Re-framing Genre Theory

Genre Theory: Cultural and Historical Motives Engendering Literary Genre

Brian G. Caraher

Genre theory possesses one of the oldest pedigrees in the history of Western, Eurocentric literary and cultural criticism. Plato's Republic (circa 373 BCE), so well known for its parables and its moralising of poetic censorship in the interests of philosophy and the ideal political state, propounds in the course of its third book an early theory of narrative point of view and the corresponding distinctions to be found in the genres of lyric, epic and dramatic poetry. On narratological, generic and moral grounds Plato's Socrates banishes the genres of epic and dramatic poetry from his conception of the ideal civic republic because their enunciative or performative positions are not closely governed by the Platonic imagination of philosophic truth. However, Plato's Socrates justifies the new genre of philosophic dialogue (as self-reflexively in play in the actual textual form of the Republic) as the prospective generic replacement for epic, tragic and comic forms of poetry. Aristotle's Poetics (circa 330 BCE), a less graceful but also less combatative and transumptive text than Plato's Republic, opines a naturalist, materialist and pragmatic approach to the historical and cultural genesis of Greek poetic genres. Poetics offers a study of actual genres developing historically and in relation to cultural practices and individual innovators. It offers constructive advice on ways to improve generic coherence and affective impact, particularly in relation to Sophoclean tragic drama and Homeric epic. For Aristotle, genres have histories and cultural motives and may evolve and cross-pollenate depending upon a variety of specific social factors and happenstances. Later critical writings of Horace, Scaliger, Sidney and Pope among others, however, tend to codify and systematise classical and neoclassical notions of genre. The developmental, fluid, changing, even combatative sense of genres once found in the work of Plato and Aristotle unfortunately became lost to the reification and conservation of classical genres as templates for later, neoclassical ideals of literary practice.

In 'Shakespeare and the Kinds of Drama', for instance, Stephen Orgel (1979) charts the ways in which Julius Scaliger's and Philip Sidney's fairly rigid allegiances to neoclassical categorisation of Renaissance literary genres handicap affective and cultural valuation of Shakespeare's early modern dramatic hybridisation of 'tragedy' and 'comedy'. As Orgel argues, Shakespeare's hybrid reinvention of early modern 'tragicomedy' articulates some intermixed, dynamic and developing structures for which the neoclassical ideal of tragic form will no longer suffice. The modern proliferation of new genres, particularly from the latter half of the eighteenth century onward, thoroughly problematises neoclassical approaches to genre theory and has generated a substantial literary critical industry attempting to embrace such post-classical entities as the gothic novel, sentimental melodrama, tales of horror, the sensation novel, sentimental poetry, conversation poems, the Romantic ode, the Bildungsroman, the Kunstlerroman, magical realism, detective fiction, theatre of the absurd, theatre of cruelty and so on. Modern genre theory is a complex and often heterodox field of literary historical and scholarly activity. It is also a field rather stunningly neglected or, at best, marginalised by the development of certain strands of post-structuralist theory which promote a problematic antipathy between 'speech' (logocentrism) and 'writing' (écriture) and new historicist theory which destabilises the cultural and rhetorical integrity of literary genres in the interests of recovering archival anecdotes and synecdoches of political power.

However, there has been an emergent body of work in poetics and literary theory which has not only rescued a sense of genre from the often overly restricted constructions of classical and neoclassical schemes of literary genre but has also recuperated aspects of the pragmatic power and cultural work of genres in practice. Heather Dubrow intimated this important new direction in the conclusion to her brief, but influential, study Genre (1982). Moreover, the extraordinary attention that the largely posthumous work of Mikhail Bakhtin (1981, 1986, 1990) on the social and cultural development of genres has received over the last twenty years in Anglophone literary theory bears clear witness to this renewed direction in genre theory. Adena Rosmarin's marvellous The Power of Genre (1985) theorises and analyses closely the schematic, cognitive and cultural work of literary genres, especially dramatic monologues and mask lyrics, in practice. For Rosmarin literary genres offer tentative yet wholly functional schemata for opening and commencing the process of cognitive refinement of literary understanding, particularly for inquiring into the rhetorical and intertextual conflicts which shape both the making and the reception of culturally resonant works. Raymond Gibbs' The Poetics of Mind (1994) and Mark Turner's The Literary Mind (1997) modernise classical notions of rhetorical modes and kinds such as figure, story and parable in concert with discoveries in contemporary cognitive and mental sciences to argue that 'the literary mind' with its fundamental structures of emplotment, projection, figuration and genre is indeed integral to and constitutive of the very nature of human knowledge, understanding and discursive activities. Such ambitious studies posit a fundamental rethinking of the pragmatic power and cultural work of genre.

Northrop Frye's once hugely influential Anatomy of Criticism (1957), now largely relegated to the archives of modern literary criticism, promised an earlier generation of literary theorists a 'new science' of genre criticism which would map genres conceptually onto historical, ethical, mythic and rhetorical critical and cultural practices. Perhaps Frye's critical ambition to reinvent and modernise Aristotle's Poetics in an academic climate marked by disagreements between an older historical mode of literary scholarship (genetic, author-based studies) and a newer mode of formalist analysis (Leavisite, New Critical formalism) actually signalled the poverty of genre theory in the 1950s in coming to terms with developments in modern social sciences and with the historical development of genres in time and cultures. I would like to propose a reversal and inversion of Northrop Frye's cycle of four literary myths in the 'Third Essay' of his Anatomy of Criticism as a way of examining and rehistoricising the literary and cultural status of genre and genre theory. It is a perspective much in keeping with the innovative work of Bakhtinians as well as Rosmarin, Gibbs, Turner and other contemporary theorists of the cognitive and cultural power of genre.

Taking its cue from an article by a researcher of small group interactions as models for social and historical change, this essay seeks to revalue this social researcher's categories in the light of literary studies. In 'Microhistory: Studying Social Change in the Laboratory', Robert Denton Rossel (1976) proposes a four-stage theory of the interrelated moments and operations of what he calls 'ongoing cultural construction' (Rossel, 1976: 388). These four stages involve expressly socio-linguistic modes or processes: [1] fantasy, [2] metaphor, [3] image, and [4] myth (Rossel, 1976: 388-93). In a social group, and by extension in larger cultural aggregations, a crisis in significance precipitates an initial and faltering attempt at refocusing the meaning jeopardised or lost in already established social and cultural forms. 'Group history', Rossel claims, 'is a transformational spiral which traces the response of language to the "crisis" of lost meaning and the "significance" of its discovery or renewal' (389). Individuals tend to fall back upon themselves and challenge the insufficient structure(s) of their existing verbal forms and interactions; they project 'potentially disruptive' fantasies and create the 'fantasy groups' they feel they need by subverting established ideas and generating a plethora of counterposed and often contradictory ideas (389-90). Significance eventually becomes refocused through 'metaphor', where the search for a new model of meaning hits upon a certain range of possible new figural links or 'conceptual hooks' that can be internalised by the group and not left in a chaotic, 'decentred' and highly idiosyncratic status – as is frequently the case in fantasy (390). Significance, moreover, becomes fully focused once a metaphor attains 'iconic' status – that is to say, becomes an 'image' capable of functioning as a meaningful collective representation (391). Here in this third stage, the image has the power to symbolise to and for the social group the crucial aspects of their experience and history. The fourth stage, 'myth', involves reflective attempts to grasp what lies behind the experience of significance. This social stage therefore comprises attempts to combine newly focused images or icons with older ones and with associated aspects of past experiences into a narrative reconstruction of the group's history. Such reconstructions often strive to provide continuity across all the crises and significant events in the social history of the group; indeed, it is what Rossel calls the 'sacred narrative' of that group (392).

If the myth or sacred narrative 'decentres' the significance imaged forth in the icons of the social group, however, a new crisis in significance will precipitate the historical spiral of socio-linguistic modes into action once again. Few myths over long periods of time maintain a sufficiently cogent or compelling frame of reference for a social group's refocused sense of significance. The motive power of metaphors and cognitive clarity of images and icons may slip out of alignment, become opaque or occluded, in the attempt to tell the continuous tale of the social group or to write or reconstruct the history of cultural crises, meanings and significances of the group. Therefore, tense states of cultural representational and social crisis become frequent occurences when a group's level of cultural and historical construction moves from metaphors and images to narratives. Narratives all too frequently lose the meanings that they attempt to reconstruct as social and historical continuities; they often fail to recover – because they re-write, re-imagine or re-invent – their socio-linguistic origins. The myths or narratives that succeed in recuperating their origins – and this possibility is in no way precluded by the 'transformational spiral' of socio-linguistic modes – do so because they do not distort or rewrite the means of producing and refocusing significance for particular social and cultural crises.

These four socio-linguistic modes of handling social change in microhistorical groups that Robert Denton Rossel has studied can be loosely related to the four literary myths formalised by Northrop Frye in the third essay of his Anatomy of Criticism. Frye, of course, offers a curious form of historical criticism in the first essay of Anatomy of Criticism, the one in which he envisages a five-phase 'theory of modes' related either internally to the type of fictionalised hero or externally to the sort of authorial thought projected by means of fictive constructions. However, this modal 'historical criticism' appears far less cogent, historically speaking, than his 'theory of myths' and for at least two reasons. First, the type of historical 'mode' being classified is too restricted to signify very much. The nature of the hero's power of action and the author's purported relation to his or her society are all that are classified modally and chronologically. These deliberate limitations privilege certain sorts of imaginative literature – most notably, epic and romance – over others in a strict hierarchy of social class and characterological type. Within the rigid social and historical hierarchy of Frye's modes, there would seem to be no way to consider how 'low mimetic' characters such as James Joyce's Leopold and Molly Bloom might be thought at least as interestingly 'divine' as the heavenly cast of Aeschylus's 'mythic' Prometheus Bound. For Frye, there is a fairly pronounced, if not categorical, scale of social types and classes which neither Aeschylus's tragic chorus nor Joyce's comedic voices succeed in querying, criticising or imagining differently. Second, Frye's 'historical' scheme appropriates a Viconian form of historicism. That is to say, it is itself a myth of cyclic and hierarchical process rooted not in contemporary social research but in the mythological speculations of Giambattista Vico's early eighteenth-century classic, Principles of a New Science (1725). Following Robert Denton Rossel's suggestive lead, however, Northrop Frye's ahistorical cyle of literary myths might be recast in a more socially and historically reliable manner – one that attempts to explain the socio-linguistic processes at work in coping with crises of significance within social groups and, therefore, might help to reveal and explain cultural and historical motives which generate literary genre.

Let me try to map this social and historical rethinking of Frye's Viconian cycle of four major literary 'myths' by redeploying Rossel's four-stage theory of the interrelated moments and operations of 'ongoing cultural construction' in actual social groups. In place of Frye's grand descent of his four 'myths' or generic plots of Western literature – Romance, Tragedy, Comedy, and Irony – we can locate Rossel's four socio-linguistic phases (see Figure 1 below). Northrop Frye charts a grand, linear descent from Romance and the innocence of a heavenly or Edenic prelapsarian social milieu through Tragedy's fall from innocence via error to either Comedy's redemption from error or Irony's earthly banishment to the arid wasteland of fallen experience. Thus, Frye's mythic literary itinerary mimes the forking pathways of two possible Christian fates. Rossel's four socio-linguistic phases, however, permit a shift toward more distinctly historicised, socially particular and culturally local appropriations of literary myths and socio-linguistic forms not dependent upon Frye's Viconian and Christian 'myth' of the cultural significance of literary forms, modes and myths.

We begin not with a Fryean 'myth' (or what he calls 'mythos', following Aristotle's word for 'plot' or 'myth' in Poetics) of 'romance' but with the socio-linguistic form or genre of irony and Robert Denton Rossel's modal conception of 'fantasy'. Poetries of namings – of the naming of places and tribes, of the origins of peoples and animals, of the births or genesis of gods and goddesses – or the 'anonymous' songs or articulations of chants, charms, gnomic verses, riddles, and so forth, characteristically attempt to handle crises of significance when humankind in its various social groups strives to handle time and again – rhetorically, socio-linguistically – the nature of difference, human apartness, and cultural differentiation from the 'natural' or from the purportedly 'non-speaking' or 'nonhuman' world. For instance, Jerome Rothenberg's and Richard Johnny John's Anglophone versions of Seneca Indian songs from 'The Society of the Mystic Animals' in the title section of Shaking the Pumpkin (1972: 15-41) strive to capture one social group's sense that human speech and song can name, evoke and articulate the inner beings of local animals such as crows, loons, wolves and moles. These Amerindian songs, however, are not merely fantasies of shared or totemic kinships with particular species of animals. They function ironically as ways of articulating cultural spaces and communal, human concerns regarding the nature of sexual desire, the eating of meat, and the experience of death. In other words, a socially particular species of fantasy reveals a social group negotiating the ironies of human nature and cultural differentiation from the natural or 'non-speaking' world and perceived anxieties regarding human social trangression (hunting, killing) and mutability (eating, sex, death). Indeed, Anglo-Saxon charms and gnomic verses and the 90-odd Old English riddles of The Exeter Book (c. 1000 CE) serve as comparable evocations of animals, natural processes and the ironies of human difference but in markedly divergent social and cultural articulations than the Seneca Indian songs (see Williamson, 1982).