discussion continued: the usefulness of genre?

Hey everybody:

Thanks for your helpful and welcoming responses. I’m using this blog a little bit as a way to generate some conversation topics of my own, and I’ll have time for it sometimes and not others, I’m sure. I do like participating on other people’s blogs, but there are sometimes things I want to say that would be out of place elsewhere. I’m not a fan of the people who seize blog comments boxes for their own agendas; if you have an agenda, start your own blog, and if that agenda’s interesting enough, people will probably read it.

Ann, obviously we could talk about how the fiction industry and media have been hung up lately on some very questionable distinctions between memoir and fiction, but that would only be saying what we already know. I do think that both fiction and memoir involve an important “truth test”; we read them partly for what they tell us about the world, the human imagination, etc, and when those things seem consciously falsified, that’s a problem. But deciding where the truth vs. falsity line lies is very tricky; the lie is clearly not in the conscious inventing, which all fiction and memoir does. Nor is the issue really “accurate depictions of the world” since so many inventions of the kind we would now call sci fi or fantasy or all sorts of avant garde and other non-realist literatures have incredible truth telling power. My fiction mixes things that happened with things that didn’t all the time., and I know yours does too. Finally, I’m trying to let my fiction or poetry “call it how I see it,” but that means very different things at different times. I’ll have to think again about it. I wonder where other people see a “truth test” in their own writing.

Small Fry, it’s funny to be in the position of teaching when, on one level, I help students make (tentative) distinctions about genre and then, on advanced levels, I show them all sorts of literature in which those distinctions break down. But like you, I think it’s probably fine, even if sometimes shocking for the students. I guess there are two types here of the pleasure (and the pain) of knowledge; the growth that comes from being able to make successful distinctions, and the growth that comes from realizing that a lot of it really is a house of cards.

FrankenS, what you say is definitely true. You and I usually talk about this in the context of rock and roll, which as you’ve made clear to me numerous times, is different in many ways from literature. Still, yes, genre can be one way of structuring a piece of music or writing–and I’m leaving aside, for now, how completely fuzzy words like “genre” and “form” and “structure” have become, although it’s an issue I’m hoping to return to soon. But I would say this: even the strictest sticklers for genre norms probably still imagine themselves as adding something new to those norms. If not, the artist runs quickly into nostalgic paint-by-numbers (your phrase, I think) copycatting. Funny though: we don’t, in literature, have revival cover artists, people literally doing all Frank O’Hara or Gertrude Stein like some bands do Presley or the Beatles. But I bet that’s just because there’s no money or literary prestige in it.

the usefulness of genre?

Thinking about the issues of how one defines a genre, and considering for the moment the case of experimental fiction, which might be called a genre, a point that could itself be questioned.

Derrida's essay “On Genre” presents his notion of the indefinite divisability of the trait. There's no defining shared characteristic of any genre that can't be broken down into further differences, and no characteristics of any piece of writing that can be absolutely the same as any other piece of writing. Thus our notions of genre as a form of sameness ultimately break down in any close examination of the traits of a given text. Any two texts are part of the same genre only as long as one is generalizing.

At the same time, absolute difference between any two texts is just as impossible as absolute sameness. Derrida gives as his example (one of many perhaps) the way in which most pieces of writing tend to literally identify their genre, for instance the cover of a novel might give the title and say underneath it, A Novel. The trait of identifying a text’s genre doesn’t belong exclusively to any genre.

Genre is therefore not a fact of texts, but a conceptual tool (usually a faulty one) that might be used to understand them (and that’s true even when the text in question accepts the concept of genre). The question would be, therefore, whether ths imperfect concept is still useful, or should be discarded entirely. The answer would be found in what the concept helps us understand in certain instances, and whether what it helps us understand in those instances is more important than what it obscures.

Given Derrida’s arguments, all novels (indeed all pieces of writing) are experiments, since whatever influence they take from other texts, they’ll never literally be those texts. And as Borges’ “Pierre Menard” points out, even if a text was literally the same as a prior text, a ground of difference would still exist, one regarding the context of their creation.

Still, there remains an important difference between fiction that highlights its inevitably experimental condition and fiction that denies/avoids/downplays that condition by trying to fit itself within a pre-existing genre. But if experimental fiction is fiction that highlights this inevitably experimental condition, on some level it's attempting to repeat the terms of its genre in a way not entirely dissimilar to the attempt found in more conventional fiction. In consciously violating conventional expectations for fiction, it's merely doing the expected for the genre of experimental fiction.

The key difference between so-called “experimental” and so-called “conventional” fiction would then be not how a given text situates itself relative to its defined genre. Instead, being true to an understanding of genre by violating the traits of genre rather than by attempting to replicate those traits seems more critically aware of the actual condition of genre.

Of course, the violation can never be absolute, since all texts replicate some features of earlier ones. So some texts successfully conscious of the problems of genre might remain within a genre by replicating a few of its fundamental traits while significantly altering others.

It seems therefore that “experimental fiction” is indeed a concept of genre that remains valuable, and it’s a concept that much of my writing is committed to exploring. A strange conclusion, in a way: to defend one’s belief in the value of a genre through recognizing the faultiness of the concept.

Are there any times when you believe in the usefulness of the concept of genre? When?