Does literary have to mean dull and boring?

Looking for likely publishers for my pile of finished mss I came across one that looked promising, asking for ‘adult literary fiction’. As per the submissions guidelines, that precluded only children’s, YA, and poetry. That’s okay, I thought. I have adult work to submit, I write pretty decent sentences, grammatically correct with the odd lyrical flourish. I had always assumed that literary denoted a quality not a genre. Sadly, I was very wrong. ‘Literary fiction’ means something that could never be accused of being ‘genre fiction’.

Since authors are obliged to fit their work into a genre when pitching it to publishers and agents, or just to sell it on Amazon, many hopeful authors were asking questions on this author’s submissions page about which ‘genres’ would be accepted. Reading through the answers, it turns out that books with protagonists under age 25, romance, or paranormal elements, if the book could be called ‘women’s fiction’ or it simply didn’t fit into an Amazon category, were automatically disqualified as not being ‘literary’, as if ‘literary’ means what’s left over when you take out all the sparkle.

Paradoxically, the answers made me think of one book in particular: Wuthering Heights. Obviously it wouldn’t have been considered ‘literary’ enough for this publisher, but I think it illustrates some of the shortcomings, prejudices and failure to think outside the box that make life difficult for us ‘genre’ writers.

I know publishers want to be selective, and I agree, there is a huge amount of rubbish around, but why are they so frightened of judging a book on its merits and look first at the label the unfortunate writer has been encouraged to give her/his book? In the label ‘genre’ writing there is an implicit sneer. Sometimes though, great writers could be accused of writing stories that don’t fall into the strait jacket of ‘literary fiction’, where things happen that are not exactly…normal. I mean like when this bloke wakes up and finds he’s turned into a giant beetle!!!!!

Garcia Marquez and other South American writers have been attributed their own acceptable and exclusive genre by the literary establishment—‘magical realism’— which avoids having to admit that this is essentially fantasy writing and as such, one of the most despised of the ‘genres’. I think Marquez and Kafka probably count as ‘literary’, but I could be wrong. And any agent looking for ‘magical realism’ outside of South America hasn’t read the right articles on the subject. Kafka is a notable exception, but purists tend to argue that ‘magical realism’ is a product of the South American experience and we in the west have lost the ability to link to the magic in our culture. Our magical realism is just plain fantasy. (I wrote that with a sneer).

Why can’t we go back to the good old days when there were just books and children’s books? I like to think I write books. I don’t like the implication that they are so similar to other people’s books that there is a handy tag for them. If I’d wanted to join the pack I’d have given them one-word, suggestively angst-ridden, preterite titles for a start.
How about Ruptured, Busted, and Knackered, the three volumes of the Banjaxed Trilogy?