Exploring Literary Fiction vs. Fantasy and Speculative Elements

Show Notes

• Vladimir Nabokov 
• 190 – What Is Literary Fiction
• Way of Kings Shows Us The Damage a Meta Mystery Can Do 
• How Romanticism Harms Writers
• The Buried Giant 
• Ishiguro-Le Guin Drama
• Piranesi
• Haunting of Hill House 
• The Metamorphosis 
• Edgar Allan Poe’s Short Stories 
• 193 – The History of Haunted Houses 
• Is Neil Gaiman Magical Realism 

Transcript

Generously transcribed by Viviana. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

You’re listening to The Mythcreants Podcast. With your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock, and Chris Winkle. 

[Opening Music]

Wes: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast. I’m your host, Wes and with me today is…

Oren: Oren.

Wes: And

Chris: Chris. 

Wes: And we’re gonna start bashing literary fiction right off the start, so I figured I’d start opening up with a quote that I think encompasses probably some of our biggest problems with this- we’ll call it a genre, a mood, a vibe, I don’t know. But, Vladimir Nabokov has this quote that says, “Style and structure are the essence of a book. Great ideas are hogwash.” And…

Chris: Mm-hm. 

Wes: If that is not literary fiction snobbery at its finest, I don’t know what is. And so, today we’re going to talk about that.

Chris: I have to say, Wes, for you, this is quite a turnaround. We did talk about snobbery last time, but-

Wes: Yes.

Chris:  To have you come out of the gate and be like, “And literary fiction people are snobs” is completely different. 

Wes:I think this is the crux of it because I consulted my notes from when we talked about literary fiction, genre fiction, and mass-market fiction in episode 190, and I’m looking at my notes, and I’m like, ‘I still agree with, like, all of this. What’s the problem?’ I’m like, ‘Oh, the problem is other people.’ Since then, what I’ve come to the conclusion of is that I don’t really understand literary fiction because I don’t hang out in literary circles. What I know about it is that when I read a book that is tagged as literary, there’s a good chance I will find problems with it, and when I critique it, I am told that those problems are actually good because it’s literary, and the arguments that people give don’t make any sense, but they are very often smug and superior.

Chris: That’s what all fan-ragers say about all of their stuff.

Wes:  Yeah, that’s true, but literary fans, I’ve noticed there’s a different vibe. 

Chris: Similar to the Malazan fans? 

Oren: Yeah, no, exactly. Malazan books definitely Venn-diagram over onto literary, right? There’s like a huge culture of ‘Actually this is very smart, and we are very smart for having read it, and if you are critiquing it, it is because you are not smart.’ Whereas, I get a lot of fan rage from, say, the Way of Kings critique. But I didn’t get specifically that level of, ‘These books are for smart people and you’re not a smart person.’ I just got people who were mad.

Chris: I said in 190, I don’t know how much there actually is snobbery around the idea of literary fiction.

Wes: Oh, you sweet summer child. 

Chris: Oh, I was trying so hard to be nice, aww! 

Wes: I was new-ish to the podcast still, you didn’t want to scare me off too bad. 

Chris: But for me, it’s just very much crystallized with my looking at romanticism, right? And now having a much firmer idea of the culture and how much that culture is bedded in academia on how it’s reinforced, and all of its tenets, which I had seen separately and not really linked together until I looked at romanticism by accident. It was like, ‘Oh, my God. This is all the things that are wrong with novel writing culture. They’re all right here and there’s a name for it.’ And from there, then it was much easier to link things together and the fact that. I think that the sense of superiority is not just an ingrained part of the culture, I almost want to say it’s an essential part. Because, when you have a bunch of professors who are sitting in universities where this is what they want, and they’re finding that all of their students come in and don’t like the works that they like, and the works that they like aren’t selling, it’s almost a reflexive way to try to continue their lofty positions, right? Because they have privileged positions in universities and that culture is ingrained there and self perpetuating. And to be clear, I’m totally in support of tenure because it gives people academic freedom, but that also means that those cultures don’t necessarily- they can make it so that they are almost all literary and resist change, even when the general populace likes other types of works better. It almost feels like the reliance on the idea of superiority is how they try to justify that privileged place that they have, even though they are a niche fandom. Which isn’t bad to be a niche fandom, but having a superiority complex is kind of bad. 

Wes: Really? (Sarcastic) 

Oren: I was gonna say that it’s if the dark fantasy fandom thought they were better than everyone else. Then I realized, ‘Wait, hang on, they kind of do.’ Not universally, of course, but that is definitely another flavor of, ‘We’re very smart for reading these books and you guys are just not smart because you didn’t like them.’

Wes: One of the fundamental issues with literary fiction, as far as I’m concerned, is that we teach English literature classes, and so they need things to study. We don’t really teach writing classes, because that’s why Mythcreants exists, because it has excellent writing advice, and how you craft characters, how you craft throughlines, like all of that great practical advice that people come to us for is not in a literary classroom because that’s not the point, but because that’s overwhelmingly the conversation, it infects actual writing, right? You start reading all these things, you’re like, ‘Oh, that must be the way you have to write it.’ Which is exactly where Chris is getting the, ‘Oh, romanticism is the root cause of all evils.’ For this kind of bit. When really it’s just literary fiction, it can be about any subject, but it just employs enough goods that you would want to teach them, like literary devices, or like multifaceted themes, or like complex illusions, right? If the payoff of reading the story is the experience of reading the text itself, instead of the resolution of the plot and character arcs, then I call it literary. I think it’s as simple as that. It’s just what are your expectations? And that’s it. But I think it just gets held up as something else because, I don’t know, I think people just want to like, like their things and be mad at you if you don’t like it, which is how I understood Chris’s talk about professors and things like that.

Chris: I would also say that I think in classrooms, there’s also a great deal of emphasis on literature courses, oftentimes over creative writing courses, as you were saying, and I think that there is partly a big difference in that literature is all about analyzing works that somebody has already written, which is very different than if you are a storyteller and you want to create something, and so I can see how if your entire profession is analyzing works that are already written how rewarding it becomes to go, ‘Oh, I want to look at all of the different multiple levels and we want to debate over what it means and I can’t change what’s in it, but I can look at it in a new light and that’s interesting.’ Whereas if you’re a storyteller and you’re trying to actually create a specific experience for the reader or get something across, that comes with very different goals than somebody who is teaching a literature course. It does feel like a lot of the English classes and the way that they almost look at quote unquote ‘great literature’ comes with the idea that the literature is fixed and so we apply creativity in how we look at it instead of looking at, ‘Okay, but how can we make it to get the result that we want.’

Oren: What I find interesting is when you have books that are considered literary, because there isn’t a great set of definitions for what literary fiction is. Wes’ definition is pretty good, but that isn’t always what other people are using.

Wes: Should be.

Oren: I take books that are considered literary, but still have speculative elements. Because, of course, like all genres, literary has a lot of crossover with other genres, and those are the ones that I find interesting. If it’s a literary book that has no magic or advanced tech or anything, and it’s just set in the real world, sorry, that is so far outside of my interests that I don’t even know how to comment on it. But, when it’s something like The Buried Giant, or Piranesi, or The Haunting of Hill House, all of which are books that get labeled as literary by various people, but also clearly have speculative elements, those are the ones that I find fascinating. Can I tell you guys a little bit about the drama around The Buried Giant? 

Wes: Oh, please. 

Chris: Yeah, let’s hear it. 

Oren: Okay, so this is some drama from 2015, so this is vintage drama. The author, Kazuo Ishiguro, said in some context, and I cannot find where the original quote is, I can only find people saying he said this, that he was worried people would think this book was fantasy. Which is a very silly thing to say, because it is fantasy. It’s set in Arthurian England with magic and dragons and stuff. It’s fantasy. So it’s a very weird thing to say. This made Ursula K. Le Guin very upset, and she wrote an angry blog post, which I think she deleted, because I can’t find that blog post either, I can only find people talking about it, and she lambasted him, and I haven’t always agreed with everything Le Guin said, but I certainly felt some sympathy there. Then, later, Ishiguro clarified that he likes all of those things, and ‘Let’s be friends, everyone’ and Le Guin was like, ‘Alright, we’ll be friends.’ But still was like, ‘If you like all those things, why were you worried that people would think it was fantasy?’ And my favorite thing that I found about this book was someone saying, it could be YA, because it’s got ogres and stuff. 

Chris: That seems to be part of the like, fantasy is for children. Thing that some people who have no familiarity with speculative fiction think. They’re just like, ‘Oh, it’s fantasy, you mean fairy tales and fairy tales for children.’ Actually, no, fairy tales are definitely not for children. If you’ve actually read any original fairy tales.

Oren: Tell me you don’t know anything about publishing without telling me you don’t know anything about publishing. 

Chris: If your only familiarity with fantasy is Disney movies. Disney animated classics, then maybe that’s what you think. 

Wes: The Buried Giant is an interesting case. I think where Ishiguro is really coming with that is like, probably how he wanted his book marketed. He’s like, ‘Okay, no, like, I’m trying to comment on memory,’ is where I think the literary components come in, right? The theme throughout the book is just, what is memory, right? That’s why there’s the amnesia inducing fog, like, how do we construct memory and the experiences that the different characters have with that? And then there’s the whole drawing on more Arthurian texts as well. So big play on themes and drawing on an established literature are two giant flags that he wants it to be taken as like a literary story. Because la hallmark of a more conventional fantasy is that maybe it’s not going to like directly comment on another book. It might just be focusing on its own thing. Everybody draws on stuff anyways, it’s just positioning, but you can see like where maybe he was just like, ‘Oh,’ and why he had to backtrack on it too.

Oren:  And here’s the thing that makes me a little sad about that. It’s because it’s not like I can prove this. I don’t have a market research team, but certainly from my experience, I can’t imagine that fantasy fans would dislike a book where the premise is, ‘Hey, what if there was a magical fog on the land that drained memories?’

Wes: Great premise. 

Oren: And buried ancient atrocities committed in the name of maintaining peace. And then what would happen if that fog started to lift and people remembered? That is a super cool premise, right? I think Game of Thrones fans would be all over that and they might expect more blood and gore but there are lots of fantasy books that don’t have blood and gore, right? That’s a cool premise, I think fantasy fans would love that. Where I think fantasy fans would have a problem… this is the part that makes me sad about the book, is that it has that great premise and then it just does not live up to it. Because we start off with this cool premise and we have this elderly couple who are trying to make a journey in the midst of all this and trying to figure out who they are and what that will mean for them, and that’s all very cool, I might even call it character driven. 

Chris: No.

Oren:  But then, in the middle of all that, suddenly we veer off and are hanging out with this kid, who, I’m sure Ishiguro had some ideas about what this kid means, but to me he means nothing. He’s not important, he has nothing to do with the old couple other than being in their proximity for a while, and I guess he’s supposed to represent how the younger generation will continue the hatred of the older generation, but, my god, he has a lot of screen time for such a simple idea and we spend a lot of time with him, and at one point we talk to these boatmen who think that they are the arbiters of whether or not your romance is real, and I’m sure that also had some deep meaning to Ishiguro, but I’m just sitting here wondering, ‘What the heck does this have to do with the initial premise?’ Which sounded really cool, and then just gets lost as the story continues. 

Wes: Right there just is, I think, maybe our chief frustration with so-called ‘literary works’ is maybe they have a throughline, but the author, like, either doesn’t really care about it, or just abandons it. But people who like these stories don’t care, which is speaking as somebody who does like a lot of those stories, but like now after we’ve been podcasting for 10 years and talking about this stuff, it’s a mixed payoff, right? And when you can have cool novel craft and world building and also rich payoff, just give me all the good stuff. Why should I trade? Why should I sacrifice? 

Chris: Even if the primary focus is on wordcraft and how pretty the wordcraft sounds and enjoying the experience, it doesn’t hurt the book to have a plot that works. 

Oren: Yeah, if this novel came to me as an editing manuscript, I would tell the author things like, ‘Your wordcraft is really strong and you have a really cool premise and very engaging characters, but you’re trying to make your story about everything and your story can be about anything, but it can’t be about everything, and I’m gonna ask you to prioritize.’

Wes: That’s right, only Moby Dick can do that. Because it’s too long. But it’s so fun.

Oren: Maybe agree to disagree on that one. I have a whale’s worth of opinions on Moby Dick, but… 

Wes: I think my favorite thing about that thing is just that it’s basically Herman Melville’s love letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne, and it’s, boy, know your audience, man. 

Chris: One thing, Wes, I’m interested to get your opinion on, since you’re putting a lot of emphasis on the type of wordcraft, but the thing that I consistently hear from romantics is that they consider important is characters, that they want to do in depth character looks, and a lot of the works that are being called literary often have characters that are really wacky or have a lot of flaws, but there is also often a lot of character internalizing. Just a lot of words are spent going into the character’s mindset extensively, going into their background, that kind of thing. Do you see that as playing a role in your way of thinking about literary works?

Wes: I think it contributes, for sure. While you were talking about that, I was like, let me rack my mind for like a spec fic type example. And Franz Kafka is The Metamorphosis where Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning and is just turned into a giant bug. It’s all interiority because he can’t talk, he’s just a giant bug. And it’s a novella, but that’s all interiority as he sees things play out around him with his family and there’s no plot at all. Like, it’s just him and the family eventually just getting tired of him and the whole thing is just social commentary done in a weird kind of wacky way. And I think it’s good. I’m glad it’s short, you know, because I think that novel premise can’t last very long. And maybe that’s an issue with literary fiction as well. It’s like, they’re just too long. A lot of them should be shorter. And I think that’s why Poe is good, because he prioritized short stories and his whole goal in his philosophy of composition, which is you can read online, is just to evoke a single feeling in a story. That’s all he wanted to do is just, ‘I wanna write something that makes you feel this one thing. That’s what I’m gonna try to do, whether it be like dread or like anxiety or something like that.’ I like that challenge. I like that idea. Does it have great plot? No. Does it have weird characters? Yes. Does it make me feel something? Sometimes! 

Oren: Well, nobody’s POE-fect. 

Wes: Nobody’s…No.

Chris: Yes. But no, I can definitely see where some people really enjoy lots of internalizing, but that does tend to really slow movement down to a crawl. So, a lot of people are just going to find that fairly dull, but other people enjoy that and that’s completely reasonable. Haunting of Hill House. One we can talk about that has lots of internalizing and is also just slow moving. It’s not that it doesn’t have a plot, but it becomes a crawl.

Chris: And I have this quote from the version that’s currently on Amazon that has this introduction and this is just so romantic, this quote from the introduction. The whole thing is, of course, like this, but this called my attention, and the emphasis comes from the quote, to be clear. “Eleanor is a genuine literary character, rather than a device of the narrative. She is complicated and a distinctive individual, peculiar even, although not so peculiar that she fails to engage the reader’s sympathy.” And it’s just the italicized “character”, right? Other people just write devices of the narratives. But this is an actual, true, genuine character. It just, again, really speaks to some of those attitudes that they have in literary circles well only a character where we spend all of this time. Internalizing to explore every faucet of their backstory and history or whatever is a real character. And, I don’t know, I just find that kind of funny, but The Haunting of Hill House definitely does that, right? Spends lots of time internalizing. 

Wes: The point of The Haunting of Hill House, besides having great prose, as far as I’m concerned… And we talked about this in our History of Haunted Houses podcast, is that Shirley Jackson wanted to write a psychological horror story, and that’s what you get. It’s just, sure, there’s that great, fantastic opening paragraph about The Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against the hills. That’s cool, but then yeah, it’s all Eleanor. And her increasing unreliability as this fantasy that she’s wrapped into her mind, ultimately, spoilers, cause her to drive away and crash and die.

Oren: It’s funny because there’s always this, this character, this is a real character, and this is the thing that people say about literary fiction a lot, and I have to admit, after reading Hill House, I don’t feel like Eleanor is especially deep. I think she’s fine, I think she does what she needs to do, but I think like most good characters, Shirley Jackson focuses on a few elements of her because trying to portray an actual person in all of their complexity, even in a novel with a lot of interiority, would be too hard, and probably, you’d lose the reader, we focus on a few things that Eleanor has, and I think it works, but I wouldn’t call it particularly unusual. If every other character that people write is a mere device, then Eleanor is that too, right? What is the difference between Eleanor and any other great character that readers connected with? 

Chris: We do lots and lots of internalizing.

Oren: We do. 

Chris: But that brings me to the question of… What is the big difference between Haunting of Hill House and what Stephen King is writing? Is it just that his wordcraft is worse? Because he does, in some of his works, a whole lot of internalizing. And he loves delving into characters. He clearly has a romantic mindset. His memoir is just beloved by literary professors, but I’ve never heard him, despite how he seems to want to be literary and has those aspirations, ever spoken of as though his novels. are literary in any way. 

Wes: Great question, Chris. My answer, I suspect, is why comedies don’t win Academy Awards. Convention. It’s just like, he positioned himself as a horror writer. He writes horror. Horror is a genre. Full stop. 

Chris: And Haunting of Hill House doesn’t qualify as horror?

Wes: Because I don’t think she ever positioned it as such. She just submitted these things to just get published. And a lot of things were published, like, posthumously. I think whoever her agent was, just grabbed it and was like, ‘Okay, well, this is just fiction writing. Like, it’s not genre, because it’s about, like, real people. And fantastical elements are not super fantastical, so hey, fine.’ I think it just has to be how the book is marketed for some of these things. Stephen King’s Misery has no speculative fiction elements and you get good feels in that, good strong horror feels in that story, but it’s not considered literary by any means, even though I think it does have plenty of literary components in it. But he’s just held up as something else entirely. So, yeah, that positioning is really weird, and it shows just how arbitrary this is, and whoever’s holding the keys to these gates is just doing their thing.

Chris: Yeah, cause to me, Haunting of Hill House does read like just classic horror, and yeah, it’s a little more slow and psychological, but, I don’t know, it doesn’t, for me, really set it that much apart from a lot of other horror works or speculative works.

Oren: One thing I would also say is that Shirley Jackson has been dead for 50 years at this point. I would not be surprised if 50 years after Stephen King’s death, and to be clear, I wish no ill will toward Stephen King. I hope he is with us for quite some time. But, I wouldn’t be surprised if 50 years after he passes, his works are considered literary. Because, the two criteria that seem to come up the most often in whether a work is literary, is, if it’s new, it has to be avant garde in some way. That is what generally gets it tagged as literary. Or, if it’s old, it doesn’t have to be. It can be very conventional, but if it’s old, then it can be literary. 

Wes: I’m glad you brought that up, Orym, because that gets back to English literature classes. Has the book been around long enough and does it have enough of what they consider teachable to be taught enough? So there’s been enough time for several works in Shirley Jackson’s catalog to have been taught and reviewed. Brought into classrooms like The Lottery, Hill House, We Have Always Lived In The Castle, those things have been taught now, and so it’s considered literary ’cause we can teach it in class. I’m sure people teach some Stephen King, but he’s not in the classrooms. He’s not part of curriculums across the country

Oren: And he’s just too present. Right. He’s still there. Still tweets or exes now is what he does.

Wes: I heard today they’re called zeets.

Oren: Zeets? Yeah, he does that. He has opinions. I just don’t think we’re ready to start the process of literarizing Stephen King yet. I suspect that will happen eventually, though.

Wes: If the author is dead, sometimes you have to wait. 

Chris: But that also speaks to the double meaning of the word literary, right? Whether it’s a genre with particular conventions, like all genres, or whether we’re just pointing at the works that we think are superior in some way and just calling them literary. Which, honestly, I just don’t think that’s very healthy, that whole attitude of, ‘You’re not legitimate unless you have this literary label.’ Writers are so eager for validation. And I don’t think that’s a good way to look at it. 

Oren: I would agree, except one obvious exception is that it got this novel that I really like, Piranesi, by Susanna Clarke. There was more notice for that book because it was declared literary. 

Chris: No! I like it so it’s not literary. It has a well, no, it has a well structured plot. With a good resolution, therefore, it can’t be literary. If people are, like, defining literary by what they think is good characters, I think I’m allowed to define it by ‘It has a bad plot.’ So if it has a good plot, it just can’t. 

Oren: That was the thing I found funny was I was trying to find, okay, why do people think that Piranesi is literary? And as far as I could tell, the answer was that they wanted it to be. 

Chris: It does have a fair amount of internalizing. But the thing is that, again, the plot is good. The pacing is good. If it was a much longer book, it would probably become a problem, but it’s just short enough that it stays tight, and it does feel like things move, even though there is a fair amount of character contemplation in there. 

Wes: Yeah, to your point of saying, why is it literary? Because they wanted it to. Brings me back to the point about why comedies don’t win Academy Awards. Until Tropic Thunder in 2008, that Ben Stiller satirical action comedy. Got a bunch of nominations and won Academy Awards because people just decided ‘Oh, okay this one.’ It just doesn’t make any sense.

Oren: But perhaps Piranesi can be where we heal the rift between spec-fic and literary.

Chris: No, it’s ours! So it belongs to us, it does not belong to them. They can’t have it. They can’t have it. It’s obviously a work of fantasy, come on. 

Oren: I saw one blog post in their attempt to define it as literary tried to say it was magical realism. 

Chris: What? No. 

Wes: Magical realism is definitely the way literary fans try to say that they enjoyed a fantasy novel.

Chris: Because it has the word ‘realism’ in it. Look again, it’s exactly how I got my TA to allow me to write speculative fiction in college is by, what if I write magical realism? Like all he hears is it has the word realism in it. And he’s like, ‘Sure.’ And then I just write whatever I want. ‘You said I can have magical realism. So therefore this must be allowed.’ 

Wes: I’ve definitely been in classes where people hold Neil Gaiman up as like magical realism, like American Gods, for example. And I’m just like, ‘Sure, whatever.’

Chris: Yeah, it can’t be speculative fiction, because it’s good. 

Wes: Can’t be spec.

Oren: Yeah, that’s a whole argument about whether or not magical realism is a genre defined by what is in the story or by who wrote it, because I’ve seen some arguments that it is a Latin American genre specifically, and I’m not going to weigh in on that, I don’t have any opinions, I just know that if you’re defining it to the point where it can include Piranesi, you don’t know what it means.

Oren: I have one more thing I want to say before we go, because we’re almost out of time, which is, regardless of what people think about literary fiction or not, I would just say that as a content editor, I often encounter problems in stories that authors tell me they are doing on purpose because they want to be literary. These are things like weak plots, characters doing things that just don’t make any sense, and poor world-building, and authors sometimes tell me they’re doing that on purpose to be more literary, and it’s, to some extent, still a free country, so you can do that, but if that’s the kind of attitude you have towards your book, I’m probably not the right editor for you, because, like, all I can tell you is how to fix those things. I can’t tell you how to keep them that way, and also make people like your story. 

Chris: Yeah, I think we should just go the Piranesi route and just make your story good enough that people want to declare it literary just ‘cause.

Oren: Yeah, that’s the new way. You’ll be literary if it’s really good and some literary fans like it. And then they will create the reasons that it’s literary for you. It’s the perfect crime! Alright, I think we will go ahead and close the podcast on that note. 

Chris: And if you enjoy this podcast, consider supporting us on Patreon. Just go to patreon.com/mythcreants. 

Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First, we have Callie McLeod. Then we have Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, we have Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week. 

[Closing Music]

This has been the Mythcreants Podcast. Opening and closing theme, “The Princess Who Saved Herself”, by Jonathan Coulton.