Hallo, wonderful people, it’s been a slightly rough week. My guts and I got into a disagreement. But I got out of work early on Friday, and no work on Monday! That’s pretty fantastic! We’re probably going to spend Monday emptying the garage, which is less fantastic, but it’s a thing that has to be done.
Also I’m reading the second Witcher book of stories? And while I sort of appreciate it and really like parts of it, I don’t know if I want to do this entire series? Just a thought.
Anyway this is a thought I had last week while reading Writing Fiction by Janet Burroway and the Stuckey-Frenches (that sounds like a terrible band).
[If you want the full effect of this essay, you’ve got say “literary fiction” in your head with a tone quite similar to the one Jim Sterling uses when saying “Triple-A game industry.” Just a tip.]
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Literary Fiction and Misery
Part of the problem I’ve always had with “literary fiction” is how miserable it often is.
Alright I know we’ve done this before but let’s give out a definition of “literary fiction” that isn’t just “It’s the stuff you read in high school English class.”
“Literary fiction” is, in the words of those who really like it, character-driven fiction featuring realistic people and scenarios. That’s… not a great definition, because so much of all fiction is character-driven nowadays--just imagine a fantasy or science-fiction novel without a clear character arc published now, and all the criticism that would come from it--and a lot of crime, historical, and mystery fiction rolls on “realistic scenarios.” In the back of Writing Fiction, the appendix tries to argue that the difference is that “literary fiction is about people, genre fiction is about stereotypes,” but that’s clearly so crock full of poop that you can smell it through the walls. It’s especially stupid because the past few decades we’ve seen more and more genre fiction deconstructing and reconstructing the genre, playing with the archetypes and stereotypes, subverting and deflecting our expectations. So that definition doesn’t work.
Let’s try again.
“Literary fiction” examines everyday life. It is a genre (SHUT UP JANE AND THE STUCKEY-FRENCHES YES IT IS) that aspires to tell “realistic” stories about everyday people. We can split hairs all day long, but that’s the definition I’m going with, because that covers a wide enough range of the stories in the genre that I think it fits. Genre is difficult to strictly define anyway. Your “literary fiction” types will try to occasionally claim that other genres are actually “literary fiction” by virtue of “I like this, and so it can’t be genre because it’s good and I’m not like the plebs!”
[I may have some unresolved issues with my undiegrad English department. So sue me.]
This is why you have things like the subset of the fantasy genre called “magical realism,” which your English teacher would argue isn’t actually fantasy because “It’s not really about magic, it’s about people!” Or that article I found in graduate school that argued that because No Country for Old Men had things like themes and messages and complex characters, it couldn’t really be a crime novel, it was “literary fiction” disguised as a crime novel to trick the uneducated plebs into reading it or some such nonsense like that.
A large part of the gatekeeping around what does or doesn’t count as “literary fiction” is built around the idea that real, GOOD Literature must not be escapist! Escapism is for entertainment. And therefore, so are happy endings. So much of “literary fiction” is meant to display not just ordinary people in ordinary situations, but ones who never actually win.
In general I do not seek out “literary fiction,” but it’s not in and of itself bad. I don’t hate the genre (yes I’m calling it a genre my sophomore writing professor can deal with it); I think it’s got some good examples. And there is a lot of value of telling the stories of everyday people and the struggles they go through in everyday life. Representation matters, after all. Being able to articulate the struggles people go through is an important and powerful thing. And you can show that many times, life doesn’t have a clear-cut happy ending, and that’s just part of life sometimes. You’re not a loser because you’re not a hero defeating the Dark Lord or restoring the Galactic Republic; you’re just trying to get through life, like the rest of us. That’s okay.
But I object to the notion that this is the only kind of story that matters. And more than that, I object to the notion that is sort of pushed on you from high school onward that for literary fiction to exist, it must not be happy. Because while I liked some of them, almost all of the stories in this book by different authors were about people… being miserable. About them failing at their lives, their jobs, their relationships, their struggles. And these were the examples of short stories to be like, “Hey, write like this!”
It made me think that there was this problem with glorifying misery in literary fiction. That seeing a bunch of people being emotionally and psychologically beaten down was supposed to somehow be better than actually trying to make things better. It’s like when someone is a dick to you, and when you call him or her or them out on it, the response is “Well life’s not fair!” Fine, but you’re still a dick! I don’t think it’s bad to draw attention to the struggles of everyday people, and show the misery that happens to people sometimes; but if that’s all you want to show, all you think is worth showing people about everyday life, then there’s a problem!
It feels less like a celebration or appreciation of the struggles of ordinary people, and more of a relishing in their suffering. At the very least, it’s an attitude that feels like a denial that there’s anything good about the real world. And I’m not remotely okay with that? Don’t we have enough problems to deal with? Don’t we have enough misery in the real world without some snobbish literature elite telling us that it’s all that really matters in storytelling?
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