Genre and critiques
To varying extents, the formal features of genres establish the
relationship between producers and interpreters.
Alastair Fowler goes so far as to suggest that 'communication is
impossible without the agreed codes of genre' [1].
It's difficult to separate Mainstream pieces from Genre
pieces - the mainstream's only a loosely related mass of more popular
genres. There are even people who look upon each piece as a unique
sub-genre, self-defining a way in which it can be read.
Genres make life tricky for critiquers though. Pieces by Agatha
Christie or Robbe-Grillet
don't have character development - should we worry? Plot-driven works like Harry Potter
use character development as a filler between action scenes - is that better?
Gertrude Stein's repetition and restricted vocabulary are part of her
game. Were Hemingway's later mannerisms as vital?
Once you're inside a genre, sub-genres appear, sometimes replicating the genres in
the higher layer. Within Science Fiction for example
there's hard-SF (written by highly qualified scientists), speculative-SF
(idea-driven), comic-SF, space-opera, "1984", "The Handmaid's Tale",
etc. Each sub-genre has implicit rules and priorities - it's easy to pluck a paragraph
from Arthur C. Clarke's "2001: A Space Odyssey" and enrich its variety of structure and
vocabulary, but doing so may well be counter-productive. There's no
reason why expert scientists should make expert SF writers, though as
readers they're best placed to offer the kind of factual critique which
fans will appreciate much more than the rewriter's literary suggestions.
In this context where do criticisms like "sloppy writing" stand? Van Gogh's
a terribly sloppy painter compared to Vermeer, and Vermeer's a mess
compared to some Hyperrealists. And yet one doesn't want "it's a genre piece"
to be a license for any type of writing ("so what if my story has a few spelling mistakes - so has
Finnegan's Wake"). The genre competence of an experienced reader
needs to be both nimble and creative. To
readers who've read Fantasy and Realism but nothing in between, a piece of
Magic Realism may seem an unfortunate mix falling between 2 stools.
Criticising a text might
be tantamount to criticising the genre, and someone with no previous
experience of the genre will have a hard job. Genre-sensitive criticism (aware of,
but not subservient to, the demands of the genre) tries to relate
the piece to its genre, using terms like
- "Good of its type" - a description
sometimes applied to a good example in an unappreciated genre. - "Stylist" - a writer whose elegance of
prose exceeds what the genre promises (Forsythe for his spy thrillers?)
Because of this genre-related complication, some critics try to focus on
factors which are common
across genres. "Well-written prose" may not be a requirement for swashbuckling
SF but surely there are some standards which apply to many genres. However, the value of elegant prose
in itself is contestable. We're used to
the idea that dialog can legitimately contain errors - after all, we're
only human. The omniscient narrator is just another voice, and it's
a genre issue (rather than one of quality or sophistication) as to
whether that fact should be hidden. One can "show the working" - in a
sense, all narrators are unreliable.
A work's uniformity of narrative mode (or point of view)
is also used as a supra-genre indicator of writerly skill, as is the
writer's ability to make all readers think the same thing, or the author's
ability to carry out his/her putative intentions. These too
are genre-bound concepts though, considered ideologically suspect by some.
John Hartley argues that 'genres are agents of ideological closure -
they limit the meaning-potential of a given text' [2] . Key psychological functions of genre are likely to include
those shared by categorization generally - such as reducing
complexity. This is a price we pay when trying to communicate, but genres
can play a role in innovation too (in "The Name of the Rose", perhaps),
providing familiar ground for readers to
stand on while they come to terms with the unfamiliar.
New genres emerge from old much as new species emerge
- Mutation - a variation on an existing genre: often a change in the proportions of the ingredients
- Combination - a fusion of 2 or more genres: magic realism for example. Some
hybrids may be sterile. - Arrested development (neotony) - e.g. a sketch treated as a finished work
- New habitats - a new media will encourage new or adapted genres
As usual, once a reader strategy is identified, writers will exploit it.
Readers look for categorisations that increase coherence and
satisfaction. Writers such as Borges take advantage of this desire, leading
the reader into one genre-context before surprising them with another. More
radical genre experiments abound -
"The effect which many identify with the Postmodern is produced by defeating readers' generic expectations" [3].
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