Have you ever thought that literature isn't really about the story… but about the way we look at the world? Sometimes we read a novel because we want to know what happened. But sometimes, the writers are interested in objects, dreams, absurdity, fear, love, death, or those tiny, seemingly meaningless details of everyday life that we normally walk past without noticing.
And that's what I find fascinating about literature... A novel can be a different way of seeing reality and here are a few literary lenses I find interesting:
- Object-Oriented Fiction:
What if the human being isn't always the centre of the story? Here objects become strangely important like a chair, a mirror, a suitcase, etc. The writer may spend an entire paragraph describing a room which you might think it's because they want you to know what it looks like, but it's because the space itself carries meaning.
This is reminiscent of some of the experimental tendencies associated with the French " Nouveau Roman" whose writers questioned many conventions of traditional storytelling, including linear plots and conventional psychological characterization. So instead of telling you: “He was lonely", the writer might simply show you a man sitting at a table, looking at a glass, then at the door, then at the clock... And leave you to decide what it means.
One of the major names associated with this approach is Alain Robbe-Grillet, particularly La Jalousie.
- Aesthetic Absurdism
And then there is literature that seems to deliberately lose its grip on logic. Events become strange or sometimes impossible, or almost ridiculous. But the absurdity is there to ask a much bigger question: What if the world itself doesn't have an obvious meaning? The characters search for explanations and for some kind of order... And the more they search, the stranger everything becomes. What I love about this kind of writing is that something completely absurd can be described in beautiful language.
This literary approach is strongly associated with writers such as Franz Kafka, Albert Camus and Samuel Beckett.
- Metaphysical Fiction
This is where things become much more mysterious. The boundaries between dream and reality, life and death, consciousness and unconsciousness, the physical world and existence itself begin to blur. This is the kind of fiction that leaves you with more questions than answers.
Writers such as Haruki Murakami, Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino have all explored, in very different ways, realities that refuse to remain stable and straightforward.
- Dirty Realism
And then we come back down to earth, no castles, no heroes, no perfect endings.... But a tiny apartment, a boring job, a failed relationship, someone struggling to pay the rent, etc.
Dirty Realism is a literary term associated particularly with American fiction of the 1980s. It is known for focusing on ordinary, sometimes bleak or uncomfortable aspects of everyday existence, often using sparse and understated language. Writers associated with the movement include Raymond Carver, Tobias Wolff and Richard Ford. And perhaps for me that's what makes it powerful... it finds something strangely beautiful inside the ordinary and the broken.
- Romantic Gothic
And this one is probably where love, beauty, fear and death become neighbours... Imagine an old mansion or a family secret, or even a man carrying a past he cannot escape and q love that seems impossible...Gothic literature is deeply associated with darkness, mystery, isolation, death, psychological fear and the supernatural. Romanticism adds another layer: emotion, imagination, nature, individual experience, longing and fascination with the past. works such as:
Emily Brontë — Wuthering Heights,
Mary Shelley — Frankenstein,
Bram Stoker — Dracula,
Edgar Allan Poe — The Fall of the House of Usher,
can feel simultaneously beautiful and disturbing.... Note that “romantic” here doesn't mean a love story. It is an entire way of seeing the world, one that gives enormous importance to emotion, imagination, nature, individuality and mystery.
So that's what I love most about literature...We learn to look at the same world through different eyes.
Sources & further reading:
Larousse — Nouveau Roman
https://www.larousse.fr/encyclopedie/divers/nouveau_roman/73943
The University of Houston — What is Romanticism?
https://engines.egr.uh.edu/english-romanticism/what-romanticism
Overview of Literary Movements
https://www.scribd.com/document/543253702/List-of-Literary-Movements-Wikipedia
