Not long ago I read a weblog post in which the blogger extolled the virtues of a recent critical book by declaring that it examined the fiction of a well-known postwar writer in ways that went beyond the "merely literary"—specifically that it examined the sociopolitical significance of that fiction. Not long after, I came across the same phrase in a slightly different context; this time what was at stake in a particular writing strategy easily transcended the "merely literary."
Versions of this idea—that worthwhile or important writing must of course be characterized by qualities that elevate it above mere literary value—are to be found everywhere in discussions of books and writing in American publications (Leon Wieseltier's infamous non-review of Nicholson Baker's Checkpoint in the NYTBR, for example, can be explained as Wieseltier's refusal to waste his time assessing the "merely literary" features of that book), but seldom is it stated as baldly as in these two instances. And it is quite likely that neither writer really thought that in speaking of literary value in this way they were necessarily denigrating literature or the literary—it's just that everyone understands there are more important tasks to fulfill in the act of writing, even in the act of writing fiction or poetry, than just to do it well or with some originality. Don't they?
Most often it is politics that is considered more important than the "merely literary," some kind of engagement with the "real world" that demonstrates the writer's concern for the problems of injustice in its various forms. Even writers as universally acclaimed as, say, Philip Roth are frequently judged by these standards. Roth's best novel in the last decade and a half was easily Sabbath's Theater, but much more attention was given to his later trilogy, American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, and The Human Stain, since they were more obviously about consequential subjects like politics and cultural history. Sabbath's Theater, a ferociously comic novel about—about what, an oversexed puppeteer?—was "merely literary." (Although not very decorously so.)
But it doesn't have to be attention to politics per se that justifies our taking a writer or book seriously. We just have to feel that the writer is reaching beyond the pages of a book to grapple with "issues," is "saying something" about the world, conveying ideas or stirring up emotions. As Ruth Franklin put it last year in a review in the NYTBR, "literature's most necessary task [is in] communicating the writer's thoughts about the world we live in." Presumably anything else a fiction writer or poet might be concerned with, such things as exploring the stylistic possibilities of language, formal invention, even just telling a story in a skillful way or making us laugh, is "merely literary."
And why would we as readers be interested in a writer's "thoughts about the world we live in" in the first place? Is there something about being a novelist or poet (or memoirist or essayist) that makes one's "thoughts" more significant than anyone else's? I hardly think so. And I don't really think most such writers want to be burdened with the role of "thinking" in this sense, anyway. They probably want to write well enough and in such a way as to attract a certain kind of reader, a reader who doesn't dismiss the "merely literary."
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