The Great Divide: Does Genre Still Matter?
JA
February 11
A few days ago, I finished China Miéville's extraordinary The City and The City (a little late I know, but you wouldn’t believe the number of reservations at the local library). It was one of the most satisfying reads I’ve had in a long while – not in the least because of the totality of Miéville vision, as well as his canny eye for detail.
The novel, which follows Inspector Tyador Borlú of the Extreme Crime Squad as he tries to solve a murder case caught between the two fictional European cities of Ul Qoma and Besźel, is a testament of Miéville’s skill as a literary technician. There is a wonderful paradox to be had in two cities which overlap and veer into each other, yet forbid their respective inhabitants from acknowledging their neighbours on the pain of something perhaps worse than death. Miéville adds to this complex geography just the right mix of misappropriated familiarities – a hint of Soviet Bloc drabness, a dash of Middle-Eastern or Turkish cuisine – to make this other-world wholly believable.
But apart from this finely-wrought landscape, there was one other thing about the book that leapt out at me as being particularly of note. Those who have read it will know that The City and the City is a veritable mash-up of genres – part detective-noir, part mystery, part SF and fantasy. Indeed when I did go hunting for it in a bookshop, I needed to check three sections (sci-fi, crime and fiction) before I could be satisfied it wasn’t in stock. While Miéville likes think of his work as part of the ‘new weird’, it seems to me that in The City he transcends even this, and that his is certainly not the only book to do so.
So where then does this leave us on the question of genre? Does it still exist, and if so, to what purpose? On the boing boing archives, American author Neal Stephenson has given a fantastic lecture on the topic, in which he argues that the notion of genre is fast becoming obsolete. This is not to say that there aren’t exceptions (there always will be) or that genre never existed. Rather, things seem to have come full circle. To take science-fiction as an example, the term ‘weird fiction’, denoting books that borrowed from horror, sci-fi, supernaturalism and fantasy, was originally coined in the late 19th century when the lines between genres were still hazy. What we commonly think of as genre sci-fi came to fore with the pulp magazines of the early-mid 20th century – remember Alex Thomas and the novel-with-a-novel in Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin, which in itself is not even sci-fi if you really stop to think about it? However, with Miéville and Atwood et al, science-fiction has become a term more commonly heard in debates about semantics, or low-brow high-brow scrap fights, than a useful category.
In an interview in the upcoming March issue of Meanjin, Steven Amsterdam, author of the brilliant Things We Didn't See Coming (which, incidentally, has just been added to the 2011 VCE reading list), points out the difficulties of being pigeonholed: 'I didn't hear the words 'science fiction' until very late in the game. I'm more comfortable with the word 'speculative'. I was on a panel at the Melbourne Writers Festival with China Miéville and felt very uncomfortable being genre labelled. But the American publisher has just sent me the flap copy and it reads like a little more sci-fi than I imagined the book.'
Stephenson goes further, citing the movie/graphic novel 300, which is technically a historical story based on the Battle of Thermopylae, yet also draws heavy inspiration from fantasy, martial arts and manga. Harry Potter, he argues is ‘obviously SF’ yet not published as such, and even The Da Vinci Code, which is often thought of as a crime novel or thriller, is arguably ‘SF-like’ in its fantastical premise. He also gives the examples of romance and mystery in movies and TV, both of which have become ‘too ubiquitous’ to be considered stand-alone genres:
Put simply: romance and violence are two things that easily cross borders and jump language barriers. You can make a lot of money on films that consist entirely of action, but there are only so many young males in the world. Romance appeals to more people. Romance is versatile. All by itself, it is enough to make a successful movie. Added to a screenplay, it works like monosodium glutamate in food, which is to say it does not matter whether the underlying material is poor or excellent to begin with, adding some of this wonder ingredient always makes it better.
What Romance became to the film industry, Mystery/Crime became to the television industry. They are made for each other. A television series needs to tell a fresh story each episode. Romance is not a good fit. You cannot have your lead character fall in love with a different person each week. Westerns worked okay for a while, but eventually, the writers ran out of things that could possibly happen on ranches and began to mix things up with ideas like the 'Wild Wild West'. By comparison, TV shows about detectives have it easy.
While some might argue that genre has its uses as a way of ‘signalling expectations to readers’ (eg. if you know a book is supposed to be fantasy, your are more likely to suspend your disbelief when reading it), I’m not so sure. Whenever I go to choose a book, I’m more likely to do so because I hope it will be a good read, regardless of which shelf it’s stocked on. Equally, if a book is good, I’ll go along with it. Never Let Me Go had what some might call an eerie and far-fetched premise at its core. I read it thinking that it was going to be something like a classic English boarding school story and was not all at put off by the lack of ‘labels’.
Stephenson also concludes thus:
… the bestseller lists have been exquisitely tweaked so as to ensure that the books that show up on the main lists are... what exactly? It is easier to say what they are not. Most so-called genre fiction is in paperback, so it does not taint the hardcover list. Young adult books get shunted to a different list... Other special categories such as Business Books, or Series Books, or Media-Related Books, further winnow the field. I gather that the people who make these lists have got an idea in their heads as to what constitutes a proper book: a hardcover work of fiction, written recently, not too genre-esque, and so on. Literary fiction is the closest thing this has to a name.
His lecture is forty minutes but well worth it if you have time. Alternatively you can read the transcript, here.
Update: James Bradley of City of Tongues has posted a very interesting response to this question, here.
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