The question nags, even when it would seem settled (by some, at least): what qualifies a work as “literary”?

In a recent discussion about Justin Cronin’s The Ferryman, the question came up again. It seems to arise mainly in relation to genre fiction, which by those who traffic in such comparisons is decidedly not literary. At least until it is.

But what does that actually mean in terms of the book in your hands?

Always and ever, just as in the assessment of wine, if you’re enjoying it, it’s fine. It can be argued that the best gauge for whether something is “good” or “great” or “literary” is whether it can be read with pleasure multiple times. 

What about a given text would support that?

Let’s assume for the time being that there really is a definable difference between Literary fiction and Genre fiction. Fine. A good starting point to make that distinction would be to ask what the book is about. Following closely on that, what emphasis is placed on how the book addresses its subject.

Before we get too far into the academic, let’s make a distinction right now. In brief, what makes a work Literary rather than Genre? Well, a literary work is about its theme[s] while a genre work is about its tropes. A bit broad perhaps, but a fair starting point.

Which brings us to a primary example of blurred distinctions which both highlights them and dismisses them. Justin Cronin began as a literary writer, then moved into horror, and now science fiction. Of course, the only label one sees on the spines of his books is Fiction and he is marketed with all the presumption that he is a Literary Writer. And yet, Spaceships? Cryogenic suspension? Computer simulation?

The Ferryman is one with such works as Station Eleven, Oryx and Crake, Invisible Things. Novels that are on one level clearly science fiction and yet are received as…not.

The Ferryman is a magisterial novel about a ship on its way from a decimated Earth to a new planet in another solar system, bearing colonists who are asleep in suspension in order to make the century-long voyage. In order to manage the many problems with suspension, they are all tied in to a computer which runs a simulation in which they live otherwise ordinary lives. This is necessary to fend off cognitive decay due to a kind of dream exhaustion. Upon arrival, they will be revived to begin the work of establishing a new colony.

This is classic science fiction. The earliest story in modern SF to suggest the idea is Murrary Leinster’s 1935 Proxima Centauri. Robert A. Heinlein’s  Universe (1941) established the idea as a major theme in SF and many examples have proliferated for decades. A large vessel carrying thousands of people, sometimes with an ecosystem designed to sustain multiple generations, on a voyage of hundreds or thousands of years due to the limits on speed. Among the better examples are Gene Wolfe’s Book of the Long Sun and, more recently, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Aurora. 

What Cronin adds is the idea of the simulated existence, set in a “real” world, with the wrinkle of regeneration. People age to a point where they must leave their life to be reborn and come back as a new version of themselves sans memories. The ferryman of the title is one who escorts these people to the docks to get on the boat to take them to an island where the regeneration happens.

But not everyone. The support staff, so to speak, the workers who do all the labor, live on another island and do not receive rebirth. It is a class society, in many ways resonant of certain cities of recent memory. The elite run things, enjoy a rich aesthetic life…and rebirth. The workers…well, revolt is brewing. 

Through a good part of the novel all this feels as if it is only the near future and this is a closed community of he moneyed class, shut off from the rest of the world. We’re allowed to imagine all kinds of scenarios that have nothing to do with interstellar travel. This is on Earth. And the dramas of the principle characters are plausibly personal, with enough politics to hint at conspiracy. Cronin does a good job at misdirection here. We keep reading to find out what happened, how this hermetically-sealed society was established, what they’ll do when the peasants, so to speak, finally rise up to dethrone them. This is a tense socio-political situation and the title character, Proctor, a ferryman, is at the heart of it.

Proctor is having problems at home as well. His father has reached the end of this life and Proctor is the one to take him to the ferry, where an unanticipated series of events start an unraveling for Proctor that leads eventually to…

The actual situation, as it is revealed, is satisfyingly surreal and takes us right out of the mimesis of literary immersion and into the science fiction scenario that has been there, all but unnoticed, from the start. With minor quibbles, it is also good science fiction.

But in point of fact, it does not read like genre, not even at the end? Why?

One could say that the writing elevates it, which is a simplistic (and frankly insulting) explanation. The writing is good, but so is the writing by Gene Wolfe or Ursula Le Guin or Octavia Butler, yet they are all firmly defined as science fiction. 

Back to my premise: Literary is about its themes while Genre is about its tropes. While Cronin does a very good job describing his settings and, even at the end, explaining how things work, his focus is very much not on those things. His focus is on the internal workings of his characters. In the end, his characters determine the shape of the world, not the other way around. In the end, they are all solving personal problems, even the overall problem of surviving a dying Earth. In more or less typical SF, the world determines the shape of the character’s internal landscape. It is the human response to those dramatic differences that drives the SF narrative and is equal to or even above the interpersonal elements of the narrative. Cronin even remarks on the tenacity of human unwillingness to change in an exchange toward the end in which it is pointed out that the simulation design shows a sad adherence to a past that ought to be dead. With all the options at their disposal, the architects of the “world” choose to recapitulate a static scenario that should have been dismissed long before.

Moving past the binary here, it is of course too simplistic to categorically claim that Literary fiction is about its themes. There is a juggling act that goes on with any work of fiction that privileges one aspect over another, and depending on the emphasis placed on one or the other, such privilege can push it into a genre model wherein the tropes can emerge as character, the detective’s city as much a character in need of analysis as the detective himself, or, in the case of science fiction, the altered landscape that dictates new responses from the people inhabiting, and in fact, if done well, becoming a character itself. The borders are soft, permeable. A century ago, before marketing categories set much of this in concrete, the standard was how well truth was addressed, how deeply the reader could be immersed, how consistent and resonant were the characters. So it never occurred to publishers to create and follow a distinction that would have removed something life Brave New World from the literary mainstream just because it was set in a place, at a time, with customs alien to current embrace. 

I’m heartened that those who inhabit the old precincts of Literary are now stepping outside those walls and writing works that challenge our definitions. And of course that goes both ways. We may come to a point when those old borders have been beaten into oblivion by all the crossing back and forth.