In 2009, Lev Grossman wrote an article in the Wall Street Journal entitled "Good Novels Don't Have to be Hard." The basic thesis of the article was that, starting in the early 20th century, modernist writers upended literary convention, excoriating plot and prioritizing other aspects of writing; but plot is now making a comeback, and in the future plot will become the centerpiece of literature.

I feel like Grossman's argument is problematic in the same way that most literary revolutonaries' arguments are: instead of destroying an old prejudice they merely reverse it. Grossman sees a prejudice for what he calls "lyricism" over plotting, and, instead of arguing that this prejudice is silly, seems to argue that plot is more important than lyricism. I'm getting somewhat tired of seeing writers gleefully tearing down our old literary shibboleths just to turn around and - with equal gusto - inaugurate new ones of their own. It's an especial shame in this case,  because I don't think lyricism and plot operate all that differently. A good plot operates by taking our expectations over cause and effect, which event will happen next, and upends them in a way that is new but nevertheless seems completely right. The outcome, in a great plot, isn't really what you expected or you didn't get there in the way you expected, but at the end you can't think of a more right way that the plot could have unfolded. Similarly, great lyricism, by which I think Grossman merely means an author's prose, operates by taking our expectations about how language works and subverting them in a way that nevertheless seems eminently right.

I also don't think that the modernists really conformed to this dichotomy - even in the way it was constructed by Grossman. In a later article, he admits that Hemingway and Fitzgerald sometimes constructed plots just as attentively as any genre writer, but  even someone like Woolf - a high modernist if there ever was one - wrote a relatively conventionally plotted novel with Orlando.

Many of these issues derive from the fact that the categories Grossman uses, like "plotting" and "lyricism," don't seem especially well-defined. Sometimes I'm not sure whether he's really talking about plot or narrative - plot being the events that happen in the book and narrative being the way these events are related to us. Grossman argues that the modernists "broke the clear straight lines of causality and perception ad chronological sequence." To Grossman, this means the modernists "broke" plot, but it seems that what they actually broke was conventional narrative. Grossman's mistake is that he thinks that the modernists are interested in plot effects when they are really interested in narrative effects. Modernists didn't take issue with the idea that events follow linear cause and effect relationships as much as they did with the idea that there was this omniscient, unitary perspective that could unify and present these sequences of events in such a tidy fashion. For the modernists, the problem was that the standard omniscient narrator related events in a way that was untrue to lived experience.

I'm kind of sad that I have to be so critical of Grossman; I think that I agree with his general aims. Grossman is a fantasy novelist, and these questions about plot are ones that tend to come up in discussions of "genre" fiction and are often used to belittle such work. I feel like what Grossman is really trying to do is rescue works of sci-fi and fantasy from the genre dustbin they've been assigned. I certainly agree that divvying fiction up into separate genres is somewhat counterproductive, especially since one - rather ironic - side effect has been the emergence of literary fiction as its own discreet genre. This "genrefication" of fiction seems, to have only made literature less diverse, less surprising, and less interesting; it has turned the creation of literature into an exercise in filling certain genre requirements.