genre theory and marketing categories

[truepenny]

rliz and I have gotten into a discussion of genre fiction (here and here), which has led me to think it's time to put down coherently some things I've been saying, in isolated patches to various people for several months, if not years, about genre theory and marketing categories.


I am not, as I may have remarked before, much of a theory head. But I do love genre theory and use it as much in my fiction-writing life as I do in my graduate-student life. My take on it is idiosyncratic, and is a mélange of ideas from sources I no longer remember. But it goes something like this:

A genre is defined by its conventions. These conventions are not things that must happen, attitudes that must be struck, or meters that must be adhered to. Rather, they are a series of questions which the text poses/is posed, and the relationship of a work to a genre is defined by the ways in which it answers those questions, Yes, No, or Giraffe!. Genres are also things whose definitions (and the definition of "genre" as a category) change over time, so that, for example, in the Renaissance in England, there were three genres: prose, poetry, and drama. Poetry was the only one really worthy of notice, though gentlemen might amuse themselves with prose, and not-quite-gentlemen might make quite a decent living off drama. Notice that while the categories are nothing like the ones we have today, the value-judgment built into them is pretty much the same. Some genres are deemed worthwhile and some aren't. In classical Rome, the worthy genre was epic, while elegy was pure frivolity. Ovid was considered a hack in his own day. So was Shakespeare. I'm not going to talk about poetry in what follows, because it has become rather exaggeratedly a thing-unto-itself, and because my primary interest is in what happens to fiction when it encounters this system.

On the other hand, we have marketing categories. These are not the same as genres, although the publishing industry, the academy, and the critical establishment have shown a distressing inclination to let the two conflate. Marketing categories are all about value judgments, and that has fed back into the way genre gets discussed and defined in this, the dawn of a brave new century.

Let me explain what I mean (as best I can). Marketing categories are a way for people to find the sort of books they want quickly. Actually, I applaud this impulse, since that is, after all, the whole point of a bookstore. So books are grouped together by features which someone, somewhere along the line (and I don't know enough about the history of publishing and marketing to know whom or when), decided were sufficiently distinctive markers: SF/F, Romance, Western, Mystery/Suspense, Literature/Fiction. In some bookstores, Horror is its own category. In some, it's lumped in with Literature/Fiction; in some, it's lumped in with SF/F. And in some, most confusingly, some Horror is Literature/Fiction and some is SF/F, thus ensuring that someone trying to find, for instance Caitlín R. Kiernan's work is reduced to sheer guesswork as to which section to try first.

That one example demonstrates most of what's wrong in assuming that marketing categories and genres exist in a one-to-one correspondence, and also why marketing categories are so frustrating. Marketing categories are prescriptive; they are imposed on books, insisting that square, triangular, and trapezoidal pegs be fit into the same round hole. Genre theory, when properly applied, should be descriptive. If we ask these questions, what answers does this particular text give us?

I realize that those of you not brainwashed and indoctrinated into the cult of academic hermeneutics may now be wondering what good genre theory does anybody, if all it does is sort books into categories that don't matter to anyone. There's a couple ways to think about it. One is that it's fun. For example, if you read Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose with genre theory in mind, or even a theoretical awareness of the genre of mystery, you notice that in fact the detective fails to solve the mystery and Eco is in fact playing a number of games with the genre of mystery. Books that retell fairy-tales, in all the myriad ways that project can be undertaken, are, in a sense, using genre theory. It's our knowledge of the genre of fairy-tales, the ways in which our expectations have been shaped by the conventions of the genre, that enable us to appreciate the cleverness of Emma Donoghue's Kissing the Witch or Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber.

Or, to take an example near to my own heart (and possibly to show how genre theory can be useful in increasing one's understanding of a text), let's look at Hamlet. I have a 40 page chapter about Hamlet and genre, but let me just point out one thing here. Hamlet is a revenge tragedy; we all know that. But if you look at the action in Hamlet, you notice that the revenge--the thing that makes it a revenge tragedy--is absolutely the last action in the play. Everyone else who dies is killed before Claudius, including Hamlet himself (the poison takes a little while to kill him, but he's a walking dead man when he finally achieves his revenge). And the play wanders remarkably freely for an ostensible revenge tragedy; we've got Hamlet's relationship with Ophelia, with Gertrude, with Horatio, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern, the players, Fortinbras skulking around the edges, pirates, gravediggers .... My argument about Hamlet is essentially that it's the rubric of revenge tragedy being imposed on a play that has a great many other interests, and the characters who die represent other genres being summarily disposed of. Genre theory provides, then, a different way to think about why Hamlet is the play it is.

And genre theory offers, also, a way to get outside marketing categories and begin to understand what's wrong with them. As I said to Rliz, the problem with the marketing definition of "genre fiction" is that it commits a crashing category error. It conflates genres defined by plot (romance, mystery) with "genres" defined by rather nebulous aspects of setting. If you've ever been witness to or participant in one of those endless arguments about defining science fiction vs. fantasy vs. horror, you'll know what I mean. And the marketing definition contrasts these "genres" with an equally nebulously defined genre, "literary" or "mainstream" fiction, as if there's a mutual exclusion clause in effect. (There's also an arrogant false premise in calling realistic fiction the "mainstream"; as Tom Shippey points out in J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century, if you look at the numbers, "mainstream" fiction ain't.)

A moment's thought is enough to dispel the argument that "genre fiction" can't be "literary." Without getting into contention about contemporary authors, let's look at the literature in the established canon, starting with, oh, gosh, Beowulf. Fantasy. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Fantasy. (I'm leaving out allegory, because you can argue about how fantastical it's meant to be, but a case can be made for the Divine Comedy, Piers Plowman, Pilgrim's Progress, Utopia all as fantasy.) The Faerie Queene. Fantasy (or, as a question on my MA exam hypothesized, SF). A Midsummer Night's Dream. Fantasy. Macbeth. Horror. Frankenstein. Horror or SF, depending on how you want to read it. The Turn of the Screw. Horror. (Other examples may be adduced at the discretion of the reader.) It's true that much of modern sf/f/h is crap, but then it's also true that Sturgeon's Law always pertains: 90% of everything is crap. 90% of "literary" fiction is also crap. The trouble is that somehow, the representative texts of "literary" fiction are the best, whereas the representative texts of "genre" fiction somehow always end up being the worst, or the most commercial, or the most derivative. Star Trek novels (which vary wildly in quality from novel to novel, but which are all one-down on the literary totem pole, thanks to their origin in a TV show), or the endless liverwurst produced by Terry Brooks, or the pulp novels of the 30s, 40s, and 50s. And "literary" authors who write genre fiction either deny strenuously that it's genre fiction (Atwood, James), or, because they are literary authors, have critics to deny it for them. Joyce Carol Oates (whose work I dislike, btw) is a stellar example. Atwood's even tried to deny genre status on behalf of Le Guin, whereas Le Guin has always been very vocal and assertive about her place within the science fiction genre.

Properly applied, genre theory does an end-run around value judgment. You can talk about how well or badly a novel handles its particular choices, but you don't have to (or oughtn't to) talk about the validity of the choices it has chosen to pose itself. Genre theory, for instance, would enable one to say some very interesting things about Swordspoint and the choices it makes; having accepted the broad markers of fantasy (secondary world, semi-Renaissance culture), it yet refuses magic, monarchy, and a number of other conventions of its chosen genre. And those choices in turn inflect and influence the kind of story the novel tells and the kind of characters who inhabit it. Swordspoint's brilliance as a novel has nothing to do with its marketing category and much (though not everything) to do with its genre.

I seriously doubt we'll ever get rid of marketing categories. As I said way back at the beginning of this phenomenally long post, marketing categories have value; they make the reader's search for a book to read slightly easier, and that's always a good thing. What I object to, and will go on objecting to, most likely at the top of my voice, is the way in which marketing categories have usurped the careful distinctions of genre theory and, even more appallingly, the way they have been mapped onto value-judgments in a way that allows books to be dismissed (as mere pulp, or "not valid," as a long-ago creative writing teacher of mine put it), not on their own merits, but on their packaging.

Comments

[ex-mommybir.livejournal.com]

As someone who writes sf/f erotica, I find this a very interesting post. I've saved it to my memories and am going to carry it away into a corner and ponder it.

[violetisblue.livejournal.com]

Very interesting post. Also reminds me how crazymaking it is to walk into chain bookstores that insist on arbitrarily cordoning off "Fiction" from "Literature."

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

So what are the questions that a text poses -- or the answers it offers -- to be defined SF, fantasy, or literary fiction? What about Swordspoint's responses makes it fantasy rather than literary fiction?

How does separating out marketing category and genre make sense of the distinction between plot-defined "genres" (romance, mystery) and setting-defined ones (fantasy, sf, mainstream)?

[oracne.livejournal.com]

Since genre is something I am struggling with right now, I'm glad you posted this.

A genre is defined by its conventions. These conventions are not things that must happen, attitudes that must be struck, or meters that must be adhered to. Rather, they are a series of questions which the text poses/is posed, and the relationship of a work to a genre is defined by the ways in which it answers those questions, Yes, No, or Giraffe!.

Giraffe! I love it! I have fuzzy giraffe stickers on my blue plastic floppy disk case, but you couldn't have known that...

More seriously, I was just thinking about why my novel (it all comes back to that for me, at the moment) is genre and not mainstream. Its fantasy element is small and isn't going to have a huge impact on the plot. The romance doesn't rule the plot, though it is a large part of it.

My idea is linked to your about questions asked and answered. For example my novel is, I think, answering questions about how characters would react to a given situation. In genre, it's allowable to show more intense emotion, even to exaggerate it. I'm taking advantage of that. I'm deliberately, as my friend Ann said, "pushing all the buttons" and I'm considering that a valid way of presenting my story. Is that sort of what you mean?

[hedda62.livejournal.com]

*cheers*

I wish I had time to discuss lots of aspects of this, but I'll comment briefly on this:

The trouble is that somehow, the representative texts of "literary" fiction are the best, whereas the representative texts of "genre" fiction somehow always end up being the worst, or the most commercial, or the most derivative.

I'm not sure the representative texts of "genre" fiction are carved in stone in quite the same way that the others are; it seems to depend on who you ask. Certainly the crap ones are marketed the most heavily, but that's true of popular realistic fiction too, and if you ask someone who knows a particular "genre" category well for recommendations, they'll give you the good ones. (Which is why I have such a long TBR list.) And that does sometimes include people who work in bookstores, but not, I suspect, people who design and manage bookstore chains.

There should also be a category for those books that are discussed and even marketed as "science fiction for people who don't like science fiction" or "a mystery novel for the intellectual" and so forth. Ducking the issue, I call it.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure the representative texts of "genre" fiction are carved in stone in quite the same way that the others are; it seems to depend on who you ask

I'd say that it is, alas, true that the representative texts of SF among those who do not read SF make up a much larger proportion of the commerical and the derivative than the represnetative texts of "literature" among those who do not read that.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Argh. There's a reason I stopped where I did, and it's because I haven't thrashed all those things out yet.

Answering the second one (because answering the first one would take (a.) years of intensive study and thought or (b.) being John Clute), I think the difference is that sf/f/h actually has gross disservices done to it by being lumped into genres. There are all kinds of ways you can proceed from the initial concept of a world with something impossible in it (yes, this is a fast and loose definition of what sf/f/h is, but it is what they have in common). Swordspoint, The Lord of the Rings, Watership Down, and The Anubis Gates (to choose things that are all "fantasy") have similarities in plot structure only insofar as ALL narratives have similarities. Whereas mysteries and romances have certain plot things that either have to happen, or have to definitively NOT happen (and sorry for that egregiously split infinitive). They are genres in the genre theory sense (and most of Barbara Hambly's fantasies also belong in the mystery and romance genres, because they have those plot markers).

It's hard to do the paradigm shift work necessary to move from "these categories are inadequate" to what better categories would be. I don't, at the moment, have any answers about that.

The other phrase that's likely to come up here is "genre sensibility." I'm not quite sure what that is, and I'd love it if someone could define it for me. Is it what oracne's talking about with the heightened emotion? Is it a way of writing about the world of the novel? I don't know.

And I think Swordspoint is literary fiction. It's literary fiction in a fantasy setting.

And now I suppose you're going to want me to tell you what "literary fiction" is. :) That's about prose style, and the narrative's attitude toward its own narration, and is probably another post all by itself.

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

And now I suppose you're going to want me to tell you what "literary fiction" is. :)

Yup. :)

I will try to think about this some more this weekend. The problem I'm having is that what you say seems very sensible and clear-headed, and then I try to apply it to the categorization and analysis of texts, and I'm lost. Which is probably me and not you.

I'm also not sure horror actually has to have something impossible in it. Take Shirley Jackson, for example. The Haunting of Hill House and The Sundial, I guess you could say are ... haunted? inflected? by the possibility of the impossibile; but We Have Always Lived in the Castle and "The Lottery" have no supernatural aspects at all, and seem to me no less and no more horror.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

being John Clute

I am definitely overly open to tangential suggestions today, because I've been having images associated with finding a portal into John Clute's head for significantly longer than the idea remained entertaining.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I like the word "infected" for, really, most of Jackson's work.

I think perhaps the problem you're having with what I've said (and it's a problem I have, too) is how to define the genres if we refuse the marketing categories. So, yes, The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle are both horrifying, but do we begin our construction of genre from the supernatural element [y | n | giraffe!], or from the effect the story produces on the reader? Tzvetan Todorov points out in The Fantastic that audience reaction is a lousy way to define a genre, because you can't rely on every audience to have the same reaction. (Case in point: when I used "The Lottery" in a creative writing class, my students didn't get why it was supposed to be scary. I nearly strangled them all on the spot.) My argument vis-à-vis horror in my dissertation is that you can see, in a given work of horror, where it wants you to be scared. The effectiveness of the gesture is irrelevant to the genre, although not to the value of the work. Bad horror movies are the ones where you laugh instead of screaming. Senecan horror movies are where you do both.

Horror doesn't have to be supernatural, but (since I am by nature a "splitter" as opposed to a "lumper," to use Johanson's cheerfully off-the-cuff terminology from Lucy) I would argue that we also don't have to put supernatural and non-supernatural horror into the same sub-genre.

And then there are the borderline cases, like The Turn of the Screw, where we can argue until the Holsteins return to the domicile about whether it's supernatural or not, although I don't think anyone would argue it isn't horrifying & scary. Which emphasizes something I let slide a little in my excitement, which is that these are arbitrary, artificial categories. They're a place to begin discussion, not a Grail or a Key to All Mythologies to be achieved and then admired without contest.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I'm glad you picked up on that, because it was entertaining me, too.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Being in-between genres is good, too. The goal is not to have a taxonomy into which every pinned and mounted dragonfly fits, but to build a critical language to talk about why certain stories behave the way they do.

I think, if I'm understanding you correctly, that the kinds of questions you're asking (about character reaction) are more plot-questions than genre-questions. The genre-questions go more with the REASONS for the situation. Is your hero really seeing ghosts, or is he crazy? [y | n | giraffe!] If he's really seeing ghosts, then it's one kind of novel; if he's crazy, then it's another. If the answer is giraffe!, then probably you are Thomas Pynchon, and why haven't you mentioned THAT before? :)

Does that make my meaning any clearer?

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

And speaking of John Clute, he said something somewhere relevant to this discussion (I have the quote, but not the citation, because sometimes I am dumb like that):

"A central way of defining crap in a genre work is to ask yourself if the work in question is govered by a structure of rules or if it itself governs the rules."

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

The genre-questions go more with the REASONS for the situation. Is your hero really seeing ghosts, or is he crazy? [y | n | giraffe!] If he's really seeing ghosts, then it's one kind of novel; if he's crazy, then it's another.

That's interesting, because for that definition of the kind of questions you ask, I feel myself strongly drawn to texts where the answers are either subtle or ambiguous, with what the actual questions are being of secondary importance. That's the first formulation that has explained the similarity between the attraction of Mark Sumner's fantasy/horror/Westerns and The Name of the Rose, and also my tastes in comics.

[supergee.livejournal.com]

I once heard this question raised at an academic conference, and John Kessel said, "Fiction is by people who are still alive."

[hedda62.livejournal.com]

True, although some of that may have to do with age and what I'd have to call an extended marketing campaign. Most people have heard of Pride and Prejudice or Moby Dick even if they don't have the slightest intention of ever reading them; they are far less likely to have heard of Gravity's Rainbow or The Name of the Rose, to pick at random some other works classified as "literature". And the older a work is the more likely it is to be classed as "literature" even if it's also a romance or a seafaring tale or a mystery. With the exception of those older works that fit into the "literature" category, SF's simply not old enough to have made its way into the realm of "classic" - especially not with several strikes against it to begin with.

But "genre" works are less likely to make it into the pantheon, to be dragged down by their less worthy brethren, and it's interesting to try to imagine why, also to look at the matter in a historical perspective - how did contemporaries of Dickens or Austen or Shakespeare see their works, and how were they marketed, and is it just that we have way too much fiction out there nowadays? And, oh yeah, can we blame TV? *g*

[supergee.livejournal.com]

A problem with splitting between supernatural and nonsupernatural horror is that an essential technique of horror is to keep up the suspense about which it is: "merely" powerful agencies with cutting-edge technology or eldritch Things beyond the rules of nature?

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Yes, but most horror novels do resolve the question in the end. The Turn of the Screw is, so far as I know, unique in refusing to commit itself. (If anyone knows of other examples, please speak up.) There's some question in The Haunting of Hill House about what exactly is the agency haunting Hill House, but there's no doubt that there's something paranormal wandering around.

The X-Files got a lot of mileage out of the tension you're talking about, but even there, most of the episodes resolved the issue, for the audience if not for Mulder and Scully. It is true that some of the very best episodes refuse resolution ("731", for instance), but the series couldn't keep its balance, and the later seasons give up any pretense of there being a non-sfnal explanation for events.

[djinanna.livejournal.com]

(Followed in here through a link by musesfool...)

>>but do we begin our construction of genre from the supernatural element [y | n | giraffe!], or from the effect the story produces on the reader?<<

For a few years now, I've been playing with the idea that the real distinguisher between fantasy, science fiction, and horror is in world view (or philosophical/metaphysical approach to life, the universe and everything).

Roughly (because otherwise this comment will be as long as your post or longer):

Science fiction ... tends to a mechanistic and problem-solving world view and is generally optomistic in nature, aka "man conquers nature" ... this is more true of earlier SF, the past decade or so there's been a shift to a more dystopian view, but this seems to be following the recent learning curve in quantum physics which is seen to have marked similarities to some metaphysical systems.

Fantasy ... has a more organic worldview, with a generally neutral-to-benevolent universe interacting with humanity ... again more likely to be optomistic (the forces of evil beaten by the forces of good), and the problem-solving aspects are mixed with an internal emotional-psychological growth process. The hero's journey.

Horror ... returns to the mechanistic world view, but within the context of a malevolent universe ... in horror, the average sucker doesn't stand a chance and those who survive the story (if any do) do so because they've gotten lucky, not through any real merit or effort (or problem-solving) on their part.

One could also look at this as:

Horror victimizes characters through interaction with a malevolent universe.

Science fiction places characters within a mechanical universe to work out their fate without metaphysical intervention.

Fantasy urges characters to learn how to cooperate with the living world around them.

This is all very sketchy still in my mind, working with very broad generalizations, many details still not worked out, and there are huge intersections between the three areas where the lines I've set down blur that result in crossed or mingled genres.

I hope this doesn't drift too far afield of what you've been discussing. I'm rather fascinated by this conversation whenever it crops up...

[ionas.livejournal.com]

Swordspoint, to me, fits squarely in genre boundaries because it shares genre elements such as wish-fulfilment (Richard and Alec are 'Mary Sue' protagonists in exactly the same way that Lymond is a 'Mary Sue'--and probably were inspired by him), protagonists who change things, a mixture of world-as-I-wish-it-was and world-as-it-is.

There is a discussion that might or might not be tangential going on over in my own journal, if you have the time to waste in perusal.


That said, I'd ben interested to see where you fit the works of John Crowley.

[inkylj.livejournal.com]

I don't think it's correct to call sf/fantasy setting-defined genres. Obviously some rely heavily on the setting but others are really focused on the idea and the setting only comes up as it interacts with the idea: "what if a time machine gets discovered?" "what if a farmboy is destined to save the world?" "what if radioactive waste gives an art critic an allergy to art?"

And, right, each of those ideas has questions associated with it. The ones that count as genres -- time travel, epic fantasy, whatever -- have been done enough to have a host of standard questions that define the (sub)genre: "what if the time-traveller tries to change their own past?", "who will be the lovable sidekick of the farmboy with a destiny?". Mainstream authors that try and do genre pieces tend to fall down because they copy the cliches but not the questions that they're addressing, or answer the questions in a way that shows they don't have any idea that they've been answered before.

I guess there are broader questions that cover a range of subgenres but they aren't usually detailed enough to be interesting: "what is people's reaction to the thing," "how does the person find out about the thing", and, ultimately, "what is the new thing?"

[oracne.livejournal.com]

I think, if I'm understanding you correctly, that the kinds of questions you're asking (about character reaction) are more plot-questions than genre-questions.

Ah. Yes, I see what you mean now.

The genre-questions go more with the REASONS for the situation. Is your hero really seeing ghosts, or is he crazy? [y | n | giraffe!] If he's really seeing ghosts, then it's one kind of novel; if he's crazy, then it's another. If the answer is giraffe!, then probably you are Thomas Pynchon, and why haven't you mentioned THAT before? :)

Well, I'm kind of reclusive.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I'm using "setting" in a much broader sense than that. Perhaps the right word would be "world."

Because the basic difference between realistic fiction and fantastic fiction is that in fantastic fiction things can happen (someone can invent a time-machine, radioactive waste can give someone an allergy instead of cancer, etc.) that aren't "realistic": that is, they don't conform to the rational consensus worldview that most of us define as "real life." Obviously, there's a squirrelly area in there, depending on one's personal beliefs about paranormal phenomena, but, for example, Murder in Scorpio considers astral travel and precognition and such as real life phenomena, and therefore is, by its own lights, a realistic novel. Reading it as a fantasy would merely be bewildering and frustrating. (Of course, reading it as a mystery wasn't all that satisfying, either, but that's a different set of problems.)

And then there's the problem of pararealistic genres, like P. G. Wodehouse. No fantasy element of any kind, but also not events that could take place in real life. When people complain about "escapist" fiction, they point at fantasy, but I think what they mean is pararealistic fiction, which allows one to escape from the dreary sordid mundanities that make up real life. Most romance novels are probably pararealistic ... and I've wandered completely away from your point into a different argument.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I, personally, am very very leery about labelling characters as Mary Sues. I agree that Richard and Alec are highly romanticized and Byronic (but that's because they are children of a highly romanticized and Byronic world), but I don't think Ellen Kushner is silly enough to want to BE either of them.

And wish-fulfillment isn't a marker of fantasy, anyway. The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, much as I loathe them, are fantasy, but not by any definition wish-fulfillment. Wish-fulfillment is a characteristic of the term I just coined up-thread: pararealistic, i.e., like real life only better. I think you can have pararealistic fantasy (Mercedes Lackey springs to mind), but the two ideas are not coterminous.

John Crowley definitely falls under Giraffe! :)

I've only read Little, Big, because I cannot get through any of his other books for love nor money. And Little Big is literary fantasy. High quality, self-reflective prose and a fantastic-enabled world.

It looks so misleadingly tidy when I put it that way.

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

*cough* "novum," I think, covers it.