The Idiot Has the Answer

What's the difference between art and entertainment? The answer is in "The Idiot."

No one I know confuses the difference between James Bond and Masterpiece Theater. Masterpiece Theater is unadulterated art. James Bond is pure Hollywood formula. I can't wait for the next one.
Yet I am seeing more and more confusion from fellow readers and fellow writers about the difference between literary fiction and commercial fiction. It is not so much that they misunderstand the distinction between a literary masterpiece and a page-turning best-seller but that they misunderstand the difference.
Why do we need these labels? Can't art be entertaining? Can't entertainment reach artistry?
Of course. Plenty of high art like Robert Frost's poetry or Ernest Hemingway's fiction has been a commercial smash. Plenty of popular entertainment has been critically acclaimed. Jazz comes to mind. But let's not allow the exceptions to overrun the obvious: we can find the answer to this question in Dostoevsky's masterpiece, "The Idiot."
In it, Prince Myshkin is explaining to a group of society women how a friend of his had been condemned and had been led out by the guards into the courtyard to be shot, being told he had five minutes to live.
[image error] Prince Myshkin goes on to explain how his condemned friend found in those five minutes all the time he needed and more to think about the things he needed to think about before he died. The friend found to his surprise that his meager five minutes stretched out like a great fabric. The friend had time to think of the people he loved. He had time to think through those final thoughts that he had always carried but not completed. He had time to look around the world of his experience and connect the things he never had the care to assemble before.
And in the final moment of life after he had done everything he needed to do, he caught a glimpse of light glinting off a crucifix in the distance. And the friend recognized with instant conviction that this was the new nature he was going to have after death.
As Prince Myshkin continues the story, he not only has the women captivated but he has the reader totally hooked. Prince Myshkin explains that his friend found himself with so much extra time that he almost begged to be shot. In fact, the friend frightened himself with the thought that if he did not die soon the eternity of minutes left in his life would be so overwhelming that he wouldn't know what to do with himself. It was at this moment that the guards did a mock execution on him, pulling the trigger on an empty cartridge. Then they let Myshkin's friend go free.
"And then?" Asks one of the women. "Did he live counting each moment?"
At this point in the reader's imagination — an imagination that has been informed so faithfully by commercial publishers and popular art — the answer comes 'Why yes, of course the friend did not waste a single moment from that point on!'
But Myshkin responds "Oh no. He didn't live like that at all. He wasted many, many minutes."
And in this response is the difference between art and entertainment. It is the difference between literary fiction and commercial fiction. It is the difference between the ragged edges of an artistic Masterpiece Theater film and the polished formula of a James Bond blockbuster.
Prince Myshkin's response is so striking because it is so lifelike. Life is contradictory and ruthlessly uneven. Life is a war that is never an accomplished fact the way it is depicted by commercial formula publishers of romance novels or Christian fiction.
To suggest that a man who has a religious conversion automatically goes on to live as blamelessly as the Virgin Mary is to make a mockery of authentic spirituality, even if it maximizes the publisher's profit by maximizing the plot's predictability.
To read about the true battles in a young man's second chance life, check out "Great Desires for Absent Things."
What we learn from "The Idiot" is that formula fiction behaves the way we expect life to behave, and that literary fiction behaves the way life behaves — in fits and visions and violations.
Commercial fiction caters to the times so that it can cash in on fashion; literary fiction plays to the ages so that we might have treasure at the end of this journey.