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

[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).