At least that's literary fiction's reputation, and one might say that it's one that's at least partially accurate. Whether the genre's authors teach in academia or not, literary fiction is the stuff in the library that could be said to challenge readers primarily from the perspective of its form (if we can separate form from content)-that is, language or prose style, and narrative structure. From Laurence Sterne's 18th century discursive novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy to the taut linear short stories of Z.Z. Packer born in 1973, fiction called "literary" has already had a long life and will continue to as long as graduate creative writing programs keep churning out writers, and as long as the aforementioned remote liberal arts institutions keep hiring them.
Literary fiction also can count on an enduring audience as long as book groups continue to thrive. Narratives built on what I'll call crucial ambiguities and necessarily complex themes are the centerpiece of many a book group, including most notably and globally, I should say, Oprah's. A quick and rather random perusal of her Book Club Books since 1996 reveals a venerable list of award-winning contemporary literary fiction authors, including Ursula Hegi, Kaye Gibbons, Toni Morrison, Alice Hoffman, Edwidge Danticat, Jane Hamilton, Barbara Kingsolver, Joyce Carol Oates, Elizabeth Berg, Isabel Allende, and Andre Dubus III, to name a handful (http://www.oprah.com/article/oprahsbookclub/20080701_orig_list/4). Why does Oprah choose titles from literary fiction lists? One can speculate, and perhaps assert that there is just more to talk about in these naturally formula-subverting narratives; but perhaps that would incite the ire of lovers of other genres.
That leads us to the next question: Can the fiction that traditionally has asserted itself as anti-generic be thought of as a genre with its own set of conventions? Because it's difficult to codify an area of fiction that by its very nature resists interpretation and compartmentalization, maybe generalizing about literary fiction's popular reputation approaches defining it. Generally regarded as difficult, pretentious, and self-selecting, literary fiction rarely appears on lists for good "beach reads," and it can be difficult if not impossible to find your favorite literary fiction titles at your local supermarket or drugstore unless one of these titles has been translated into film (like Alice Walker's The Color Purple), and that film won an Oscar (in the case of Ian McEwan's Atonement). Literary fiction titles drift out of print, which should surprise no one as books in this category are difficult to write, generally challenging to read, and almost impossible to define.
When we think of literary fiction we often think of the modernists as largely defining the genre's aesthetics. The plot, or semblance of plot, usually happens beneath the narrative's surface. From another angle, in modernist literature, the character's internal life is usually more important than her external life. In other words, what a character thinks is more important than what she does. In Samuel Beckett's Molloy the narrative traverses seamlessly between the points of view—or heads—of two characters. Beckett's fellow British modernist, the iconic Virginia Woolf's work depends on the same device. In her novel To the Lighthouse, as one example, Woolf seems far more concerned with tracing protagonist Mrs. Ramsay's inner life than actually shuttling the Ramsay family to the lighthouse. Perhaps the most extraordinary example of this "privileging of the interior" is Joyce's obsessive representation of protagonist Leopold Bloom's interior life as he traipses around Dublin on a single day in Ulysses, Joyce's magnum opus.
To put it mildly, Joyce does not lead the reader by the hand through Ulysses. There are no conventional transitions between the narrative's "episodes," the prose style is experimental (a prose style that is extended to a disorienting degree in Joyce's follow-up novel Finnegan's Wake), the language is rife with allusion and bears a multiplicity of tone. That said, Joyce is often read with assistance: that is, in a college class with the support of an instructor and the appropriate literary criticism, along with critically annotated versions of the text itself. It could be asserted that Joyce and his fellow modernists (and the post-modernists that follow) unwittingly define what many readers think of when they think of literary fiction:
- the rejection of plot-driven narrative,
- the embrace of linguistic experimentation and non-transparent language,
- the rupture of links between cause and effect, and
- the refusal of endings that satisfyingly resolve the narrative's events.
It is understandable then that readers new and/or resistant to the genre can find themselves alienated in this world of lit fiction.
So why read it?
The Appeal of Literary Fiction
Ironically, those elements that make the genre so universally frustrating or challenging are the very factors of its appeal. In other words, literary fiction's challenges-that which stretches the boundaries of classification and cursory summation-are why its loyal readers love it so much. To the characteristics or "appeal factors" delineated in the preceding paragraph, we can add the following conventions of literary fiction:
- poetic language (or a studied attention to the way words sound and appear on the page),
- idiosyncratic narration or narrative stance,
- a "difficult" or challenging narrative voice
- discursive or digressive narrative structure,
- shifting points of view, and the inclusion of enigmatic, ineffable, seemingly random events-that which is left un-interpreted or unexplained.
In subverting the quick, easy read, literary fiction thus requires work from the reader. Instead of being passive receivers of a story as it unfolds, the reader here must be an active participant in the text, translating moments of ambiguity, and filling in intentional narrative gaps. In a sense, the reader makes meaning along with the writer. The text seems to imply that the reader must interpret characters' motivations, and make inferences regarding connections between two juxtaposed narrative events. The famed semiotician Roland Barthes was probably theorizing about literary fiction when he, most particularly in S/Z, privileges texts that hold multiple meanings, shifting connotations, and intentional ambiguities-even gaps-making these texts open to diverse interpretations. Barthes calls these "writerly" texts (as opposed to "readerly texts"), in that the reader takes part in the process of making meaning, essentially "writing" along with the author, we can probably safely assert (Barthes 1975).
It is also in this genre that prose is birthed from the language of poetry. In Gravity's Rainbow the narrative's resonant first line is one that many readers of this genre can instantly retrieve from memory-like a line of poetry-even if they haven't revisited the novel in years: "A screaming comes across the sky." While that line ultimately references the setting of the book-the locus of war at the conclusion of WWII-an immediate connection between language and meaning is not obvious. For literary fiction lovers, that line, like so many other opening lines of titles in the genre, works on the level of language, asserting its musicality and establishing an uneasy narrative voice, achieving importance on its own instead of what it represents, or where it situates the reader. Caught in lushly poetic language, eventual orientation in the narrative is held in suspension. In the case of Gravity's Rainbow a reader may never fully achieve it. At least partially forming literary fiction's aesthetic, it is the kind of language that is capable of disordering the senses. Using the overarching ethos of other artistic movements like surrealism and symbolist poetry, it is a language that devalues traditional notions of realism.
Literary fiction may be relatively easy to find in a bookstore-particularly an independent bookstore that privileges titles that might be overlooked by chains. But where does one look for literary fiction in a public library? Where does the patron start? As opposed to the time that Joyce Saricks refers to when literary fiction comprised her libraries' "core collection," I, for one, can't seem to locate easily the literary fiction in my branch (Saricks 142). As I write this in my local branch today, there is a display of award-winning children's fiction, but nothing for adults. As if the library had become a physical manifestation of a high modernist narrative, there are no signposts leading me to a literary fiction section. There is no foregrounding of authors who care about characters more than plot, form over events, the poetic over the transparent. There is no list of ambiguity worshipers to be found. The librarian on duty points out the classics section. But contemporary writers who have inherited the artistic mantle of deeply canonical writers like Austen, Dickens, O'Connor, Lawrence, Sterne-where are they?
Although I live in a major metropolitan city renowned for its illustrious literary history, book snobbery, and its large population of revered writers, literary fiction is never singled out in my local public library branches. It's never on display, and difficult to find unless you have an author or title in mind. Mysteries, romances, and science fiction, on the other hand, are shelved in their own respective sections, and each genre is identified by a clever visual motif printed on book spine stickers: tiny hipster skulls demarcate titles in the mystery/suspense genre, a cluster of hearts identify the romances, a "Star Trekian" spaceship separates the science fiction from the everything else.
The "other" fiction in the collection, by stark contrast, is pell-mell. Each book in this section has an accession number, obviously, but philosophically speaking, it's a democratized hodgepodge of hard cover mass market titles, literary fiction novels, and short story collections all interfiled, no doubt, because of the physical limitations of the library. Perusing the general fiction section in this branch one weekday morning, I spotted ex-Baywatch actress Pamela Anderson's ghost-written novel Star sandwiched in-between Sherwood Anderson's canonical Winesberg, Ohio on one side and New York Times Notable Book author Kurt Anderson's Heyday on the other. Generally speaking, the works of the hoi polloi—whose texts may have been generated by "co-writers" (in the case of Star)—rub covers with titles handcrafted by authors (often teaching lit fiction in an academe) who toil over the birth of a single architecturally perfect, yet disarming sentence. Virginia Woolf famously wrote, and I paraphrase, "It took me all afternoon to get my characters down the hall."
While it may be safe to say that literary fiction is not usually the preferred genre in public libraries, is rarely in best-seller sections, and perhaps gets lost among its very distant, more popular cousins, it plays a crucial role in a library's collection. Writers in this genre are known for taking the most risks on the page, their feats of daring occurring at the level of language and the sentence. In this sense, literary fiction writers are stretching the boundaries of published prose, keeping the language alive and vital, presenting old stories in ways that make them seem unfamiliar, even strange.
For library patrons who are loyal to this genre, literary fiction becomes more than entertainment or a pleasurable diversion; literary fiction, I'll assert, constantly revises readers' experience and expectation of the language that defines them and their world. Literary fiction is a genre that so often depends on paradigm shifts, presenting to its readers original and startling, if subtly nuanced ways of inhabiting the world. Perhaps more elaborately, the experience of reading literary fiction can be a life-altering experience, one that changes a readers' perception of the world they live in, and the ways in which they interpret their own living narratives in it.
References
Barthes, Roland. 1975. Translated by Richard Miller. S/Z: An Essay. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc.
Saricks, Joyce G. 2001. Readers' Advisory Guide to Genre Fiction. Chicago: American Library Association, 2001.
JULIE TURLEY reads and writes literary fiction in New York, where she also works as a part-time adjunct librarian at Borough of Manhattan Community College. She blogs at marginalmormonlit.wordpress.com.