Krystal's position is the traditional one, that literary fiction is superior to genre fiction; the former art, the latter easy entertainment. In the later piece he concedes that the term genre should not be regarded as an epithet, that hybridization of literary fiction and genre fiction does happen, and that quality "comes in different forms" (there being well-written genre fiction and badly written literature) - but without altering the existence of the divide.
This rather unoriginal distinction also strikes me as unsatisfying, not least because of what these two labels happen to entail.
As I see it a genre is a body of fiction unified by a certain commonality of tropes and concerns. As a genre develops a canon of classic and founding works accumulates, and a sense of tradition develops among both the writers and their audience, the self-awareness of which is reflected in dedicated writers and fan organizations, and specialized publishers connecting the two.
The term literature is essentially an honorific applied to certain especially worthy works of fiction. The most basic criteria are a work's standing out in some way, its innovating significantly, or providing something aesthetically or intellectually or dramatically richer than the "trite-and-true" as Arthur Krystal puts it.
The two definitions do not seem to me mutually exclusive. There is no good reason why a work cannot be "genre," and at the same time, a piece of literature. Perhaps the most obvious reason why this is not more widely appreciated is the simplistic equation of genre with formula in the minds of many critics. It is, of course, indisputable that genres do have formulas - but not all genre work is formulaic. Certainly those founding works which create the formula cannot be looked at that way. (Can one seriously speak of, for instance, Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest as a mere formula novel, any more than they would Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice - a work massively imitated for two centuries?) Every genre also includes works which do not lend themselves to transformation into a formula. (The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, for instance, is a classic spy novel that has not spawned legions of imitators, for reasons which should be immediately obvious to anyone familiar with it.) Equally, it is not the case that a work's using certain well-established tropes, or working within a popular tradition, necessarily rules out its rising above the "trite-and-true" to offer the sense of "felt life" by which Krystal sets so much store. (M. John Harrison's The Centauri Device, for instance, deals brilliantly with concerns hardly specific to the space opera - just as Shakespeare's Hamlet is a revenge tragedy of the sort that was such a pop theater entertainment in its day, and at the same time much, much more.)
A second, reinforcing explanation is the existence of conflicting ideas about what makes a book worthwhile enough to be considered literature - with the uncertainty most directly affecting recent works, given the absence of received opinion, the uncertainty about what will manage to endure. Inseparable from this is a certain amount of snobbery. Certain kinds of accomplishment, certain techniques, certain themes are celebrated, and others denigrated. The tendency in recent decades has been to reward authors who favor character over plot or idea; who are conspicuously stylish rather than merely skillful, and opt for narrative modes which present stories in ambiguous, subjectivity-emphasizing ways, over clarity-focused straightforwardness; who engage with matters of epistemological uncertainty and identity over concern with the material dimensions of life.
It needs hardly be repeated here that the results of these attitudes have been unfavorable to science fiction, even in comparison with other popular genres - unsurprisingly given that it is a fiction of ideas which has emphasized the presentation of exotic content over the exotic presentation of the mundane. I have at times wondered if the disregard has not brought science fiction advantages as well as disadvantages (there are costs to being too "respectable"), but there is no doubt in my mind that contemporary literature has been the poorer for it.
Postmodernism and Self-Censorship
11/10/12
A Note on Literary Technique in an Age of Muddle
11/7/12
Of Postmodernism and Conservatism
11/4/12
The Debate Continues . . . (As Paul Kincaid Answers)
10/24/12
More Reactions to Paul Kincaid
10/6/12
New and Noteworthy (Spielberg's Early TV Work, The Dark Knight Returns' 25th, Niall Harrison at the Strange Horizons Blog)
9/19/12
New and Noteworthy (Ian Sales and the Hugos, SHIELD TV series, "Geeks" on Big Bang)
9/18/12
Paul Kincaid and Last Year's Best
9/17/12
Review: The Centauri Device, by M. John Harrison
11/30/11
Source: http://raritania.blogspot.com/2012/11/of-genre-fiction-and-literary-fiction.html
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