The debate over whether genre fiction can ever count as literature is back, this time in the form of an essay from Arthur Krystal at the New Yorker. I don’t much agree with the piece, because I think it’s totally ludicrous to say that “Writers who want to understand why the heart has reasons that reason cannot know are not going to write horror tales or police procedurals. Why say otherwise?” when environments of stress, grief, or transitions between old worlds and new ones are precisely those that expose the reasons that reasons cannot know. But I actually think it’s a great example of the dodge people like Krystal perform to justify treating genre as lesser than an amorphously-defined “literature.” He writes:

The science-fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin, for instance, announced that literature “is the extant body of written art. All novels belong to it.” Is that so? A novel by definition is “written art”? You know, I wrote a novel once, and I’m pretty sure that Le Guin would change her mind if she read it…

What I’m trying to say is that “genre” is not a bad word, although perhaps the better word for novels that taxonomically register as genre is simply “commercial.” Born to sell, these novels stick to the trite-and-true, relying on stock characters whose thoughts spool out in Lifetime platitudes. There will be exceptions, as there are in every field, but, for the most part, the standard genre or commercial novel isn’t going to break the sea frozen inside us. If this sounds condescending, so be it. Commercial novels, in general, whether they’re thrillers or romance or science fiction, employ language that is at best undistinguished and at worst characterized by a jejune mentality and a tendency to state the obvious. Which is not to say that some literary novels, as more than a few readers pointed out to me, do not contain a surfeit of decorative description, elaborate psychologizing, and gleams of self-conscious irony. To which I say: so what?

What he’s doing here is clever: essentially, Krystal is holding genre responsible for the worst stuff written in its name, while literature doesn’t have to be responsible for, say, romance novels, or Nicholas Sparks weepies. Genre is determined to be genre because it includes certain kinds of plots or takes place in certain kinds of settings. Literature is a determination of quality. Treating them as if they’re similar categories for sorting out novels, film, or television is a brilliant dodge on the part of people who don’t want to recognize that genre fiction can be literature. Why they’re resistant to that recognition is the really interesting question.

In case any of you haven’t seen it yet, I wanted to call your attention to Emily Nussbaum’s New Yorker column on Community and Doctor Who, which is really a stealth argument that it’s time for those who look down their nose at genre fiction to reconsider, in part, perhaps, because genre fiction itself has changed:

The original “Who” dwelt on pure sci-fi obsessions, abstract questions of how society is organized and the line between humans and machines. But, as deeply as fans loved the show, its themes were rarely emotional. Instead, it jumped from Aztec civilization to Mars, as much an educational show for children as an adult narrative, with a British-colonialist view of the universe. (So many savages, so little time.) The series’ most striking feature was the Doctor himself: in contrast to “Star Trek” ’s Kirk—the Kennedyesque leader of a diverse society—the early Doctor Who was an alien iconoclast with two hearts and a universe-wide Eurail Pass. For a certain breed of viewer, this was an intoxicating ideal: the know-it-all whose streak of melancholy—or prickly rage, depending on who was Who—had to be honored, because he actually did know everything. Though that show had its charms, I was surprised, and delighted, to find that the modern “Doctor Who” has a very different emphasis: it’s a show about relationships, in an epic and mythological vein.

“It’s so much larger when you’re on the inside,” she writes of science fictional shows, though it’s worth remembering that emotional complexity and attentiveness to relationships aren’t the only thing that validate science fiction. There’s plenty of value in well-executed silly gadgets and drivebys to distant civilizations. The Daleks may be low-effects “Nazi-ish pepper pots,” but shabby exteriors and crude mechanically can be a vehicle for totalitarianism as well as glitz and glamor. Dropping in on a planet or a time per week can read like a survey of the Empire, but early Star Trek made those encounters melancholy, and strange, and sad (and occasionally silly) from the outset—those visits were less an affirmation of control but a reminder of how much there is out there. It’s not less worthwhile to dream about how we’ll interact with the strangenesses of the future than to ruminate on how we might have interacted with people we already know in the past. The world is changing rapidly, and even outwardly silly thought experiments may yield useful lessons and parallels. How we’d behave under siege may be a question that fluctuates only slightly if the invaders are orcs, or medieval humans, or Nazis, or cybermen. How we define humanity is a question that can be extended and expanded by science fiction in a way that realism or historical fiction may not allow us to access. Execution is one thing, but ambition itself is not inherently laughable or dismissable.

Genre fiction may become respectable when it’s seen to be answering the same sorts of questions as literature, and if it meets certain standards for prose or artistry. But judging fiction on the former rather than simply the latter says more about the gatekeepers of respectability—the New Yorker a week earlier banged the guilty pleasure drum to no particular effect or insight, saying “part of the pleasure we derive from them is the knowledge that we could be reading something better”—than about the fiction that’s up for judgement.

Super-commenter Gabriel Rossman pointed me in the direction of University of California, Davis professor Greta Hsu’s work on movies that span multiple genres a while back, and in the wake of Cowboys and Aliens, it seemed like an opportune time to dive deeply into a couple of her papers. Her research into the relationship between how active movie watchers assign categories to movies, and the commercial and critical reception of those movies, demonstrates a fairly unsurprising conclusion: “Producers who target a broad area of the market have access to greater potential revenue; the extent to which they capitalize on this potential, however, depends on the clarity with which they communicate their fit with targeted genres.”

This makes a lot of sense. If you take a gander at the top 10 all-time grossing movies (leaving aside for the moment factors like problems in calculation, the growth of the industry, the high cost of 3D tickets), they’re all very clean, effective genre-bridging movies. Avatar is a sophisticated science fiction adventure story that’s animated in part by a gooey romance. Titanic is a gooey love story facilitated by intense action sequences. James Cameron is a visionary film director who is pushing movie technology forward, but he’s also the undisputed master of working across genres. The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King is an epic struggle that’s also substantially concerned with whether our Bearded Hero Other Than The Short Dudes will get his elfin princess. Pirates of the Caribbean entwines its love story with its adventure story — Will falls in love with Elizabeth essentially at the moment that she steals a piece of cursed pirate gold from him when they’re both children. Toy Story 3 doesn’t really feel like a genre movie at all to me — it’s the only move in the top 10 that doesn’t fit into an easily identifiable genre category, which demonstrates the strength of that sort of simple categorization. Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides brings back one of Jack Sparrow’s lost inamorata. Alice in Wonderland is the reverse of most of the movies on this list, which are largely movies men could take women to and the women wouldn’t mind, accomplishing this gender switch by turning Alice into a warrior. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows 2 would have been a giant hit no matter how good or bad it was, but it’s also the movie in the series that is most a genre mash-up: it’s an intense adventure, during which the main characters’ romances come into full flower. The Dark Knight is perhaps the movie on the list that has the smallest amount of genre-crossover; Rachel Dawes and Bruce Wayne aren’t together in the movie, and while her death is a blow, it’s definitely a B or C plot in the movie, which is otherwise a very focused action morality play. And I don’t even know what to make of Transformers: Dark of the Moon.
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