Introduction to Focus: Serious Fiction

Abstract

Introduction to Focus:Serious Fiction Stephen J. Burn (bio) To be properly serious, the introduction to a special issue devoted to serious fiction ought to begin in the dusty archives, aridly searching for historical precedent. The Oxford English Dictionary traces the multiple origins of the word serious back to ancient borrowed phrases from French and Latin, eventually appearing in English in the 1400s. The word's fate from that point rises and falls, coming to its modern crescendo, according to Google's Ngram, between 1918 and 1974 before suffering a modest decline. Across the spectrum of its historical meanings—which run from "in a series" to a room "reserved for purposes of business" (1692: "The Treacherous Lady steps … into her serious closet")—it takes a century or two for it to appear in debates about aesthetics. The OED has serieux appearing first in late-sixteenth-century French as a term to describe literature or art that deals with "deep, grave, or profound matters," and it lists the earliest English usage a century later in Joseph Addison's An Essay on Virgil's Georgics (1697). Yet while we can track an adjective's halflife as plotted by word-frequency algorithms, the graph's fluctuating peaks do little to dispel the lingering fuzziness about what is or is not grave. A century and a half after Addison, Herman Melville—who knew a sub-sub-librarian when he saw one—recognised that the word depended absolutely on the nebulous agreement of all parties to the dialogue, and so the right attitude could readily empty the word of any assumed gravitas, as when he described Captain Peleg as caring "not a rush for what are called serious things, and indeed deemed those self-same serious things the veriest of all trifles." What is true for Peleg turns out to be true in the narrow orbit of literary criticism, and a certain circularity, a clinging self-referentiality, often haunts the invocation of seriousness. Addison's early use is instructive, inasmuch as he calls on the word less to define something in itself (his ostensible topic is the "serious poem") than to exclude the quite concrete things that he finds inappropriate. Seriousness acts, then, as a prophylactic against the intrusion of "common talk"—the actual vocabulary of animal husbandry—into Virgil's verse, keeping it from "sinking into plebeian style." So long as everyone agrees on what is and is not common or plebeian, the word serious can keep the real toads out of the imaginary garden. Several of the reviews in this collection take up the fate of seriousness in later literary criticism, and find it performing similar exclusionary labour. Toon Staes picks up the story in the late nineteenth century, when Matthew Arnold invokes a "higher seriousness" as the signature of authentic poetic achievement, and traces the path that leads across genres to serious fiction, passing through F. R. Leavis, Harold Bloom, and John Gardner. At the end of this path, Staes finds Karen Tei Yamashita, asking serious questions about the excluded "voices of a community that are generally written in the margins" while the rest of the page has been dominated by the voices of power and privilege that often control what is or is not taken seriously. One constant, through much of this longer history of seriousness, is—as some of the austere names that pepper Staes's review suggest—its tendency to shade into manifestoes for realism. "From the eighteenth century forward," Mark McGurl has argued, "artistic seriousness in fictional narrative has been strongly associated with realism," and Beatrice Pire's review considers Mary Holland's tour-de-force study of contemporary realism. But where many studies of realism are (like Addison and Arnold) in the business of exclusion, as Beatrice Pire demonstrates, Holland's book goes far beyond McGurl's summary of the term's orthodox meaning ("a reasonable-seeming correspondence between representation and ordinary adult perceptual experience"), opening up the question of what counts as representation and how we delimit perceptual experience. In a specifically American context, a Venn diagram that correlated the codes of realism with serious fiction would surely find Henry James at its overlapping centre. James...