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More on literary vs. popular novels

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From Michael at 2Blowhards, the transcription of a speech by novelist Richard Wheeler. Wheeler notes that the novels “we call classics . . . were largely written for ordinary people, not educated elites” and then offers this explanation for the creation of “literary fiction” as a category:

[T]he distinction between literary and popular fiction is quite recent, three or four decades old. When I was a youth it didn’t exist. Yet today it is a given: we assume that there have always been two branches of literature, and we writers need to make one or the other our own. Where did it come from? I had no idea how it evolved until my friend Win Blevins, who has an advanced degree in criticism from Columbia University, enlightened me. The distinction between literary and popular fiction arose, he told me, about the time when colleges began to offer workshop courses in creative writing, especially in the 1960s and 1970s.

Teachers used the term “literary” to describe what was to be taught in these workshops. These seminars would teach students the art of writing a “serious” novel, and not something light or transitory or appealing to popular tastes. This distinction gradually became the norm, and in modern times “literary fiction” has become a distinct branch of literature.

Wheeler also says this, but doesn’t elaborate further:

Until recently, authors who wrote popular fiction thought it provided a better income than literary fiction. Publishers threw their publicity resources behind blockbuster and midlist novels, and the result was real rewards for the commercial novelist. But times are changing and who can say what the future will bring? I suspect that just now, most literary novelists earn more.

I wonder if that’s true, and why it is . . . are there too many pop fiction writers out there eating from the same pot? Is pop fiction a commodity, whereas literary fiction is a luxury, and so able to command higher prices?

Interesting questions . . .

Posted about this subject as well here.

Update: and here.

What he said

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Just when you thought one could hardly find a new virtue to ascribe to the blogosphere, we have this, in a piece at 2Blowhards about pulp fiction:

I was brainwashed, er, educated into reading and appreciating upscale fiction, yet my own temperament much prefers popular fiction. Games with words and concepts can amuse me for a while, but on a gut level I love narrative. In this, I’m like most people, of course. It’s funny the degree to which the upscale set has made so many readers feel apologetic about preferring story to intellectual shenanigans and art-games, isn’t it? Story is basic, after all; without it, there’s no such thing as fiction in the first place. Where highfalutin’ artists and audiences often see narrative as a to-be-regretted necessity, I see it as an inviting and giant playground. Where the upscale set often experiences the requirements of story as getting in the way of creativity and visions, I see narrative as what makes expression possible.

I can remember exactly when I realized that for me as a writer, it was about telling stories. I was an undergraduate, a Comparative Literature major, and reading all kinds of High Literature, but on the side I’d begun collecting volumes of folk tales at second hand bookstores, I’d become fascinated with literature’s oral roots, with the image of people gathered around a communal fire, trading stories, and how once in awhile someone would come along who was just that much better at telling them; someone who knew how to embellish an old tale just so, how to draw out the suspense, how to time the climax.

I was a hair’s breadth from becoming an academic, applying to graduate school and embarking on a writing career that would have hinged, always, on writing for other academics. But I broke.

I went for a long time afterward not writing much fiction — too much other stuff to sort out — but my fundamental commitment had been made. I wanted to tell stories. I wanted to write books that people draw up to, transfixed, the way they once listened to storytellers spin tales around those ancient fires.

Do I have the chops? I don’t know. But that’s my aspiration.

I hang out on a chicklit forum on Yahoo (a fabulous resource for anyone who writes commercial women’s fiction) and once every couple of months someone will post a link to yet another review that sniffs at the chicklit genre for not being Literature, for not being High Art.

And every time, I feel like I’m looking at something through the wrong end of a telescope — something far away. And preternaturally tiny . . .

Update: posted more thoughts on literary versus popular/genre fiction here.