the problem of genre & sffh

[truepenny]

I want to talk for a minute about why "genre" is the wrong word for science fiction and fantasy--though not necessarily the wrong word for horror. And how that makes the whole question of genre vis-a-vis sffh so damn complicated.

I'm sure I've said most of this before, probably more than once, so here's a cut tag for those of you who don't want to sit through it again.



Okay. Step 1, a definition: what is a genre?

(Step 1a: "genre" is not the same as "marketing category." "Marketing category" tells booksellers where to put the book on their shelves; it's an external label applied for the sake of convenience and has very little to do with what's going on between the covers. So the following discussion is not about marketing categories. Just so we're clear.)

Put most simply, a genre is a kind of story. The First Folio of Shakespeare is divided into comedies, tragedies, and histories: those are the genres his contemporaries identified. (And remember that to the Elizabethans and Jacobeans, a comedy was a story with a happy ending, not necessarily a story that was funny.) Modern scholars tend to divide them into comedies, tragedies, histories, romances, and problem plays (although this term is itself problematic, suggesting as it does that there's something "wrong" with the plays it's used to describe). Problem plays are plays like Troilus and Cressida and Measure for Measure: stories that aren't tragedies or histories, but don't meet our definition of comedy and most certainly are not romances. And even "romance" is a slippery term, because Shakespearean scholars don't use it to talk about plays like As You Like It or Much Ado About Nothing, which are concerned with erotic romance, but about The Tempest, The Winter's Tale, Pericles, and Cymbeline. Romance in a much more old-fashioned sense, as a kind of precursor to the novel. Modern novelists have tried to resurrect the romance in this sense from time to time, but it mostly doesn't work very well. Romances are proto-novels, but they're also more and stranger than that; they're artifacts of a different way of understanding storytelling.

... I've distracted myself slightly.

Kinds of stories.

So mysteries are stories in which a puzzle is solved (generally it's a crime and most often a murder, but neither of those is mandatory). Romances (in the popular sense) are stories in which two people fall in love. Bildungsromans are stories in which a young person becomes an adult. These are genres that are identified by their plots. Other genres can be identified by the kinds of events that happen in them. The Gothic, for example, or the adultery-in-Hampstead novel which oursin decries so trenchantly. Westerns are defined by their setting (more about that in a moment), but also by the kind of events that take place within them--thus we can recognize "Westerns" even when they don't take place in the Old West. (Firefly is a sf example.) Horror, too, can be defined by the kinds of events that it allows and disallows--and those events aren't necessarily supernatural. Psychological horror is also horror (A Kiss Before Dying springs immediately to mind for me; doubtless someone can supply more recent examples).

By this definition--a genre is a kind of story--science fiction and fantasy are not genres. You can tell any kind of story you like, because what makes it science fiction, or fantasy, is the setting. ("Setting" is a tricky word, because it has connotations of the external, and therefore superficial--or of a stage-set in the theater, which is canvas and plywood made up to provide the illusion of a drawing room or a psychologist's office or even a theater. In other discussions about setting and sffh, I've used the word "world," as in world-building, but that also feels wrong here, because I'm not necessarily talking about world-building at all.) You can write sff mysteries, sff romances, sff bildungsromans, sff westerns ... None of the story elements that makes those genres genres needs to be tampered with very much. Note, however, that horror does demand that the story elements shift. A horror bildungsroman (like, say, Frankenstein) is very different from a science fiction or fantasy bildungsroman (Growing Up Weightless, for instance, or--to be utterly immodest--A Companion to Wolves). For that matter, you can write sff horror. Alien, Q.E.D.

The other problem is that what makes a setting sff can vary wildly from book to book. The two books I was talking about yesterday, The Drowning City and Dragon in Chains are secondary world fantasy; they take place entirely in imaginary places. matociquala's Blood & Iron takes place partly in imaginary places, but partly in New York. Is it an imaginary New York? Yes, of course. But then, every time New York appears in a work of fiction, it's an imaginary New York. pameladean's Tam Lin takes place at an imaginary college--but we understand as readers that it's a real imaginary college (not like Caroline Stevermer's College of Magics, which is a secondary world imaginary college)--except that it's also connected to the court of the Queen of Faërie. And then there's a book like Peter Dickinson's Sleep and His Brother, which is utterly, prosaically real--except that the condition the children suffer from, described in perfect, prosaic detail, is imaginary. Does that make it fantasy, or just fiction? And then there's the meta axis--Samuel R. Delany's Neveryon books (I apologize: I can never remember where the diacritical marks go, and at the moment I can't remember where my Delany books are) is fantasy about fantasy, sharply and scintillatingly self-aware.

You begin to see why sff defies genre definitions. It's a kind of story, yes, but the common element is simply the contravention of consensus reality, which can range in fantasy from the objective reality of ghosts or fairies or other supernatural creatures in the "real" world (Toni Morrison's Beloved) to the shifted details of a realistically extrapolated alternate history (papersky's Farthing books) all the way through to the creation of an entire imaginary and non-Newtonian world like Terry Pratchett's Discworld. And science fiction is no better in terms of definitional stability, as it can range from rigorously extrapolated "future history" (using Heinlein's term but not pointing to Heinlein as an example of rigorous extrapolation) through a vast variety of combinations of science and fiction (Octavia Butler, Kim Stanley Robinson, C. J. Cherryh) to space opera to science fantasy like Star Wars.* Again, what makes two books recognizable as part of the same kinship group is the existence of an element contrary to consensus reality. Even horror isn't so much a kind of story as it is a pressure on the way those stories unfold (see above re: bildungsroman).

And to make things even worse (!), there are genres within these broader categories of fantasy, science fiction, and horror. We know this because there are genre conventions which we recognize. Diana Wynne Jones' The Tough Guide to Fantasyland is a compendium of these tropes, a satirical guide to the genre matociquala calls Fat Fantasy With Maps. Horror movies run on genre conventions; that's how you can have franchises like Friday the Thirteenth and A Nightmare on Elm Street. But there are also books in these categories (fantasy, horror, science fiction) that don't merely reject or subvert the tropes of those particular genres, but that aren't even playing the same game, much less by the same set of rules. Against the Belgariad put Molly Gloss's Wild Life. There are genres within fantasy, but fantasy is not a genre.

We need a better word, and the problem is not that such words don't exist--papersky uses the word "mode," [ETA: to talk about something similar but not identical]--but that there isn't consensus. It's hard to talk about something before you've agreed on a vocabulary, and the word that people have agreed on is "genre." And I guess all this post is, really, is an argument about why agreeing on that word doesn't get us any farther.

---
*I, personally, have never been able to decide whether alternate history is science fiction or fantasy. But since my own view tends to make science fiction itself a subset of fantasy, we'll go with that.

Comments

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

The one place I'd disagree with you is on the positioning of Westerns; I think we recognize them much more by their setting-components than by their narrative ones. If you took away Firefly's accents and horses and dusty plains and guns that look like six-shooters and so on, it would just be an SF story about smugglers on the edge of the law, and while that's a common type of story to tell in a Western setting, I don't think it's definitional in the way the puzzle-solving of a mystery is, or the tropes of a Gothic novel.

As for terminology -- I, too, like the word "mode," after Brian Attebery's distinction between mode (fantastic vs. mimetic), genre (marketing category), and formula (specific narrative types -- the term is used non-pejoratively).

I wonder what accident of development classed alt-hist as science fiction? Its closest relative might be Ruritanian fantasy, but on the whole I tend to think of it as this weird third sibling in the family, who gets along well enough with the bickering duo of SF and F but doesn't really play the same games they do.

[herewiss13.livejournal.com]

I think alternate history gets classifed more as SF than fantasy for two reasons:

1) It's not actually fantastical, just _different_; ergo: SF by default.
2) When alternate history intersects our own (1632, Islands in the Sea of Time, Lest Darkness Falls), the cause may be mysterious, but isn't typically shown as magical/fantastic. Therefore alternate history = parallel universe = scientific extrapolation.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

My familiarity with Westerns is neither broad enough nor deep enough to make a convincing argument, but since I can think of two examples (Firefly and Stephen King's Dark Tower books) that are Westerns without taking place in the actual Old West, I think there's something else going on there.

And the thing about alternate history/alternate universe is that it can be either something that looks like science fiction (i.e., there's nothing "fantastical" about it) or something that's obviously fantasy: Randall Garrett's Lord Darcy stories, matociquala's New Amsterdam, Diana Wynne Jones' Chrestomanci books.

(Also, Malificent FTW!)

[jaylake.livejournal.com]

Darn, now I need to change my license plate.

Great post, for reals. Much to chew on.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Thanks!

(And, dude. The Genre Car is eternal.)

[metafrantic.livejournal.com]

You could make many of the same arguments for Westerns: after all, you can have a Western Romance, or a Western Comedy.

So if Mysteries are "stories in which a puzzle is solved", and Romances are "stories in which two people fall in love", and Bildungsromans are "stories in which a young person becomes an adult"... why can't SFF be "Stories in which the contravention of consensus reality occurs"? It's a signifiantly more broad definition, but it does place specific boundaries. Can't that be a genre?

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Well, sure. I mean, that's not wrong. The thing is, though, it's so broad as a definition that it's not very much use. A Game of Thrones and The Haunting of Hill House are both stories in which the contravention of consensus reality occurs. But that's a commonality on roughly the same level as the fact that they're both novels. It's true, but it doesn't increase our understanding.

[redbird]

I think the problem there is that the contravention of consensus reality often isn't the point of the story, and usually isn't noticed by anyone within the story. In a mystery, at least some of the characters are aware that the puzzle exists, and if it is solved* it is solved by characters in the story, not by Deus Ex Machina. [Random person not previously seen in the story showing up on the next-to-last-page and confessing isn't considered proper, nor are divine voices telling the detective "arrest the guy in apartment 4, he did it and if you tell him you know he'll confess and show you the knife.") Similarly, the people the romance is about are aware of each other and of their feelings, at least by the end of the story.

In most sff, the characters aren't aware of consensus reality being contravened. Their world is the real world. It may have alien spaceships, or a different history from ours, or magic that works. But the story isn't about history having changed, and if it's about the spaceships showing up or the magic coming back, the reaction is "this is weird|scary|wonderful" not "this can't be the real world, because in the real world magic doesn't work, and Nixon lost in 1960."

So, yes, sff are stories set in alternate realities, many of which fall into identifiable patterns, but they aren't stories in which reality changes. [Not usually, and that tends to get metafictional, as with R.A.W. Wilson's Schrodinger's Cat or Matt Ruff's Fool on the Hill.

*It's arguable whether, say, McBain's He Who Hesitates is a mystery, despite being clearly a novel about a crime.

[beautifuldorian.livejournal.com]

What you have to remember foremost is that very, very few books have only ONE genre. Or mode, or whatever. Most fantasies are also mysteries. Hell, MOST books are mysteries, in that there are mysteries that will be solved in the course of the book, regardless of them being the central plot.

The real question is, what -defines- a book. IS it the setting? The plot? The characters? You can't find an appropriate way to define the genre if it differs from genre to genre, like you said.

I think the main dilemma is that we divvy up books based on their happenings. Mysteries center about whodunit, or why; tragedies have sad things, comedies have happy or funny ones. But that leaves fantasy out. Why? Because all the things that happen in fantasy don't happen in the real world. You have fantasy that's possible but unreal; that makes it fiction. Then you have true fantasy - things that don't happen, and can't. (supposedly). Like magic. Science fiction isn't fantasy because it IS theoretically possible at some point in the future, but it's not out and out impossible like conjuring monkeys or something. Again, the line DOES blur, but for the most part, fantasy is separated out because it's things that can't happen for real. All other genres are possible real life occurrences, and they're separated by the main theme of their occurrences. Fantasy, being altogether impossible, is taken out all on its own.

Mostly, though, you have to look at the origin of the term. When publishers made a separate category for fantasy, it was pretty much ALL LOTR-type fantasy. Anything else was simply fiction. So later when they got a book that was set in the real world, but which CONTAINED magic, they pondered over it and finally said, "well, it has fantastical elements, and those trump the occurrences in the story, since ALL fantasy has the same occurrences of other genres." Basically, it was all about the setting to begin with, but then the setting changed, and expanded vastly, and voila, you had a category full of things that don't exactly meet the definition. At my bookstore, Anne McCaffrey's Pern novels (a staple of my childhood) are located under Scifi. But at the bookstore they are in the fantasy section.

A genre then, isn't what type of plot the story revolves on. It's the predominant theme of the novel, the first thing you notice, the first thing you'd tell someone else about it. "Well, it's a fantasy. IT's about dragons and elves and wizards." or "It's set in the Old West" because those are the defining characteristics of the story. But no two people will perceive the exact same thing first. I consider those Pern books to be fantasy, because they take place on a make believe planet, and even though the dragons are genetically engineered, they were modified from fantastic creatures that already had their own magical abilities. Some people would just look at the 'spaceship' part and call it scifi and never think otherwise.

Then, the ultimate solution is this: dismantle the fantasy section completely, and mix them right in with all the other fiction books, separated out by genre as in, the main theme of the book's plot. THat would be more accurate, but make things harder to find. And mostly they want you to be able to find what you're looking for, so you can buy it.

Therefore, books are separated by type, that type being what type the shelf-stocker thinks go together, because they're read by the same type of people. Supposedly.


Yeah, I'll shut up now.

[beautifuldorian.livejournal.com]

Bah, I meant to say that at the LIBRARY they are under fantasy. So much for proofreading.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

That's not quite what I mean by "mode", or rather mode has more stuff in it.

(I just by the strangest string of associations defined Murder Must Advertise as a Harlequin Romance, and indeed the only one I can think of.)

[kate_nepveu]

*spittake*

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Oh dear. I apologize for misrepresenting you.

(And you're right.)

[temporus.livejournal.com]

I thought the way you could tell if it was a Comedy or a Tragedy, was based upon whether everyone ended up married, or dead by the end of the play?

Wow, so I'm not the only one out there that considers Science Fiction a subset of Fantasy?

[hippoiathanatoi.livejournal.com]

George R.R. Martin has put forward the theory of genre (by this, the common public perception of the genres) as just "furniture" -- that setting stuff can be swapped around willy-nilly, but the bones of the story you're telling can remain.

That strikes me as one way of trying to pick out where genre is and isn't. If you can swap it out for something else without changing the fundamental narrative, it's part of the furniture.

[girlpunksamurai.livejournal.com]

Psychological horror is also horror (A Kiss Before Dying springs immediately to mind for me; doubtless someone can supply more recent examples)

I have 2 fairly good examples of such, though the latter is really more towards psy thriller, than strictly psy horror.

1)Drawing Blood. by Poppy Z Brite

2)The Analyst, by John Katzenbach-this is one extremely good book, btw-the words completely swallows you whole and leaves you shivering O.o

genre

[innerplatypus.livejournal.com]

I think Westerns are characterized by rough justice, revenge and vigilantism in the setting of a failed state(or a frontier that has a similar lack of good governance), where one is obliged to take the law into one's own hands due to the lack of althernatives. This equally describes the old west or the Japan of Kurosawa's movies, or other places. So the setting and the type of action in a western are intertwined, with the flawed hero being the lone gunman or sheriff for example, in an otherwise lawless place bringing justice.

Re: genre

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Thank you. That's a lovely capsule description and points at the things I wasn't managing to say.

[britmandelo.livejournal.com]

Huh. I'm going to think about this for awhile. (And I also totally end up putting scifi as part of fantasy, because it seems to make sense to me.)

[starlady38.livejournal.com]

I like the idea of fantasy/sf as a mode (though partly I think that's just because I spent way too much time wrestling with modes in ancient Greek), and I certainly think that the continuing pervasive construction of sf/f as a genre contributes to a number of unsavory habits of thought both in readers and fans of fantasy/sf and among people who don't read sf/f and would be horrified to do so. Audrey Niffenegger just received (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/11/books/11niff.html?_r=1&ref=books) a $5 million advance for her second novel because her work has been stamped "literary fiction" and is published by "literary" publishers--whereas to fans of sf/f such as myself, her work is fantasy/sf that dares not speak its name. But perish the thought that it's not literary! On a similar note, I was considering today why Haruki Murakami has been labeled "literary" when his work features any number of tropes which are rather fantastic. Genre (and high-low culture) divisions aren't as strict in Japan, but this isn't Japan. Is it just because only "literary" publishing houses have the resources to publish authors in translation?

Whoops, digression.

So, yeah, I'm in favor of any convention of reference that takes the fight to those small-minded literary fictionalists who've somehow managed to stake the high ground for themselves on the basis of the idea that "more real" = better. *g* Even though if we stop referring to fantasy/sf as a genre, we'd just be stuck with handfuls of sub-genres within a larger mode, which might lead to even more sub-genre balkanization, which is a trait I find pernicious.

For myself, fantasy has magic, and science fiction doesn't, though the categorization is admittedly arbitrary. -rolls eyes at self-

genre vs marketing category

[innerplatypus.livejournal.com]

I think that on a practical level the problem with defining science fiction and fantasy as opposed to other genres is that the genre of sff doesn't fit neatly into a marketing category and thus on a day to day basis when trying to find a particular work or even browse this genre in the bookstore I (and probably other readers) run into problems that I don't find when browsing Mysteries or Romance or other categories or genres. I might find Oryx and Crake and The Handmaid's Tale put into literary fiction. Vampire stories are sometimes put into Horror. And what about magic realism? It's put in literary fiction usually, but from a genre defining perspective I don't see why it ought to be. I have found many books I consider science fiction and fantasy in other marketing categories. What would be really useful for me is for the definition of the sff genre and the definition of the marketing category of sff to coincide.

How about "language" and "dialects"?

[joshenglish.livejournal.com]

That's what I came up with tonight after thinking about it.
In short: tropes are the vocabulary of genre, therefore genres are languages, and sets of tropes are dialects.

http://joshenglish.livejournal.com/147889.html

[calanthe-b.livejournal.com]

By this definition--a genre is a kind of story--science fiction and fantasy are not genres. You can tell any kind of story you like, because what makes it science fiction, or fantasy, is the setting.

I would disagree with this rather; setting may be important, but I don't think it's what makes a fantasy. For me it's that narrative movement through eucatastrophe into recognition and metamorphosis (or aware variations on this movement - the rejection of eucatastrophe, or metamorphosis, or reinterpretation or suchlike) that Clute and Grant discuss in the Encyclopedia, along with the question of mode (the fantasy/mimesis continuum etc) and the sharp awareness of being told, and told in relation to other stories, that make a text a fantasy (can't comment on SF; not my field). I also don't know another genre that uses structuring devices to encode stories and ethical theories the way fantasy does, but that's a project I have yet to fully explore.

Have you read Attebery on this topic, btw? The first chapter of Strategies of Fantasy is particularly good and says lots of useful stuff about the formula/mode/genre intersection...

Eeep. Sorry for academic 'splosion all over your journal. I just got support for the first stage of a postdoc fellowship application and it's got me all giddy and enthused about my lit scholarship again!

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Congratulations! That's awesome!

I'm not sure I agree with your definition of fantasy, but I frankly haven't read enough theory to keep up with you.

[ozarque.livejournal.com]

This is a splendid essay; thank you for posting it. I am especially pleased with your elegant "the common element is simply the contravention of consensus reality," which is one of the most useful propositions I've ever read.

I'd like very much to be able to refer people to this post. Is that all right?

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

That is absolutely all right. And thank you!

[girlpunksamurai.livejournal.com]

Actually, the whole genre' thing is giving me a serious problem right now

I'm doing a research paper on Jewish women in America and their efforts to support WWII or to help Jewish immigrants fleeing the Nazis and my college library was having trouble finding resources (only 2 articles and 2 books-not enough for me, many Multiple Paragraph Girl >.>) and the librarian explained that it was because there were many genre's, categories, and sub categories that had to be sifted through.

So I vote for more efficient system please. 10 page paper, due in 2 weeks. Failure on my part is unforgivable [/end darth vader voice]

[innerplatypus.livejournal.com]

May I suggest a Jewish library for the essay? They may be able to help with titles of books.

[dark-towhead.livejournal.com]

A great essay about the fluidity of genre, though I find myself disagreeing with your presentation of the horror genre. For me, "horror" is more of a mood than a type of story.

Unfortunately, your essay is a bit vague about this particular genre, drawing more examples from film than from fiction. While I agree that film has a very tried and true paradigm for what constitutes a "horror story" (be it the dead teenager flick or monster movie or whatever), unfortunately the fiction is not quite so clear cut. I am, alas, having trouble seeing the "events that it allows and disallows".

Let me present some examples: I find horror equally expressed in Gary Braunbeck's Prodigal Blues, Poppy Brite's Exquisite Corpse, Gustav Flaubert's Madame Bovary, William Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily", Cormac McCarthy's Outer Dark, Joyce Carol Oates' Beasts, and Dan Simmons' Drood. I personally include these as horror stories, yet I do not see these books particularly united by event inclusions (or exclusions) . . .

Could you perhaps expand a bit upon your view of horror fiction?

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I don't quite see why Madame Bovary is a horror story. It's a horrible story, and it's a horrifying story--and it's certainly a cautionary tale, as many horror stories are. But if you call it a horror story, I think you've diluted the horror genre to the point where the term becomes meaningless.

There are two different tacks I can take in answering your question--which, I should add, I think is a completely fair question and one worth asking. One would be to pursue my dissertation (http://www.sarahmonette.com/dis-pref.html), which argues that Renaissance tragedy is the precursor of modern horror. But I don't think that line of argument is particularly useful in this instance; I mention it mostly to reassure you that I have actually thought about horror as a genre and the issues involved. The other would be to cite John Clute's The Darkening Garden, which crystallized the genre for me beautifully: Clute says that what characterizes horror is the a priori given that the world as we know it is a lie. Horror stories are about the process of uncovering the lie. (In these terms, Madame Bovary is not a horror story because we as readers know all along that Emma Bovary is self-deluding. There's no revelation for us, only watching her stupid, pointless tragedy unfold. But Flannery O'Connor writes horror, because her stories rip away our protective belief in the decency of human beings.) So horror, as a genre, rather than being defined by the presence or absence of elements contrary to consensus reality, is defined by this process of revelation, what I suppose, paralleling Tolkien's eucatastrophe, we might call dys-epiphany. But because horror always leads to the dys-epiphany, it also has a natural affinity for the fantastic, because what horror says, over and over again, is in essence, "The monsters they told you were make-believe are real."

[fjm.livejournal.com]

Mode is actually pretty standard among critics these days. See the introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction. And it gets us a lot further for all the reasons you then list in the post.


SF is a mode which steals the plots of other genres and gives them an attitudinal twist.

Both I and Paul Kincaid are convinced that sf and fantasy should be understood as *attitudes* and this is why you can have sf with no actual speculation, and fantasy with no magic. (And also why you can have "futuristic thrillers" that leave sf readers dissatisfied, and slipstream novels that we "know" aren't fantasy.)