Genres and Conventions

Abstract

‘Narrative form,’ the subject of the preceding chapters, often means something entirely different from the tools and techniques described in most of this text. To the question ‘What form is this narrative?’ an interlocutor may expect an answer that names a genre. It is an epic in twelve books. It is a mystery novel, with a gathering of characters in an English country house, one of whom will be revealed to be the murderer. It begins as a psychological thriller and halfway through turns into a farce. It is a space opera. It is the third and climactic part of a fantasy trilogy. These forms (or kinds, types, or subgenres) have often been left out of theoretical discussion of narrative form, as the undignified sub-literary cousins of ‘serious fiction’ which obey no formulas, as the irrelevant impingements of ancient traditions on up-to-date narratives, or as the too-contingent categories that confute the premise of structuralist ahistoricity.¹ The rejection of the idea of genre often implies that genre impedes originality, that it imposes form onto an artist’s ideas, and that it is the enemy of innovation. Yet as Claudio Guillén observes, genre is but an ‘invitation’ to combine matter and form in ways that resemble previously achieved combinations (Literature as System, 109). Neither a strict recipe nor an exclusionary tradition, genre can thus be seen as Guillén recommends, as a problem-solving model, whose usefulness is demonstrated when real writers match matter and form (Literature as System, 110–11).