In pre-modern China, Japan, and Korea, the general word for fictional
writing was xiaoshuo (in Chinese), meaning "trivial discourse."
Socialist critics of the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries have accused the novel of bourgeois frivolity. By contrast,
aestheticians of the novel, like Flaubert, proposed the ideal novel
as "a book about nothing," or, like Joyce, as a game which would turn
the everyday world into the most concentrated and highly designed
prose possible. Moral writers of novels like George Eliot or D.H.
Lawrence believed in the novel as the book of truth, teaching us how
to live and understand our lives and those of others. The novel's
entanglement in "the prose of the world" can also be its
justification and its pride. The novel's virtue, it has often been
argued, lies in its egalitarianism, its very commonplaceness.
Hermione Lee, "Storms Over the Novel," The New York Review of Books,
vol. 54, no. 8, May 10, 2007.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/20172
"Trivial discourse" is a good translation of xiaoshuo (小說), but a
more literal one is "small talk." To Zhuangzi, a xiaoshuo was an anecdote.
