The slippery beast

The latest post on the Macmillan New Writers group blog is an interesting rumination among those interesting authors about whether or not they think of themselves as writing in a particular genre. The responses, as you might imagine, vary. The difficulty is that the term 'genre' is a slippery beast at the best of times, being used in lots of different senses in many different contexts.

Genre as plot-style. As in romance (will they live happily ever after?), detective (will they find the murderer?), thriller (will they save the world?), adventure (will they come out alive?). This seems to be the one that literary criticism meant when it decided to talk about genre: A S Byatt has fun with this in Possession, as her campus satire characters point out that they've moved from 'The Quest' to 'Chase-and-Race'.

Genre as set of rules. My Dictionary of Literary Terms defines 'genre' according to the classical French origin of the word: epic, tragedy, lyric, comedy, satire, 'to which must now be added novel and short story'. In their tidy-minded way (the French were horrified by the 'muddle' that Shakespeare made of his genres) they set forth the rules that writers in each genre had to stick to. There still are rules: Detective stories do need a body fairly early on, even if we've all got a bit more sophisticated since the absolute outrage that greeted Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, when... No, I won't spoil it. Romance does need great love, even without a happy-ever-after ending: sadder-but-heroically-wiser is also an option.

Genre as setting. Historical, fantasy, sci-fi, and what I'd call 'exotic' (think The Beach, or The God of Small Things). In these settings, of course, any plot is possible, though I have a theory - entirely unsupported by looking for evidence - that you don't get a lot of pure, full-on romance plots in a sci-fi setting.

Genre as opposed to literary. This is a book-trade rather than a literary distinction. Commercial fiction has to be jacketed/packaged/sold as a known quantity: as crime, lad-lit, sci-fi, fantasy, saga, mum-lit, and so on. 'Women's fiction' is probably the broadest church (why is there no equivalent label of 'men's fiction'?) but they all have their rules which readers expect, and have covers and PR campaigns to match. And yet, while conforming to those, the novel between the covers can be anything from tick-box dull or utterly banal, to a thumping good read or truly original. As Valerie Shaw says, 'Where originality comes over is in the skill with which a writer can simultaneously meet the demand for comforting sameness and divert it into new and often disturbing areas.' The odd result of the opposition between 'genre' and 'literary' is that books which clearly belong to a genre are somehow disqualified from also being literary. 'Not just a good detective novel, but a really good novel' they said of Dorothy L. Sayers' The Nine Tailors, and Margaret Atwood's recent dismissal of much Sci-fi writing was greeting with some scepticism, given The Handmaid's Tale. And yet, to the book-trade 'literary' is just another genre with covers and PR to match: one where prestige and prizes make up for relatively modest sales, and which you can't classify by plot-style or setting, but only by its style, where the quality of the prose and the complexity of the ideas are as important as the drive to tell a story.

So how does it feel as a writer to find your work classified in a certain way? The MNW writers each have their own reaction. I was very disconcerted at first to be asked, 'So what genre do you write?' and 'What period do you write?' because all I knew was that I wrote novels which at the moment had partly historical settings. Genres needn't be reductive for a writer, at least not at the more loosely-defined, literary end of the market, and besides, there's a lot of sophisticated fun to be had playing with the rules. But for me they are too defining. What if the next thing I want to write isn't historical? What if it doesn't chiefly involve the development of one or more sexual relationships? Chances are, knowing me, that it is and it will, and maybe my publishers will be relieved to know it. But something small and cussed inside me needs to say very clearly every now and again: 'Well, if what I want to write next is a short, sharp sci-fi techno-thriller, I shall. So there!'

Comments

[David I]

As Kurt Vonnegut put it, after the publication of 'Player Piano', "I learned from critics that I was a science fiction writer. I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labeled 'science fiction' ever since, and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal."

[Janet]

Readers may prefer their authors to write in a familiar genre because they feel it brings out a writer’s particular gifts. Henning Mankell is best known for his Kurt Wallander detective stories which have won many awards but recently he has concentrated on general fiction and Wallander fans have turned with some disappointment to ‘Chronicler of the Winds’ - a fable in the Paul Coelho style, ‘Kennedy’s Brain’ - seemingly a thriller but more of a diatribe, and to ‘Depths.’ Although respectfully reviewed this book struck me as the literary equivalent of ‘Gloomy Sunday’. Without the discipline of the crime genre Mankell’s gifts feel a little out of control.

In passing - you mention Roger Ackroyd, a character who came to my mind when you wrote in ‘Singing the Story’ -

“… those of us who write prose fiction - most of all novels - have to assume that our words may only get one pass, as it were, from a reader.

“The question's most acute when you have a narrator who's also a character in the novel. Even if they aren't technically unreliable they are, inevitably, subjective, with a partial (in both senses) view of the events they take part in.”

Presumably the reader’s uncritical acceptance of the narrator’s account was exploited to good effect on this occasion.

[Poppyflds]

Examples of Sci-fi romance? May I suggest The Ship Who Sang, and, Crystal Singer, by Anne Mccaffrey.

[Emma Darwin]

Janet, that's really interesting. I certainly think it's true that a writer dying to break away from what they've done before may not be... No, I was going to say, 'may not be right', but who says that a writer has to play to nothing but their most obvious strengths? A thing worth doing is worth doing badly, after all, as my schoolmaster grandfather used to say.

Poppy, I tried an Anne McCaffrey once, but I'm completely missing the sci-fi/fantasy gene, and didn't find the writing compelling enough to overcome it. In that sense, I understand the notion that 'literary' transcends genre labels. I read particular genres of commercial fiction with huge pleasure, but for other settings/subjects the prose and the ideas have to be really brilliant for me to overcome my basic indifference to those settings and subjects. My sister adores McCaffrey, though, being very into dragons.

[Rosy Thornton]

Well said, Emma, about rejecting the restricting effects of genre. As to why there is 'women's fiction' but no 'men's fiction' (except perhaps lad-lit).... Isn't it because men just claim the dominant discourse, the dominant culture, as in so many areas of life, and then treat it as gender-neutral? So authors whom I'd have down as squarely in the 'men's fiction' camp (Hemingway, Mailer, Lawrence) are just plain 'literature'. But women and books about women's concerns and experiences (being the 'other') are marginalised as 'women's fiction'.

Very much looking forward to your sci-fi techno-thriller!

Rosy