Writing: Genres

 I have thought for a long time, genres have only a meaning in a marketing context. Yes, you have spaceships in science fiction and dead bodies in crime fiction, but how do you explain something like Asimov's Robots of Dawn? Is the Mystery Edwin Drood literature or a detective story? 

So, it was nice to read Counter Craft's Genres Are Historical and Cultural, Not Scientific. Who does not like to see support for one's opinions?

But I’d argue that every attempt to classify genres in a rigid way is bound to fail. This includes the definitions that people were using to refute Chiang’s taxonomy. People love rigid definitions that easily sort all works of art into a few handy boxes. But art never quite fits. The boxes overflow.

Genre is not chemistry or physics. There are not a set of rules we can apply to genres that always hold true or which we can use to sort works of art from across time and culture. There isn’t anyway to objectively measure if a story is genre x or genre y. 

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If I had to pick a metaphor, I’d say literary genres more closely resemble cuisines than chemistry. Cuisines don’t have rigid and universal rules. What was Italian cuisine before the introduction of new world ingredients like tomatoes is obviously quite different than what it is today! Cuisines are shaped by history—see map above—but have porous borders. Cuisines are ever-shifting, ever-overlapping, and ever-changing. New ingredients are introduced, new hybrids formed.

I recommend Counter Craft - it has a subscription option - as it has kept me on my toes. 

Along these same lines, Richard Joseph's Fooled You: On Donna Tartt’s Genre Fiction from The Los Angeles Review of Books. The essay argues that Tartt is ignored on how she uses genre fiction. I read Tartt's The Goldfinch while in prison, and her blending of Dickens and Albert Camus I thought was a wonder. Joseph makes the point, I think is most important about genre:

Much of the uproar following The Goldfinch’s Pulitzer win centered upon one thing: seriousness. Francine Prose felt duty-bound to pan the novel because it was “being talked about, and read, as a work of serious literary fiction.” James Wood, too, argued that the novel was “not […] serious,” that it told “a fantastical, even ridiculous tale, based on absurd and improbable premises.” In fact — said Wood — it was like something out of children’s literature. For Wood, as for many contemporary critics, that which is childish cannot be serious. But if you’ve spent much time with kids, you know this is not necessarily the case: children, in fact, take things extremely seriously, and Tartt knows this. Harriet, the young girl at the center of The Little Friend, follows her fantasies so completely that it nearly kills her. Dickens — himself, in many ways, a lifelong child — is particularly fond of the “absurd and improbable.” One wonders how Wood might review the infamous chapter in Bleak House wherein a character, in deadly earnest, spontaneously combusts. And yet nobody would dream of calling Bleak House an “unserious” novel because Dickens wholly commits to his premises. The spontaneous combustion is rendered with gravity and pathos. Seriousness, then, is not about subject matter, but execution.

This wholehearted commitment to the fantasy is, at base, what I want from fiction — and, I suspect, why so many people love Tartt’s novels. The novels of the genre turn are most interesting when they’re leaning into genre, and least engaging when they’re flashing their highbrow credentials. It can be distracting when an author, no matter how talented, feels compelled to constantly remind you that their fiction is better than other fiction. If I’m watching a movie for the first time, I don’t want to hear the director’s commentary. What I want from a novel is for the author, and all his hard-won sophistication, to disappear: I want the world and its characters to take over, to forget what time it is, to lose track of everything except the book I’m holding. That, I think, is the central enchantment of great literature, and for my money, Tartt casts that spell as well as Dickens.

sch 10/3/22