Literary fiction doesn’t exist. We certainly talk to one another as if it does, as if this or that novel or story is literary, but this is an illusion of language. The referent set of the term “literary fiction” has no members. Here’s why.

The main way we use the term “literary” is to differentiate works of high aesthetic merit from works not concerned with aesthetic merit at all. Pulpy novels with sex and violence and no attention to aesthetic considerations are genre garbage, while novels trying to do innovative things with form and structure and prose rhythm are literary art. On the one hand, you have the Jack Reacher books, and on the other, books like Will There Ever Be Another You and Vincezo Latronico’s Perfection. Low art and high.

The problem with this distinction becomes clear when we try to exclude some works from the “literary” category, even when those works use techniques that we associate with literary fiction. By most measures, one technique that we tend to call literary is resistance to formal constraints. Genre books often require certain structures and plot devices. You can’t have romantasy without romance elements and fantasy elements. However, this criterion requires us to include within the literary category a novel that almost no person invested in literary fiction would want to include, The Lord of the Rings.

The Lord of the Rings is formalistically innovative because it is the first to rely on a constructed mythology and legendarium, the first that builds an entirely new world and invents cultures and languages and histories to tell its story. Fantasy stories didn’t really do this before Tolkien. If formal innovation is necessary for membership in the literary fiction category, then the novel that created a new format that other authors would go on to imitate definitely suffices.

However, most people invested in literary fiction wouldn’t want to include Tolkien’s work in their favored category. Maybe because they view its characters as one-dimensional, or maybe because The Lord of the Rings is largely plot-driven. However, if these are the reasons for the exclusion of The Lord of the Rings, more problems follow.

Take a novel like The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth. It is heavily plot-driven, with twists, reversals, surprise meetings, revelations, and changes-of-fortune. That’s a literary novel in which the plot takes a central role in creating reader interest. And how about Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, which doesn’t have traditional characters or character development at all? If these two novels are literary, despite being plot-driven and not-character-driven, then why is The Lord of the Rings excluded, given its stylistic innovation?

And what do we do when a genre work is just flat out better than a comparable literary work? Why is Stanisław Lem’s His Master’s Voice, a really quite fantastic novel that asks questions about the scope of human knowledge and the personal repercussions of doubt, called a genre work, while Martin MacInnes’ In Ascension, a bland do-nothing book that fails to grapple with any strong theme, is called literary? Both have sci-fi elements, including time travel, space exploration, and advanced technology. Both have character-driven moments, and both have plot-driven moments—but the one that is actually a good novel, with high aesthetic merit, is a sci-fi book, while the one with low aesthetic merit is literary.

Maybe because of prose style? Genre tends, at best, to showcase prose that is workman-like. The best of it won’t be objectionable, but the worst of it will include cliches, ready-made phrases, and miscellaneous tripe sentences. Literary fiction, on the other hand, should feature interesting sentences with unique similes, strong verbs, and attention to sound. This criterion could explain why we shouldn’t include The Lord of the Rings, given its heavy-handed, bombastic prose, which tends to trip over itself in its attempts at being weighty.

Really, though, this criterion fails too. It might work for The Lord of the Rings, but probably not for His Master’s Voice, which definitely has a poignant sentence to two. Here’s an interesting quotation from one of the early chapters: “[Yowitt’s biography] shows that my name was to be found wherever the heritage of science was in the process of being torn down and the edifice of new concepts raised—for example, in the mathematical revolution, in the field of psycho-ethics, or in the Master’s Voice Project.” That specific phrase, “the heritage of science,” is quite profound, bringing to mind a few thousand years of intellectual pursuit in just four words—but it is then overturned and rejected, “torn down” in favor of “the edifice of new concepts raised.” Quite a lovely passage, actually.

While this discussion hasn’t exhausted all plausible candidates for inclusion in the “literary fiction” category, it’s doubtful that we could ever come up with one that has no exceptions. Regardless of the criteria we come up with, a genre story will poke out to satisfy them. This fact tells us that the literary-genre dichotomy is meaningless. We can’t identify any element that a book has to have to be called literary, and calling a book literary is no guarantee that it will have greater aesthetic merit than a book we call genre. If we can’t identify the necessary conditions for membership in a category, and using that category tends to give the wrong impression about quality, then we should probably conclude that that category isn’t useful.

To solve this problem, we should cease talking about literary fiction altogether. We should simply ask, Is X or Y a novel, or story, with high aesthetic merit? If we asked this question, instead of the other, we’d probably make more progress in defining the aesthetic merit of a given work. If, for example, we tried to score The Lord of the Rings on an aesthetic merit scale, say 1 to 10, we might give it a 5 or a 6. It gets points for creating a new mode of storytelling, the worldbuilding mode, but loses out on a higher score because of prose quality. Likewise, we might score In Ascension at a 3 or 4, mostly for having reasonably good prose but lacking in all other areas. Maybe The Sot-Weed Factor and His Master’s Voice would score a 9 and an 8, respectively, both for being novels with good prose, deep themes, engaging plots, and intriguing characters. The Jack Reacher books would all score 1, since they have none of these things.

Surprisingly, “genre” would be a harder term to let go of than “literary.” Most genre books have definitive qualities that place them into one category or another. Horror books typically try to scare readers with disturbing or spooky events. Romance books feature love triangles, busty heroines, and muscled heroes with huge members. Fantasy series often have magic systems, wizards, and involve world-changing conflicts. Sometimes books have elements from different genres, like a detective story set on a space station. Suffice it to say, unlike literary fiction, which doesn’t seem to have any necessary qualities, genre fiction has a ton, and just as we do for music, clearly identifying genre helps readers find stories they want to read.

The comparison with music does have one flaw, though. Namely, the term “genre,” when speaking about fiction, carries negative baggage that “genre,” when speaking about music, doesn’t. A death metal fan might say something like “Dying Fetus and Immolation are better death metal bands than Cannibal Corpse,” which is controversial but doesn’t also connote the sentiment that all death metal music is worse than all symphonic music. A fantasy reader might say something similar, perhaps claiming that Tad Williams is a better fantasy novelist than George R. R. Martin, but a reader invested in literary fiction will scoff, since they know that all fantasy is worse than all literary fiction anyway.

That’s a sentiment that we should want to dismantle, and the aesthetic merit scale can help us do that. If we move away from the term “literary” and instead compare stories on the aesthetic merit scale, we can start having real discussions about why certain books are good and others are bad. We’ll have disagreements, and we’ll often find out that sometimes we just don’t like certain books, even when that book has definitively good qualities that give it high aesthetic merit. But we’ll have learned something about fiction and about our tastes.

We’ll still face the problem that many readers prefer stories with low aesthetic merit that offer comforting structures and devices to stories with high aesthetic merit that don’t, but this is a problem for all art. People tend to prefer easily accessible music and kitsch art to forms that take time to understand and appreciate. That’s okay, though. The universe is huge, so there’s room for all kinds of tastes and the art that meets those tastes. There’s time for people to discover tastes they didn’t know they had and to reevaluate preferences that have become too calcified. Letting go of “literary fiction” will help, not hinder, this process.