Literary Fiction: Is Style Enough?

[Lucius]

'Shut the fuck up! This is art.' :D

Literary fiction novels are the sea mammals of the Literary Ocean -- sometimes they look like other fish, but you can't really mistake them for anything other than what they are. Thar she blows -- for the delectation of the Nobel Committee! The largest, fattest right whales are surrounded by the too-clever-by-half dolphins of experimental fiction, and in certain waters one encounters the odd metamodernist killer whale -- or even the narwhal of a novel in verse.

Such novels are supposed to reflect on human condition. At the risk of certain generalization I'll say they used to be studies of (many) characters. Character-driven vs plot-driven, then? Not a chance for such a clear definition to stand, for 100+ years high literature could have been ... anything at all.

Sometimes I think that perfect kind of literary writing makes the most mundane things thrilling -- like, in the finale of Gravity's Rainbow Thomas Pynchon made a prose poem out of the inquiries and responses of the missile launch sequence. I suppose many can enjoy the prose style of a particular novel independent of the plot -- few read Gravity's Rainbow for its plot or even for the characters, that with the 'protagonist''s personality sort of falling apart along the way.

Yet I understand that many readers of novels of that kind may well feel themselves like the marks in the shell game, with the implicit promise of the plot which is never found under the shell of their choice. Does having a genius for the game operator make them feel better?

So, has the literary fiction of the last ~100 years succeeded in capturing the attention of RavishA members? Why or why not?

[SoftGameHunter]

Well, most of what I read that can be classified as literary fiction is also classical fiction. That is, the classics. In contemporary literature, the only author I can name in lit-fic that I've also read a lot is Haruki Murakami. He definitely studies characters, but I think it would be wrong to say the plots don't matter for him. They do. And they don't. Usually the biggest challenge is trying to describe what's even happening. Yet, as I'm reading them, I really enjoy myself and want to see what happens next.

I think that exhausts most of what I can say about modern literary fiction. I've read a handful of others. I read Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum when it was big twenty or thirty years ago, mainly because my dad bought it and then couldn't finish it. Even when I told him it only drags for the first 450 pages or so, he didn't give it a second try. I recall liking it well enough, but damned if I can remember what it was about. Knights Templar in the modern world or something. I want to say it was like Da Vinci Code for people who can't get to the point, but I may be thinking of an entirely different piece.

I do like many classics, and they've all been grandfathered in as literary. A lot of them weren't at the time. The Three Musketeers was adolescent popcorn at the time, but it was two hundred years ago in French, so it probably picks up some literarity in translation. Truth be told, I like most of my literary fiction to be translated. Give me something Nineteenth Century translated from Russian or French and I'm on it. Give me British or American novels of that era and I want to hit myself with a blunt object. Not always, but often enough. It's tempting to say most of them were getting paid by the word by whichever journal was serializing it, so they were incentivized to pad the verbiage, but Dumas was the same way and Three Musketeers still managed to be fun. As for the Russians, they have ten months of snow a year so they just kept going and going, yet still managed to be profound, if not always chipper. (And not always profound. Tolstoy should have retired one novel earlier. Resurrection was crap.) Anyway, that's my literary way of saying I sometimes like it but often can't say exactly why, but when I dislike it words never fail me.

[HistBuff]

@SoftGameHunter is absolutely right in saying the Three Musketeers was orignally light entertainment. Its French is readable by many if not most teenagers today; it certainly was back in the 80s. In a similar way, I perfected my English during those teenage years by reading Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes (and looking up a lot of words).

In the 19th century, you still had many educated men who only took the Classics seriously--the works in Greek and Latin. Shakespeare's plays were originally for the masses, unless I'm mistaken, and 1600 was a time when you were no learned man if you couldn't read Latin. I've helped my wife during her Ph.D. thesis by translating 19th-century letters from Latin to French; letters between bishops and priests who dabbled in natural science and lived in places such as Romania, Finland, Canada...

Malaparte's Kaputt is one of the rare novels where characters speak Latin---Finnish diplomats during WW2. I think there were eight or nine different languages in his novel, beside Italian. Malaparte's prose is to the point without overly long sentences. Umberto Eco is different, but he writes so well that nothing feels heavy, even for a non-native reader.

Umberto Eco wrote a masterpiece in which he liberally put sentences in Latin throughout his novel Il Nome della rosa. The Name Of The Rose. The novel differs from the movie in impportant aspects. I couldn't recommend any translation since I own it in the original and I'm blessed with fluency in Italian. Eco is renowned for the style and quality of his prose, and his mastery of plot. One of the best modern writers I ever read.

Style for me is life. A work with no style has no life. A work with epic style is one that will live forever. Style is the air the characters breathe and the world where the plot exists.

[Shocker]

Are we now comparing what is considered culture today, and how it was written?
@SoftGameHunter and @HistBuff already mentioned Dumas. He published his novels as serial in newspapers, and was employing a large office of ghostwriters, the modern equivalent would be perhaps James Patterson. But while I despise Patterson’s novels, I still come back to Dumas because they are fun to read.

Shakespeare living today, would likely writing scripts for Michael Bay movies, giving the audience exactly what they want. He was a perfect showman, knowing how to sell tickets. To stay on topic, Shakespeare included rape as part of his plots (Titus Andronicus), sex always sold.

[HistBuff]

Culture is alive and evolves. This is something readers of Greek and Latin tend to forget; nothwithstanding the fact every time I read such ancient texts, the words become alive with voices and the world they live in.

Anybody alive today has been exposed to unprecedented variety of contents. Style can be basically anything. What someone finds beautiful could be ugly to the next one. Very confusing. In recent years I got close to two girls who are generation Z and both girls are avid readers. One has devoured all the Harry Potters and the current one (turning 19 next month) loves 19th century France and is perfecting her English because she struggles with those Dickens novels so I told her to start with Arthur Conan Doyle (we've watched episodes of the TV series of Sherlock Holmes and she's now a fan of actor Jeremy Brett). I never had children so I lacked this perspective on today's youth before meeting the first girl in 2022; a college* girl. Both was/is very curious to know what it was like to grow up as a teen in the 80s. The current one is the only person in my real life who's read my stories here.

* College in Quebec is very different. It is a whole education level between high-school and university. College of general and professional studies that students attend between 17 and 19 or 20. High school finishes one year sooner but students enter university at 19 or 20. This is unique in Canada. Most people in Quebec are college-educated in that specific sense. There are really good libraries in these colleges and there are mandatory courses in French literature, advanced language classes, and all sorts of programs leading to various careers. College in Quebec is the reason why youths between 17 and 20 date one another a lot. Some stay together for life.

It's impossible to grasp the variety of stuff I was exposed to back in the 80s, from horror movies like Friday the 13th (the first of which I watched at an age I had no business watching it) to First Blood, Scanners, Superman, Star Wars Return of the Jedi to classics, Belgian comic books (nothing like American comics) to French movies (teeming with nudity and underage sex) to American movies back when martial arts heroes wearing a headband were taken seriously, and then more classics, erotic stories, teen love stories. I mean etc., etc., etc.

Something popular among teens back then was Dungeons & Dragons and books where you were the hero. The Sorcerer of the Fire Mountain came in translation to Quebec in 1984 and I was like "what's this?" at 12. It became a huge hit with us. You were the hero; you took decisions, sometimes for the worst. It was fun. These adventure books were mostly inspired from Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. So was Dungeans & Dragons.

Style can be whatever one sees as art. It's just as easy to define as it is to drink the ocean or play golf in Greenland.