genre, from the top

[truepenny]

I should say before I begin that the following is only what I think, based on some study of genre theory, plus my own observations and reading. Which is to say, IMHO in flashing neon lights. I can't cite other people in support of these opinions, nor do I guarantee that they are well thought through. This is just what I think on a mildly muggy June morning in 2005.


Okay, start with the most basic: a genre is a kind of writing. Sir Philip Sidney and his compadres thought of there being three genres: poetry, prose, and drama. Nowadays, the schematic is vastly more complicated (and we apply that complication retroactively to the Elizabethans as we study them). Most of the things we call "genres" should properly be called subgenres (although we use that word, too--you can see where this starts to get difficult to talk about) or marketing categories.

A marketing category is not a genre, although the two terms tend to get used interchangeably. A marketing category is prescriptive, intended to make the lives of publishers, booksellers, and bookbuyers easier, and it is often a very Procrustean bed for the author and the book itself. A genre is descriptive. You can't talk about what a genre should or shouldn't do; you can only talk about what it does. People forget this part, too.

Genres are also inherently Ouroborosian, swallowing their own tails. You define the genre by the texts in it, and you define texts by whether or not they fit in a particular genre. This is where descriptive starts to turn into prescriptive, and people get very worked up about whether something is or isn't "science fiction." (Why, no, Ms. Atwood, I'm not looking at you at all.)

So given you have a group of texts, how do you figure out if they belong together? Two things: (1.) conventions and (2.) intertextual conversations.

I'm going to take the second one first, because it's quick. Works within a genre tend to talk to each other. (Works can also talk cross-genre, but if you find a group of texts that are all talking to each other, odds are pretty good they belong together.) You see it in Renaissance tragedy, in Roman elegiac poetry, in the Cthulhu Mythos of the twentieth century. One argument for why fantasy and science fiction are the same genre is that they talk to each other. (Examples include Tad Williams' Otherland, which has a lot to say, some of it very metatextual, to The Lord of the Rings, and C. J. Cherryh's Rider at the Gate and Cloud's Rider, which are talking to Mercedes Lackey's Arrows of the Queen.) Some genres become hyperaware of themselves; Shakespeare's sonnets are excruciatingly aware of the genre they're in, and all the sonnet sequences that have proceeded them, and how there's nothing new to say in sonnets anymore. (SF fans should find that last bit familiar.) Works in a genre build on their predecessors, tear down their predecessors, argue with their predecessors; that's what creates a genre, this ongoing conversation between texts about what the heck it is exactly that they're doing.

The way we defined genre conventions in the grad seminar I took on genre theory is that conventions are a series of questions the genre asks the text. Now, the text can answer those questions any damn way it chooses, but the fact that it engages with them tips you off to the fact that it belongs in the genre. Mysteries ask a series of questions about a crime: what is it? who committed it? who will solve it? Romances ask a series of questions about a relationship: who falls in love with whom? what obstacles are in their way? how do they overcome them? (By this definition, a novel in which the two characters fail to overcome the obstacles is still a romance, because it's engaging with the questions the genre asks.)

My examples are all very plot-heavy, but the questions asked aren't necessarily plot based. They can be questions about the speaker of a poem, about the imagery used, about the form. And you can see where trying to define fantasy and science fiction as "genres" starts to lead you into trouble. They're too sprawling, have too many different concerns. Because the only thing science fiction novels and fantasy novels have that make them lump together rather than apart is a certain peculiarity of setting. They all take place in worlds that are in one way or another subjunctive, that is, contrary to fact. (Watership Down takes place in the real world, except for the contrary to fact bit where the rabbits have language and society.) And that commonality in setting leads to other commonalities in narrative, such as what papersky describes as pacing, or what I call puzzle-solving. But other than that, fantasy novels or science fiction novels (or both) can be asking completely disparate sets of questions. The Lord of the Rings, Swordspoint, Watership Down, Flying in Place, The Last Unicorn, Spindle's End, Fudoki: they're all fantasy novels, but do they really belong together? (I leave the same quick trawl through sf as an exercise for the reader.)

My argument has been that f&sf isn't/aren't a genre per se; it's an attitude. An attitude toward story-telling, an attitude toward the reader. And how exactly to characterize that attitude, I haven't worked out yet.

Comments

[aranel.livejournal.com]

Sidney and his compadres thought of there being three genres: poetry, prose, and drama. Nowadays, the schematic is vastly more complicated (and we apply that complication retroactively to the Elizabethans as we study them).

What about comedy and tragedy within drama? Pastoral and epic within poetry? Romance in prose and verse? I know early modern writers made distinctions between these literary kinds; if they weren't genres then, what were they?

And although it's very tangential to your post, I've always wondered why some genres go so far out of style as to be effectively defunct. If you know of any convincing theories about why this is so, I'd be very interested.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Yes, and that's what Shakespeare's making fun of with "The best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastorical-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, scene individable or poem unlimited."

We call all those things genres; the point I was trying to make wasn't that the Elizabethans and Jacobeans didn't categorize their writing; it's that "genre" isn't a fixed term. As all words do for Humpty Dumpty, it means what you use it to mean.

Genres go out of style because either they no longer serve any cultural purpose, or they've been supplanted by a genre that serves the same purposes they do, plus something else. So, for example, romance is defunct because it couldn't compete with the novel. Epic poetry is largely defunct--well, because again we use the novel for that purpose, and because poetry doesn't mean the same thing to us that it did to the Romans or the Greeks or the Anglo-Saxons.

Art of all kinds gets made because people need it (for a loose and wide-ranging definition of "need"). What art gets made in a particular culture at a particular time depends on what those particular people happen to need. (For a good specific working out of this idea, Stephen King talks about the monster movies of the 50s in Danse Macabre.) So if a genre isn't doing what people need (either for artist or audience), it doesn't survive.

[aranel.livejournal.com]

I've always wondered whether the fall from fashion of rhyme and meter in English verse had less to do with Modernist ideals than with the increased availability of popular music via gramophone and wireless. Not that metrical poetry and pop music fill exactly the same niche, but the way people quote song lyrics in their journals, among other things, persuades me that both types of lyric do fill overlapping niches. So perhaps when pop music took away part of poetry's market share (ugh, but I think it's a pretty precise metaphor), poetry had to carve out a different niche for itself, one that appealed less to people's needs for rhyme, the expression of individual emotion, etc. And yes, the answer to "Was it World War I or were people just tired of the same old verse forms or was it the gramophone or...?" is probably "all of the above, in subtly interrelated ways."

[tekalynn.livejournal.com]

That makes a lot of sense. Thank you.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

The only problem with that theory (which is lovely), is that popular music was hardly an invention of the twentieth century. It coexisted with poetry for centuries, and probably more people were listening to/singing popular music than ever considered poetry at all.

I suspect the difference is that popular songs ceased to be ephemera with the advent of technologies for recording sound. So it's been preserved.

[aranel.livejournal.com]

Yes, of course you're right. (See Richard Thompson's 1000 Years of Popular Music album for one look at the long-term continuum from folk to pop.) Preservation was what I was getting at with the gramophone, and was part of what I meant by "available"--something you can own, and come back to, and don't have to make for yourself. Of course, if you go far enough back to the bardic and folk traditions, or possibly far enough forward to hip-hop, even the distinction between music and poetry starts getting fuzzy. I had an amazing class on the Western lyric tradition that started with Hermes inventing the lyre and ended with Dylan, by way of Sir Patrick Spens.

I think I've hijacked this thread enough now. Sorry!

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

Hijack it a little more please. I like both Richard Thompson and trad folk a lot, so was intrigured by your mention of the album. But I couldn't find it at Amazon. Do you know if it's out of print, or if it might be sold under another title?

[aranel.livejournal.com]

It seems to be sold exclusively at his website, Beesweb. Here (http://www.richardthompson-music.com/catch_of_the_day.asp?id=117) is the list of tracks, which includes "Sumer is Icumen In," "Oops! I Did It Again" (yes, the same), and the remarkable "Marry, Ageyn Hic Hev Donne Yt." Click through to the merchandise section and you can buy it, along with various "authorized bootlegs."

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

Thanks!

[surely-i-jest.livejournal.com]

Another thought, perhaps, is that the advent of recording technologies took music out of popular control in a lot of ways. The ability to record music means you have to find music worth recording--so suddenly public music is performed by the musically gifted, rather than being a communal activity. Before the gramophone, poetry was a matter for poets, but music was something everybody did; the intrusion on poetry's market share may be more related to the fact that music became professional than to the fact that it was more widely available in certain forms.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

This is great and I'm bookmarking it. Perhaps later I'll have something intelligent to say in response.

[branchandroot]

*inhales mightily* That's it!!

*regathers composure*

That's what the back of my mind has been trying to articulate for days--that designations like hurt/comfort don't function as genres, in fanfiction circles. They function as marketing categories. *sigh of relief* My brain feels less cluttered, now; thank you.

*considers* And, you know, I think your point about what sf/f is might also articulate what struck me as off about the anthology Irresistible Forces. The editor seemed to think that science fiction and romance were somehow alien to each other... or, at least, sketchily acquainted. That just didn't ring true to me. Possibly because the entire realm of specfic seems to me such a natural breeding ground of novels, and novels are so given to combining genres. The combination of romance and mystery, in Asimov's robot novels, is one of my favorite examples.

[seajules]

I've never considered it in those terms, but I think your final argument is on to something. I also think it's why genre and marketing category might sometimes clash. Because an author might consider her work in one genre because that genre marks the attitude with which she'd like her readers to approach the story, whereas the publishing house might want to put the book in a marketing category not in line with the genre because they think it will sell better if marked as belonging to that category.

So I think that f&sf is an attitude, but it's not just an attitude the author has; it's an attitude she wants her readers to have, a certain openness of mind and ability to interpret subtext and allegory in particular ways.

I think I need to think about that some more.

[oursin.livejournal.com]

It's too late in the evening for me to have any very coherent thoughts on this, but this seems to be saying something that makes sense of my recent thinking about the use of tropes we would now consider sf/fantasy/horror etc by various early C20th British writers who were moderately mainstream. That they were not thinking of what they were writing as belonging to a particular genre, although this was perhaps nascent, in that dialogue was taking place (the only example alas that immediately springs to mind is Lewis vs Wells).

Atitudes

[dmsherwood53.livejournal.com]

I think that Fantasy/SF assume that the world the ordinary social world the grown-up world workaday world isn't a given that you make the best of but is problamatic in some sense. Not that its the only sort of work that does that some sorts of political novels do it too. But Fantasy/SF does it big-time.
PS I'm of course talking about ambitious works an ANALOG puzzle story No.