the problem of genre & sffh
Mar. 12th, 2009 01:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyI 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![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
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 genrematociquala 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.
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.
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no subject
Date: 2009-03-12 07:53 pm (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2009-03-12 07:56 pm (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2009-03-12 07:59 pm (UTC)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,
(Also, Malificent FTW!)
no subject
Date: 2009-03-12 08:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-12 08:04 pm (UTC)Great post, for reals. Much to chew on.
no subject
Date: 2009-03-12 08:10 pm (UTC)I also don't know a lot about about Westerns, but it seems to me that, for instance, the "lone law-man rides into town" could be a Western or not depending on the furniture.
no subject
Date: 2009-03-12 08:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-12 08:13 pm (UTC)(And, dude. The Genre Car is eternal.)
no subject
Date: 2009-03-12 08:17 pm (UTC)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?
no subject
Date: 2009-03-12 08:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-12 08:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-12 08:33 pm (UTC)Ditto what
The Dark Tower series is a really interesting example for arguing genre, actually, since the seven books collectively contain everything including the kitchen sink -- science fiction, fantasy, horror, westerns, you name it, those books eat genres for breakfast.
As I said above, I think I quibble with the notion that fantasy is the marked category relative to the unmarked-ness of science fiction -- that absent a bit of magic, it defaults to SF, even if there's no actual science involved. Which is why I want to lump it in with Ruritanian fantasy: it's "fantastical" in the non-mimetic sense, but there's (usually) no magic involved.
no subject
Date: 2009-03-12 08:43 pm (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2009-03-12 08:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-12 08:46 pm (UTC)(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.)
no subject
Date: 2009-03-12 08:48 pm (UTC)But that's a different rant, and this soapbox hurts my feet.
no subject
Date: 2009-03-12 08:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-12 08:49 pm (UTC)(And you're right.)
no subject
Date: 2009-03-12 09:00 pm (UTC)Wow, so I'm not the only one out there that considers Science Fiction a subset of Fantasy?
no subject
Date: 2009-03-12 09:21 pm (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2009-03-12 09:40 pm (UTC)Soapboxes really need to be built more ergonomically, don't they?
ouch!
Date: 2009-03-12 09:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-12 11:09 pm (UTC)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
Date: 2009-03-12 11:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-12 11:29 pm (UTC)Alternate history isn't "Unreal" it's just differently "Real".
...if that makes sense.