The Literary Line

[swan_tower]

A discussion over on Catherynne Valente's livejournal has me thinking about what distinguishes literary fiction with genre (i.e. speculative) elements from genre fiction as such.

People approach this in a lot of different ways, of course. There's value in saying, if it has a genre element -- ghosts, vampires, time-travel -- then it's genre, and enough with all this waffling. (Margaret Atwood, I'm looking at you.) Otherwise this notion of "speculation" loses all real meaning. There's also value in saying the real line lies in shelving: it's all about what publisher will pick you up, what audience they think they can market you to. That, more than the actual content of your book, determines which camp you belong in. This ends up being a fairly accurate descriptor of how society creates the divide, after all.

But I do think there is something within the stories that separates Is Genre from Contains Genre. Some people say it has to do with the centrality of the genre conceit: if you could pull out that thread and still have a coherent story fabric, what you have isn't really science fiction or fantasy. This almost but not quite hits the mark I'm looking at, and I can give a good example of how.

I mostly enjoyed the movie Stranger Than Fiction. If you haven't seen it, this is a story about a man who suddenly starts hearing a woman's voice narrating everything he's doing in his life. He comes to discover that the woman in question is a writer, and what she's writing is a novel about his life -- a novel in which he's going to die.

This is not just genre but as central as you get. Pull out that thread, and you have no story left at all. But in the end, I felt dissatisfied with the film, and my dissatisfaction grew directly out of the fact that I wanted it to be a genre story, and I don't think it was.

What made it not genre, for me, was its utter lack of interest in the cause of its own conceit. Why had this strange connection happened? Did the writer's imagination create that man, summon him into reality, or did she somehow tap into the life of a pre-existing individual? Did her work control or merely reflect him? Stranger Than Fiction doesn't care. What it cares about is the moral question of that connection: once the writer discovers her character exists outside of her head, what will she choose to do with her story? She insists the death she has planned for him -- a meaningless, random demise; I think he's supposed to be knocked down by a bus -- is a powerful ending, the one the story has to have. Which I found to be an interesting nod toward the conventions of literary fiction in general, the notion that an ending where somebody dies is somehow more meaningful than one where the person lives.

The moral question is an engaging one, certainly. But it wasn't enough for me. I want not only to think about the ethical ramifications of our fascination with watching characters suffer and die, but also the metaphysics of how a writer might be confronted with her own protagonist. Otherwise -- in strange contravention of mainstream opinion -- the story feels shallow to me. Its own world feels like a painted backdrop, rather than a reality.

Which brings me around to the division I like best, where narrative content is concerned: genres as conversations. Stranger Than Fiction is talking to litfic, not specfic. It's debating this whole notion that telling a story about some schlub who wanders through his life and then gets knocked over by a bus is inherently better than telling a story about that schlub living, which is very much a litfic kind of issue. If it were a genre story, the conversation would address the matter of causation. Is her typewriter magical? Is that man some kind of tulpa, called into existence by the power of her thought? Is this some intervention on God's part, or a weird experiment conducted by aliens? The moral relationship between author and character could still figure into it, but the manner of that figuring would be shaped by the cause.

It isn't that a genre story absolutely has to explore the causes of its own science fictional or fantastical elements. Not every narrative needs to be about its own foundations. But Stranger Than Fiction's complete disinterest in its own fantasy was a clear signal, at least to me, that its conversational partners are not mine. This is also what annoys sf/f readers when a litfic writer decides to write a book with (say) time travel in it: in most cases it's painfully obvious that the writer is ignorant of the long-standing conversation on that subject. As a result, you get novels where the author seems to think they're the first person to discover the grandfather paradox or branching realities or whatever, and their community celebrates it as this awesome new thing, while the specfic community yawns at the sight of Yet More Old Hat.

Who's involved in the conversation? Which writers and works is a story responding to, agreeing with, counteracting, poking fun at? It isn't just a litfic/specfic divide; I suspect, for example, that you can use the same principle to sort urban fantasy from paranormal romance. And it's probably a rare story indeed that can talk with equal facility to more than one community at a time, however much the basic content of the narrative may look like a hybrid of two worlds.

For me, that's where the line really lies. Sometimes it's useful to say "if it contains genre, it is genre," and sometimes it's useful to look at where a work is shelved, but ultimately, it comes down to the conversation.

Comments

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

To my eye, sometimes these discussions can get a tad too self-serving--providing a fine opportunity for the speaker and the speaker's friends to point at one another and say "literary here"--but that is only when genre is compared detrimentally.

There are conventions (patterns) in all human endeavor, including fiction, or so it seems to me. A great deal of what is touted as literary fiction (The Lovely Bones) might very well be seen as potboiler in ten, twenty years, when its conventions have passed out of fashion.

Literature evolves the conventions, and it also offers insight, even if in the form of question. Literature can be read at any age over a lifetime--and any generation. If something is literary to twenty-somethings but overwrought trickery to the generation older (or reinventing the wheel, only with more tattoos) then chances are it's probably not "literature" in the sense of enduring fiction that will communicate down the centuries.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I was trying to stay away from the value-judgment end of the question, since it can so easily turn into bashing -- but yes, I use the term "litfic" to indicate a particular set of conventions that are currently deemed literary, but whose staying power is open to question. In my opinion, we can't do more than guess at what books will be considered worthwhile in the long run.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Yep.

The discussion becomes interesting to me when people discuss possibly whys certain conventions are embraced by this or that group, and others rejected.

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

I'm with you on the 'a spaceship does not make it science fiction' (and a ghost etc doesn't make it fantasy) argument. For me, the core lies in 'what-if'. What would it mean if a person wrote the life of another? There's got to be a way for this to happen (magic is fine, but it needs to be plausible and consistent), and I want to see the consequences explored: will the writer deny that it's real? How wiill the character rebel? And last but not least, I want to see the written character be a protagonist: to fight the destiny that has been forced upon him, to use everything they have - from direct appeals to acting out-of-character - to change his destiny. What happens if the character stages a sit-in? How much free will does he have? There are a hundred and one fascinating questions, and I need to see them explored. If he simply acts by authorial fiat, because that fits the message of the book, then, in my opinion, that's not genre.

And the writer in me has to ask: what happens in revision? If she plotnoodles with a friend and tries out several interpretations of a scene? If she gets blocked and cannot write on? The concept of the writing as continually flowing, and immediately final is just so unrealistic I find it hard to accept. Or is he living the final printed book, in which case the author is powerless *to* change anything, and all his entreaties come to nothing... or _can_ she literally stop the presses? Slghtly different what-if, completely different stories. Either of them could work (and could be great fun) - but without working out the implications of that cool idea that was thrown into the room, the story itself cannot develop fully. It remains a metaphor for life. Or for religion.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I like people who try to figure things out.

I like them as characters. I like them as authors.

Sometimes a genre-literary novel with speculative conceit can work for me if the things people are trying to figure out are different from the things they would be trying to figure out if it was genre-speculative. But incurious books, like incurious people, do not much interest me.

I think this is why I do so well with mysteries and historicals, because I think in the former the characters are inherently trying to figure something out (this may be why genre-mystery is pretty good for me and genre-thriller is hit or miss), and in the latter it looks from here as though the author inherently is, and in both cases there can be cases where they do both.

I also think that if I could get people to categorize romances this way I might get a category of romance I could really love. Because if I got pointed at romances that were about people who were actively trying to figure out how to build a life together, or something like that, that'd do much better for me than the blundering around kind I've mostly read/seen.

[akashiver.livejournal.com]

Thinking it over, I guess I have to agree with you: lit-fic tends to be far less interested in the mechanics of the conceit than most genre works. I guess my caveat would be that genre fiction itself has a continuum: hard SF and certain Golden Age stories tend to be much more interested in mechanics than other SF works are, and litfic's attitude towards mechanics is similar (I think) to that of fairy tales and fairy tale-ish fantasies: the emphasis isn't on the biolgy of magic frogs or how/why a magic frog can exist, it's on what happens to characters after discovering there's a magic frog in the garden.

[london-setterby.livejournal.com]

I don't know if it necessarily comes down to biology and, say, engineering, though, does it? Fantasy stories can invest a lot of time in examining how (and why) their world works, too, just in a different way--for example, why magic works the way it does, how the rest of the world functions (or doesn't) given that magic is there, and so on. Sabriel by Garth Nix springs immediately to mind, and so does "The Woman and the Mountain" which was published a few weeks ago in Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Actually, the Harry Potter series does a great job of explaining how and why fantasy coincides with reality, now I think of it.

But I don't know, I'd be curious to hear what other people think about about this.

[coraa.livejournal.com]

I liked The Time Traveler's Wife, but reading it didn't feel like reading a genre fantasy/science fiction time travel story. I don't know why; it wasn't that the setup was unrigorous (she set 'rules' for her time travel and followed them, for sure, up to and including the fact that fillings in teeth couldn't time travel and so he had to pull out teeth that became decayed). And the speculative element was absolutely vital: no time travel, no story. It just didn't... feel... the same.

I know others who do think that it's distinctly genre sff, and that the marketing as litfic is purely a sales mechanic. And I can't tell them they're wrong; I can't even explain why that feels wrong to me. It just does.

Maybe it's that the tropes are far more those of female-oriented litfic than sff, even though the central element is speculative. I don't know, though; mostly it's just that I read it and it doesn't feel genre to me, and trying to pin down why is like trying to nail jello to a tree.

[moonandserpent.livejournal.com]

This is something that has been on my mind lately (I *hate* writing fiction...) and while I think there are vast exceptions to the guidelines you lay out I do think you're onto something.

If nothing else, you actually isolate why I tend to dislike a lot of genre fiction, and that's because I *like* just being able to toss the weird and fantastic out and just fly with it. I'm generally not worried about the "why" of the setting, just the story being told.

So, for example, the central conceit of "Stranger than Fiction" didn't bother me any more than I was bothered when Gregor Sansa's origin story didn't make the cut. ("Bitten by a depressed radioactive cockroach!")

Likewise, unless it is particularly relevant to the plot, I don't care why magic works in a setting, at what point the timeline diverged or how many many hours it took to harness the baby star at the heart of your space-drive. Sometimes these things are in fact part of the plot and useful details, and sometimes they're distractions.

I also *really* like things that start in media res, though.

But that is probably the most useful distinction for lit differentials other than marketing stuff that I've ever run into.

[akashiver.livejournal.com]

I wasn't thinking of Harry Potterish or Tolkienesque fantasy (most of which does have elaborate worldbuilding) but about fairy tales and fairy tale-ish fantasies. Mind you, Angela Carter et al fall on the lit-fic end of the spectrum anyway.

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

Hm. Kafka's unexplained cockroach and Ballard's unexplained disasters (well, the stories aren't about people trying to explain them) feel like litfic.

Same with _Charlotte's Web_; something magic is happening but the kids don't seem to care how or why or try to do anything else with the power: litfic. In contrast, _Half Magic_ and Edgar's other early books are all about figuring out what and why and coping: genre.

I'd put classic fairy tales in genre, although one mark is that no one is surprised when animals talk or whatever -- though often surprised by what the animal says. The human characters are surprised about other things and cope with other things, quite actively, even though they live in a world where talking animals are normal. Hm, maybe the problem is when the talking frog is neither normal nor examined.

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

Well, he might suggest that she type that he wins the lottery, then he will split it with her. Just as random as the bus.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

"What if" is specfic's arch-conversation.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I would even go so far as to say Stranger Than Fiction worked for me, so long as I turned off genre brain while watching it. But yes, I like people to be figuring stuff out, and there was a decided lack of it in that story (and its ilk).

Some recent exploration through romance has built up a solid list in my head of what a romance needs to do in order to make me like it, but I'm afraid the things I'm looking for mostly aren't what romance does.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I would agree there's something of a blurring in the realm of fairy-tale fiction (retellings or similar things); I also think this is where the whole interstitial thing falls. But even then, sometimes you can point to a particular story and identify which authors and works it's trying to talk back to.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I haven't read it, so I can't say, but this:

Maybe it's that the tropes are far more those of female-oriented litfic than sff

sounds to me like the "conversation" idea in different terms.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Well, but I'm not saying genre always has to get down and explain the nuts and bolts, either. I can think of plenty of fantasy novels I love that don't actually tell you the why of the magic. But they'll explore it, which is what Stranger than Fiction didn't do. It didn't just fly with it; it practically ignored it.

If my brain were less mushified, I would be able to provide more examples of stories that do the same kind of thing, and maybe that would make what I'm trying to say a little bit clearer. But, well, mush.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Classic fairy tales are a different thing entirely. They predate all of our notions of "fantasy" and "realism" and so on, at least as applied to literature; they are the thing certain kinds of fiction are reacting to, rather than a reaction themselves.

Ditto Kafka, I suppose.

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

Yep. And if it's missing, for me the contract between reader and writer is broken. My suspension of disbelief doesn't work for 'we'll pretend this perfectly logical consequence won't happen because I don't want to engage with it.'

I like the idea of 'conversation' as a way of looking at genre.

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

I like people who try to figure things out.

Word. And I am a person who likes to discover new stuff. When I pick up a book I want to be intrigued. I don't want to know where the book will go 10K in, minor details nonwithstanding.

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

I read it too many years ago to say _why_ it didn't read as SF, but if my memory doesn't betray me, it just accepted the time travel and never explored the wider implications of it.

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

The past doesn't bother me. I can suspend my disbelief for it, I _expect_ to suspend my disbelief for it, and I don't need meticulous explanations, on the contrary, they can be counterproductive.

The present and future, on the other hand, need to be consistent and well-explored. What does it *mean* that someone can turn into a giant cockroach? Do other people in the world wake up in that state? How will society adapt, and how quickly does it have to? Is there a way for him to turn back? What if the Prime Minister had turned into a cockroach, and might that yet happen? I mean, it's a big event for the individual to turn into a giant roach; but what are the implications for the wider world? If it's only ever one person affected, they don't find out why, and there's no danger for anyone else nor even a hint of curiosity whether other people are affected, then the book, for me, lacks a vital dimension.

[dr_whom]

Wider than what? I mean, at least on the surface, the entire premise is that the book is an exploration of what the implications of time travel would be on romance—a description which at least sounds exactly like one of the canonical tropes of SF; the archetype of an SF concept is to take the question 'What would the implications of [SF-type phenomenon] be on [aspect of society]?' and use that as a metaphor for exploring the way that aspect of society works in real life. The ability of SF to use fantastical story events to comment on real life is what's always trotted out as one of the key virtues of SF. Moreover, the time travel in The Time Traveler's Wife is handwaved in a sciency-sounding way ('It's a neurological disorder'), rather than just accepted without (quasi-)explanation the way the scenario of Stranger than Fiction or of, say, Groundhog Day is.

The fact that The Time Traveler's Wife seems to punch all of the SF tickets—SF-type phenomenon, treated in-story as scientifically intelligible; exploring its implications on society; using that exploration to comment on real life—and still doesn't feel quite like SF is a really interesting question. I feel like the "conversation" idea is probably at least partially right, but then I don't really know how to diagnose what "conversation" a particular work is participating in.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

What Stranger Than Fiction mostly did for me was the same thing Evita did: frustrate me mightily. Before those movies I did not think that Will Ferrell and Madonna had interesting talents they were spending most of their time wasting, and now I do.

[janni.livejournal.com]

The notion that it's about what conversation (conversations?) you're part of is an interesting one, and is making sense to me.

I think there can be something of a continuum as to how much the fantastical elements are explored and remarked on. I've noticed that readers have a huge range of preferences as to how much they want the conceit of a story explored, from wanting meticulous detail to wanting nothing at all, with many people falling somewhere in between. It's one of the reasons, I'm beginning to suspect, that no book can be for everyone ...