Here's a description of some of the differences between literary and popular fiction which takes on the critics of popular culture. It does, of course, involve some generalisations but I think the broad points outlined are worth thinking about. The first
relates to character development. The critic maintains that in popular fiction, characters are flat and uni-dimensional as to their behaviour and motives. The hero or the heroine are basically looking for unconditional love that leads to long-term commitment. What the critics insisted on is total realism which requires that characters are portrayed psychoanalytically as complex and multi-dimensional. Not only this but characters have to relate to the entire social network, interact with others and not merely embark on a personal journey.
What the critics failed to understand is that this level of complexity is not in the nature of the genre. Popular fiction intends to deal with a close circuit of personal and emotional experience which is ultimately individualistic. Because the experience according to the genre is so personal, the writer deliberately ignores the social network, background and the general environment. As a result, time and place become of secondary importance, hence the ambiguity of locations, town, etc.
Popular fiction is intended to serve a message which may not be any less profound than any realistic or historical or political novel one cares to name. But to get there the genre has its own conventional character vehicles: stereotypes such as the lonely girl whose father has just died. [...]
Regarding events, what the critics would like to see is an event development not for its own sake (one thing leads to another) but as a vehicle to uncover the suffering of the characters, and the forces which surround and move them, hence the flashbacks, reverse chronology, etc. The aim of fictional events is to produce a change in the reader regarding the real world. Popular fiction approaches events differently: there is a temporal build-up: a beginning, middle and end. This sequence, however, is meant to be logical; coincidence plays a part, but to focus on personal emotions and to keep the reader constantly interested in them and not be distracted by a thought or a reason. In short, the reader has to be rather passive, not in the sense of having no opinion or of accepting to be led but in the sense of accepting the narrator's word for it and trusting the narrative as such: this is how the reader is made to leave his or her real world behind. (159-60)
----------------
- Al-Bataineh, Afaf Badr, 1998.
- "The modern Arabic novel: a literary and linguistic analysis of the genre of popular fiction, with special reference to translation from English." Ph.D., Heriot-Watt.