Ha! Thank you Henry. I saw the title of your piece in my inbox and to start with thought, gosh, that's a coincidence, I thought I was the only one . . .
haha well maybe I count half? (I actually would be interested to scare up anyone else who agrees with the hard view you take.) Do you have a list of other Middlemarch type novels that are literature?
For me the high modernists, Woolf, parts of Lawrence, Joyce, Proust are in a category of their own (as novelists, if we're going to call them that). I have no doubt that what they are doing is Literature in my strict sense, though I recall Bunting who said he took 'the works of Joyce as something other than novels'.
I have no standing on the scholarly merits here, but: for any person interested in arresting, or maybe even reversing, the late decline of literature's cultural capital, I must emphatically urge them NOT to take action against the literary status of Jane Austen.
When speaking to outsiders, this person might instead say something like, "ah, you like Jane Austen? Isn't it a pity she's defunct? Well didn't you know this book Middlemarch is something like three Jane Austen novels stapled together, you might quite like it".
Hi Victoria. I suppose your working definition of capital L literature is an intuitive thing based on a lifetime of built context, but are you able to put it into words?
Maybe it will help me understand my own feelings as someone who is especially inspired by Proust and Greek/Latin epics but lacks a literary education.
Hello Dylan and thanks for your comment. Funnily enough, epic (especially Homer) was one of the things I kept thinking of when I read Proust -- I wrote a bit about that here: https://vamoul.substack.com/p/on-first-reading In that essay I said that Proust is one of the only prose texts -- and certainly the only Western text of 'prose fiction' -- that struck me as having something of the majesty of epic, even though his subject is so different. This is a hesitant response -- you are quite right that the feeling is an intuitive one -- but I think for me capital L literature is always about the language (as well as whatever it's obviously "about", whether that's Bronze Age warriors or aristocrats on the left bank) -- it is an interrogation or exploration of the limits of that specific (literary) language, of the specific shape and taste, possibilities and limits of that particular grammar, syntax, diction and so on. It seems to me that most excellent prose is an example of supremely good *use* of that particular language, but it does not usually make me feel that it is *about* the language, the specific *logos* we might say. The best poetry generally does have this quality -- though as someone else noted in response to my piece, it is perfectly possible of course to write good verse which is also not 'literature' in that sense. This is also why I would never comment in these terms on any work of literature I cannot read in the original. I can well believe, for instance, that there are several Russian novels that are Literature in this strong sense, but my tiny amount of Russian does not allow me to judge. This is also why I am so fascinated by the question of how one can (or cannot) go about translating poetry.
Thank you so much for the thoughtful reply! If you don't mind me picking at your mind a little bit more:
When you say an exploration of a "specific (literary) language" and go on to provide a (not exhaustive) list of components, that reads to me as something like style. Would that be an approximate word, if "style" were to be the total manner by which a writer goes about producing an effect? Is that word insufficient or too loaded?
Do you consider the novelty of the language/style being explored important, or rather would the depth of the exploration be more important (is a full-throated deviation from an existing tradition necessary)? Perhaps at a certain depth one crosses over into novel territory anyway.
I guess my other question is related. Do you think there is a relation between the literary value of a work and its ability to express or embody the personal philosophy of its author, or perhaps even the philosophical assumptions of an era/generation? (would you include such a quality in your list of literary components?)
I'm so sorry, I didn't mean to ask so many questions
Thanks Dylan. No, I don't think I am talking about style -- though style obviously is created by grammatical, rhetorical and syntactical features. But good prose of all kinds has plenty of style, including novels. Mastery of style is one facet of what it means to write well. What I mean is a sense I have in the works I would call Literature that the language itself is part of the subject of the work of the art, it is a (quite big) part of what it is in some sense 'about'. This is linked I think to all the hoary old debates about the untranslatability of certain kinds of literature, especially poetry. It is perhaps prompted or concentrated in verse of various kinds because formal constraints of one sort or another tend to push you up against the limits and contours of that specific language in a particularly forceful way. Let me come back to the other parts of your question when I have a moment.
"literary" can be in the prose (henry james), in the characters (austen), in the plotting (fitzgerald), in the atmosphere (danielewski), in the world-building (tolkien), in the philosophy (dostoevsky), in spirituality (murial strode), in the political (orwell)
It would be exciting to have this debate. Indeed, the breadth of literary achievements should be kept in mind. That's one reason why it is a good starting point to understand literature as a particular way of treating language (and not to rely on something like genre conventions or even content). This ‚formal‘ view, of course, has an affinity with the literary theory of the Russian Formalists and Prague Structuralists, which also explains very well why we perceive poetry as particularly ‚literary.`
I’ve been struggling with this question as well. The advent of AI seems to me to create an opportunity to identify and defend a space for literary language. Writing not meant to entertain or instruct, but in which language itself is the main attraction. I’m not sure exactly how to define it—it need not be too exclusive—but these four criteria come to mind: 1.) a sense that the language has been crafted, cultivated, or refined in some memorable way 2.) an appreciation for the sound of language – something notably lacking much contemporary writing 3.) Goethe said tone is everything. The author must succeed in creating a unique, unified, and non-robotic perspective 4.) literary writing must leave us in some way uplifted, hopeful, sensing a grace beyond ourselves.
I would be interested in any thoughts others might have.
I’ll just go out on a limb and say I’m not sure this is a great thing to quibble over. I think I kind of get where Victoria Moul is coming from, but in my non-online sphere, the vast majority of people I know either do not read *at all* or read only meet-cutes and fantasy porn. If we start saying no prose fiction counts as literature, then what IS it? And how do you distinguish it from the kind of garbage being spewed out for consumption currently? Since there are many novels that are worthy and challenge, elevate, and expand the mind and soul, I feel like calling those works literature (or let’s say, literary fiction) helps emphasize their value.
I do take this point (and someone else said roughly the same thing). I am clear in the interview I think that I'm not talking about what it means to write well -- I care a great deal, for instance, about children's books being well written, though I wouldn't count a single children's novel as Literature in the capital-L sense. So this point does not prevent us from talking clearly about what is well and poorly written. This particular interview has had a tiny degree of escape velocity, but my substack is about poetry and its translation from antiquity to the present and in a range of languages ancient and modern. The current default view that prose fiction of medium length is 'peak literature' is a very recent and anomalous one, historically speaking, and less obvious even today outside the Anglophone world. One thing I find interesting in your comment is that it does imply -- though I realise that might not be what you meant -- that if someone is looking around wanting to be challenged, elevated and expanded intellectually and spiritually, that a good novel is the obvious place to start. I think that's a really interesting assumption, and one probably widely shared, but it's not how I feel.
Thanks for responding! To your last point, I apologize if that is what I inadvertently communicated because I didn’t really intend to. I definitely do NOT think the best or primary way to challenge, elevate, and expand the mind & soul is with a good novel, although I think they do that and it’s valuable to be able to distinguish them from everything else. I’m an anomalous reader perhaps in both this audience as well as my real circle of acquaintance in the fact that most of my own reading is of poetry and especially spiritual classics, with the Spanish mystics being my favorite. (John of the Cross especially) So I actually am not on the prowl for a novel to change my life, really. Since writing my original comment I’ve thought a lot about your responses here (I had already read the interview and enjoyed it!) and it’s changing my view a bit, but I still think there ought to be a distinction in describing between the great novels and everything else.
Prose fiction will be literature once regular people stop liking it. That should come in a few decades, but it hasn't quite happened yet
I actually count a lot of it as literature now!
Ha! Thank you Henry. I saw the title of your piece in my inbox and to start with thought, gosh, that's a coincidence, I thought I was the only one . . .
haha well maybe I count half? (I actually would be interested to scare up anyone else who agrees with the hard view you take.) Do you have a list of other Middlemarch type novels that are literature?
For me the high modernists, Woolf, parts of Lawrence, Joyce, Proust are in a category of their own (as novelists, if we're going to call them that). I have no doubt that what they are doing is Literature in my strict sense, though I recall Bunting who said he took 'the works of Joyce as something other than novels'.
No other Victorians? No C18th?
If I'm honest I don't think I'd go in to bat for any other 19th c. novel in English no, much as I love many of them.
No Austen? Swift? Richardson?
I have no standing on the scholarly merits here, but: for any person interested in arresting, or maybe even reversing, the late decline of literature's cultural capital, I must emphatically urge them NOT to take action against the literary status of Jane Austen.
When speaking to outsiders, this person might instead say something like, "ah, you like Jane Austen? Isn't it a pity she's defunct? Well didn't you know this book Middlemarch is something like three Jane Austen novels stapled together, you might quite like it".
Ha I take your point. Though if you really love Austen, I'm not sure you actually would enjoy Middlemarch very much, or not necessarily anyway.
😮
That’s a hot take!
Hi Victoria. I suppose your working definition of capital L literature is an intuitive thing based on a lifetime of built context, but are you able to put it into words?
Maybe it will help me understand my own feelings as someone who is especially inspired by Proust and Greek/Latin epics but lacks a literary education.
Hello Dylan and thanks for your comment. Funnily enough, epic (especially Homer) was one of the things I kept thinking of when I read Proust -- I wrote a bit about that here: https://vamoul.substack.com/p/on-first-reading In that essay I said that Proust is one of the only prose texts -- and certainly the only Western text of 'prose fiction' -- that struck me as having something of the majesty of epic, even though his subject is so different. This is a hesitant response -- you are quite right that the feeling is an intuitive one -- but I think for me capital L literature is always about the language (as well as whatever it's obviously "about", whether that's Bronze Age warriors or aristocrats on the left bank) -- it is an interrogation or exploration of the limits of that specific (literary) language, of the specific shape and taste, possibilities and limits of that particular grammar, syntax, diction and so on. It seems to me that most excellent prose is an example of supremely good *use* of that particular language, but it does not usually make me feel that it is *about* the language, the specific *logos* we might say. The best poetry generally does have this quality -- though as someone else noted in response to my piece, it is perfectly possible of course to write good verse which is also not 'literature' in that sense. This is also why I would never comment in these terms on any work of literature I cannot read in the original. I can well believe, for instance, that there are several Russian novels that are Literature in this strong sense, but my tiny amount of Russian does not allow me to judge. This is also why I am so fascinated by the question of how one can (or cannot) go about translating poetry.
Thank you so much for the thoughtful reply! If you don't mind me picking at your mind a little bit more:
When you say an exploration of a "specific (literary) language" and go on to provide a (not exhaustive) list of components, that reads to me as something like style. Would that be an approximate word, if "style" were to be the total manner by which a writer goes about producing an effect? Is that word insufficient or too loaded?
Do you consider the novelty of the language/style being explored important, or rather would the depth of the exploration be more important (is a full-throated deviation from an existing tradition necessary)? Perhaps at a certain depth one crosses over into novel territory anyway.
I guess my other question is related. Do you think there is a relation between the literary value of a work and its ability to express or embody the personal philosophy of its author, or perhaps even the philosophical assumptions of an era/generation? (would you include such a quality in your list of literary components?)
I'm so sorry, I didn't mean to ask so many questions
Thanks Dylan. No, I don't think I am talking about style -- though style obviously is created by grammatical, rhetorical and syntactical features. But good prose of all kinds has plenty of style, including novels. Mastery of style is one facet of what it means to write well. What I mean is a sense I have in the works I would call Literature that the language itself is part of the subject of the work of the art, it is a (quite big) part of what it is in some sense 'about'. This is linked I think to all the hoary old debates about the untranslatability of certain kinds of literature, especially poetry. It is perhaps prompted or concentrated in verse of various kinds because formal constraints of one sort or another tend to push you up against the limits and contours of that specific language in a particularly forceful way. Let me come back to the other parts of your question when I have a moment.
Thanks for linking to this, Henry. I thought Victoria's answers were characteristically brilliant. I'm so glad they're getting a wide readership.
Great interview!
"literary" can be in the prose (henry james), in the characters (austen), in the plotting (fitzgerald), in the atmosphere (danielewski), in the world-building (tolkien), in the philosophy (dostoevsky), in spirituality (murial strode), in the political (orwell)
It would be exciting to have this debate. Indeed, the breadth of literary achievements should be kept in mind. That's one reason why it is a good starting point to understand literature as a particular way of treating language (and not to rely on something like genre conventions or even content). This ‚formal‘ view, of course, has an affinity with the literary theory of the Russian Formalists and Prague Structuralists, which also explains very well why we perceive poetry as particularly ‚literary.`
Yes I am hoping more people will blog about this would be a great debate
In this broad language-based view, Samuel Johnson’s essays become literature as much as Middlemarch or Anna Karenina, or even poems.
Do you see that as a strength or a weakness of this approach?
A strength, and a challenge due to the vastness of literature in this picture
I’ve been struggling with this question as well. The advent of AI seems to me to create an opportunity to identify and defend a space for literary language. Writing not meant to entertain or instruct, but in which language itself is the main attraction. I’m not sure exactly how to define it—it need not be too exclusive—but these four criteria come to mind: 1.) a sense that the language has been crafted, cultivated, or refined in some memorable way 2.) an appreciation for the sound of language – something notably lacking much contemporary writing 3.) Goethe said tone is everything. The author must succeed in creating a unique, unified, and non-robotic perspective 4.) literary writing must leave us in some way uplifted, hopeful, sensing a grace beyond ourselves.
I would be interested in any thoughts others might have.
I’ll just go out on a limb and say I’m not sure this is a great thing to quibble over. I think I kind of get where Victoria Moul is coming from, but in my non-online sphere, the vast majority of people I know either do not read *at all* or read only meet-cutes and fantasy porn. If we start saying no prose fiction counts as literature, then what IS it? And how do you distinguish it from the kind of garbage being spewed out for consumption currently? Since there are many novels that are worthy and challenge, elevate, and expand the mind and soul, I feel like calling those works literature (or let’s say, literary fiction) helps emphasize their value.
I do take this point (and someone else said roughly the same thing). I am clear in the interview I think that I'm not talking about what it means to write well -- I care a great deal, for instance, about children's books being well written, though I wouldn't count a single children's novel as Literature in the capital-L sense. So this point does not prevent us from talking clearly about what is well and poorly written. This particular interview has had a tiny degree of escape velocity, but my substack is about poetry and its translation from antiquity to the present and in a range of languages ancient and modern. The current default view that prose fiction of medium length is 'peak literature' is a very recent and anomalous one, historically speaking, and less obvious even today outside the Anglophone world. One thing I find interesting in your comment is that it does imply -- though I realise that might not be what you meant -- that if someone is looking around wanting to be challenged, elevated and expanded intellectually and spiritually, that a good novel is the obvious place to start. I think that's a really interesting assumption, and one probably widely shared, but it's not how I feel.
Thanks for responding! To your last point, I apologize if that is what I inadvertently communicated because I didn’t really intend to. I definitely do NOT think the best or primary way to challenge, elevate, and expand the mind & soul is with a good novel, although I think they do that and it’s valuable to be able to distinguish them from everything else. I’m an anomalous reader perhaps in both this audience as well as my real circle of acquaintance in the fact that most of my own reading is of poetry and especially spiritual classics, with the Spanish mystics being my favorite. (John of the Cross especially) So I actually am not on the prowl for a novel to change my life, really. Since writing my original comment I’ve thought a lot about your responses here (I had already read the interview and enjoyed it!) and it’s changing my view a bit, but I still think there ought to be a distinction in describing between the great novels and everything else.
One criterion: fiction that isn't primarily based on plot?
What about Charles Bukowski? Are his novels literature? Is his poetry literature? is his poetry prose? How can anyone tell the difference? Who cares?
I write poetry. The novel would too difficult. It is literature. Read Blood Meridian.