This past summer, top movie critics debated and voted on the best movies of all time. To much surprise, Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” knocked the long-running favorite “Citizen Kane” from the top spot.

I suspect, dear reader, that if I dared to refer to “Vertigo” as a thriller or to “2001: A Space Odyssey” — which also made the top 10 — as science fiction, some critic would inform me none-too-politely that these works of art do not fit into such mere genres.

Many critics, art aficionados and artists try to convince their audiences of the difference between the great works of literary import and the dismissible works of genre — to which they would be loathe to even call art. But for all their attempts to sever one from the other, I have never seen an adequate definition of literariness. 

I can discern only a few qualities from the muck of their attempted definitions. First, that literary works of art should never fall into any genre, regardless of shape or form (it may be romantic, but never a romance). Second, that literary works should have the proper pretensions toward winning the Pulitzer (or Oscar, Tony, etc.).

As far as divisions of art go, this artificial definition seems horribly useless. It speaks less to the content of the art than to the ego of its creators and distributors. If one wants to stick art into a category to attract potential readers or viewers, why not call “literary” works “bourgeois realism” — which they frequently are, anyway — and be more descriptive in the meanwhile?

A more useful division is that between high art and low art — art to make us think and art to entertain. It is an overly simplistic division, even a crass one, but at least it tells us what to expect. One does not go see “The Expendables 2” for insights into the existentialism of war, after all.

And here again, the proponents of literariness want to put all of literature in the former category of high art and all the works of genre into the latter category of low art. So long, spaceships and faster-than-light travel. So long, elves and dwarves. So long, hard-nosed detectives and gorgeous dames. You are deemed unworthy of serious thought.

Sometimes, the critics are right. Genre can be very, very low art indeed with a tendency to become too much of an in-joke. The unscrupulous artist drops cliche after cliche, so that only the most ardent lover of that genre would enjoy it. It fails to appeal to any beyond the fanboys.

Literary works can suffer the same ills, though. They too have their fanboys for pseudo-intellectual rambling.

When I, as a writer, have spoken with good writers who work in genres — good here meaning that they write to tell a story, not just to collect a paycheck — they tell me they write that way because that is how they envision the story: the sci-fi elements, the western elements, the horror elements. Those were all present from the story’s inception in their mind, inextricably linked to the characters, setting and plot. 

If they tried to remove those elements, the story would feel less real to them as writers and so would feel less real to us as readers. Genre, for them, is not about appealing to a particular audience, but about accurately painting the picture in their minds.

We are left with a snobbish belief that genre simply cannot do something that literary works can, that only literary works can provide us a viewpoint of the (high art-y) human condition. 

Really? 

Can we not illuminate who we are as human beings by contrasting us with aliens from the planet K’th’raxx? 

Can we not express the gripping terrors of the human psyche through encounters with grappling terrors from the Lovecraftian depths?

The notion becomes even sillier when asked in reverse: Are literary works truly so weak that they can no longer ask interesting questions the moment a starship shows up?

Good genre fiction distinguishes itself from good literary fiction not by whether it can ask interesting questions of ourselves, but what kind of questions it asks.

Joe is a graduate student in Mathematics. He can be reached at [email protected].