About fiction

Steve of This Space talks about how literary fiction is perceived, here. What I think is, fiction can be bifurcated into two parts: pulp fiction and literary fiction. The Brothers Karamazov is literary fiction (which I haven’t touched for a long time after reading more than 300 pages) and If Tomorrow Comes is pulp fiction.

Both kinds of fictions are not defined by the kind of things they tell, but by the way they tell things. Most pulp fiction books narrate stories of love, passion and crime. But so do most of the classics that are the epitomes of literature, be it Tolstoy, Garcia or Hemingway. Our own Indian classics are replete with romance and intrigue. Talking about Indian literature, literary fiction is less esoteric here. You cannot compare Dickens with Munshi Premchand. Premchand mostly depicted poverty, illiteracy, backwardness and their associated miseries in rural India whereas Dickens mostly wrote dreamy romances in the backdrop of putrefying English society.

Literary fiction makes you a part of the story, and pulp fiction tells you a story. I don’t want to go into the debate that literary fiction is more intelligent and pulp fiction is less but one can easily make out the difference. The readers of pulp fiction want to read the book like a quickie — be done with it. They don’t care how the words are used, how the sentences are constructed, and how the droplets of tiny incidents are turned into a wave of imagination. They want everything understandable, and they don’t want to use their brains — at least while reading pulp fiction.

No, easy language does not mean dull writing. Hemingway — I’ve never read him — is known for using very simple expressions to write very complex thoughts.

Literary fiction readers on the other hand look for a deeper satisfaction. It may not be immediate, but the intellectual pleasure they derive is long-lasting. You always end up learning something new. You are not merely a viewer; you get involved with the nerration. The writers of literary fiction make ample use of extensive research. Take for instance White Mughals; the author, William Dalrymple, spent 9 years researching for the book and travelled to multiple continents in order to glean valuable but deeply hidden details. Can a pulp fiction writer do that, or afford to do that? I doubt it.