But this take on genre reflects a widespread misconception. Genres are not in fact necessarily based on expectations or specifications or elements inherent to the work. On the contrary, many folks who work on genre theory make a persuasive case that genre is much more amorphous. John Rieder, for example, argues that science fiction is not one thing or another, but a "web of resemblances" created by intertexual references. Jason Mittel goes even further, and argues that television genres are constituted basically by social and cultural agreement.

So genre is not just what's in the art, but where the art appears, what institutions support it, and all the other markers that cause people to decide that the genre is a genre. This is why efforts to define, say, comics on a formal basis so quickly devolve into nonsense, with respected authorities insisting that one-panel political cartoons don't count, or trying to define the form on the basis of continuing characters. They're looking in the wrong place, like trying to define an ocean ecosystem by looking solely at the plankton. (And yes, I know that comics are often thought of as a medium, not a genre—and that's a social convention too.)

That's why the argument that some books transcend genre is incoherent: Genres aren't conceptually solid enough to be transcended. Any genre is going to be made up of things that both fit and don't, and over time those things will change and shift. Frankenstein, as John Rieder argues, was Gothic romance first, but now it's science fiction. Jimmie Rodgers was hillbilly music, now he's country. Dave Sim, a well-known comic creator, wrote a story in prose, but sold it in comics shops, so it was treated as a comic. I first read about Philip K. Dick's Confessions of a Crap Artist in a magazine that reviewed sci-fi and fantasy books, because Philip K. Dick was a sci-fi writer, and so his book was (for these purposes) sci-fi. Such overlaps and blips aren't mistakes, nor are they necessarily signs of a work's unique brilliance. They're just a function of the fact that genre is a more like a jelly, or a vague description of a jelly, than it is like a box.

Thus, Beha's description of holy-crap books as books that don't fit in a genre is itself a genre description. *Beha says as much himself, defining it as "the genre that has the genre specification 'does not conform to any genre specifications.'" What Beha does not say, though is, is that this is basically the same genre description often used to demarcate literary fiction. That is, the lit fic genre is often defined as books that deliberately avoid genre categories. Detective novels have murders and clues; lit fic novels have a (pretense to?) genius and an insistence that each book is its own special snowflake.

In casting aside some lit fic as "genre" fiction, then, Beha isn't really abandoning the lit-fic genre. He's just doing what metal fans do when they say some album is not metal. He's reifying the genre, and his own connoisseurship, by attempting to shore up the inevitably leaky genre boundaries. Poetry fans talk about how poetry is deeply felt; comics fans talk about how comics are the art of ordinary people. Beha insists that his holy-crap fiction—defined, again, in much the same way others define literary-fiction—is "more interesting to talk and think about" than other kinds of fiction.