idea of what was meant. Everyone seemed to agree that Gertrude Stein was highbrow, and Mickey Spillane was lowbrow. At school, you could do a book report on certain authors (those would be highbrow) but not others--including JRR Tolkien (fantasy was an automatic lowbrow). Where the total confusion came in was, who constituted middlebrow. Some said Michener, others tagged him as totally low. Truman Capote was middlebrow to some, highbrow to others, though I saw reviews after In Cold Blood came out that declared it was a disgusting pandering to lowbrow tastes.
I think my easy definition of literary is 'polysemous,' though I know that that can present problems of degree and definition. But, just as few ever appear to totally agrees on what is an archetype and what is a stereotype, though if you ask if people know what they are most hands go up, I hope that word will be taken as a generality.
What I'm going to throw down here are some aspects of novels that I think can divide either way.
Resolution. I think that one of the most powerful drives to storytelling is the human craving for resolution. A mainstream novel has resolutions big and small--they can be simple, they can be complicated, they can be incredibly tense. I think the literary novel veers away from resolution, and because some readers want their reading to mirror the muddle of real life, this becomes a virtue. A novel full of murky motivation, directionless conversation, meaningless actions, and a dangling ending seems a tour de force to some and a depressing, boring waste of trees to others.
I like resolution, but I like to feel it was earned. I feel cheated if there's a sense of deus ex machina, and I don't care for resolution being the reward for intense emotional suffering. (Many readers find that cathartic: heck, synedoche is built into our hindbrains, which we realize if we look at the history of human sacrifice. I tend to feel that because we don't believe in the efficacy of that any more, I find the "she suffered so extremely the entire kingdom was healed" stories to be a form of Mary Sue thinking. Again, there is a favored place for just such a story on many readers' shelves.)
Motivation In mainstream, characters tend to be . . . streamlined in motivation. In the simplest stories, each character has a single motivation, and crowds all have the same expression, reaction, and action--without being mobs. (Mob psychology being a different, and terrifyingly fascinating subject.) Those crowds are there as set decoration, and to serve as audience to the action. No one in these crowds has a mind, or a motivation, or an action of their own. In the science fiction stories I grew up with, there was always a 'science guy' who was ready and willing to lecture the heroes on science factoids, and to invent robots or futuristic machines out of tools in dad's garage, or the science lab at school, that the heroes then used to execute the action. The Science Guy didn't seem to have any hint of a private life. The heroes never asked their opinion on anything but science, yet supposedly they were friends with Science Guy.
Literary fiction tends to have such complicated motivation it can get murky, especially when there are pages and pages and pages of self-examination over one's complexity of emotional reactions to minutiae. Other times, the writer makes the reader work hard to gain clues to motivation, such as Hemingway's reporting on body language of characters, without letting the reader inside anyone's thoughts. Some books that are considered literary I find mainstream because everyone is predictably dysfunctional in ways I see over and over, as authors (consciously or unconsciously) dialog with one another.*
Meta-representation and levels of intent In the simplest mainstream novel, the narrative voice clues the reader what to think about the characters and sometimes about the story. The hero's "piercing eyes" are the instant clue that he's smart and a forceful character. The indolence and careless cruelty of the rich CEOs let us know that powerful business people are bad. A very easy example is, if the narrator tells you that a comet is flying toward Earth, then dives into the POVs of the characters, who have no idea about the comet about the strike. In a literary novel, meta-representation can be willfully tricky, or carefully neutral, depending on the characters to carry dramatic tension. By this I mean how the narrative voice lets you know things that the characters don't know.
Sometimes, when we agree with the implications of the narrative voice, we call such hints 'literary' while a reader who disagrees resents being told what to think. You can see that dividing line very sharply in Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials stories, for example. Cultural assumptions leap out when one reads very old novels that were invisible in their day. In a mainstream novel, the narrative voice seems unaware of cultural assumptions; often in a literary novel, these are examined in various ways, or at least highlighted.
Levels of intent can be the fun part of storytelling, especially as we get older. This is tied tightly with motivation, emotion, and reaction, but the levels come in with our recognition of who knows what. Part of the pleasure of reading is our cognitive adaptation--our trying on different states of mind, without having actual responsibility for them. What can intensify that (but we need to learn how to do it) is when we start keeping track of who knows what. Lisa knows that Brian is aware of Tom's secret hankering for Lisa, but Tom isn't aware that Brian knows, and Brian isn't sure how much Lisa is aware of. So the story can turn on Tom's and Brian's conversation with Lisa, in which exchanges have several meanings below the surface. Mainstream novels usually only go to one or two levels, maybe three. Seldom beyond that. Literary novels can get quite complicated, both with complex levels of knowledge, and with how they are conveyed.
Okay, I think this has gotten long enough--and anyway my timer went off ten minutes ago. Gotta get to work, but I hope someone will want to talk this stuff over. I just love thinking about it.
*I remember a story that was highly lauded one year in genre, back in the eighties. This story was considered highly literary--it had no resolution, and all the characters were motivated by a mixture of cynicism and sexual desire, with a heavy implication of "that's all there is." A number of writers all seemed from this distance to be writing versions of that story for the next six or seven years, and admiring one another for so doing.)