Literature: Not What You Think It Is

So Many Books, Such Little Time

It's been five years, but I'm almost finished reading the massive tome The Novel: A Biography by Michael Schmidt (which incidentally fails to deliver on its title, being more The Novelist: Many, Many Biographies). Amongst its pages the author, at last, has deigned to write a chapter on "genre" fiction, where he damns with faint praise some of my favourite authors, giving a mere mention to Agatha Christie (he says her settings are charming, but that's all she gets from him). He earlier mentioned Tolkien, somehow skipping his achievement and influence in favour of noting his meagre earnings from the sale of his film rights.

This is in a whopping 1,200-page book, which had time to spend multiple pages detailing the lives and works of other authors, including luminaries like Arthur Koestler, Laura Riding, Clara Reeve, Susan Ferrier, James Hogg, B.S. Johnson and others, though to be fair I've heard of most of his choices, even read quite a few of them: it's your expected lot of Bronte sisters, Conrad and Crane, Faulkner, Hemingway, Woolf, Patrick White, Margaret Atwood, Julian Barnes, there are dozens and dozens.

And I've mostly enjoyed it, even though I'd rather read about the books than the brains behind the books. But when I reached the genre chapter, he gave most authors remarkably short shrift, mentioning them only long enough to dismiss them as not literature (save for Raymond Chandler, whom he likes). But what is literature? What's so great about literature? Why can't the best of Agatha Christie be literature as well?

I may be venturing dangerously close to Humpty Dumpty territory (he famously told Alice that when he used a word it meant whatever he intended: "the question is which is to be master—that's all.") But I think Literature is a quality, not a product, and yes, I think the best of Agatha Christie (and Tolkien, and others) are certainly literature ... and that some of those works deemed "literature" aren't at all.

I'm not alone in this dangerous territory: Terry Eagleton's "What Is Literature" says that this is a status conferred on particular works because of how society decides to treat it, and that of course could change: a work can become no longer literature. C. S. Lewis (mentioned only in passing by Schmidt) essentially proposed that literature is a form of reading, not a type of book: if one can happily read or re-read Agatha Christie, deeply, appreciating her craftsmanship, then it's literature.

But so often the works that are considered Literature fall into one of two categories: dreary high-minded fancy writing, or experimental fiction.

Agatha Christie was beyond any argument an experimental writer, pushing the boundaries of the recently-established mystery novel. Some label her books formulaic, but she invented the formula and was constantly testing it. She innovated in narrative structure (The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, And Then There Were None, Murder on the Orient Express), her social comedy could be as sharp as Trollope's, and her most famous characters endure.

Experimental fiction either works well (hurrah!) or doesn't, but a learning opportunity is always valuable even as a counter-example of what not to do. To begin with, all novels were experimental. They had to be, it was a brand new form. People like Defoe (a sort of proto-novelist, with long form fiction that didn't quite achieve the effect of getting inside one's mind and letting us live in the story), Richardson, and Fielding got in early: Fielding wrote the first great works of fan fiction (parodies of Richardson) until he found his own voice. Jane Austen laid down the rules of the rom-com, Charles Dickens was the first to write in a Dickensian manner, natch, Charlotte Bronte created the epitome of a Gothic romance. None of them set out to write dreary high-minded fancy writing, they were doing their own thing, trying it out, seeing if it worked, because the novel was still relatively new, relatively young, and ready for anything.

So, experimental fiction: big fan. But not so much of the dreary high-minded fancy writing. You're probably familiar with some of these, and have been required to read a few during your education. I expect they appeal to those setting high school English curricula because those books have more to unpack, not because they are a delight to read. Whereas Charlotte's Web (for me, a perfect book, and don't get me started about how Schmidt left off almost all children's authors) achieves its success so cleanly that criticism feels almost superfluous.

(And I have nothing against non-dreary high-minded fancy writing. But I insist on being able to enjoy a novel, the same way I would reject an uncomfortable seat, an inedible meal, or a seat in first-class on a plane that never leaves the tarmac. There are vast swathes of books written by authors who seem reluctant to let their audience enjoy themselves, prioritizing seriousness of purpose over storytelling, and that's no more appealing today than it was during the moralizing period of some Victorian fiction).

Imagine, as an analogy, literature as a meal. Chefs experiment: will these two unlike ingredients work together? Not quite. But maybe with some honey? Better. A dash of fish sauce? And the dish starts to come together. Sure, all the meals out there are food, but some taste better than others, and some are more interesting than others, and the best meals do both. But if you create a dish using only difficult techniques and fine ingredients and it doesn't taste good, that won't win you any customers.

I'm a big fan of books that both taste good and are interesting, and with almost 300 years of practice and precedent, I don't think that's too much to ask. For me, that's literature, and it includes Dickens and Austen, more recent writers like Robertson Davies and Kazuo Ishiguro, but also Diana Wynne Jones, Kate Atkinson, Connie Willis, and Gene Wolfe.