I’ve been astounded by the rumpus around the Booker: Harrumph, the litsnobs say, it’s historical fiction, not literature! [Imagine that drawn out to about five syllable.] Jumped up little... [Dissolves into muttering and ‘Pass the port’.]
Wolf Hall is a novel set in the past. So is Orlando, and The Name of the Rose, and Atonement, and (maybe, depending how you squint at it) One Hundred Years of Solitude.
So what makes a novel literature and what makes it genre?
I wish I knew. I’ve asked myself and others the same question about science fiction and crime fiction. I seem to be at odds with most people. I believe I write novels: books that are both literature and comfortably ‘science fiction’ or ‘crime fiction’. I set them where and when I like, use the characters I choose, and employ whichever literary conventions please me. The publishers (and critics and booksellers) label them as they find convenient. I’m still getting royalty cheques, and the majority have had many printings, so readers don’t seem to care one way or another.
Here’s the definition of historical fiction given by the Historical Novel Society
To be deemed historical (in our sense), a novel must have been written at least fifty years after the events described, or have been written by someone who was not alive at the time of those events (who therefore approaches them only by research).
We also consider the following styles of novel to be historical fiction for our purposes: alternate histories (e.g. Robert Harris’ Fatherland), pseudo-histories (eg. Umberto Eco’s Island of the Day Before), time-slip novels (e.g. Barbara Erskine’s Lady of Hay), historical fantasies (eg. Bernard Cornwell’s King Arthur trilogy) and multiple-time novels (e.g. Michael Cunningham’s The Hours).
It’s a fairly broad definition. Nothing there about ladies and lances, no requirement for romance–which is how litsnobs seem to think of the genre.
I’ve laid out my notions of how and why this Us vs. Them thing began with literature and genre. (See my essay, “Brilliance and Beauty and Risk,” which I gave as my Guest of Honour speech in 2001 at the University of Liverpool’s Celebration of SF.) It’s a basic human trait to separate out qualities that are desirable and not (or, to use T.H. White’s terminology, Done and Not Done). It’s not pretty but it is, I believe, unavoidable, unstoppable. All we can do is remember to to shake up the test tube every now and again so that the layers mix again.
I can’t tell you how pleased I am that the judges for this year’s Booker are happily shaking test tubes.
Why does this please me so much? Because the minute people (readers, in this case) start to believe that two substances, literature and genre, are immiscible, each loses something important. Literature loses joy. Genre loses the brilliance and clarity, the life-changing potential of art.
Go forth and shake test tubes. Readers of the future will thank you.
Addendum: here‘s a video of Hilary Mantel reading and talking. (If you don’t enjoy the reading–I admit I don’t–fast forward to 2:45 where the interview begins.)
Nicola Griffith 
Great post.
And you used the word “immiscible” in a sentence. Fits perfectly with the test tubes. Just love it. Somehow, even though chemistry is a science, it is rarely the science in science fiction.
My biggest problem with genre is finding more books by the same author, shelved on the other side of the bookstore. Or, in the pre-online era, not finding them. Your books are separated into two aisles, Stay in Mystery and Slow River in SF/F. For a casual browser, how is one to know that there is more?
This just happened to me. The only way I knew that Ayelet Waldman wrote crime fiction was listening to her talk on Fresh Air. Her other books are shelved as litfic.
I also recently noticed that YA fiction is all shelved together. It's not broken out by subgenre, and the teens do not seem to have a problem finding what they want.
Glad you liked it. (Yep, since Hal Clement died, chemistry gets short shrift in sf.)
I wish fiction for grownups was shelved the way it is for YA readers. But readers seem to prefer categories. Sigh.
As someone who used to be a genre reader, but now tends to recoil instinctively at genre, I think it's important to note that a fair number of authors and a substantial number of fans seem not only content, but entirely self-righteous about segregating 'their' material from the broader and more generic fiction section and making their genres insular and masturbatory. (This is a tendency that's come perilously close to destroying the American comic book industry, as well, which now caters almost exclusively to an ever-smaller subset of devotees.) That such segregation is popular with publishers and bookstores is understandable and harder to criticize — why not put your wares where favorable readers are likely to find them — but it has the simultaneous effect of making those sections impenetrable to general readers and encouraging the reluctance of genre fans to venture outside their safe little territory. It also provides a place for authorial self-indulgence and “fan service” wankery to run wild, not because “lit'rature” writers are in any way immune to those things, but because genre fans reward it so enthusiastically. “Give the people what they want, and they'll turn out for it,” as Red Skelton once said.
In a broader sense, genres and subgenres tend to blur to the point of uselessness (should A Christmas Carol be shelved under science fiction/fantasy because Scrooge experiences, as Peter David once suggested, visions of possible futures?). But in the literary world, it seems like battle lines being drawn.
(I should note that that isn't a personal accusation, but a general observation. I've read many of your books, and didn't find them either indulgent or lacking in integrity, and there's no reason a story that could be classed as science fiction (or any other genre) automatically lacks literary merit.)
It seems to me that serious readers and critics shouldn't be confused with book marketers. If those who sell books, whether publishers or booksellers, want to classify them according to their own arcane theories of what kinds of books they are, fine. This often leads to problems, though, as when the chains refused to carry Samuel Delany's Bridge of Lost Desire because they couldn't decide whether to classify it as “gay” or “fantasy.”
Myself, I'd like to throw out the category of “literature”, not that of “genre.” Even though I have at times succumbed myself to the snobbery that supposes that some writings are Literature (implying Quality), where others (not necessarily “Genre”) are not. I'm not saying that all books are equally good — of course they aren't — but the idea of a subset of writing that is somehow sacrosanct, 'above' the common herd, is just as limiting as that of genre. Especially when you remember how much of today's High Lit was once popular Trash (Shakespeare and Dickens, for example). To paraphrase Duke Ellington, if it reads good, it is good.
Well, that seems to have covered everything…P.G. Wodehouse and Terry Pratchett should be in the same section, I've always liked the Dewey Decimal system as an organizational system and now I have to go look up immiscible. Good night.
Any personal recommendations from Hal Clement? I never read any.
Virginia is in a room of her own. I have always loved Orlando.
Thanks for the Orlando mention; it always reminds me of the novella I liked instead…I went through many of Woolf's novels when I was directing Vita and Virginia, but I preferred her shorter works (Slater's Pins Have No Points). What I did come away with a love for was Vita Sackville-West's Seducers In Ecuador, which astonished me with its humor.