Much of what is said today on the topic of genre is complete nonsense. In the book world, genre is something we can’t stop talking about—and yet no one seems to know or agree on what exactly genre is. The discussion tends to get hijacked in the intersection of elitism, populism, and social class, hung up somewhere between the very real temptation to look down on others and the very real pain of being looked down upon. To some, “genre” is a marker of inferiority, a ghetto in which to confine stories that don’t rise to the level of Serious Literature; to others, “literature” is a marker of stuffiness and “genre” is at least interesting, and fuck you if you dare to criticize it.
Generally, this argument goes nowhere. It’s worse than pointless. It’s boring.
The problem, it seems to me, is that the current discussion about genre misses the most crucial issue: what genre really is, and how it actually functions in storytelling.
It’s this gap that seems to be what’s frustrating Michael Cunningham and Ursula K. Le Guin in a recent conversation for Electric Literature:
Michael Cunningham: I believe that some of the most innovative, deep, and beautiful fiction being written today is shelved in bookstores in the Science Fiction section. That that section probably contains more fascinating books than does the… what to call it?… mainstream fiction section. […] This is especially important to me, in that I’m always trying to talk readers into venturing into genre fiction, and still encounter a surprising degree of resistance. The line, “I don’t read science fiction” emanates from a surprising number of well-educated, erudite mouths.
Ursula K. Le Guin: Well, you’ve said much of what I’d have said, and I’m delighted to hear it said by a writer whose fame is not within a “genre” but in what is still called literary fiction.
And that, of course, is the lingering problem: The maintenance of an arbitrary division between “literature” and “genre,” the refusal to admit that every piece of fiction belongs to a genre, or several genres.
The last bit of what Le Guin said is important, so I’m going to write it again, in all caps, so it’s impossible to miss: EVERY PIECE OF FICTION BELONGS TO A GENRE, OR SEVERAL GENRES.
This is the most important thing to understand about genre, and why it’s absolutely nonsensical to speak of a distinction between literary and genre fiction. Genre isn’t something that can be isolated and separated from the mainstream. Genre is everywhere. It’s impossible to write a story without writing in a genre, or several genres at once. The neatly divided sections at Barnes & Noble actually represent a stew of genres that are themselves constantly in flux: satire, tragedy, family epic, comedy of manners, heroic quest, epistolary romance, gothic sci-fi, speculative dystopia, paranoid noir. Even those novels that the critics breathlessly assure us “defy genre” are in fact inescapably part of genre traditions—genre clings to these stories as a negative presence, something to be defied; if the novelist’s transgression of breaking the rule has any force, it proves the existence of the rule in the first place.
Encouraged by Cunningham and Le Guin’s courage and common sense when it comes to genre, I’ve decided to put forward my own views on genre—presented as a short list of propositions about what genre is not, what it actually is, and how to talk intelligently about it. Here goes.
What genre is not:
Genre is not primarily a marketing category. Though that’s the way it’s often used in the publishing industry, which is part of what makes all this a little confusing. To help readers of a particular kind of book find similar books they might like equally well, publishers have found it expedient to lump certain types of stories together. But this system of classification isn’t particularly consistent, and even when it is, it pays attention to certain genre distinctions more than others—when’s the last time you saw a “Satire” section in the bookstore, for instance? Besides, when it comes to actually thinking critically and responding to the content of a particular book, these broad marketing classifications aren’t always valuable. Ursula K. Le Guin is generally shelved in science fiction, for instance, but she has just as much in common with writers shelved in fantasy, and mystery, and literary, as she does with her fellow science fiction writers. To understand the kind of genre game she’s really playing in her books, you have to look past the marketing classification to what’s actually going on in the text.
Genre is not an arbiter of quality—or lack thereof. Some argue that genre basically equals bad, and literary equals good, and if there’s a genre book that happens to be good—well, that’s because it’s not actually genre, it’s literary. This is a bad argument. It’s circular reasoning, for one: “Genre is bad and literary is good, because bad things are genre and good things are literary!” Also, it completely eliminates genre as an actual component of stories, one that is real and has significance and meaning for how we read and interpret and experience stories. That’s a bad thing.
What genre is:
It’s tradition. There’s a massively influential essay by the poet and critic T.S. Eliot called “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in which Eliot essentially argues that no writer is an island: her work, no matter how unique it may be, exists and has meaning in relation to everything that came before it, the “tradition,” from Beowulf and Homer on down. Now replace “tradition” with “genre” and you’ll get what I’m driving at. Genres are the stories that came before. They’re the forms and archetypes and conventions that the writer will mimic, and echo, and alter, and destroy. By writing, the new novelist changes the tradition, the genre. The genre is always changing—just as the tradition bears upon the new, so too does the new ripple back into the tradition. But the tradition is always there.
It’s a narrative game. Books are games, in which writers and readers agree to abide by certain rules, for a time, in order to create the pleasures of story—interest, entertainment, excitement, distraction, reflection, interpretation, resonance, meaning. And genres are certain kinds of games. When we play at mystery, we expect that the game will have crimes, clues, suspects, solutions. When we play at fantasy, we expect that the game will have worlds, kingdoms, quests, magic. When we play at romance, we expect that there will be infatuation, sex, obstacle, resolution. When the rules are broken, sometimes we are irritated. Sometimes we are thrilled. But the rules are always there. As readers of Wittgenstein will know—it’s simply impossible not to play a game. The genre game (as with the language game) is everywhere.
How to talk about genre:
Be aware of genre when talking about books. If genres are traditions that books sit within or defy, games that stories play or break, then it’s important to understand what genre or genres a book belongs to when you respond to it and talk about it. Genre is just as important to a work of fiction as character, plot, setting, motif, and theme. Chances are that the writer thought long and hard about her genre influences, about the writers and stories that were conversation partners as she spent months (years, even) laboring over the book.
Genre is not an arbiter of quality, but “local conditions” can temporarily influence the quality being produced in a given genre. In the interview with Michael Cunningham, Ursula Le Guin says that it is possible for editors, writers, critics, and readers to destroy the reputation of a genre by allowing the form to degenerate into formula: “Salability, repeatability, expectability replace quality,” she says. These are what I call “local conditions”: the cultural and economic conditions surrounding a given genre that influence the quality of the work being created in that genre. That is to say, it’s possible for culture to push the percentage of good work in a given genre up or down temporarily. Genres see times of flourishing, followed by fallow periods in which bad writers formulize past successes instead of creating new innovations in the form. It happens. I happen to think that genre writing of all forms is seeing a creative flourishing right now, but it’s always possible for a given genre to fall back into the doldrums. How to stop that from happening? Well, that brings me to my last point.
Genre books of all forms can and should be subjected to serious criticism. OK, so “genre” doesn’t automatically equal “bad.” But it doesn’t automatically equal “good,” either. There’s often a damaging double-standard when it comes to some genres: “It’s just a dumb romance novel,” we’ll sometimes say, “so even though it wasn’t great, I didn’t have high expectations for it and I enjoyed it for what it was.” Um, no. This kind of attitude just continues to propogate the literary = good, genre = bad stereotype that we’re trying to get rid of in the first place. Regardless of genre (and genre is EVERYWHERE, remember), critique books. Love your favorite genres—but make sure it’s tough love. Demand excellence. Whether it’s historical romance or space opera or contemporary realistic lit fic, we need better stories. And better stories come from smart readers who demand them.
So let’s be those smart readers, OK?
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