What Is "Serious" Literature?
What a question!
Happy Thursday, everyone. It’s almost the weekend. Yay!
Before I regale you (bemuse you? befuddle you?) with my wandering mind’s musings of late, I want to share two R&W programming updates:
Due to several compounding factors, Rhea and I have decided to set aside Middlemarch for this 2024 reading year. However, we have not discarded it! Heavens no! We will be reading it straight away in 2026.
What are the compounding factors?
First, we recognized that we cannot do this novel justice in the 6-8 weeks we were allotting it.
Second, there are several other Substacks engaging presently with Middlemarch; we didn’t want to add noise to those folks’ fine efforts (Closely Reading, and The Common Reader, for example). We are anxious to add to this Middlemarch conversation. Which is why we are waiting until we can give it the attention it deserves, as well as develop better ways to for our R&W community to engage with us as we do.
Finally, collectively, Rhea and I will be out of the country most of July (Rhea: vacation, Me: MFA residency) when we were slated to begin Middlemarch. In addition, I have a large pile of reading and writing work to accomplish before my July MFA residency time.
If you are sad to hear this, we understand. We are sad with you. Sorta. But really, we’re excited for the ways we will be able to engage with Middlemarch and you in more deep and meaningful ways in 2025.
My essay posting for the rest of the summer will be lighter than normal (see Summer MFA residency reason above).
That’s all for programming. On to the question burning a hole in my brain.
What makes “serious literature” serious?
Does this seem like an odd question to you? It does to me, and yet, here I am asking it and thinking about it. It’s the topic of my latest MFA seminar, specifically as it relates to genre literature v. “literary” literature, and whether genre literature can ever hope to ascend to the high offices that literary literature occupies.
Before we can even tackle this question of “serious” literature, shouldn’t we define what “serious” means? Beyond this, what are we even implying by the question? Why do we care to distinguish between serious and unserious literature in the first place? And, who gets to decide what’s serious and unserious anyway?
This kind of stuff makes my head hurt. They also mildly irritate me. It isn’t the “serious” aspect of the question, but rather the “who gets to decide” aspect.
It seems to me that those who’ve taken it upon themselves to be the deciders are often the most disconnected with the larger reading public, their lives and their concerns. The deciders tend to live in bubbled-off echo chambers where all their own ideas, values, and belief systems bounce back to them as affirmations; and all those things they find unsophisticated and despicable also bounce back to them as affirmations (by the other deciders living in the same bubbled echo chamber).
Beyond this, is the simple fact of personal taste. We all have our leanings when it comes to style. And also, styles seem to find their fashion—their ‘vogue’—in various times and places.
How could all these things not shape what one decides is serious or unserious literature?
And yet, the question is a valid one. Whether I’m making decisions for my own reading or for The Reader & the Writer, I, too have a set of criteria I am holding each book up against to determine if it is “worth” reading. (And, in the case of the podcast, worth you reading, too.) This, I think, could be another way of considering what is serious literature: that which I think is worth spending my time and energy on, and recommending it’s worth your time and energy, too.
So then, what kind of literature do I think is “worth” reading?
In the broadest sense of the term, I consider serious literature that which both instructs and delights.
This phrase, instruct and delight, is ancient. The Roman poet, Horace said it in his “Ars Poetica” (“Art of Poetry”) written in 19 BC. It was picked up in the Middle Ages and Renaissance era, and has been a touchstone for literary criticism ever since—whether by its upholding, or its rejecting.
C. S. Lewis, for example, didn’t seem to think much of the notion, at least as far as the terms were defined in the Renaissance Era. In his essay, “Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What’s to be Said,” he writes:
In the sixteenth century when everyone was saying that poets (by which they meant all imaginative writers) ought ‘to please and instruct’, Tasso made a valuable distinction. he said that the poet, as poet, was concerned solely with pleasing. But then every poet was also a man and a citizen; in that capacity he ought to, and would wish to, make his work edifying as well as pleasing.
Now I do not want to stick very close to the renaissance ideas of ‘pleasing’ and instructing.’ Before I could accept either term it might need so much redefining that what was left of it at the end would not be worth retaining. All I want to use is the distinction between the author as author and the author as man, citizen or Christian. What this comes to for me is that there are usually two reasons for writing an imaginative work, which may be called the Author’s reason and the Man’s. If only one of these is present, then, so far as I am concerned, the book will not be written. If the first is lacking, it can’t; if the second is lacking, it shouldn’t."
Lewis spends the rest of his essay distinguishing between each term: Author’s reason, which amounts to the creative impulse and bubbling, and the ultimate Form that impulse takes; and Man’s reason, which relates to Tasso’s statement about Man as a citizen (broad sense) with a moral obligation to consider how the work will benefit the citizenry.
This is what I mean, too, when I speak of serious literature being that which “instructs and delights.” As an artist, there must be the creative impulse giving inspiration, then shape and form and voice, and all the other things that make a work creative and not didactic; a story and not a progress report. As a human living in a particular time and place in history, making an work of art for other humans to “consume,” there ought to be woven through that art some greater vision toward the benefits of that work to humanity. (By “humanity,” I mean this at whatever audience the artist is considering while making the work)
The late novelist and literary critic, John Gardner, called fiction that sought these two principles, “moral fiction.” He wrote a book about it, On Moral Fiction, first published in 1978, and reissued with a new introduction by Lore Segal in 2000. Here is Gardner at the beginning of Chapter Two:
Nothing could be more obvious, it seems to me, than that art should be moral and that the first business of criticism, at least some of the time, should be to judge works of literature (or painting or even music) on grounds of the production’s moral worth. By “moral” I do not mean some such timid evasion as “not too blatantly immoral.” …. True art, by its nature is moral. We recognize true art by its careful, thoroughly honest search for and analysis of values. It is not didactic because, instead of teaching by authority and force, it explores, open-mindedly, to learn what it should teach. It clarifies, like an experiment in a chemistry lab, and confirms. As a chemist’s experiment tests the laws of nature and dramatically reveals the truth of falsity of scientific hypotheses, moral art tests values and rouses trustworthy feelings about the better and the worse in human action. (p. 18-19)
There are a few things I think worth noting in both Lewis’s and Gardner’s descriptions of worthwhile art (or “serious” art, for the sake of the question we’re asking):
Neither writer suggested that art ought to give pat answers to moral questions, or have some sort of “lesson” or “take away” the reader is supposed to apprehend through the reading. These kinds of stories often read like a bad sermon. You can almost hear the author behind the page “grinding his axe,” “beating her nail,” “riding his hobby horse.”
The story doesn’t have to end with the good guy always triumphing, or everything tied up in a neat, tidy bow in the end. I recently read The Watchmen, (don’t be surprised if this book shows up in a later essay) and the good guy definitely didn’t triumph in the end—unless you have a much different view of “good” than I do. If that story isn’t moral to it’s core, then I don’t know what is. It’s entire point is to wrestle with those ultimate questions of life: What is good? What is evil? What is right and wrong? Are these values absolute or relative depending on the situation? What is the value of a human life? Who decides these things??
Nowhere is genre mentioned. Not in the quotes I shared at least. Lewis—as the title of his essay suggests—talks about the fairy story being the form (or genre) he thought would best fulfill his intentions as both Author and Man. Gardner speaks of any artistic medium as being “good,” as long as it meets the standard of being “true” or “moral” art. The Watchmen, is a graphic novel. And it is serious, moral art.
There is so much more to this question of “serious” (or “true” to use Gardner’s language) literature than what I’ve already laboriously laid out above.
For example:
How does the Beautiful, the Good, and the True fit into all these things?
Can moral art be bad art? What makes it bad? If it is bad, then is it “true” art?
Can art that only delights still be worthy? Can it be called serious? Is it possible for a work to be of great delight and ultimately not have any “moral” or instructive value. Take the poetry of Shel Silverstein, for example.
I mentioned earlier literature that is “worth” reading. But, is it ever worth reading unserious literature? (How do we know it is unserious before we read it? And again, who gets to decide??)
And what about “genre”? Can serious art run across genre? Can a romance be serious literature? A western? A horror story? A graphic novel?
What else is there to consider?
What questions arise for you when it comes to this notion of serious literature?
Am I combining terms and ideas that I shouldn’t? Am I stretching definitions too far? Not far enough?
What else??
I love the questions you’ve posed and am curious to hear what others have to say.
I agree with you; serious literature is that which makes the reader wrestle with the big questions. When did it become unpopular to wrestle with your thoughts, ideas, deeply held beliefs? How do you know if you truly stand for something if you haven’t wrestled with it?
My hope is that authors will start writing more “serious” literature for children. No shade to books like DogMan and Diary of a Wimpy Kid (because they DO have their place) but how do these books sharpen a child ability to critically think? Kids need serious literature, too.
And to your question about genre—I do think “genre” literature can be serious literature. Look at books like THE ROAD and FAHRENHEIT 451, those are serious literary fiction in my mind but they also can be classified as dystopian. They are serious lit because they push the reader to wrestle with big questions—good and evil; how do you find hope in a desolate place.
Is it possible that PERSUASION could also be classified as a romance, too ? (I cringe at the thought) but… come on! When Wentworth writes that letter to Anne, I melted!
Could genre classifications be thought of as tools to help “shelf” a book or add more description to its type—not something that detracts from the quality?
You mentioned being too busy for a steady stream of newsletter posts but, even if you're not writing new material, you're demonstrating here a great knack for curation; by setting these two perspectives together, Gardener and Lewis, with some bullet-point observations and questions can be as thoughtful as a fleshed-out piece. I'm glad you saw a way to fit these two takes into a single conversation!
Also kinda thrilled by this: "Nowhere is genre mentioned. Not in the quotes I shared at least. Lewis—as the title of his essay suggests—talks about the fairy story being the form (or genre) he thought would best fulfill his intentions as both Author and Man. Gardner speaks of any artistic medium as being “good,” as long as it meets the standard of being “true” or “moral” art."
Genre stuff deserves a little more time in the sun here, I'm happy to see it championed