Thank you for reading and thank you for commenting, friend.

I've over the years read many of your short stories and poems, and there's really no question that your literature belongs primarily to the category of literary. I mean, is there? The care you've given to the cultivation of your writing style is the total giveaway — because style is ever the infallible clue to personality.

But the main thing I wanted to get across in this article is that the question of literary classification isn't always either-or — nor need it be. That's never, to my knowledge, been a rule — and if it ever was, we should all rejoice over the fact that it's been stricken from the record.

There's no good reason that literature — that all art — should not or cannot cross into other genres. This creates no upheaval. It causes no confusion. I use in this article the example of Blood Meridian (by Cormac McCarthy), which in many ways can very legitimately be classified as a classic American western novel -- a la Sam Peckinpah. Yet Blood Meridian is written with such stylistic lyricism, such philosophical erudition, and with such depth of character exploration, that it’s unquestionably, in my mind, even in spite of all the violence it contains, among the most literary novels ever written. But I see absolutely no contradiction or difficulty in classifying Blood Meridian as a literary-western. On the contrary, it clarifies — it specifies —of what stuff the book is made.

The same thing I also write about Season 1 of the HBO series True Detective, which was written as both a detective story and also a literary story, with, among other things, a profound exploration of character motives and psychological depths. And, in addition, it’s performed with the highest sort of literary sensibilities. Yet it is still a detective story. It’s both. It’s a literary-detective story virtually every scene of which holds you rapt and riveted on all levels.

Twin Peaks aussi.

Crossing genres and mixing genres is good and healthy because it stretches human imagination and in so doing creates new artistic forms. Dostoevsky wouldn’t have produced his four great masterpieces had he not read, absorbed, and then incorporated the great gothic fiction of Anne Radcliffe.

My thesis here is only that there is a definite distinction between the genres of literature, and that we can recognize and know these different genres -- with ease, in fact, once we establish criteria. But all genres can and should be blended, if the writer finds a way and wants to blend them, because in so doing it creates new forms and new art.

Thank you for dropping by!