[Prestidigitweeze]

Originally Posted by murraypaul

So, following that logic, you would think that the statement "films are fiction" is true? So documentaries don't exist?

To define a medium and mode based on one's own expectations and then to claim that the satisfaction of those expectations is based on inviolable universal laws is a tad too inductive. Films are not necessarily works of fiction, but they can be. So can poems, just as long works of prose are occasionally defined as poetry (cf. John Ashbery's Three Poems).

Of course, nearly all of our definitions of recognizable fiction are that ultimately:-- inductive. People rioted at the premiere of Le Sacre du Printemps because they had not yet recognized it as music. We've all been guilty of failing to recognize what was good about a writer whose particular kind of excellence was not apparent to us at first. Sometimes we need a bit of time and context.

Re the description of epic verse as a kind of novel (The Odyssey, Beowolf, Childe Harold, etc.): the distinction is not as rote as people are making it out to be. Even the Bible in its entirety has been translated into verse. Manuals were frequently written in verse stanzas in earlier periods. Why not a novel as well?

We can find many examples of narrative in verse which, if written today, would be conceived as novels, and we can certainly find hybrids. Nabokov's Pale Fire is one such example: A novel which consists of footnotes by one imaginary author to a poem written by another. Why circumscribe all novels according to definitions which are centuries old when the form has the capacity to change constantly?

Someone mentioned Gravity's Rainbow, by Pynchon, but from what I recall, that novel does have conventional structure. Many novels written since at least the modernist period do not. (It isn't a novel, but it is a work in prose and does use the same kinds of experimental writing that certain of her novels do: What is storyline in Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons?)

Here's the salient fact for people who insist that any novel -- not simply a novel one likes -- must always be concerned primarily with story:

At roughly the same point in the twentieth century, key organizing principles in the arts were seen by certain practitioners as something to work against. People who work for literary, art and music magazines, and who teach in universities, can tell you that those principles/limitations were these:

• representation in art (cf. works by Kandinsky, Pollack and Mondrian which try to avoid it),
• tonality in music (Schoenberg, Webern, Krenek) and
• conventional narrative and storyline in the novel (see above).

While not everyone likes Schoenberg, Pollack or even late Beckett, elements of their artistic language are now part of everything else.

Many artists who were not purists about avoiding those principles do have periods or moments of seeming to avoid them: middle-period Bartok and early Penderecki in music, for example; Gerhard Richter in painting. The techniques that evolved from avoidance are now available to everyone.

My point is not that you need to enjoy those kinds of work. You need only to acknowledge that they exist, and that their existence shows how the organizing principles you're accustomed to saying are intrinsic to a particular mode of art are not necessarily so.

Think of a novel as having a row of faders attached to its various parts. One might be characterization, another plot, another narrative flow, another style, another the number of cultural and psychological insights per page. Any of those traits can be emphasized and any muted.

My favorite balance of those traits is for a writer to advance the plot while offering key insights into the character and moment in culture -- all at the same time (simultaneously), and all in a gorgeous and graceful style with rhythmic momentum. That for me (personally) is the ideal.

However, there exist a number of writers who are primarily concerned with style and tone -- with the poetry of narrative -- at the expense of plot or story and their work can be exceptionally beautiful regardless.

From where I sit, the true act of snobbery is not to point out that novels without stories or story emphasis exist. It is to discount them and those who read them as wrong and unimportant. If it helps you to think of the plotless novel as a genre -- albeit one you intend not to read -- then think of it that way.

Most of us prefer the sort of novel that emphasizes story and there is nothing wrong with saying so. What is wrong is insisting that other kinds of novel do not and should not exist.

We all have our preferences, and I personally would rather read any stylistically beautiful but static novel to one which is uninspiring stylistically but advances on its plot grid reliably.

You don't have to agree with anyone else's preferences in fiction. All you have to do is recognize that there are other approaches to the form, and other points of view regarding the merits of those approaches.