Literary, Genre, or Both?

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what makes a piece of fiction literary and what make it not so. The common term for fiction that is not literary is “genre”, e. g., science fiction, fantasy, horror. It is like there is this hierarchy of literature with literary works at the top and genre below. It is a lot like visual arts. Back in the day, historical and religious paintings were considered the top (physically as well; on the walls at the salon) and “genre” paintings (those depicting everyday life - peasant life) were at the bottom or not even considered worthy of display.

Defining literary is not that easy. From what I gather, a literary piece of fiction focuses on character and style, think scenes involving two people talking in a room discussing deep philosophical stuff or just life with not a lot of action going on and often highly metaphorical and with experimental language, making it more challenging to read. Genre, however, tends to focus on plot, action, and setting (worldbuilding). It is more “straight forward” in language. Of course there are those rare crossovers. My fave novels of all time are Dune (sci-fi) and Perdido Street Station (New Weird fantasy), which I consider very literary. That is what I aspire to with my UrbanWeird aesthetic.

I read a lot of literary fiction, particularly the classics, as well as a good amount of speculative fiction. Over the past couple years while I was doing major edits on my novel “Flowers Wilt, Weeds Thrive”, I was reading quite a bit of modernist and postmodernist literature (first and second halves of the 20th century, respectively). These types of literature are notoriously difficult to read. Anyone who has read the likes of Woolf, Joyce, Faulkner, and McCarthy know what I mean. The goal of these writers is to challenge the reader, to not make it easy. I found that my writing, particularly my editing, had become influence by these writers. I found this out when I joined a local writers critique workshop and I submitted the first chapter of my novel as a last opportunity to get feedback before publishing. Many were confused and disoriented by the chapter. Because it is a type of fantasy as well, and many there write fantasy, they had that “genre” mindset of needing the language to be straight forward and to know what was going on right away. They tended to take my metaphors literally just because of the nature of fantasy. A metaphor could easily be mistaken or something that is actually that way. It was quite eye-opening.

Many of their critiques were very useful and I did make the first chapter clearer because it was a bit too obtuse and overwrought. This is my debut novel after all, and I needed all the feedback I can get and by no means a seasoned author. My goal for the future books in this series and books in general is to strike that balance between the expectations of the genre but challenge such readers more than they are used to and hopefully win over literary readers to speculative.