They’re hard to pin down, and different people I know have different explanations.
The one in my head is basically that they pay too much attention to theme and perspective; while in many cases litfic is directly about perspectives (themes), lots of people tend to be reductio ad absurdums of this, focusing on these things in rather simplistic ways that sometimes ignore how the world works or the basic potentially interesting things in the setting**. This is made worse because it’s less obvious to the unpractised eye by the very nature of what’s being tackled what the difference between Nabokov and McEwan is than is that between Arthur C Clarke and a generic bad SF writer; and by the fact that the average litfic writer has been through a professional course in writing and therefore sounds very polished.
Here’s China Mieville’s explanation, since you shouldn’t be limited by my account found in the Guardian (it’s not a coincidence that he chose Saturday too, it’s partly that it’s too good an example and partly that he put it in my head back when I read this piece): ”Literary fiction of that ilk – insular, socially and psychologically hermetic, neurotically backslapping and self-congratulatory about a certain milieu, disaggregated from any estrangement or rubbing of aesthetics against the grain – is in poor shape.” Miéville identifies Ian McEwan’s Saturday, set around the 2003 demonstration against the Iraq war, as a “paradigmatic moment in the social crisis of litfic”. ”In the early 2000s there was this incredible efflorescence of anger and excitement . . . It seemed to me that Saturday quite bolshily said, ’OK, you accuse us of a neurotic obsession with insularity and a certain milieu. I’m going to take the most extraordinary political event that has happened in Britain for however many years and I am going to doggedly interiorise it and depoliticise it with a certain type of limpid prose . . . It was a combative novel that met that sense of there being a crisis and de-crisised it through its absolute fidelity to a set of generic tropes.”
*Another particularly appropriate example: Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is a post-apocalyptic novel involving, among other things, cannibals and an earth that can’t grow food that, at page 300, suddenly reveals that it’s about A Father’s Concerns About Setting His Child Free and nothing else*. I’m sympathetic to the theme, but not when it funges on everything else potentially interesting about the story.
Edit: I consider China Mieville more able to answer this question properly than Eliezer because he has read a lot of litfic and incorporates techniques from that side into his writing. Also, I just realised that this whole thread must have been a bit frustrating to you because of my laziness. Sorry about that.
I have heard that the decline in the compelling qualities of literary fiction is due to classes in writing taught by literature professors, who know how to identify things like themes but who have no idea how to write compelling writing. Does this seem like a plausible statement to you?
No. I wouldn’t mind that, but those two are hardly the only things novels can do; and I can’t provide an exhaustive list of what literature does and how it does it—if I could do such things I’d have written something worth reading by now.
I’m sorry, but I have no idea how to explain Mieville’s statements to you. Lit people are often vague, and often because they aren’t able to be clearer. Maybe if you had specific points of confusion I could help. It might help to know that the litfic audience is a lot more like an academy than a fanbase, and that Mieville is a Marxist so he’s using language from there.
*I can tell you that he’s talking about rich people’s concerns and how they’ve taken over litfic and how there’s a very narrow understanding of character building, but there’s lots more intricacy to it and that’s why I’d do better at explaining bits than the whole thing.
.
They’re hard to pin down, and different people I know have different explanations.
The one in my head is basically that they pay too much attention to theme and perspective; while in many cases litfic is directly about perspectives (themes), lots of people tend to be reductio ad absurdums of this, focusing on these things in rather simplistic ways that sometimes ignore how the world works or the basic potentially interesting things in the setting**. This is made worse because it’s less obvious to the unpractised eye by the very nature of what’s being tackled what the difference between Nabokov and McEwan is than is that between Arthur C Clarke and a generic bad SF writer; and by the fact that the average litfic writer has been through a professional course in writing and therefore sounds very polished.
Here’s China Mieville’s explanation, since you shouldn’t be limited by my account found in the Guardian (it’s not a coincidence that he chose Saturday too, it’s partly that it’s too good an example and partly that he put it in my head back when I read this piece):
”Literary fiction of that ilk – insular, socially and psychologically hermetic, neurotically backslapping and self-congratulatory about a certain milieu, disaggregated from any estrangement or rubbing of aesthetics against the grain – is in poor shape.” Miéville identifies Ian McEwan’s Saturday, set around the 2003 demonstration against the Iraq war, as a “paradigmatic moment in the social crisis of litfic”.
”In the early 2000s there was this incredible efflorescence of anger and excitement . . . It seemed to me that Saturday quite bolshily said, ’OK, you accuse us of a neurotic obsession with insularity and a certain milieu. I’m going to take the most extraordinary political event that has happened in Britain for however many years and I am going to doggedly interiorise it and depoliticise it with a certain type of limpid prose . . . It was a combative novel that met that sense of there being a crisis and de-crisised it through its absolute fidelity to a set of generic tropes.”
*Another particularly appropriate example: Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is a post-apocalyptic novel involving, among other things, cannibals and an earth that can’t grow food that, at page 300, suddenly reveals that it’s about A Father’s Concerns About Setting His Child Free and nothing else*. I’m sympathetic to the theme, but not when it funges on everything else potentially interesting about the story.
Edit: I consider China Mieville more able to answer this question properly than Eliezer because he has read a lot of litfic and incorporates techniques from that side into his writing.
Also, I just realised that this whole thread must have been a bit frustrating to you because of my laziness. Sorry about that.
I have heard that the decline in the compelling qualities of literary fiction is due to classes in writing taught by literature professors, who know how to identify things like themes but who have no idea how to write compelling writing. Does this seem like a plausible statement to you?
It sounds unlikely to be a cause—with a different reward system different teaching will be deemed right.
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No. I wouldn’t mind that, but those two are hardly the only things novels can do; and I can’t provide an exhaustive list of what literature does and how it does it—if I could do such things I’d have written something worth reading by now.
I’m sorry, but I have no idea how to explain Mieville’s statements to you. Lit people are often vague, and often because they aren’t able to be clearer. Maybe if you had specific points of confusion I could help.
It might help to know that the litfic audience is a lot more like an academy than a fanbase, and that Mieville is a Marxist so he’s using language from there.
.
*I don’t know what you understand and don’t.
*I can tell you that he’s talking about rich people’s concerns and how they’ve taken over litfic and how there’s a very narrow understanding of character building, but there’s lots more intricacy to it and that’s why I’d do better at explaining bits than the whole thing.