"Literary"

I recently read Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake (which I liked immensely) and Year of the Flood (which I liked less, but the person recommending the books to me had the opposite reaction, so your mileage may vary). These two books straddle a near-future man-made apocalypse visited upon a hyper-capitalist, post-climate-change world where humanity's primary means of survival are the bizarre and often grotesque genetic engineering projects created by scientists in elite corporate compounds. Atwood has made the claim that these books are not science fiction for two reasons: 1) that they have literary merit and 2) that they contain plausible science. Both of these strike me as more or less the definitions of a good science fiction novel, but Atwood's been bashed from enough corners that I don't feel like I need to add to that here past saying I'm a little confused about why anyone not embarrassed to have written the novels would be embarrassed to call them science fiction.

Mainly, I was intent on using it as a segue into the genre of literary fiction (which, much like post-modernism, seems most intent on defining itself entirely by the exclusion of things it is not. It is not genre (not mystery, horror, fantasy, science fiction, western, thriller, nor romance) nor is it "chick lit" or "mainstream popular fiction").

There seems to be some resentment on both sides of the aisle- weird defensive barbs about the rotting-from-the-inside-out, nihilistic and near-incestuous "literary elite", and the artifice and mind-numbing dullness of their self-indulgent navel-gazing stories where nothing ever happens; upturned noses at trash genre fiction that's nothing but cookie-cutter stock plots, flat, utilitarian characters, unbelievable and paper thin justifications, and gratuitous violence and sex, all in service to banal titillation, rather than elevation of the mind and spirit, or any reflection of real, complex human emotions.

There's ugliness flying in both directions.

Frankly, I don't really understand the vitriol, nor even, entirely, the divisions. Off the top of my head, three of my absolute favorite novels are The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues by Tom Robbins, and the infamous Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov. The first is solidly fantasy, through and through. The second falls into the slippery category of magical realism and gets placed consistently on the fiction/literature shelf. The third is Literature with a capital L.

That said, I like all three for pretty much the same reasons. They're whimsical stories populated by memorable, flawed characters, wherein the author has great fun both with the beautiful language of the book and sly winking allusions for the reader to catch; and ultimately they all have something to say about human nature and our place in the universe.

There's a lot of heartbreakingly beautiful literary writing. There's also a fair bit of it that falls short, though not for want of trying, and that's true across any genre you pick up. I'm a much richer person for having read both Austen and Asimov (Hemmingway and Heinlein, Tolkien and Tolstoy, Clarke and Checkov, King and Kafka, I can do this all night), and there's a lot I think genre writers can learn from the literati (I feel weirdly like I'm talking down to people when I say that, like I'm back in the role of substitute teacher).

(Also, I've noticed in my browsings that about half of the stories I've come across published as literary could comfortably find a home in genre).

Anyway, a couple of the things I think literary fiction has to share with its genre brethren (and in my opinion a lot of the best genre fiction already makes spectacular use of literary convention):

-Awareness of and experimentation with form- Prose and narrative are the vehicles by which story is delivered, and what you do to tweak them can vastly and beautifully effect the way the story is perceived. Lately I've looked at some great literary fiction that was written completely out of order, or once utilizing a sort of second parenthetical narrator. Narrative origami, when done well, is a delight to read, and there's no reason it would enhance a story any less just because there were also robots.

-Semiotics- Literary fiction seems to be nothing if not the substituting of one small part for a whole too large to grasp- in fact, I think if I had to make a statement about literary fiction as a genre, that would probably be it, at least in the short form. It's easy to write a story off as being about nothing because it's about a broken cup or a day where two people didn't speak to each other while gardening. But the point may be that that cup came with the character from her old home in Nuevo Leon, where it was hand-made by her mother, and after coming to America she has lost touch with so much of her previous life, but made the cup a symbol of a part of her identity that means more to her than she pretends- cup becomes a condensed icon, focusing a much larger narrative like a laser into one powerful moment. The story may be about the symbol as a stand in, how and why she has made the symbol as she has, and how well others can or cannot read it.

-The understated- I've read some bombastic literary fiction, don't get me wrong, but very often the beauty of the genre is the very simple, even prosaic moments that become profound because of the way in which the author talks about them and the context, both personal and societal, that frames them. It's a fabulous juggling act when it's pulled off well. I think as genre writers we very often use the leeway afforded to us by the types of stories we tell to go bigger and stranger- giant monsters, serial killers, entire space stations falling into the atmosphere of a planet- and I am emphatically not knocking that, because those things are awesome. But I think the ability to intersperse sense of wonder with small, quiet, immediate, and profoundly character driven moments makes for some spectacular fiction.

-Relationships- Over the last couple of weeks I've read or listened to at least fifty literary short stories, this not counting the years of English classes and spare time reading, and I really can't think of any literary story off hand that doesn't have specifically to do with the problematic relationships between people. I think part of the rap literary fiction gets for nihilism comes from the fact that these problems tend not to be solved within the time frame of the story- and frankly if they could be, they would not be compelling problems (I'm tempted to say this is one of the key places literary fiction parts company from the romance novel). Women who feel taken for granted, men emotionally isolated and searching for a way to make a real connection, boys trying to grow into men in the shadows of their fathers, children who can no longer say what they wish they could to dead parents, and so on. Again, it's not like this is absent from genre, it's just often not so much the focus. We also, especially in science fiction and detective fiction, have a bad habit of producing characters that come from nowhere, seeming to have sprung fully formed from the earth without nation, creed, or family (I listened to a fabulous interview in which Mary Anne Mohanraj was about to tear her hair out as an editor from all the stories she received where there was a blank, presumably white male protagonist. (It was not, per se, that the protagonists were presumably white males so much as that there was no description, no information, no history that made them who they were- that absent any identifying factors, the default was straight white male)).

Again, off the top of my head, Rachel Swirsky's Eros, Philia, Agape (which has the dubious honor of being my all-time favorite sex-bot story ever), is full of all of the best tricks of literary fiction, while still being a story about a robot. It has a lot to say about love, freedom, ownership, and agency, and I don't think it could if it were any less a literary story as well.

I guess in conclusion, two dragon thumbs and a blaster up for literary fiction!