A generic post

[owlectomy]

flemmingstook a stab at the difference between Genre and Literature, and I did too, and I've been thinking on it since then...

(Disclaimer: I think that everything, or nearly everything, has a genre. So I'm not saying that James Patterson is a better writer than your favorite fantasy writer. I'm trying to grope at some of the ways that genre expectations can help you or constrain you, is all.)



Professor Lamarre, my favorite prof at McGill, taught a section on genre within the class on anime I was taking (lucky me), wherein he explained that genre is the way a work tells you how to read it, and what to expect. Cowboy Bebop is a western in space. Westerns are all about the past-- nostalgia for a better time, regret, guilt, a wish to change what's in the past. They're partly about nostalgia for what the west used to be and partly about our nostalgia for the image of the west that we used to have-- the illusion that morality used to be simple. Science fiction is all about the future--and, perhaps more than anything (dystopias nonwithstanding) the idea that we can use science to build a better tomorrow for ourselves.

So. Cowboy Bebop gives us all this western imagery, and all this space imagery, why? To tell us how to read it. As signposts to let us know that it's all about the past and future. Our heroes are looking back on a better yesterday, and hoping for a better tomorrow, and completely incapable of living in the present. Even if you look at the action sequences, it's all about timing-- about barely missed opportunities, being in the right place a moment too early or too late.

Now, when I talk about knowing how to read something-- sometimes a movie will strike me as weird on a first pass, and when I sit down and watch it again suddenly it clicks (Spirited Away was one such for me). It's a lot of things. It's knowing what to pay attention to and what doesn't necessarily matter. It's knowing what to expect. It doesn't mean being able to impose a certain scholarly interpretation on a movie; it means grokking it at a certain level. (Have you ever been to the movies with a friend, and they're like, "But why did THAT happen? It doesn't make SENSE." And you say, no, it doesn't make sense, but if you want it to make sense you're missing the point.)

So I think there are three things an artistic work can do. (And a lot of these things can be happening in combination).

One, it can tell us how to read it.
Two, it can lean on genre expectations in order for us to know how to read it (to a greater or lesser extent).
Three, it can have no coherent way of reading it at all (or perhaps have no door into a coherent way of reading it; what would a crime thriller look like, if teleported two hundred years into the past?)

There's a great bit in Anne Lamott's "Bird By Bird" where she says that your broccoli will tell you how to eat it. I think Big-L Literature does that. It's not so much that it's unconstrained by expectations; it's more that it builds up its expectations on its own terms, so that when you're immersed in the reality of the novel, everything is absolutely organic, it fits together, and if it doesn't fit together somehow it makes sense not fitting together.

Works in a genre rest on genre expectations to let you know how to read them, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. At best, you can do the kind of thing that Cowboy Bebop does in its use of genre. You can deconstruct tropes. You can subvert them. You can parody them. To do any of those things, first the genre trope has to exist! Or, to go down a level: sometimes you just don't have enough time, and what you really need is a shorthand. If you are watching an episode of House, MD., you will not be surprised if:
-House does something incredibly rude.
-House takes painkillers.
-A patient has a mysterious disease.
-The first diagnosis and treatment only make the disease worse.
-The second diagnosis and treatment only make the disease worse.
-A flash of insight leads to the patient being correctly diagnosed.
-House does something incredibly dangerous to the patient in order to cure him/her.

67% of the show is pure formula, but I continue to watch it, and it continues to be incredibly popular. Why? Because the formula stuff is just the flashy lights surrounding what the real drama of the episode is; and so that we can be genuinely surprised when House acts nice, or the patient dies (and, incidentally, those deviations from formula are the signposts that say Look! Look, something is going on here!)

But leaning on genre tropes can also mean that you're either too predictable for those who read a lot in the genre (David Eddings, Terry Brooks...) or too impenetrable for those who never read in the genre (Terry Pratchett's gotten better at this because he's mined all the fantasy ground, but his early novels aren't nearly as funny if you don't read high fantasy).

And-- for me, what I really really want to read for is that moment when you think you know exactly what's going to happen, and the author swerves away from that, and you go, Oh. Right. That's exactly what these people *would* do-- which is very different from the Shocking! Plot! Twists! that you get with thrillers and such. I think that's much easier when you do the ground-work and the building-up-of-expectations yourself, rather than leaning on the genre conversation to do it for you. But I don't know that I would draw a bright line between Literature and Genre because Patricia McKillip has done that to me.

But 'not knowing what to expect' or 'breaking the rules' aren't 100% good things, of course. If I pick up a novel at random I can usually predict that it will be English all the way through, and it will not deviate much from English orthography and syntax, and it will be basically the same story all the way through. I don't want to be wrong about those things. Also, of course, sometimes 'breaking the rules' (especially just for the sake of breaking the rules) means that you have a story that doesn't cohere, or contradicts itself. (What do I mean by 'contradicts itself?' Well, take the third Star Wars prequel. Anakin can't be both a good man driven to a tragic, desperate choice and a brash, callow, power-hungry teenager at the same time. But that's what you get when a committee writes a script).

Which is why Literature is hard. ;)