1 Chapter 1: What is Fiction as a Genre of Writing and Where did it Come From? What is Analysis?

What is Fiction as a Genre of Writing and Where did it Come From? What is Analysis?

What is Fiction?

For very good reasons a great many college courses start out by defining their object(s) of study. So here goes: what is fiction?

Many of us will have recourse to that commonsensical conceptual opposition of fact vs. fiction, with fiction being the inferior, maligned term within the pairing. Fiction is thought of writing that is in essence imaginative, fantastic, or made-up, as opposed to more rigorously empirical and objective forms of writing like journalism and history. You may have learned in philosophy class that Plato didn’t want to allow “poets” (in modern terms, creative writers) into his ideal society, the Republic, because to his mind they spread misinformation.

But what does it really mean for writing to be made-up or imagined when we poke deeper into things? All forms of writing use the imagination in various ways to bring some sets of meanings together that have never existed before; all forms of writing draw on the imagination and are “creative” in some way, shape, or form. And using a standard of pure imaginativeness as a litmus test to define what is and isn’t fiction starts to break down when we hold it to closer scrutiny. Even a highly “fantastic” and “imaginative” work like George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire (Game of Thrones) novels (and television adaptations) is grounded in things from the real world—not magic spells and dragons of course, but psychological motivations like ambition, lust, and jealousy, as well as historical realities: the overriding narrative conflict of familial struggle to rule a kingdom is based on the War of the Roses (1455-1487 CE) from British history, The Wall where Jon Snow is stationed was based on Hadrian’s Wall, and the Battle of Blackwater Bay was based on the Siege of Constantinople (717-718 CE). Other works of fiction are based extremely closely on historical personages and events, such as George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo, whose protagonist is Abraham Lincoln, and Joyce Carol Oates’s Blonde, a fictional retelling of Marilyn Monroe’s life. There is even a sub-genre[1] of fiction known as New Journalism that recounts actual historical events, but using the kind of writing techniques that a novelist traditionally employs. Truman Capote’s novel In Cold Blood took just such an approach to narrating the very real-world 1959 killings of a Kansas family.

So what makes these works of fiction rather than history, journalism, or what is loosely called creative non-fiction? It is not reducible to the writing style or techniques that they employ: core defining elements of fiction like dialogue, symbolism, and using sensory detail to establish setting are also used by good writers of other genres like history and journalism.

No, perhaps the best way to answer the question “what is fiction?” is to enquire into its rhetorical purpose. “Rhetoric,” as defined by Robert Penn Warren, is “the art of using language effectively.” You may have encountered this term in your freshman writing class or classes, as those in essence are classes in rhetoric: on how to use written language strategically to accomplish the different sorts of things people seek to accomplish through language. So to ask what is the rhetorical purpose of a piece or genre of writing is to ask what it is trying to use language to accomplish. So what does fiction, as a form of writing, seek to do that is different from what other genres of writing seek to do? It isn’t to faithfully and accurately capture events exactly as they have transpired—that is the rhetorical purpose of journalism and history as genres of writing. No, works of fiction seek to varying degrees to entertain and/or inform–in the sense of exploring different ideas or states of being through narrative. As we will see when we consider the historical roots of the genre of fiction below, it emerged as a form of writing of a society in which more and more people were literate and had leisure time to fill, so in the absence of motion pictures and sound recordings (both late 19th-century inventions), reading fiction was a major form of diversion—as it still is for many people today. As for the other part of its rhetorical purpose – to instruct or explore- storytelling is one of the most basic ways that human beings communicate complex information. These can be basic forms of moral instruction, like don’t cut corners on work or materials in the children’s story “The Three Little Pigs,” or more nuanced and ambiguous attempts to explore the nature of particular places and times, like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s take on Roaring Twenties capitalism in The Great Gatsby or Chinua Achebe’s take on the social fallout of the establishment of British colonialism in the Niger Delta region in Things Fall Apart.

Seeing fiction as being defined by its rhetorical purpose rather than some ostensible relationship to fact and imagination not only gets us past dismissals of fiction as frivolous or misleading/deceitful, it also points us in direction of what we need to do to best grasp the complexities of the ideas that fiction explores: engage in the act of textual analysis, the subject of this textbook. But before discussing the nature of analysis in some general terms, a little history on the genesis and evolution of fiction as a form of cultural production[2] will give us a deeper appreciation of what sort of human society gave birth to fiction as a way, among other things, of making sense of itself.

Where did Fiction Come from and How Has it Changed Over Time?

                No form of cultural production comes out of nowhere or is the product of some singular, isolatable stroke of genius. Rather, a new form of cultural production is always the result of a complex set of intersecting economic, technological, cultural, and socio-historical factors. For example, for rock and roll music to come into being, there had to be certain cultural precursors (most importantly the blues, which was brought to Northern U.S. big cities by African American musicians during the early 20th-century “Great Migration” of African Americans from the rural South to the urban centers of the North and the West Coast), technological means to produce the constitutive sounds of this music (the newly invented electric guitar), means to disseminate and make money off of this new musical form (radio transmissions, LP recordings, and the new medium of broadcast television), and just as importantly, a viable consumer group. In the early post-World War II era the U.S. entered a period of shared economic prosperity and a greatly expanding middle class (albeit one based on systems of racial segregation and white supremacy). Families had enough disposable income for their children to buy rock and roll recordings, concert tickets, and even musical instruments to join the ranks of rock and roll performers themselves. Thus the economic infrastructure—the birth of the teenager as a consumer group—existed for rock and roll to grow into the cultural phenomenon that it did.

Other genres of what we call literature are ancient, originating from before the beginning of recorded time, so we have to conjecture a little bit in trying to grasp when and why they emerged. We know that the ancient Egyptians had plays (though not a lot about what they were like, other than that they seemed to have a religious ritual function), but one can imagine even earlier than that Stone Age humans pantomiming something like a mammoth hunt, then repeating in the performance at a later date. Poetry has its roots in song and probably dates just as far back. But fiction in its defining modern forms of the novel and the short story is a relatively recent invention, and we can put our fingers exactly on the socio-historic factors that caused it to arise.

There are older, premodern forms of prose[3] fiction such as the parable, the tale, and the medieval romance. These were defined formally by fairly simplistic and linear plot structures and one- or two-dimensional characters who were stock types rather than complex facsimiles of human beings with deep interiority and complex character psychologies as in the novels and short stories of today. These premodern forms of fiction were part of the folk culture tradition – that is, the culture of societies that transmitted information (the news of the day, how to cook a certain recipe or do a particular local dance) orally as opposed to through print of digital mediums. The versions we have of these works were often recorded at a later date, as with the famous case of the German folktales collected and written down by the Brothers Grimm early in the 19th century.

But where the novel and the short story – the more complex forms of print narrative this textbook and course will focus on, — come from is the changing structure of society, first in Western Europe and then throughout the world, brought on by capitalism. Here’s the short, broad-contour version of this story (because this isn’t a history class – though all cultural phenomena have complex historic roots that need to be understood):

Capitalism is a form of economic and hence social organization based on private ownership of the means of production (the economic “engines” of society like financial institutions and businesses) and the drive to accumulate ever-greater amounts of capital (wealth in the form of money and other assets) through financial instruments like bank lending and bond purchasing and through large business ventures. It arose gradually from the 16th through the 18th centuries, first in England and the Low Countries (today’s Belgium and the Netherlands), then spread throughout Western Europe and, eventually in the 19th and 20th centuries, throughout the world due to European colonialism. Capitalism has become the target of much critique (again) today due, among other things, to the vast wealth inequalities that under-regulated capitalism sows and the way that the single-minded profit motive that drives it causes massive harm to the environment and indigenous peoples. But it has also produced much of wonder and beauty like the Empire State Building, fine dining, and the novel and short story as genres of writing. Karl Marx, capitalism’s most famous critic, marveled in The Manifesto of the Communist Party, that “It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former Exoduses of nations and crusades.”

Capitalism not only shifted the way human societies were organized economically, it brought on epochal changes to human societies and social psychology, creating an era scholars have dubbed “modernity,” which we still inhabit. Capitalism provided the funding for the Industrial Revolution to take place (money that was amassed from atrocious ventures, like the transatlantic slave trade and the plundering of mineral wealth from Central and South America), and these two pushed each other forward in a kind of mutually reinforcing feedback loop. This gradually transformed society, first in Western Europe then throughout the world as an accompaniment to European colonialism, from what sociologists term gemeinschaft society – small, organic, village-type communities with traditional cultural practices, a collective sense of purpose, and a predominantly oral manner of transmitting information – to gesellschaft society: predominantly urban settlements made up of alienated (to various degrees) individuals who transmit information in print (and then digital) forms. It’s hard to over-emphasize how epochal a change to human societies this marked; to name just a few ways: individuals went from small subsistence producers to individuated wage earners and consumers, the hours of the day came to be marked no longer by the movement of the sun but the abstract time of the clock (and time clock and train schedule), societies went from being majority-illiterate to majority-literate (especially in the UK, France, and United States after free compulsory public education is inaugurated in the later 19th century), loneliness and senses of social isolation became widespread phenomena, and the world came to be seen in increasingly secular terms – which is not to say that everyone suddenly became irreligious, but that whereas in the Middle Ages all aspects of life were seen in relation to ideas of the divine, in modern society people increasingly came to see the world operating in terms of impersonal relations of cause and effect and science came to predominate as an alternative vehicle for explaining the universe.

These social changes gave rise to the novel and the short story, modern forms of fiction for a modern age, due to at least four principle factors: increases in book and periodical affordability due to innovations in printing technology, increases in literacy rates, increases in leisure time, and an increased emphasis on individuality and psychological interiority. To touch on these each briefly in turn:

• 1) We’ve all heard of Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of the first moveable-type printing press (around 1440). But subsequent to this capitalist industrialization brought forth a whole series of innovations in printing and even paper-making technologies that over time brought the cost of printed materials down from that of luxury items only the rich could afford (back in the Middle Ages and before when books had to be hand-copied) to where they were effectively affordable and accessible for the common person. This of course allowed more books to be produced, allowing reading to become a mass form of popular entertainment and paving the way to new institutions like free lending libraries. The novel and the short story—at least during its heyday from roughly the middle part of the 19th century to the middle part of the twentieth, when it was circulated widely in popular print magazines—came to be among the most popular genres of writing within this new world of mass print culture.
• 2) As societies became more urban and industrialized, workers agitated to have access to education, some capitalists saw advantages to having a more educated workforce, and educational reformers like the British writer Matthew Arnold saw mass literacy as a way of creating a more moral and cohesive society. So by the end of the 19th century literacy rates had skyrocketed compared to earlier historical eras and with them the readerly demand for novels and short stories exploded as well.
• 3) Labor-saving technological innovations like tractors and washing machines created more free time for non-elite individuals—though we must never forget that workers had to organize and fight long, bitter battles to achieve the shorter working days that we often take for granted today (19th-century factory workers worked 6 days a week, 14 hours a day). But once this comparatively greater amount of free time was achieved for more (though certainly not all) people, novels and short stories were embraced as forms of entertainment and instruction/education to fill these hours.
• 4) As we touched on above, the modern era created secular spaces and placed more emphasis on the individual (for good and bad). The novel and the short story evolved as ways of expressively grappling with the complex interior lives and life trajectories of these modern individuals. Compare the fairly simplistic and un-nuanced presentation of character in a premodern work of fiction like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to the kinds of psychologically rich and deep characters in modern works of fiction like Dickens’s David Copperfield, Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, or Balram Halwai in Adiga’s The White Tiger.

With this sense of the socio-historic factors that gave rise to the novel and the short story in mind, we can now begin to ask, in general terms to start in the following chapter, just how we can go about analyzing works of fiction.