God, hes left as on aur oun.
Utilitarian plastic.
Oh this I’m afraid will not do, I’m sorry, but it’s all manner of much too respectfully not at all right about this, which is just plain muddled and wrong, to the extent I’ve been able to read it—apologies to any affiliate links out there, but thirty-five bucks is just too much for an ebook, and the library doesn’t have it (yet?), and I’m not about to wait out an interlibrary loan and make space in a too-crowded reading list as it is for a book I’ve already been subtweeting snarkily (yes, subtweeting, you say subtooting or subskeeting and people are going to look at you funny, as they should), so: I made do with what I could skim from the river’s free preview, which was more than enough; for God’s sake, the man put scare quotes around the New Weird.
But! But. Begin as you mean to go on, and all: the this in question is Jeremy Rosen’s Genre Bending: the Plasticity of Form in Contemporary Literary Fiction, which, well, let’s go to the book’s preface, Beyoncé and Werewolves:
That premise is that writers of literary fiction have been enthusiastically adopting the genres that historically flourished in popular fiction because they have recognized the utility and endless plasticity of genre.
And there is just, so much wrong, with that premise? I mean, for starters: genres aren’t plastic. Genres are rules. Rules to be at all useful must be fixed, agreed-upon, or at least legible enough to be contested; you can’t thrust your fists if there are no posts. —Genres can be changed, can be bent, can even be forged anew, it happens all around us, but it takes great effort over gobs of time: they’re social objects, genres, and you need to get buy-in from enough other sociable players to make it at all noticeable, much less arguably worthwhile.
No, what’s plastic is the work itself: the way it molds itself to the rules of the genre it’s decided to play with, the forms it takes to dutifully follow this, to provocatively break that, the sinuous moves it makes to run the course set for it, to be recognizable, and yet itself. —One does not speak of the plasticity of the sonnet; one speaks of its rigidity, even as one quibbles over rhyming schemes. One admires the endless facility and ability of the words and work that might be packed within its confines. —And even the most aridly austere free-verser can find themselves envying the energy and wit of a well-formed couplet.
Thus, the enthusiasm mentioned in that premise, and the next wrong thing: the direction of that enthusiasm. Writers of literary fiction, we are told, are enthusiastically adopting the genres of popular fiction, and why not? There is energy, and wit: having ground rules and barriers can embolden flights of spectacular fancy in the unencumbered directions, and sprezzatura’s so much more easily admired when one appreciates the demands that are effortlessly being met. What’s not to envy?
But note what’s missing from this statement of the premise: any notion of bending genre. —Writers of literary fiction have been adopting the genres of popular fiction since the turn of the millenium, we are told, and in so doing,
articulate a theory of genre’s utility and plasticity that explains the newfound allure of genres that had largely been relegated to genre fiction fields, and these writers’ discovery that such genres have not been exhausted by their often-repetitive use in popular culture but remain as malleable and generative as any others. To think otherwise, these writers assert, would be to adhere to a kind of generic fallacy—the notion, familiar since Aristotle, that certain genres are inherently superior to others—or the anthropomorphizing view that genres have life cycles and eventually grow old and die out.
And look at the assumptions that must be made, for this to be noteworthy; look to the flow of power, and regard, from this perspective. —Oh, lip-service is paid to the notion that literary fiction is a genre much as any other, and no genre is inherently superior; it would be foolish not to, since this is a truism of our democratic age, accepted by all. But, that lip-service having been paid—I mean, look to the rules that we are told define this genre of literary fiction:
a focus on individual subjectivity and consciousness; formal innovation and linguistic exuberance; dedication to rendering the intricacies of character psychology and voice; careful attention to style; and treating “consciousness as the primary site of experience, the medium through which oppressive workings of power are felt and the vehicle for generating resistance to them.”
You know. The good stuff. The good mid-(last)-century stuff. —There’s no mention of bending genre in this statement of the premise because the adoption of genre forms by these literary writers—say their names with me, now, Margaret Atwood, Michael Chabon, Jennifer Egan, Louise Erdrich, Kazuo Ishiguro, Chang-rae Lee, David Mitchell, Cormac McCarthy, Ian McEwan, Haruki Murakami, and Colson Whitehead—this adoption is itself the bending: literary writers do not by definition write popular fiction, therefore, their adoption of the genres of popular fiction must necessarily bend those genres to some new form, with the subjectivity and linguistic exuberance and careful style and intricate psychology that were presumably lacking before such literary interventions. —Sure, everything’s a genre, and no genre’s inherently superior over any other, but nonetheless the underlying logic’s nothing but a kinder, gentler form of McCarty’s Error: “To label The Sparrow science fiction,” he once said, in an age-old review, “is an injustice and downright wrong.”
If you wanted to look to the actual bending of genres, the forms and rules and audiences and conversations that make them up, and change over time, in slow irreducible gradations and suddenly punctuated equilibria, why wouldn’t you look to the very popular fictions as well, where the rulesets of many and various genres have been bent and intersected, implicated and imbricated for centuries, where locked-room murders are set on generation starships, and happily-ever-afters played out within the kingdoms of high fantasy, where the very act of combining and bending genres has itself developed its own rules and conventions and (yes) genres; and where (yes) the tools and rules of literary fiction have been picked up, kicked around, put to use, and given back, just as altered and renewed as any other convention? Why limit yourself to this (very) recent and (very) particular phenomenon?
Because that’s where the clout is, yes, thank you, Willy Sutton. —I mean, maybe Rosen does do this, or at least gestures toward it, somewhere in the rest of his book that I did not read; maybe Sparrevohn glossed over it in his review to make other points, I mean, time and space are limited. But I’m not optimistic on this front. To state that it’s but anthropomorphizing to assert that genres have life cycles, grow old, die out (of course they do! The attention of the audience is a critical component of any genre, and that attention waxes and wanes!), to so confidently state that, one must really have grappled with (say) Joanna Russ’s magisterial essay on The Wearing Out of Genre Materials, to find a way beyond the cycle she delineates, to reveal the mechanisms that allow these materials to recombine and recur, again and again, to explain why vampires suddenly worked once more (and fell once again to decadence), to actually get at the engines that bend genres, and the conditions that render them plastic. But: the index (which the river’s free preview allows one to peruse) lists Russ precisely once in Rosen’s book, on page 10, where there’s a gesture toward the “politically motivated work to come out of genre fiction fields—like that of” (same them with me, now) “Octavia Butler, Samuel Delany, Le Guin, and Joanna Russ.” —Better by far had those works been read and examined and discussed (as a start!), instead of just checking their names.
