Genre Matters: Essays in Theory and Criticism

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Garin Dowd, Lesley Stevenson & Jeremy Strong are all members of the Media Subject Group in the Faculty of Arts at Thames Valley University. Garin Dowd is Reader, coauthor of Leos Carax (2003), and the author of several essays on Samuel Beckett. Lesley Stevenson is Principal Lecturer and has published widely on Art History. Jeremy Strong is Head of Media and has published on topics ranging from film adaptation to the semiotics of bodybuilding.

Genre Matters

This collection of new essays addresses a topic of established and expanding critical interest throughout the humanities. It demonstrates that genre matters in a manner not constrained by disciplinary boundaries and includes new work on Genre Theory and applications of thinking about genre from Aristotle to Derrida and beyond. The essays focus on economies of expectation and competency, genre as media form, recent developments in television broadcast genres, translation and genericity, the role played by genre in film publicity, gender and genre, genre in fiction, and the problematics of classification. An introductory essay places the contributions in the context of a wide range of thinking about genre in the arts, media and humanities. The volume will be of interest to both undergraduates and postgraduates, especially those following courses on Genre Theory and Genre Criticism, and to academics working in a range of subject areas such as Cultural Studies, Film Studies, Media Studies and Literary Studies.

Dowd, Stevenson & Strong

Genre Matters Essays in Theory and Criticism Edited by Garin Dowd, Lesley Stevenson & Jeremy Strong

intellect

9 781841 501079

Genre Matters Essays in Theory and Criticism

intellect PO Box 862 Bristol BS99 1DE UK / www.intellectbooks.com

ISBN 1-84150-107-7

Edited by Garin Dowd, Lesley Stevenson & Jeremy Strong

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Genre Matters: Essays in Theory and Criticism Garin Dowd, Lesley Stevenson & Jeremy Strong

intellect Bristol, UK Portland, OR, USA

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First Published in the UK in 2006 by Intellect Books, PO Box 862, Bristol BS99 1DE, UK First Published in the USA in 2006 by Intellect Books, ISBS, 920 NE 58th Ave. Suite 300, Portland, Oregon 97213-3786, USA Copyright ©2006 Intellect Ltd All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 1-84150-107-7 Cover Design: Gabriel Solomons Copy Editor: Holly Spradling

Printed and bound in Great Britain by 4edge, UK.

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Contents 5

Acknowledgments

7

Preface

11

Introduction: Genre Matters in Theory and Criticism Garin Dowd

I. Re-framing Genre Theory 29

Genre Theory: Cultural and Historical Motives Engendering Literary Genre Brian G Caraher

41

Objectivity and Immanence in Genre Theory Paul Cobley

55

The Genericity of Montage: Derrida and Genre Theory Jeff Collins

II. Genre in Adaptation and Translation 69

Ohio Impromptu, Genre and Beckett on Film Garin Dowd

85

Translating Genre Susan Bassnett

97

Tess, Jude and the Problem of Adapting Hardy Jeremy Strong

III. Genre in Television Broadcasting and Film Publicity ‘Mixing and Matching’: The Hybridising Impulse in Today’s Factual Television Programming Richard Kilborn

123

‘So What Kind of Film is it?’: Genre, Publicity and Critical Practice Mike Chopra-Gant

Contents 3

109

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4 Genre Matters

IV. Genre, Gender and Fiction 135

Three Faces of Ruth Rendell: Feminism, Popular Fiction, and the Question of Genre Margaret Russett

155

The Historical Novel?: Novel, History and the ‘End of History’ Martin Ryle

169

Contributors’ Details

171

Index

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Acknowledgments We are grateful to the author, editor and publisher for permission to reproduce ‘Three Faces of Ruth Rendell: Feminism, Popular Fiction, and the Question of Genre’ by Margaret Russett, from Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture XXXV, spring 2002, pp. 143-166 © The University of Oklahoma. We are also grateful to the Research Committee of the Faculty of Arts, Thames Valley University for its financial support.

Acknowledgements 5

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Preface Genre Matters is a collection of new essays addressing a topic of established and expanding critical interest throughout the humanities. A key objective of this book is to assert that genre matters in a manner not constrained by disciplinary boundaries. While it does not seek to be comprehensive in the sense of collecting instances of genre-based criticism from all of the humanities disciplines, it is the case that the collection aspires to providing a balanced selection of new perspectives on enduring philosophical and methodological problems in genre theory, contributions to genre criticism based on an application of either a classification in itself, or a perspective linked to methodological predilection, and essays responding to aspects of contemporary cultural transformation. Genre Matters, then, includes new work on genre theory and applications of thinking about genre from Aristotle to Derrida and beyond. The essays focus, variously, on economies of expectation and competency, genre as media form, recent developments in television broadcast genres, translation and genericity, the role played by genre in film publicity, gender and genre, genre in fiction, and the problematics of classification. An introductory essay establishes a context for the diverse contributions in a wide range of thinking about genre in the arts, media and humanities.

Preface 7

The essays grouped together under the heading Re-framing Genre Theory in distinct ways seek to intervene in genre theory. Brian Caraher, in ‘Genre Theory: Cultural and Historical Motives Engendering Literary Genre’ provides a thorough re-articulation of Frye’s ahistorical genre theory in Anatomy of Criticism (1957) along more distinctly social and historical lines. This more historicised model of genre theory, Caraher shows, reflects the pragmatics of specific social groups striving to cope with cultural crises through distinctively socio-linguistic strategies. It is praxis of a different kind that emerges in the discussion by Paul Cobley of expectation as the organising principle of the generic. In his essay, ‘Objectivity and Immanence in Genre Theory’, recalling one consequence of the gesture whereby the critic may give each work the genre it deserves, or that the critic demands that it deserves (in order to neutralise the aberrant uninvited guest of the emergent hors-genre), Cobley sets out to assuage the fears of any genre critics who feel their position challenged by audience-based textual studies, which in his view do not treat the work as an object. It is at the moment of engagement with the work as generic because of its part in an economy of expectation (supply and demand) that genre as a problematic encounters the political imaginary. In ‘Derrida, Genre Theory and the Genericity of Montage’ Jeff Collins pushes genre to the centre of the debate around ‘montage’ in the visual and audio-visual arts. If in terms of its microstructures, for Adorno ‘all modern art may be called montage’ (Adorno, 1997: 155), as a genre term ‘montage’, Collins argues, escapes grounding in ‘classical’ genre theories and exposes the instabilities of generic demarcation. Collins proposes that its condition might best be considered in the light of Derrida’s

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engagement with genre: a thinking that both radicalises and yet decentres the most prevalent notions of demarcation and classification.

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The second section focuses on the conceptually related questions of Genre in Adaptation and Translation. A recent special number of The Yale Journal of Criticism reflects that the word ‘translation’, like the words ‘modernity’, ‘culture’ and ‘literature’, might be ‘so overburdened with meaning as to signify everything yet nothing at all’ (Brantley and Luzzi, 2003: 236). A key question remains: ‘Is adaptation a species of translation, or should one avoid speaking of the two in the same critical breath?’ (236). The combination of a text’s recalcitrance towards generic transposition coupled to a determination on the part of an adapter to transform through that very act of transposition – a kind of treacherous fidelity that is arguably common to any adaptation – provides the focal point for Garin Dowd’s essay, ‘Ohio Impromptu, Genre and Beckett on Film’. Specifically, it is argued that the Beckett on Film version of Samuel Beckett’s play – through a combination of casting and special effects – elides the disjunctions (between ‘genres’ and between ‘characters’) upon which, Dowd argues, the play itself depends. Susan Bassnett’s ‘Translating Genre’ intervenes in the question of translation as a genre category and seeks to ask the question of what happens to the labour of translation within the context of the contemporary and predicted future position of the English language. Bassnett considers how new forms in different eras – such as the sonnet – crossed cultural frontiers through the activity of translation. Similarly, new genres (such as the haiku) have been introduced more recently from other literary systems, whereas others, for example the Arabic qasidah, remain rooted in their source language. Underpinning her essay is a charting of how the perceived status of the source text and its generic characteristics, relative to the perceived status of the translator’s literary system and heritage, determine the process of translation, including the imposition of new generic frameworks and the abandonment of original elements. This section then returns to adaptation in the shape of Jeremy Strong’s essay ‘Tess, Jude and the Problem of Adapting Hardy’. For Strong, to move from Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles or Jude the Obscure to the film adaptations they have engendered is never going to be a simple matter of degree of verisimilitude. The ‘genres’ are always apt to refuse one another to some extent. It is an awareness of both the determinant and consequent factors of this ‘refusal’ that motivates Strong’s reading of the ‘between’ that operates disjunctively and constitutively in getting from Hardy to Polanski and Winterbottom and back again. The between here is figured as the site of ideology in Comolli and Narboni’s sense, even if that site is itself refused by both films. The third section – Genre in Television Broadcasting and Film Publicity – groups together two essays which offer contrasting perspectives on the question of generic hybridity, the one turning its attention to a field that has attracted much attention from Media Studies in recent years – reality television – and the other instantiating

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an influential methodological stance in relation to genre in film studies. In the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century a meta-generic distinction is established between the ‘factual’ style of the Lumière brothers and the fantastical visions of Méliès. Nonetheless the distinction between factual and fictional genres was already blurred in early cinema, and in the era that some commentators might still want to call postmodern, the blending reaches its apogee (or nadir depending on one’s view). Richard Kilborn’s essay ‘Mixing and Matching: The Hybridising Impulse in Today’s Factual Television Programming’ outlines the specificity of the ‘hybrid’ genres of ‘reality TV’. His essay explores the manner in which factual television programming has to an increasing extent since the beginning of the 1990s conjoined elements from existing genres into new hybridised formats. The results, he shows, frequently blur traditional distinctions between fictional and factual categories. Mike Chopra-Gant in his essay ‘So What Kind of Film is it?: Genre, Publicity and Critical Practice’ takes his lead from Rick Altman in his study of the use of publicity materials in the post-World War II period. His synchronic approach takes the year 1946 as providing its frame of reference, enabling him to assert that a group of popular Hollywood films, released in what he argues is U.S. cinema’s peak year, is conspicuous in not representing the familiar generic classes employed in film genre theory, classes moreover, he states, which have been assumed to typify Hollywood’s output in the period immediately after the war.

Preface 9

In the fourth section, Genre, Gender and Fiction, the essays intervene in the question of genre in relation to the novel the better to pose questions that in some way resonate with the section on genre theory, and the endeavour of the latter to open genre on to the political. When the philosopher Luce Irigaray refers to the ‘three genres’ (Irigaray, 1991) the fact that she is writing more about the genre that the French word gives us, namely gender, does not for all that make her intervention less crucial for genre studies. In ‘Three Faces of Ruth Rendell: Feminism, Popular Fiction, and the Question of Genre’, the contribution of Margaret Russett writing on the work of Ruth Rendell published under the name Barbara Vine, a confrontation between what Fredric Jameson might identify as ‘expression’ and ‘content’(Jameson, 1981: 161) is staged. The detective and crime genres with which the name of Rendell is primarily linked only came to be associated with the male gender due to a combination of historical and economic factors and the exclusionary force of canon formation and maintenance. In a complex modality of identification with the genres, Rendell as Vine, emerges for Russett as sensitive to the imbrication of matters of genre and gender. Martin Ryle’s ‘The Historical Novel?: Novel, History and the “End of History”’ is a timely revisiting of the themes of war and cultural memory in Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans and Ian McEwan’s Atonement. Postmodern scepticism about historiography, and revaluations of realism by literary critics and theorists, might seem, Ryle suggests, to call into question the viability of historical novels. An

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evaluation of the genre, he goes on to argue, requires a critical approach capable of addressing their specifically historical ambitions. In dividing the contributions into four sections the editors have emphasised both conjunctions and disjunctions between the critical voices of the contributors. However, these divisions should not disguise the fact that there are mutual areas of concern evidenced between all the sections. Far from seeking, however, to assert that genre matters in the same way for all of the disciplines touched upon in the individual essays, the collection in its diversity affords a sense of the multiplicity of ways in which considerations of genre inflect and determine our engagement with the humanities. Bibliography Adorno, T., Aesthetic Theory, trans. R. Hullot-Kentor, London, Athlone Press, 1997. Brantley, J. and J. Luzzi, ‘Introduction: Translation Unveiled’, The Yale Journal of Criticism 16.2 2003, pp. 233-236. Irigaray, L., ‘The Three Genres’, The Irigaray Reader, M. Whitford (ed.), Oxford, Blackwell, 1991, pp. 140-153.

10 Genre Matters

Jameson, F., The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, Ithaca NY, Cornell University Press, 1981.

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Introduction: Genre Matters in Theory and Criticism Garin Dowd Writing in 1925, Le Corbusier, responding to the proliferation of archiving systems in the business environment and to its impact on furniture design in particular, concluded: ‘On s’est aperçu dans l’ordre rigoreux nécessité par les affaires qu’il fallait classer le classement lui-même’ (Le Corbusier, 1925: 76-77 n.1).1 In identifying the problem of the classification of classification itself, his conclusion serves as a reminder of one of the key considerations faced by a volume such as this. For, by virtue of what it includes, and implicitly excludes, this book proclaims the legitimacy of its own delimiting of ‘genre matters’ themselves. There is in this gesture – of collecting and gathering genre, or items that belong to the question of genre – a manifestation of what Jacques Derrida calls the assumption of a ‘hermeneutic right and competence’.2 Genre matters, the title asserts. Aside from acknowledging the continuing importance of genre in diverse areas of the humanities, the present volume also hopes to go some way towards articulating what Gilles Deleuze might call the ‘symptomatology’ of genre. The act of classifying a work of literature as ‘classic’, ‘romantic’, ‘neo-realist’ or ‘nouveau roman’, Deleuze argues, must be attenuated by a commitment to trace the work thus classified to ‘singular symptoms’ or signs rather than general forms (Deleuze in Flaxman, 2000: 368). Rather than be content to seek out a transcendent form which acts as the template for generic works, the task of the critic should be to attest somehow to the ‘matters’ or ‘signs’ operating ‘anonymously’ in them (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988: 267).

Theorising Genre Michel Foucault describes the tendency toward classification in terms of ‘the history of the order imposed on things...of that which for a given culture is both dispersed and related, therefore to be distinguished by kinds and to be collected together into identities’ (Foucault, 1970: xxiv). The manner in which Aristotle’s Poetics establishes the problematic of exemplarity, then, remains a pressing question for genre theory today. For, the correlative of exemplarity is exemption or exclusion – the exorbitant or extraordinary to be policed by a logic and pedagogy of conformity, as Aristotle clearly believes:

(Aristotle, 1996: 3).

Introduction 11

Let us discuss the art of poetry in general and its species – the effect which each species of poetry has and the correct way to construct plots if the comparison is to be of high quality, as well as the number and nature of its component parts, and any other questions that arise within the same field of enquiry.

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Much later René Wellek and Austin Warren express in concise terms a key concern in genre theory from Aristotle through to contemporary interventions such as the present volume. ‘The subject of genre’, they write, raises ‘philosophical questions concerning the relation of the class and the individual composing it, the one and the many, the nature of universals’ (Wellek and Warren, 1949: 357). The tension between singularity and form as identified by Aristotle, Wellek and Warren, Deleuze, and Foucault (but which as far as genre theory is concerned is first posed by Aristotle) remains on the agenda in the ‘Bulletin’ of the International Colloquium on Genre held at the University of Strasbourg in 1979. The Strasbourg bulletin states that the focus of the colloquium will not be genre theory but the transition from the plural to the singular; specifically the event will explore ‘the singularisation of the concept... [as] this transition was effected most of all by German romanticism’ (Chartin et al., 1980: 235). As it was conceptualised from the perspective of the latter: The literary work came to be considered as an autonomous process, self-instituting and self-reflexive, entailing the laws of its own production and of its own theory. Hence, genre, in the sense of the literary genre, became the genre of self-generation... in its generalised and self-generating movement, literature seems to imply its own specification.

12 Genre Matters

(Chartin et al., 1980: 236).

If the focus for the Strasbourg bulletin was the singularisation by means of which literature self-classifies, this should not obscure the fact that genre theorists have been much exercised by far less abstract reflexive instances of classification. Gérard Genette has gone furthest in this direction through his enlightening survey of the presence and deployment, to a variety of ends, of autonomous genre indications as evidenced in the titles and subtitles of works of literature.3 In the presence of ‘genre indications’ such as ‘novel’ and ‘roman’ either on the cover or the frontispiece of a volume, ‘no reader can justifiably be unaware of or disregard this attribution’ (Genette, 1997: 94). The novel of course was not one of the genres which Aristotle would have been in a position to identify in the Poetics.4 However this genre nonetheless succeeded historically in avoiding ‘flaunting a status Aristotle had never heard of, and contrived to suggest [...] genre status more indirectly by way of parageneric titles in which the words history, life, memoirs, adventures, voyages, and some others generally played a role’ (95). Authors have long had the opportunity to carry out further and more elaborate mischief in their use of genre indicators. Indeed in the period in which it was held in low esteem the novelistic often uses acrobatic evasions in order to acquire for itself the desired level of respectability. As

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noted by Schaeffer (Schaeffer in Cohen, 1989: 180), German novelists of the eighteenth century tended to label their works ‘story’ (Geschichte) in order to lean toward such decorum. In England in the same century Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1747-51) is not a ‘novel’ but ‘The History of a Young Lady’ (on the historical novel see Ryle). The author does not confine his rhetorical obfuscation to labour on the title. The burgeoning and elaborate editorial apparatus, comprising prefaces, summaries, ‘tables of letters’ and footnotes, over which Richardson fretted as the novel went through successive editions, is of a piece with the desire, remarked upon thus within one of these artefacts (in this case a ‘Table of Letters’): It is thought fit in this edition, instead of prefixing the whole contents to the first volume (as was done in the last) to subjoin to each its particular contents, which will serve not only for an INDEX of the principal historical matters but as a RECAPITULATION that will enable the reader, without anticipating events, to enter into the succeeding volume with the attention that is humbly bespoke in favour of a HISTORY OF LIFE and MANNERS; and which, as such, is designed for more than a transitory amusement. (Richardson, 1978, Vol I: 517).

Introduction 13

Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (175967), while far from sharing the propriety insisting in the shape of the results of Richardson’s editorial anxiety, is another well-known instance of the evasion in the title of the genre of the novelistic. This practice of evasion even continues long into the period in which the roman as an acknowledged generic designator moved from the periphery to the centre, namely in the nineteenth century. Indeed while one notable author of this period, Balzac, may steadfastly avoid autonomous genre indications in his titles, the question of paratextual genre identification clearly concerns him – insisting as he does on oeuvre, ouvrage or scène in place of roman (Genette, 1997: 96, n 56).5 At the extremes of sombre challenge (a strand exemplified by Maurice Blanchot) and playful mischief (Raymond Queneau) in the twentieth century it is again French authors who come to the fore, with Blanchot (adding and subtracting the designator récit or roman as works go through subsequent editions), Philippe Sollers (Genette’s example: the novel Paradis), Georges Perec (his La Vie, mode d’emploi [1978] is identified on the flyleaf as belonging to the genre ‘romans’) and Queneau all experimenting with the significance (and signifiance) of the presence or otherwise of a genre designation. Queneau in an Editions Gallimard catalogue (to which, being himself a Gallimard editor, one presumes he had a direct input) has his oeuvre divided into three sections: ‘poèmes’, ‘romans’ and ‘*’, thus making of the asterisk the name of a genre. At the opposite extreme is his appropriation of the non-literary genre of ‘le journal intime’ where, under the pseudonym Sally Mara, Queneau ([1950] 1962)

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writes from the point of view of an 18-year-old Irish student of French who, keeping a journal in her acquired language, details her attempts – following the departure of her erstwhile professeur – to learn Irish. The generic designation here at once presents and absconds into an intricate – and intimate – mise-en-abyme. The author leaves his own name, profession and gender co-ordinates behind and – relocated – ‘falsifies’ an intimate journal which is, in turn, presented as a ‘fiction’ (on generic hybridity see Kilborn and Chopra-Gant). The example of Balzac is instructive. His refusal of the designator ‘roman’ serves as a reminder of the fact – well documented – that genre designations are imposed retrospectively (see for example Genette, 1992: 1-3; Schaeffer, 1986: 198 and 1989: 175 and Neale, 2000); that if the (aberrant, exorbitant) part which emerges does not seem to find a ready-made host body to which to attach itself, then the genre critic, ‘intoxicated’ by the ‘effervesence’ (Fowler, in Cohen, 1989: 303) of her/his new grouping, will assuredly create a whole in which that part can be lodged and given sustenance (see Cobley).6 Part and whole, the relation between the exemplary and the exemplified: the entire logic of exemplarity is laid bare in the genre gesture. If, as Schlegel (1957 [1797-1801]) famously asserted, each poem is sui generis (‘eine Gattung für sich’), that need not prevent the part itself, via a metonymical effort, from the unilateral declaration of its wholeness. This interplay of genus universum and clavis universalis (Beaujour, 1980: 29) continues, in the view of Jean-Marie Schaeffer, to create unease even in the work of Genette. The core problem with the thought of the latter, Schaeffer asserts (in ‘Du texte au genre’), is that it ends up by postulating an ideal text whereby each text has its own genre.

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Genre in Contemporary French Philosophy In the course of his book The Differend: Phrases In Dispute Jean-François Lyotard, while not addressing literary or filmic ‘kinds’ as such, does make an important contribution to genre theory, as first pointed out by Leitch (1991). In a conception which owes much to the notion of the language game in Wittgenstein’s sense (Wittgenstein, 1958: section 23), Lyotard attends to social constructions and political applications of discourse (Leitch 1991: 93). As distinct genres of discourse, one has for example a narrative genre, a philosophical genre and a scientific genre. As Lyotard points out, there is no political genre: politics, he argues, is the name for what takes place when genres and the phrase regimens which they comprise are at variance with one another. Genres are responsible, Lyotard argues, for giving finality: they produce the conditions for a coming to rest; they cause a state of quiescence; they suppress and exclude. This is made possible by virtue of the fact that ‘genres of discourse impose onto phrases the finality of a concatenation able to procure a success proper to each genre’ (Lyotard, 1988: 128). However genres neither fill the void, nor are they mapped on to a plenitude. Rather, Lyotard writes, there are abysses between genres. Among genres, nonetheless, it is narrative that hides better than other genres the heterogeneity of phrase regimens

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and genres of discourse (Lyotard, 1988: 151). This is because narrative has the advantage of being itself teleological, such that wherever in ‘diegetic time it stops, its term makes sense and retroactively organises the recounted events’ (151). Nonetheless, despite the particular virulence of the homogenising force of narrative, heterogeneity is what characterises the relationship of genre to genre. For Lyotard the matter is posed in terms of a certain ‘hospitality’. To adopt the metaphorical polarity deployed elsewhere in his book, one can assert that in the Heim the différend is suspended; this is the place where conventions supervene over the potentiality of the différend – between genres in dispute. Such suspension, however, is only possible at the price of an exclusion pre-requisite to the suspension in the first place. It is in this sense that Lyotard’s contribution to our thinking about genre is at its most suggestive. The unheimlich, then, names the anomalous, the exorbitant, the hors-genre: figures for Lyotard such as ‘Joyce, Schönberg and Cézanne [are] pagani waging war among the genres of discourse’ (Lyotard, 1988:151).7 What each of these artists achieves is the reflexive articulation of what precisely is at stake in in his respective medium.8 As glossed by Leitch, in Lyotard’s hands, ‘Pragmatics loops back into poetics. The author is just another critic – with similar rights of use. A text is always more than a genre allows, and this surplus is incorrigible for no genre can totally saturate all the phrases and gaps in a text’ (94).9

Introduction 15

It is a conception of genre in relation to the question of limits that is articulated elsewhere by a philosopher not commonly noted (though see our comments above) for his contributions to our thinking about genre, Gilles Deleuze. However, that he is represented in a number of the journal Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture from 2001 (in the form of a translation of his 1966 essay on the ‘série noire’) reminds one that Deleuze does contribute a brief reflection on genre in his book on cinema.10 There Deleuze asserts that genre in its manifestation in Godard is one of those types of category made subject to a specifically Godardian usage which he associates with a reflexive gesture (Deleuze, 1989: 184-7). What Godard does with categories is to make genres turn their gaze upon themselves, in a gesture which makes them confront their own limits. This process occasions a certain disequilibrium: the category acknowledges its own boundary as arbitrary. The example Deleuze gives is the genre of musical comedy as it is deployed in Godard’s Une femme est une femme (1961) where, in place of the ‘organic’ generation of dance from intercalary elements of non-singing and non-dancing mise-en-scène, there is an abrupt lurch into the song and dance sequences (Deleuze, 1989: 184).11 Rather than being subject to ‘organic’ linkage, these moments present us with the spectacle of characters performing more for themselves than for the sake of the advancement of the narrative, the underscoring of the plot or characterisation, or the comprehension of spectators. The ruptures which these moments bring about

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are examples of the sort of discontinuity which Deleuze associates with the innovations of the cinema of the time image (Deleuze, 1986: 213-4; 1989). Deleuze’s use of the term genre – as a way to speak of traits held in common by a group of films – is one which does not significantly depart from a quite orthodox usage widely accepted in film studies and film history. Indeed the musical is itself an example of a genre to have elicited much attention from film scholars, notably from one of the foremost contributors to genre studies in film, Rick Altman (see also Chopra-Gant).

Genre in Film Studies

16 Genre Matters

Perhaps the most influential of Altman’s contributions to the theorisation of genre in film studies come in the shape of his distinctions between the semantic and syntactical approaches to the question of genre on the one hand (for a discussion of this distinction see Cobley), and between the ritual and ideological approaches on the other. It is worth noting that the first of these distinctions (as outlined in his 1984 essay) is often referred to in the literature on film and genre in apparent ignorance of the fact that Altman borrows the distinction from Fredric Jameson’s discussion of ‘magical narratives’ which appeared in its first version as early as 1975 – predating Altman’s essay by nine years. Altman himself attributes the distinction (one half of which – the semantic – he remodels) to its source. The semantic approach, in Jameson’s terms, ‘aim[s] to describe the essence or meaning of a given genre by way of the reconstruction of an imaginary entity ... which is something like the generalized existential experience behind the individual texts’ (Jameson, 1981: 107-8), while the second approach, dismissive of the impressionistic nature of the first, seeks to ‘analyse the mechanism and stucture of a genre...and to determine its laws and limits’ (Jameson, 1981: 108). In Altman’s description, the ritual approach ‘sees Hollywood as responding to societal pressure and thus expressing audience desires’, whereas the ideological approach defines genres as ‘simply the generalized, identifiable structures through which Hollywood’s rhetoric flows’ (Altman, 1999: 29). Steve Neale – another key figure in genre criticism in film – is unapologetic in his own focus on Hollywood because, as he puts it, the overwhelming majority of genre studies in the area of film focus on ‘what is still the most powerful national cinema’ and ‘in order to engage with this work, it is necessary to engage with its object’ (157).12 Neale’s main disagreement with Altman centres on the significance the latter accords to the role of institutional discourses. Wary of the apparent stasis of the Altman genre, Neale attends, rather, to the processual and contingent nature of genres, the elements of which ‘are always in play rather than simply replayed’ (Neale, 2000: 165). It is for the reason that they are so attentive to evolution within genre that the Russian Formalists remain so crucial in Neale’s view. In particular Tynyanov’s concept of ‘the dominant’ permits one to conceive of genre as a

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historical system of relations within which evolution is not a matter of modification, improvement and succession in an unproblematic linear movement, but rather a faltering, stop-start picture of rivalries and struggles.13 The other principal assertion made by Neale is that perhaps film only has need of two genres: narrative film and experimental or avant-garde film (171).14 Neale goes somewhat further in order to assert that the odd fit of genre with film derives from the historical situation in which genre emerges in its modern sense. It emerges, precisely, Neale points out borrowing from Ralph Cohen, in the nineteenth century at that moment when ‘high’ literature begins to become consolidated as somehow beyond the reach of genre and of the circumscribing considerations imposed by genre. Bearing in mind that Cohen and Neale are referring here to the written word alone, the argument is that whereas prior to the romantic period only ‘literature’ could have genres, in the post-romantic period genres come to be associated with popular forms (172). Neale’s last word on genre, then, is that despite its good fortunes as a marketing tool in publicity, an archiving principle in film history, an organising concept in both pedagogy and publications it is in fact only half at home in film studies.

Introduction 17

In his introduction to Film Genre 2000: New Critical Essays, Wheeler Winston Dixon makes a distinction between the contemporary ‘facelessness’ which he sees as a consequence of the serial orientation so characteristic of Hollywood film from the 1980s on and the genre orientation proper (on genre and adaptation see Strong). The serial orientation is exemplified at perhaps its most obsessive in the manner in which George Lucas retrospectively situates The Phantom Menace (1999) as the ‘first’ in a series whose instalments chronologically predated the belatededly engendered ‘inaugural’ artefact (Dixon, 2000: 1). Such facelessness of course is repeated on both small screen and large in Star Trek, where the singularity attaching to the directors of the individual films becomes obliterated in the franchise endeavour (it should however be noted that Star Trek, with its origins on television and a parallel life on the small screen during the series of films, had from the outset a serial logic).15 The serial orientation, Dixon points out (2), is to be distinguished from the genre orientation, as exemplified (he shows) by the relation between genre conventions of the road movie and the unique interventions in the genre of the 1960s (his examples: The Trip, Corman 1967; Zabriskie Point, Antonioni; 1970; Easy Rider, Hopper, 1969). It is important to note, however, that Dixon is addressing a phenomenon in its mainstream Hollywood manifestation. Suffice it to say, when the veteran Nouvelle Vague director Jacques Rivette returned in 2003 to his series of four films abandoned (due to the failure to complete its third instalment in 1976) finally to make Histoire de Marie et Julien it is with his credentials – his ‘face’ – as an auteur unassailed by his version of what one might call the ‘Lucas manoeuvre’. Equally the cases of Tarantino’s Kill Bill (2003), which was released in two ‘volumes’ with a period intervening, Lucas Belvaux’s Trilogy (2002), the elements of which were released in France in a sequence different to

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that applying elsewhere, and Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood for Love (2000) and 2046 (2004) in different ways disrupt chronology and the expectations one might have of film in a strictly serial mode.

Genre in the Musical and Visual Arts

18 Genre Matters

Since genre studies and genre criticism – as these are identified within the sphere of academic research in the twentieth century and beyond – emerge out of a context one might describe first as literary (say, in the work of the Russian Formalists), and subsequently as belonging to the realm of cultural and media studies (see Cobley), it is perhaps not surprising that some of the clearest instances of genre-driven criticism and applications of genre theory in the case of music arise in contemporary interventions on popular musical forms rather than classical musical forms. There has, nonetheless, been some work in the latter area, albeit far from extensive, as Kallberg reports (Kallberg, 1996). It is notable that most of the work which theorises genre (as a concept in itself) in classical music is in German with relatively few formal accounts of the concept in English. Kallberg notes that, tellingly, the concept (as divorced from the application of categorisation per se) fails to make an appearance in The New Grove Dictionary of Music (an absence which is no longer the case). In his own account of and contribution to the area of classical music and genre theory, Kallberg sets out to ‘recapture’ the experience of a particular musical work (in this case Chopin’s Nocturne in G Minor) – an experience which in his estimation genre (as musical concept) informs (Kallberg, 1996: 5). In genre studies of popular music, the intervention will often seek to locate the popular musical form in a broader cultural context, as does Mark Jones in an essay (in the journal Genre) on the tribute band phenomenon by pointing out ‘while generic classification works – at least partially – inwards from context to text, the reverse procedure also occurs, attaching musical generic associations on such diverse activities as drugs, hairstyles and mode of personal transportation’ (Jones, 2001: 265). As for the history of genre classification in the realm of painting, it is impossible to consider aside from the hold – quite unique in this respect – of the institutional framework supplied by the Académie royale from the publication of Félibien’s De l’origine de la peinture (1660) onward. It is generally acknowledged that the academic classifications by subject matter which are formulated for the first time in a systematic manner in this publication and in Félibien’s later preface to the Conférences de l’Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture pendant l’année 1667 (1669) harken back to Leon Battista Alberti’s Della pittura (1436), albeit not in a straightforward fashion (Stevenson, 2000). As is customary in systematic definitions, there are particularly telling exclusions in the classificatory predilections of the Académie. The supposed grandeur and large scale proper to and expected of history painting elevates it, while the alleged modesty of genre painting relegates it. As for still life, it remains much maligned well into the

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nineteenth century. Against the grain of this conformity, Diderot emerges as the indirect champion of the right of each genre to develop in relative autonomy not necessarily constrained by the quasi-Cartesian certainties so much in evidence in the hierarchical fervour of the academicians (Stevenson, 2000).16 In the broader institutional framework of the visual and plastic arts as in the domain of the human sciences there is a pivotal moment wherein a modality of grouping according to analogy and resemblance comes to be troubled by the (taxonomic) ‘table’. In a study of one of the modalities of gathering – the catalogue – Patricia Falguières points out that in the sixteenth century the natural home of the catalogue was not the world of art but of botany, specifically the emerging gardens of Italy in the middle of that century (although there were notable exceptions): Le jardin botanique est une ordonnance, c’est à dire un index: il assure, d’un dispositif spatial, une règle de concordance entre des objets et leur nomenclature, des objets et leurs usage. (Falguières, 1996: 10)17

In so far as it was a way of grouping works, the catalogue, founded as it is upon juxtapositon and arrangement (as is the botanical garden and the Wunderkammer), however, came to be troubled by the table – by taxonomies of fixity based on a conception of essential identity rather than arbitrary juxtaposition (Falguières, 1996: 17). The catalogue finds, in some ways, its natural successor in the shape of the museum. According to André Malraux – the seminal thinker of the specificity of the museal – the museum becomes (in Rosalind Krauss’s words): a great field of comparison, but not in the old way, with Classicism at the center and everything else seen as marginal to it: barbaric or demotic deviations from a norm. Rather the museum’s comparisons began to operate within a space neutralized by efforts to range and to classify...This collectivization – the work of the museum and its eventual partner, the art historian – began to create unities with what could be seen as their own internal coherence. (Krauss in Cohen ed., 1989: 287).

Introduction 19

The occasion of the 2004 re-opening of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York provides Hal Foster with enduring evidence of this specific museum’s claim on the very history of Modernism in art. The narrative which it promotes, however, selects as its visible exemplars works which, taken together, in some way give a version (of Modern and contemporary art) cleansed of either inbuilt ordure or anti-aesthetic imperatives (say in certain instances of Arte Povera) or subversion

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(Cobra, Fluxus etc.) or the ‘institution-critical work’ of Marcel Broodthaers and Robert Morris (the alcove devoted to their respective works ‘feels like an embarrassment, as if it were a bathroom in the first plan’ (24)). Foster even goes so far as to claim that institutions such as Tate Modern in London, the Guggenheim in Bilbao and especially MoMA are seeking out the conditions of what he calls ‘transcendent aesthetic experience’ which would involve more than the ‘pictorial-spiritual’abstraction of Malevich’s White on White (a pivotal work in MoMA’s understanding of Modernism), or, one might add, the aspiration towards universality to which the abstraction from the particular of Piet Mondrian is a contribution (Mondrian, 1992 [1919]: 284). The more in question is for Foster nothing less than the ‘immaculate spatial effect’ of the institution in its presence – ‘a sublimation that is at once aesthetic, architectural and financial’ (25). It is perhaps the irreducible tangibility of the institutional frame (the architectural shell of the musuem-gallery), abetted by the auratic presence of the work (even if, postBenjamin, requiring a via negativa to get there) and, now, the immaculate spatial effect, that makes the institutional context of the applicability of taxonomy in art a specific case.18

Genre and Gender

20 Genre Matters

It is often as a work of a decentering anamnesis (of centres founded on false assumptions and fraudulent exclusions) that feminist theorisations of genre have made their mark on genre studies (see, for example, Jacobus, 1984). One of the challenges faced by any study which implicitly gathers contributions to thinking about genre with an ear to both French and English senses is, as Avital Ronell points out in her translator’s note to Derrida’s ‘La Loi du genre’/’Law of Genre’, that ‘the word “genre” [in French] enjoys a suppleness and freedom of semantic movement that is rigorously constrained in the English’ (Ronell, 1980: 232; on translation and genre see Bassnett). In Shari Benstock’s response to the Derrida of ‘Envois’ and ‘The Law of Genre’ the focus shifts to genre as gender rather than genre as literary classification. However the contribution is crucial to the present concerns in its swerve back to the knot which each strand forms. In Textualizing the Feminine Benstock suggests that ‘Feminist criticism pauses before an important critical and theoretical question: ...what is the relation of feminine/masculine gender constructions to our biological genre?’ (Benstock, 1991: xxi). Her reading of Derrida emphasises those aspects of his essays, considered in tandem, that link the question of law, genre and a specific literary genre: ‘I suggest that “Envois” turns the law inside-out, exposing what is lost when epistolary discourse usurps women’s letters and reinscribes them under the signature of a male writer’ (xix). When Derrida wrote that genres were not to be mixed he also referred to the notion, available only to the French language, that the two meanings of genre in that language (gender and genre) were not to be mixed (and of course it is impossible not to be mixed). In ‘Envois’,

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Benstock points out, the I writes under the dictation of ‘la loi’ (emphasis added) – the generic law being feminine in French. While the law of gender has traditionally supported the (feminine) integrity of the literary genre (of epistolarity), in ‘Envois’ this support is undermined and subverted (91): In Derrida’s game of double writing, ‘toi, mon amour,’ is unwritten as she and/or he writes: ‘En train to write you (you? to you?)’ (Derrida, 1987: 32; cited Benstock 1991: 115). Benstock’s reading of Derrida then serves to emphasise the way it stages a confrontation between literature, genre, gender and agency (see Russett for another approach to this conjunction).

Genre and Modern Literature Why, Jean-Marie Schaeffer asks in his study of the question of literary genre, is it that it is above all in the area of literature that the need to focus on genre is most forcefully felt? After all there is nothing intrinsically more or less difficult in the task of differentiating a sonnet from an epic (Schaeffer, 1989: 8) than an example of rare groove from one of rap. The answer, he suggests, lies in the fact that literature has always tied the question of genre to the question of what literature itself is (Schaeffer, 1989: 8) – the version of the question common prior to the end of the eighteenth-century version being ‘what is Poetry?’ (as asked by Sidney for example). Indeed the ability to know what a literary genre is (and to know what the true genres are) is a measure of the extent to which one knows in what literature inheres. For the other arts, however, the problem of the status of genres is ‘largement inerte par rapport à la question de savoir ce qu’est la nature des arts en question’ (8).19 Unlike the other arts, literature is situated in a much vaster unified ‘domaine sémiotique’ comprising all of those elements identified by Bakhtin as ‘speech genres’. For Hegel it was only literature that had genres in the strict sense, being the only art form to ‘s’organiser en système de spécifications internes qui forment une totalité organique’ (9).20 Other categories for other arts remain largely empirical and descriptive (10). This would go some way to explaining the minor role played by genre theory in the areas of the musical, visual and plastic arts.21

Introduction 21

Turning to the question of the challenge to genre categories in modern art forms, it might be said that modern art is to be defined – and certainly is by many commentators – by its eschewing of the very substance Croce wants to protect.22 For literature, this void need not mean an unproblematic turn to genre as underwriter of the jouissance of the writerly reader. For Roland Barthes the abeyance of the expressive is indexical of the proliferating force of textuality – a force which ruins genres as much as it does books in their purported unity.23 For one of those authors exemplary of such a force, Alain Robbe-Grillet, while the idea of pouring books into a mould is equally as problematic as it was for Croce, it is for quite different reasons. This is why Culler chooses lines from the author’s Pour un nouveau roman to open his essay on non-genre fiction. Genre fiction, he suggests, might only be allowed to designate a residue (Culler in Federman, 1975: 256). In

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Culler’s account, taxonomic categories become mere ‘artifices of description’ (257). Confronted by a novel by Robbe-Grillet or Philippe Sollers, one is faced by instances of writing which as yet lack a method of reading identified as appropriate to them (257). This absence of method – which loss is another way of describing the Barthesian pleasure of the text – leaves one with an artefact that sits uneasily or does not sit at all with even residual or artificial taxonomy. For Culler this shortfall means that ‘our most crucial and tantalising experiences of literature [are] located at the interstices of genres, in this region of non-genre literature’ (258). Equally, however, the falling-short leads to all manner of ‘philosophical acrobatics of recuperation’ (259) on the part of the critic. Some works, however, so comprehensively reveal their refusal of classification that no amount of dextrous negotiation will neutralise their recalcitrance (see Dowd). Hence Finnegans Wake (Joyce, 1939) in Culler’s view ‘must be read at a metaliterary level: the level at which the acts of reading and writing are posed as problematic’ (259). The distinction between écriture/writing=production of surface and lecture/reading=production of sense is not upheld by Joyce’s novel. For Sollers: The limit reached by Finnegans Wake is paramount: the reader is put in the position of becoming the deciphering act which can never be definitive and global but which manifests itself as circular metamorphosis and sliding. (Sollers in Federman, 1975: 70).

Distinctions between genres, he claims: are generally maintained only by a convention which ignores the economy and the field of writing, a repressive convention which permits falsified limits (those of an evident pseudo-communality) to be assigned to the novel and to confine ‘poetry’, for example, to an inexpressible obscurity. (73).

From this persepctive, in a succinct challenge to Bakhtin’s insistence that the novel is literature’s supreme genre, the modern novel may have a genre after all but it is for all that a quietly aberrant one constantly moving toward indiscernibility.

22 Genre Matters

Concluding Remarks Putting together two distinct perspectives on taxonomy in Foucault and Lyotard respectively, then, one might ask: is this book on the ‘side’ of the same and the Heim, or is it, rather, a zone wherein ‘pagan’ confrontations take place; is it going to stake a claim on a territory called genre, and thereby silence and suspend the différends between genres and genres of genres; or will it, rather, acknowledge the

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wrinkles mentioned by Foucault as the forgotten and elided memory of the taxonomical impulse (Foucault, 1970: xxiv)? If David Duff, writing in his introduction to Modern Genre Theory (2000) is correct, genre is resurgent in literary studies specifically and enjoys exponential growth in cultural commentary in general. But not for all is it felt to be resurgent. For some, the Derridean assertion that to be generic is already to err far from the Heim of one’s genre; that to belong to the species is already to belong to the category of the extra-terrestrial (genre as unheimlich, or Borges’s enciclopedia china), is a distant refrain belonging to a long forgotten past of genre theory (see Caraher), while for others Derrida’s position offers a resource for negotiating a perennial problem in interpretation (see Collins and Dowd respectively). Is it true of the contributions here that they occupy, in Lyotard’s terms, different phrase universes, or are they in some ways commensurable after all? If they communicate with each other can we as editors subject them to some form of recuperative gesture, designed to make them conform to a discourse we impose? At what point does the cataloguing impulse of any anthology begin to betray its tableau agenda? Georges Perec, trying to articulate what was set in train by the interrogation encapsulated in the title ‘Think/Classify’ (‘Penser/classer’), concludes that: Perhaps also it is to designate the question as in fact having no answer, that is, to refer back to the unthought on which it rests, and the classified to the unclassifiable (the unnameable, the unsayable) which it is so eager to disguise. (Perec, 1997: 185).

It is therefore perhaps both inevitable and welcome that much in the present volume has successfully escaped the synthetic manoeuvres of the volume’s editors, and at least some of what is here presented causes our competencies and expectations in the question of what matters in genre to experience the irruption of the singular and perhaps, even if for a short time, to fall outside our taxonomy of taxonomy. Notes

2. On the exercise of hermeneutic right and competence in the context of archival collection and gathering, see Derrida, (1996: 1-3).

Introduction 23

1. Trans.: ‘From the rigorous order necessitated by business it became evident that classification itself needed to be classified.’ Patricia Falguières (1996) quotes these words, written by Le Corbusier in an illustrated volume notable for the (pictorial) stress it places on office furniture, and in particular furniture designed to frame systems of classification and archiving. I am deeply indebted to my co-editors Lesley Stevenson and Jeremy Strong for their contributions to and advice on this introduction. Without their invaluable assistance the introduction would have been much the poorer.

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3. The titles given to works of art for exhibition purposes and to musical compositions for performance purposes should also be mentioned in this connection. 4. Plato, however, does include narrative (for Genette a mode rather than a genre), and Aristotle does have autonomous genre indicators. 5. His La Comédie humaine for example, with its quasi-scientific ambitions, could not in his view accurately be referred to as a roman. 6. For Fishelov what he calls a ‘necrophiliac impulse’ in genre theory leads him to claim that biological analogy is back on the map of genre studies (Fishelov, 1993: 19), this in the same volume as the deconstructionist ‘school’ [sic] is dealt the backhanded compliment of requiring ‘careful exegesis’ from sympathisers (13). 7. Pagani: plural of paganus, meaning of, or belonging to, the country or to the village; a peasant or a heathen; citizen as opposed to member of the military. 8. Other genre theorists have sensed in the reflexivity in question an opportunity to discuss the question of transformation, as well as using it as a reminder of the fact that the act of generic identification is also in part a constitutive gesture. 9. Other genre theorists have sensed in the reflexivity in question an opportunity to discuss the question of transformation, as well as using it as a reminder of the fact that the act of generic identification is also in part a constitutive gesture. 10. Since 2000 the journal has been under the editorship of Timothy S. Murphy, the author of many essays on Deleuze and Guattari. For Murphy, Deleuze lends a seriousness to a popular genre a decade ahead of Cawelti (1976) and others (Murphy, 2001: 4). 11. See Gibson (1996: 95-6) for a close reading of one of the scenes exemplifying the discordant interplay of sound and image. 12. For further discussion of Neale see Cobley and Collins respectively in this volume. 13. ‘The need for ceaseless dynamism is what gives rise to evolution, because every dynamic system inevitably becomes automatised, and dialectically delineates the opposite constructive principle’ (Tynyanov [1924] in Duff ed., 2000: 37). 14. The extent to which avant-garde film is necessarily incompatible with narrative per se remains open to debate. 15. This is not to claim that all franchise films lack an auteur signature. Tim Burton’s gothic Batman considered in the context of his other films is a case in point. However what remains true is that overall the effect is of any auteurist elements being sacrificed to or at the very least obscured by the series. 16. This paragraph owes everything to my colleague Lesley Stevenson. See Stevenson (2000). 17. Trans.: ‘The botanical garden is an ordonnance, that is to say an index: it assures, on the basis of a spatial apparatus, a rule of concordance between objects and their nomenclature, between objects and their usage.’

24 Genre Matters

18. It is in this context, as far as Genre Matters is concerned at least, that the famous essay by Michael Fried, ‘Art and Objecthood’ can be (retrospectively) placed. On the one hand artists such as Robert Morris (a ‘literalist’), in their tendency towards ‘objecthood’, require the injection of what Fried calls ‘theatricality’ – a kind of dangerous supplement which contaminates the art and necessarily deprives it of ‘abstraction’ properly speaking. It is in the eliciting of the beholder as participant (as evidenced, say, in Morris’s statements about how his unified, shaped works present themselves to a viewer in a situation [Fried, 825]) that the literalists, in Fried’s view, wilfully leave their art parasited by, among other things, anthropomorphism (a paradoxical consequence as Fried remarks). 19. Trans.: ‘largely inert with respect to the question of knowing what is the nature of the arts in question.’ 20. Trans.: ‘organise them into a system of internal specifications which form an organic totality.’ 21. There is of course a vast literature on genre institutions in the history of art. 22. ‘The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from

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which to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express’ (Beckett, 1987: 103). 23. ‘[T]he Text cannot stop (for example, on a library shelf ’ (Barthes, 1984: 157).

Bibliography Adorno, T., Aesthetic Theory, trans. R. Hullot-Kentor, London, Athlone Press, 1997. Altman, R., The American Film Musical, Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 1989. Altman, R., Film Genre, Bloomington, Indiana and London, Indiana University Press and BFI, 1999. Altman, R., ‘A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre’, in R. Stam and T. Miller (eds.), Film and Theory: An Anthology, Oxford, Blackwell, 2000, pp. 179-206 (1984). Aristotle, Poetics, trans. with an introduction by M. Heath, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1996. Barthes, R., ‘From Work to Text’, Image, Music, Text, trans. S. Heath, London, Flamingo, 1984. Beaujour, M., ‘Genus Universum’, Glyph 7 (1980), pp. 15-31. Beckett, S., Disjecta, R. Cohn (ed.), Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, New York, Grove Press, 1984. Benstock, S., ‘Letters: The Post Card in the Epistolary Genre’, in Textualising the Feminine: On the Limits of Genre, Norman, University of Oklahoma Press, 1991, pp. 86-122. Blanchot, M., ‘The Disappearance of Literature’, in The Blanchot Reader, trans. I. Maclachlan, in M. Holland (ed.), The Blanchot Reader, Oxford, Blackwell, 1995, pp. 136-42 (1953). Blanchot, M., Le livre à venir, Paris, Gallimard, 1959. Borges, J. L., ‘El idioma analítico de John Wilkins’, Otras inquisiciones 1937-1952, Buenos Aires, Sur, 1952, pp. 121-25. Cawelti, J., Adventure, Mystery and Romance: Formula Stories as Literature and Popular Culture, Chicago, Univeristy of Chicago Press, 1976. Chartin, J.-J., P. Lacoue-Labarthe, J.-L. Nancy and S. Weber, ‘Bulletin’, in Glyph 7 (1980), pp. 234-237. Cohen, R. (ed.), The Future of Literary Theory, London, Routledge, 1989. Croce, B., ‘Criticism of Artistic and Literary Kinds’, in Aesthetic, London, Vision Press/Peter Owen, 1967, pp. 436-48. Crowell, S. G., ‘Differend Notice: Philosophy as a Genre’, L’Esprit Créateur, Passages, Genres, Differends: Jean-François Lyotard 31:1 (1991), pp. 77-99. Culler, J., ‘Towards a Theory of Non-Genre Literature’, in R. Federman (ed.), Surfiction, Chicago, Swallow, 1975, pp. 255-62. Davidson, M., ‘Palimtexts: Postmodern Poetry and the Material Text’, in M. Perloff (ed.), Postmodern Genres, Norman, University of Oklahoma Press, 1989, pp. 75-95. Deleuze, G., ‘Philosophy of the Série noire’, trans. T. S. Murphy, in Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture 34:1/2 spring/summer (2001), pp. 5-10 (1966). Deleuze, G., Cinema 1: The Movement Image, trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Haberjam, London, Athlone, 1986.

Deleuze, G., ‘The Brain is the Screen’ in G. Flaxman (ed.), The Brain is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2000, pp. 365-73. Deleuze, G and F. Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. B. Massumi, London, Athlone, 1988 Derrida, J., ‘La Loi du genre’/’The Law of Genre’, in Glyph 7 (1980), pp. 176-201/pp. 202-32.

Introduction 25

Deleuze, G., Cinema 2: The Time Image, trans. H. Tomlinson and R. Galeta, London, Athlone, 1989.

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Derrida, J., ‘The Law of Genre’, in D. Attridge (ed.), Acts of Literature, New York, Routledge, 1992, pp. 221-52. Derrida, J., The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. A. Bass, Chicago and London, Chicago University Press, 1987. Derrida, J., Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. E. Prenowitz, Chicago and London, Chicago University Press, 1996. Diderot, D., ‘Essai sur la peinture’, Ouevres complètes, Paris, Garnier, 1876, vol. 10, pp. 455-520 (1765). Dixon, W. W., Film Genre 2000: New Critical Essays, Albany, State University of New York Press, 2000. Duff, D., ‘Introduction’, in Duff (ed.), Modern Genre Theory, London, Longman 2000, pp.1-25 Falguières, P., ‘Les rasions du catalogue’, in Les Cahiers du Musée National d’art moderne 56/7 (1996), pp. 5-19. Fishelov, D., Metaphors of Genre: The Role of Analogy in Genre Theory, Penn State University Press, 1993. Foster, H, ‘It’s Modern but is it contemporary?’, London Review of Books, 16 December 2004, pp. 23-5. Foucault, M., The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, London, Tavistock, 1970. Fowler, A., ‘The Future of Genre Theory: Functions and Constructional Types’, in R. Cohen (ed.), The Future of Literary Theory, London, Routledge, 1989, pp. 291-303. Frye, N., Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1957. Genette, G. et al., Théorie des genres, Paris, Seuil, 1986. Genette, G., The Architexte: An Introduction, trans. J. E. Lewin, foreward by R. Scholes, University of California Press, 1992, extract reprinted in Duff (ed.), pp. 210-18. Genette, G., Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans J. E. Lewin, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997. Gerhart, M., Genre Choices, Gender Questions, Norman, University of Oklahoma Press, 1992. Gibson, A., Towards a Postmodern Theory of Narrative, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1996. Hjelmslev, L., Prolegomena to a Theory of Language, trans. F. J. Whitfield, Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1961. Irigaray, L., ‘The Three Genres’, The Irigaray Reader, M. Whitford (ed.), Oxford, Blackwell, 1991, pp. 140-153. Jacobus, M., ‘The Law Of/And Gender: Genre Theory and The Prelude’, Diacritics 14 (1984), pp. 47-57. Jameson, F., ‘Magical Narratives: On the Dialectical Use of Genre Criticism’, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, Ithaca NY, Cornell University Press, 1981, pp. 103-150 (partially reprinted in Duff ed., pp. 167-192).

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Jones, M., ‘Going through the Motions: The Tribute Band Phenomenon’, Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture 34:3/4 fall/winter (2001), pp. 265-278. Kallberg, J., Chopin at the Boundaries: Sex, History and Musical Genre, Cambridge Mass., Harvard University Press, 1996. Krauss, R., ‘The Future of an Illusion’, in Cohen (ed.), The Future of Literary Theory, London, Routledge, 1989, pp. 280-90. Lacoue-Labarthe, P. and J.-L. Nancy with A.-M. Lang, ‘Preface’, in The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism, trans. P Barnard and C. Lester, Albany, State University of New York Press, 1988; ‘Avant-propos’, in L’absolu littéraire: Théorie de la littérature du romanticisme allemand, Paris, Seuil, 1978, pp. 8-28.

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Le Corbusier, L’Art decoratif d’aujourd’hui, Paris, G. Crès, 1925. Leitch, V. B., ‘(De)Coding (Generic ) Discourse’, Genre 24:1 (1991), pp. 83-98. Lukács, G., The Theory of the Novel: a Historico-philosophical essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature, trans. A. Bostock, London, Merlin Press, 1978 (1920). Lyotard, J.-F., The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. G. Van Den Abeele, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1988. Massumi, B., ‘Introduction: Like a Thought’, in Massumi (ed.), A Shock to Thought: Expression after Deleuze and Guattari, London, Routledge, 2002, pp. xiii-xxxix. Mondrian, P., ‘Dialogue on the New Plastic’ [1919], in C. Harrison and P. Wood (eds.), Art in Theory 1900-1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, Oxford, Blackwell, 1992, pp. 282-7. Murphy, T. S., ‘Introduction to Gilles Deleuze’s “Philosophy of the Série noir”’, Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture 34:1/2 summer (2001), pp. 1-5. Neale, S., ‘Questions of Genre’, in R. Stam and T. Miller (eds.), Film and Theory: An Anthology, Oxford, Blackwell, 2000, pp. 157-178 (1990). Perec, G., ‘Think/Classify’, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, trans. J. Sturrock, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1997. Perloff, M. (ed.), Postmodern Genres, Norman, University of Oklahoma Press, 1989. Pizer, J. D., The Historical Perspective in German Genre Theory: its Development from Gottshed to Hegel, Stuttgart, Hans Dieter Heinz Academische Verlag, 1985. Queneau, R., Le oeuvres complètes de Sally Mara, Paris, Gallimard, 1962. Richardson, S., Clarissa, or The History of a Young Lady, 4 vols., reprint of 1932 edition, London, Everyman, 1978. Ronnel, A., ‘Why I Write such good Translator’s Notes’, in Glyph 7 (1980), pp. 229-32. Schaeffer, J.-M., ‘Du texte au genre’, in Genette et al., Théorie des genres, Paris, Seuil, 1986, pp. 179-205. Schaeffer, J.-M., ‘Literary Genres and Textual Genericity’, trans. A. Otis, in Cohen (ed.), The Future of Literary Theory London, Routledge, 1989, pp. 167-187. Schaeffer, J.-M., Qu’est-ce qu’un genre littéraire?, Paris, Seuil, 1989. Schlegel, F., Literarische Notizen 1797-1801, H. Eichner (ed.), Frankfurt, Ullstein Materiaien, 1980 (1957). Sollers, P., ‘The Novel and the Experience of Limits’, in R. Federman (ed.), Surfiction, Chicago, Swallow, 1975, pp. 59-74. Stevenson, L., ‘Still Life, Modernism and Cézanne’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of London, 2000. Todorov, T., Genres in Discouse, trans. C. Porter, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1990. Tynyanov, Y., ‘The Literary Fact’ [‘O Literaturnom fakte’], trans. A. Shuman, in Duff (ed.), Modern Genre Theory, London, Longman 2000, pp. 30-49. Wellek, R. and A. Warren, ‘Literary Genres’, Theory of Literature, London, Jonathan Cape, 1949. Wittgenstein, L., Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, New York, 1958.

Introduction 27

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I. 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.

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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

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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.

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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

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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.

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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 sociolinguistic 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

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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).

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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

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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.

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34 Genre Matters

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, sociolinguistically – 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). However, the contrast between the socio-linguistic resources of fantasy and the Fryean ‘myth’ of romance may not be clear enough. Another example might suffice to indicate the implicit link between fantasy and a fundamental, constitutive form of irony that socially and historically displaces the narrative pretentions and illusive continuities of Fryean romance. In the earliest extant versions of the Old Irish tale Táin Bó Cúailnge (The Tain or The Cattle Raid of Cooley) narrative progression, coherence and the romance of the epic-scale plot are often ignored in the profuse repetition of singular episodes of place-naming, chants and the origins of tribes, games and animals. Such a textual condition does not signify poor skill in narrative construction so much as the original nature of the socially significant materials of narration. The early, fragmentary texts of Táin Bó Cúailnge are first and foremost social and linguistic maps of particular localities of pre-Christian and pre-Norman, Gaelic Ireland. The episodic, narratively fragmented tale of battles between the armies of Connacht and Cuchulainn, the lone warrior-giant of ancient Ulster, seem a retrospective narrative convenience through which to display the materials of

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socio-linguistic conquest and appropriation – namely, episodes of place-naming and chants in which the landscape of late Iron Age and early medieval Ireland are rendered Gaelic (linguistically speaking) and Celtic (socially speaking). Later medieval (twelfth and fourteenth centuries) and modern (late nineteenth and twentieth centuries) attempts to bring narrative coherence and completeness to Táin Bó Cúailnge often displace and reorganise these myriad fantasies of placenaming according to the narrative logic of an epic struggle between two warring kingdoms over the right to possess a giant brown bull. The earlier materials, the fantasies of social and linguistic appropriation of the features of a natural landscape, nevertheless preserve the crucial, socially significant irony upon which the narrative elements are founded. That is to say, the landscapes of ancient Connacht and Ulster achieve ‘natural’ shape and cultural articulation only through the passionate desires and conflicted struggles of beings, however fantastic, who strive to appropriate them in words and names. Such culturally diverse stories of social origins – Amerindian, Anglo-Saxon, Celtic, plural, supernaturalist, fantastic, frequently unsystematic and local are essentially fantasies that are built upon the implicit and all-important irony of simultaneously distinguishing and conflating the forces and values of the world, on the one hand, and human nature and values, on the other.

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Socio-linguistically mediated fantasies and the always already implied workings of irony give rise to metaphors, and eventually to metaphors of focused significance. Metaphors spectacularly intimate, reveal and demarcate the limits of the human and of mortal powers and natural laws that fantasy must acknowledge within the constraints of social groups (Caraher, 1992: 169-73). Thus the literary ‘myth’ of tragedy would seem best expressive of the powers of discovery and intimations of limitation that the socio-linguistic mode of metaphor expresses culturally for humans. Culturally potent metaphors and tragic plots constitute the stuff of a literate and expressly literary knowledge for many societies. For example, within a Western or Eurocentric literary tradition, the metaphor of the fruit of the tree and the tragic Garden of Eden plot, the metaphor of the armour of homosocial amorousness and the tragedies of Troy, and the blindness of desire and the Oedipal plot provide three resonant classical instances. Indeed, regarding the sociolinguistic mode of metaphor and the ‘myth’ or generic plots of tragedy, the social and operative character of a shared form of cultural knowledge have clearly gained material ascendency over fantasy and irony. That is to say, a particular range of metaphors and metaphor-making as well as a particular range or series of plots for handling or delimiting human nature and powers have been able to focus significance for a social group or culture. For instance, the way that Aeschylus stages socially divided and emotionally conflicted female choruses in the concluding part of his tragic trilogy, The Oresteia, embodies both the tragic consequences of matricide and blood-revenge as well as a stunning metaphor of the real workings of justice – namely, intense moral debate pled by grievously

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wounded parties before a jury of fallible citizens seeking reasonable civic compromise. The metaphorics of jury politics – rational, rhetorical, pluralistic, enfranchised, proto-democratic, agonistic, fallible – permeate Aeschylus’s ancient Greek staging of tragic crisis and tragic delimitation of human nature and powers for the classical Athenian city-state.

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In a social group where cultural significance has been focused or refocused consistently, coherently and reassuringly, strong images or icons (or what Northrop Frye calls ‘archetypes’ in The Anatomy of Criticism) of that social and operative knowledge may be produced in the form of popular comic plots. Perhaps the way recitations from The Odyssey functioned for certain ‘Hellenised’ groups in classical Greek and Graeco-Roman antiquity or Boccaccio’s The Decameron (1353) and Dante’s The Divine Comedy (1308-21) for certain groups under the influence of the Italian Renaissance, vernacular culture and nascent humanism in late medieval and early modern Europe may be cited as instances of this social and historical point. Socially focused images, indeed iconic images of cultural meaning – for example, the heroic wanderer, the spiritual wanderer, the loyal and clever spouse, the alluring and inspiring muse, the taleteller as social agent and cultural hero – would seem to function hand in hand with the cultural ‘myth’ of comedy. Social and cultural crises, though, precipitate crises in significant, shared metaphors and images as well as tragic and comic plots. When elaborate cultural myths of significance and constructions of ‘sacred narratives’ arise, they tend to embody and to articulate – symptomise, one might say, in a sublimely ideological way – a sense of loss, of lost or occulted meaning. According to Robert Denton Rossel (1976), the socio-linguistic process of myth or myth-making enters late in the historical development of social groups, generally in the wake of a social crisis or a calamity that shakes the group’s shared, operative sense of itself. Social or religious division, climactic disaster, invasion, exile, migration, industrialisation, or loss of a vernacular or ‘mother tongue’ tend to generate narratives of social and historical explanation and legitimation that can tax the full linguistic and literary resources of literate cultures. The socio-linguistic origins of Biblical canons of sacred history and prophecy or of Beowulf, Piers Plowman and Paradise Lost offer some clear cases in point. The ‘sacred narrative’ of the Hebrew people was largely written and constructed after the exile in Babylonia as a way of organising the laws, chronicles and prophecies of a defeated, dislodged and displaced social group. The New Testament of the Christian peoples was assembled long after the death of Jesus of Nazareth and in the teeth of social and religious schisms in the Roman world. Beowulf (c. 1000 CE) comprises a highly literate, elegiac epic of a lost world of pre-Christian, tribal heroism composed by and for the Christianised descendants of Scandivanian immigrants to the midlands of early medieval England. William Langland’s The Vision of Piers Plowman (c. 1377) provides a dream vision of Christian history and doctrine and a composite figure of a new

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Adam/Moses/Christ in the idealised figure of the English plowman. This religious allegory and ‘sacred narrative’ was projected in the face of clerical corruption and of Edward III’s and Richard II’s harsh treatment of farmers and peasants in the 1370s and 1380s. Milton’s ‘sacred narrative’, Paradise Lost (1667, revised 1674), retells by augmenting dramatically and allegorically the tragic plot of the ‘loss of Eden’, but expressly in the wake of the bitter and bloody collapse of the Puritan Commonwealth of the 1640s and 1650s. Again, the loss of cultural significance by means of social and historical crisis provides the prompt and the motive toward allegorical narrative. Indeed, this claim is in concert with an intriguing book by Deborah Madsen (1995) that offers a cultural and narratological ‘rereading’ of the genre of allegory, a genre that thrives in moments of what Madsen calls ‘cultural disruption’. Allegorical narratives, cultural myths of significance, sacred histories, all symptomise and articulate a sense of cultural loss, of broken, lost or occulted meaning. The metaphors and images that may once have focused significance for a social group have become attenuated or dislodged – that is, unless the allegorical process and its dependency upon myths and myth-making can remain in touch with the socio-linguistic origins of cultural significance. Irony can deconstruct allegory or allegorical narratives through showing the ways in which attempts at continuous myth-making often belie or betray the social, operative knowledge articulated in metaphors and images and through tragic and comic plots. However, this mode of irony, this deconstructive irony, appears distinctly different from the mode of irony that is implicit within the sociolinguistics of fantasy. Deconstructive irony is an analytical tool of thought. Through it we can appraise the pretentions and unwitting transgressions of various intellectual and imaginative constructions of thought according to the law of contradiction. If a construction of thought flouts or transgresses this conceptual law, deconstructive irony faults the construction by rending it at and through its conceptual and figural seams. However, deconstructive irony never fully coincides with the constitutive form of irony that is implicit within the socio-linguistic mode of fantasy. This constitutive form of irony – one I would maintain deconstructive irony often fails to recover – actually operates according to a different principle than the law of contradiction (Caraher, 1992: 170-1).

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The posture of the self in fantasy – or let us say, the fantast or the dreamer – is one that is simultaneously constitutive of self and of otherness; it is fundamentally a paradoxical or contradictory state of affairs, epistemologically speaking. Even the root word of ‘irony’ foregrounds this paradoxical function. The role or character of the classical Greek figure of the ‘eiron’, the self-deprecating revealer or facilitator of the quality of actions and judgements of others, is the core embodiment of the function of irony (see also Frye: 40, 172-5). This paradoxical posture of the self in the socio-linguistic mode of fantasy, or in the playful social function of the eiron, comprises a fundamental irony of our human form of experience – a form of irony

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that can be called ‘experiential’ or ‘aesthetic irony’ in ‘Metaphor as Contradiction’ (Caraher, 1981: 83-4; 1992: 171-3). Aesthetic irony exhibits the contradiction that is at the core of aesthetic experience – namely, the simultaneous separating and blending of the perceiving and knowing self and the other object, subject or being perceived, encountered and known. It would seem impossible or pointless to probe deconstructively beyond this state of constitutive contradiction. To cleave this paradox of our ways of knowing open would precipitate us toward epistemological solipsism on the one hand – that is, our fantasies are only about self-centred desires – or toward forms of social determinism on the other – that is, our fantasies are determined solely and systemically by ideological structures. The fundamental irony of our very human, perceptive and cognitive position seems to be that we constitute a cleft or break or rupture in the fabric of nature and natural ways of knowing and operating that might dream or fantasise stories of cultural significance for the natural, social groups within which we live. In many respects I have worked to establish a cultural and historical framework for understanding the motives which engender discursive genres. It is a framework that would dispute the ‘twilight zone’ of generic ‘clusion’ that Jacques Derrida affords in ‘The Law of Genre’ where a literary text is said neither to ‘include’ nor to ‘exclude’ its ‘genre’ but to provide ultimately and problematically ‘an example of this unfigurable figure of clusion’ (Derrida, 1980:. 65-6). From the first page of ‘The Law of Genre’, Derrida promulgates and prosecutes an outmoded, distinctly neoclassical sense of ‘genre’ and its quasi-metaphysical regime of discursive laws and orders (see especially: 55-7). Modern and contemporary approaches to the literary pragmatics and cultural politics of genres should be more developmental, empirical and better grounded in the social dynamics of texts and genres. The cultural and historical framework for mapping the motives which engender discursive genres that I have outlined here attempts to do just that. It is a framework which thoroughly reconstructs Northrop Frye’s ahistorical cycle of literary myths from Anatomy of Criticism (1957) and loosely approximates the work of Mikhail Bakhtin (1986) on the nature of ‘speech genres’ – especially their dynamic, social, interactive and thoroughly historicised qualities. Moreover, Bakhtin’s persistent insights into the dialogic character of literary discourse and the literary politics of alterity – particularly the sociological poetics of selfhood and otherness, of speakers and alterities – exhibit the ways in which the myriad genres of speech and writing interpenetrate (Bakhtin 1981, 1990). Moreover, such a sociolinguistic and cultural-materialist approach to genre theory never allows human imaginative and cultural work to escape the demands and the responsibilities of response and answerability to others, to other voices, to alterity in its manifold, protean shapes.

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Bibliography Bakhtin, M. M., Art and Answerability, M. Holquist and V. Liapunov (eds.), trans. V. Liapunov, Austin, University of Texas Press, 1990. Bakhtin, M. M., The Dialogic Imagination, M. Holquist (ed.), trans. C. Emerson and M. Holquist, Austin, University of Texas Press, 1981. Bakhtin, M. M., Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, C. Emerson and M. Holquist (eds.), trans. V. W. McGee, Austin, University of Texas Press, 1986. Caraher, B. G., ‘Metaphor as Contradiction: A Grammar and Epistemology of Poetic Metaphor’, Philosophy and Rhetoric 14 (1981), pp. 69-88. Caraher, B. G., ‘Metaphor as Contradiction: A Grammar and Epistemology of Poetic Metaphor’, Intimate Conflict: Contradiction in Literary and Philosophical Discourse, B. Caraher (ed.), Albany, SUNY Press, 1992, pp. 155-80 (expansion of 1981 essay). Derrida, J., ‘The Law of Genre’, Critical Inquiry 7:1 (autumn 1980), pp. 55-81. Dubrow, H., Genre, London and New York, Methuen, 1982. Frye, N., ‘First Essay. Historical Criticism: Theory of Modes’, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1957, pp. 33-67. Frye, N., ‘Third Essay. Archetypal Criticism: Theory of Myths’, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1957, pp. 131-239. Gibbs, R. Jr., The Poetics of Mind: Figurative Thought, Language and Understanding, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994. Madsen, D. L., Rereading Allegory: A Narrative Approach to Genre, London, Macmillan, 1995. Orgel, S., ‘Shakespeare and the Kinds of Drama’, Critical Inquiry 6:1 (1979), pp.107-23. Rosmarin, A., The Power of Genre, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1985. Rossel, R. D., ‘Micro-history: Studying Social Change in the Laboratory’, History of Childhood Quarterly: The Journal of Psychohistory 3:3 (1976), pp. 373-400. Rothenberg, J. (ed.), Shaking the Pumpkin: Traditional Poetry of the Indian North Americas, Garden City, New York, Doubleday & Co., 1972. The Tain, translated from the Irish epic Táin Bó Cúailnge, trans. T. Kinsella, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1970. Turner, M., The Literary Mind, New York and Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1997. Williamson, C., A Feast of Creatures: Anglo-Saxon Riddle-Songs, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982.

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Objectivity and Immanence in Genre Theory Paul Cobley The premiss of this essay can be stated very simply. It is this: genre is not a set of textual features that can be enumerated; rather, it is an expectation. While no separate assertions about genre beyond this one will be made, there are nonetheless a number of adjuncts to this observation that are worthy of note. It remains interesting, first, that the argument that genre is an expectation still has to be strenuously made in an epoch where, supposedly, ‘all that is solid melts into air’. Possibly genre has a special status in the present age because of the way it has been retained as a bastion of ‘stable’ meaning. Second, it is instructive to register the way in which the formulation that genre is an expectation forces a reconsideration of facts about genre and about textuality in general; facts that are commonly elided or simply overlooked. The entity that bears closest on the above issues is, in fact, the focus of semiotics: the sign. In an essay which is ostensibly a tribute to the greatest semiotician, Thomas A. Sebeok, W. C. Watt makes an almost off-the-cuff observation about ‘signhood’. The ‘sign’, he argues, is not responsible for the process of signification. Imagining that the sign signifies is just one false way of conceiving signs, a way in which it is held

(2001: 68).

The truth of the matter for Watt is that items in the universe are not involved in any act of ‘signifying’. They are, instead, filled with the potential of signifying. The real work of an X coming to signify some Y – the act of semiosis – takes place within the cranium, and thus, as Watt argues, the study of signs is ‘foundationally biosemiotic’(69). Expectation is one of the relations which may make up a sign; it is a ‘possible’ relation which is closely allied to similar kinds of relation within a sign: namely, the

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that the weathervane and the letter-strings constituting printed English sentences and all other X’s that signify some Y are things that perform an act of signifying, they are ‘signifiers’ or ‘signs’ for short. The north-pointing weathervane ‘signifies’ that the local wind is from the north; my speedometer ‘signifies’ that I’m doing 85 and am likely soon to be pulled over by the California Highway Patrol; the North Star ‘signifies’ where due north is and ‘signifies’ that Earth’s axis is for all practical purposes aimed at the same point on the celestial sphere. Indeed every point on the celestial sphere can ‘signify’ something to him who scans the skies; in this sense, everything can ‘signify’ something or other and the universe is indeed, in Peirce’s great mystical summation, ‘perfused with signs’.

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relation that is and the relation which must be. This, incidentally, corresponds to Peirce’s (1998) formulation of logic through the key processes of abduction, induction and deduction, respectively. As such, the relation which genre exemplifies is one where something is expected to stand for something else. The signs of genre, like many other signs, thus rely for their existence as such on the possibility that they may achieve signhood. This, indeed, could be said to be the condition of all things. For Watt, the entire universe is composed of things – ‘in fact of everything that is’ (68) – and it is not the things that signify but the sign-using organism. Every thing, then, insofar as it has the potential to come into contact with a sign-user, has the capacity to become a sign. This recognition, overlooked occasionally even by teachers of semiotics, alludes to another crucial distinction in sign study which is imperative in understanding genre: the difference between ‘signs’, ‘objects’ and ‘things’. Here is a more deep-rooted philosophical problem that is not simply a matter of features of signhood being unconsidered. Indeed, it is exacerbated by common sense and technical uses of terminology: the term ‘objective’, especially, but also the same kind of uses of ‘thing’ and ‘sign’. The philosopher and semiotician, John Deely, has relentlessly pursued the antinomies of the thing/object distinction in relation to signhood and it is worth considering his explication of the issue before proceeding any further with the discussion of genre. As Deely maintains: There are signs and there are other things besides: things which are unknown to us at the moment and perhaps for all our individual life; things which existed before us and other things which will exist after us; things which exist only as a result of our social interactions, like governments and flags; and things which exist within our round of interactions – like daytime and night – but without being produced exactly by those interactions, or at least not inasmuch as they are ‘ours’, i.e. springing from us in some primary sense.

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(1994: 11).

Objects, on the other hand, are ‘what the things become once experienced’ (1994: 11), bearing in mind also that experience takes place through a physical, sensory modality. In this sense, even such mythical creatures as unicorns or the Minotaur can be considered objects embodied in the physical marks of a text. But Deely argues that a ‘thing of experience’ – an object – requires more than just embodiment: the Colosseum and the Arc de Triomphe preceded us and are expected to exist after us; but the point is that their existence as such is the product of anthroposemiosis. There are plenty of things – such as some metals in the earth and some things in the universe, as Deely suggests (1994: 16) – that anthroposemiosis has not yet touched.

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Objects are thus sometimes identical with things and can even ‘present themselves “as if ” they were simply things’ (1994: 18). Likewise, signs seem to be just objects of experience – the light from a candle, the scent of a rose, the shining metal of a gun; but a sign also signifies beyond itself. In order for it to do so, a sign must be: not just a physical thing; not just an experienced object; but experienced as ‘doubly related’ (Deely, 1994: 22), standing for something else in some respect or capacity (or, for short: in a context). To illustrate this point Deely employs the image of an iceberg’s tip: to be sure, the tip protrudes into experience as an object; moreover, it is, as such, a thing; but, above all, as is known by the popular phrase, the tip is a sign that there is much more below (1994: 144). An important corollary of this, though, is that whatever is beneath the tip of the iceberg cannot be approached as a thing. It is possible that experience could make it an object but, even then, through the sensations it provokes, the feelings about them and its consequence, it is only available as a sign. Hence, Deely repeatedly cites Peirce’s famous statement that ‘to try to peel off signs and get down to the real thing is like trying to peel an onion and get down to the onion itself ’ (see Brent, 1993: 300 n. 84).

It is commonly noted that there is little genre theory in the period between Aristotle and the twentieth century. Perhaps more accurate is the argument that there is little development in the theory of genre during this period of nearly two and a half thousand years. The fragmentary observations in Aristotle’s Poetics, generally taken to inaugurate genre theory, set a tone for Aristotle’s successors: above all, the Poetics indicates a perspective on genre that is prescriptive. From the vantage point of the present it seems that the guiding principles of Aristotle were inescapable, and were bound to be replayed in, among others, the work of the Italian Renaissance theorists, Sir Philip Sidney, the Augustans and Friedrich Schiller. However, it is also well known that there have been notable sceptics in

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What this means for the understanding of genre should be quite clear. The ‘facts’ of genre – be they, inter alia, a genre’s ‘structure’, its discernible ‘formula’, its key repetitive elements – cannot be ‘things’. Furthermore, no matter how much they are experienced and no matter to what extent they invoke objects, nor can they be considered to be objects themselves. In the triad under discussion here, then, this leaves the ‘sign’, which, of course, refers to something beyond itself. Yet it also needs someone for whom it is a sign. What can be said then is that genres comprise generic texts which are made up of generic signs. However, that which lends the signs in such texts their generic character is the relation of expectation that accrues in the sign user. This is a much different proposition from that which insists on the constituents of genre as discernible entities. Furthermore, it precisely the conflation of ‘thing’, ‘object’ and ‘sign’ which has dominated the theorisation of genre to the present. The most salient manifestation of this tendency has been the judgment of the quality of a given genre according to the presence or absence of prescribed ‘things’.

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Aristotle’s wake, including Dr Johnson, who seriously doubted that prescriptive rules for literary works could be sustained for any length of time (1960: 300). The key issue in the whole trajectory of genre theory in this long period seems to concern the reification of generic features, the maintenance as given ‘things’ of entities that should be considered as ‘objects’ (that which is referred to in generic texts), ‘signs’ (the means of referring to those objects) and ‘expectations’ (the relation that sustains a reading of generic signs and the connection between them). The matter is compounded when a genre is seen as a textual entity which should possess certain ‘things’ resulting in an easy slippage to a position where a genre must consist of those ‘things’. A prescriptive theory of genre, then, needs constant recourse to an epistemology of ‘thinghood’ whose potency – everywhere, but unspoken – consists in its very repose, but which is already undermined by the fact that the ‘things’ in question are taken to be experienced and thus already ‘objects’.

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In one sense, what is surprising is that the acceleration of genre theory in the twentieth century took place, initially, on similar epistemological grounds. Such a scenario might be less anomalous, perhaps, if genre is considered on a par with tropes in general. Throughout and since the period of the Enlightenment, the theory of tropes has been curiously instrumental in evacuating agency from textuality when it might have figured irony, metaphor and so forth as so many convenors of individualism. What is clear is that genre theory in the twentieth century was, in the first instance, tied to a change in the status of knowledge in the West and the re–orientation of the role of the university. Space precludes a discussion of these issues now except to say that genre theory was embedded in what might be called a new ‘synchronic’ bearing in the humanities in which theoretical investigation of phenomena displaced the accumulation of knowledge as ‘breeding’. Synchronic study, as with Saussure, entailed the questioning of the very basis and conditions which allowed phenomena to exist and function. Among those prominent in this synchronic perspective must be put Propp and the Formalists in Russia; Ogden, Richards, Empson and Leavis in Britain; the New Criticism, Innis, McLuhan and Frye in North America; the structuralists in France; the Prague Linguistic Circle in Czechoslovakia; the Copenhagen School in Denmark; as well as Lotman and the so–called ‘Moscow–Tartu’ school in its early, but not later, period. The other facts that precipitated the growth of genre theory in the twentieth century were the proliferation of narratives in general and, in particular, an understanding of narrative by reference to genre. The first point grows out of the establishment of new media. The obvious, but often forgotten, fact is that the technologies of film, radio and television were responsible for the suffusing of peoples’ lives with narrative on an unprecedented scale by the late part of the twentieth century (Cobley, 2001: 171–200). The latter two media especially ‘domesticated’ narrative, bringing it into the home as either an imageless

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companion or as a constant ‘flow’ complementing other, non–narrative domestic technology. Ultimately, without this proliferation and familiarisation of narrative signs the phenomenon called postmodernism would not really have become manifest in the way that it seems to have done. In a more local sense, the almost seamless stream of domesticated signs in these media lent itself to ‘generic’ rather than ‘individual’ understanding. Distinctions between radio and television narratives – and even those on film – were dominated by genre rather than authorship. For most consumers of narratives in these media (and it is true that genre could be a marker of consumer choice) it made no sense to identify the author of radio narratives such as The Shadow, Dick Barton and The Archers or television programmes such as I Love Lucy, Coronation Street and Friends. In any case, the question of authorship would be complex: was the scriptwriter the author, or was it the director, or the star, or (in radio) the sound engineer, or (in television and film) the director of photography?

By the early 1970s genre theory found itself at a curiously overdetermined juncture. In film studies especially, synchronic investigation became paramount and close attention was given to the multiple roles involved in the production of the cinematic text – directing, of course, as well as photography and scriptwriting; but also the roles associated with the mise-en-scène or iconography of film, such as lighting, set design and acting. The emphasis on roles in the production of generic meaning among Anglophone film theorists often lent itself to a structural approach which was not far removed from that of recently translated works by Propp and LéviStrauss (see, for example, Kitses 1969; Buscombe 1970; Ryall 1970; Tudor 1970). These works continued to treat generic features implicitly as ‘things’; however, the

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Even if the social function of generic narrative could be demonstrated to be more intense in previous epochs – in oral cultures, for example – the twentieth century indisputably became the era of genre. In fact, it is telling that genre theory’s acceleration beyond the consideration of prescriptive possibilities actually occurred with the development of the study of new media within the academy. The focus of genre theory for the majority of the century had still been within literature and drama; as the universities began to embrace the study of film, and then television and other popular media in the late 1960s in the United States (and later elsewhere), the prescriptive impulse in genre theory diminished. To be sure, the character of genre theory in this period was affected by a range of other issues that impinged upon its already necessary increase in relation to the study of ‘genredominated’ narratives. The post-Second World War period had seen a panoply of social factors dictate a temporary decline in adherence to prescriptive attitudes in general. At the same time, the growth of Western Marxism and the criticism of establishment institutions encompassed a greater awareness of the working of abstract phenomena such as ‘ideology’ and ‘false consciousness’, which were believed to restrict people’s resistance to establishment prescriptions.

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question of genre as ‘formulaic thing’ was necessarily supplemented by an interrogation of the audience and the industry’s complicity in the production of ‘repetitive’ product. Furthermore, the ‘thingness’ of genre was also held to be constituted by iconography, plot determinants, stock situations, actors and auteurs. Yet, if genre was any one kind of thing it seemed that it was most like an empty vessel, an item into which other things could be poured with the result that these other things would automatically take on the vessel’s shape.

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It is tempting to imagine that the notion of an empty vessel, allowing one thing after another to be poured into it without any real material change, would be an irresistible image to critics of contemporary capitalism. Indeed, it has remained so in genre theory for a number of years (see Hess Wright, 1986 [originally 1978] and Lipsitz, 1998). Yet the most creative implementations of structural study of genre (Wright, 1975; Palmer, 1978; and, later, Roth, 1995) have, perhaps, unwittingly, opened out genre theory by exploring homologies between a resolutely generic ‘thing’ and features of the contemporary world. Palmer (1978), for example, argues that the very essence of the thriller genre lies in its genesis and structure, both of which permanently enshrine ‘ideology’. In an ingenious analysis Palmer shows that a set of economic and ideological conditions occurring at the moment that the thriller genre crystallised, in the early- to mid-nineteenth-century West, resulted in the inscription of capitalist social relations into the very fabric of the genre. These include a growing fear of crime, the cementing of views about property and theft, in addition to the forging of a liberal hegemony of laissez-faire individualism and entrepreneurial industry. The flexible competitive individualism of the hero is an embodiment of such social relations and is, of course, as demonstrably crucial to the genre as the threat to the social order posed by the often ‘bureaucratic’ villain. This thesis, although detailed and nuanced, can be summed up in a nutshell through Palmer’s anecdote of a Trotskyite of his acquaintance in the 1970s. Apparently, the acquaintance posited a ‘radical’ thriller in which a multinational corporation was the villain and a revolutionary socialist the hero (1978: 67). As Palmer argues, no matter how much the thriller vessel’s contents change, the capitalist nature of the social relations enshrined in the vessel guarantee that such a thriller will consist of the same political complexion as all thrillers. Undoubtedly, there is an overwhelming sense in which Palmer is right: innovations such as the ‘radical thriller’ have come and gone with a great degree of frequency over the years, both before and after the Trotskyite tabled his proposal. So, of course, generic innovation is the first casualty of ideological-structural studies of genre. Yet, so too, concomitantly, is the understanding of capitalism as an object. In fact, ideological-structural analyses of genre can almost be forgiven for positing capitalism as a thing. To be sure, capitalism is dominated by material and by objects, including the brute realities of exploitation, poverty, wealth and wars to secure these latter. But what has become increasingly evident since the 1970s is the

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extent to which ‘late’ capitalism is a mutable phenomenon and, in seeking to maintain itself, can flexibly respond to people’s desires and identities. What the unfortunate aspect of the genre/ideology homology should show, however, is not so much that things change – the emergence of new genres or new economic formations, for example – rather that they become dosed with experience. It is true that new generic elements or new hybrid genres do appear from time to time and it is also the case that capitalism continues to find novel ways of extending exploitation in the name of extracting surplus value. Yet the most pressing issue concerns how a putatively repeated ‘thing’ is actually rendered as a mutable object. To posit genre as an unchangeable thing – or even as an object – is, effectively, to maintain an untenable monologic perspective on signification. Another way of putting this is to say that genre cannot be sustained in anything other than dialogue. As genre is the prime mover in one kind of sign relationship it is necessarily a part of dialogue because, by definition, a sign is not for itself but for an other. The basic definition of sign to be found in Peirce states, in an eminently straightforward fashion: A sign, or representamen, is something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity. It addresses somebody, that is, creates in the mind of that person an equivalent sign, or perhaps a more developed sign. That sign which it creates I call the interpretant of the first sign. The sign stands for something, its object. It stands for that object, not in all respects, but in reference to a sort of idea. (2.228).

A further way, still, in which the question of understanding genre dialogically may be addressed concerns, simply, readership. If generic texts are signs conditioned by alterity, then they require readers to recognise and interpret them. Once again, it may seem surprising that this issue needs to be raised here. In the field of communication sciences it is well known that there has been a renaissance in audience studies since the 1970s, much of which has shed light not only on media but also on textuality. Audience study has seriously challenged the fragile idea that

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The ‘somebody’ in this formulation is no accident. It might have been possible to replace it with ‘some organism’, for signs are received within both the animal and plant worlds. However, it should be remembered that only humans have semiotics, that is to say the ability to question the functioning or veracity of signs. Indeed it is this very capacity which is focused on the dialogic nature of signs, the way in which signs exist for ‘somebody’ other than themselves. It is for this reason that Peirce, like another ‘dialogic’ theorist, Bakhtin, explicitly refers to thought as a kind of inner speech consisting of ‘thought-signs’ (see, for example 5.264-8, 280-317 and Peirce, 1868).

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concrete textual features are the ultimate repositories of meaning. However, one would not guess this from many writings about genre in the same period (see, for example, Austin and Gordon, 1988; Cranny-Francis, 1988; Welsch, 1997; Lipsitz, 1998; Porter, 1998; Ryall, 1998). It is almost as if generic texts still constitute a dishonourable exception in the roll-call of textual multiplicity. There are quite clear and, sometimes, justifiable reasons why generic texts might be treated as though their significations are limited, even if there now seems to be little justification to treat them as characterised by ‘things’. The main one of these is that the significations of generic texts are always already ‘short-circuited’ (Altman, 1987: 4). By definite means the expectations which enact generic signs may act to close down the multiplicity which seemingly accrues to other texts. In other words, generic signs, thoroughly imbued with expectation, are susceptible to objective experience of them as limited in meaning. This, however, does not derive from the alleged ‘thinghood’ of genre; if so, it would be to suggest once more that ‘ideation’ precedes ‘interpretation’, a key issue in semiotics and philosophy and, memorably, the crux of the rancorous debate between Stanley Fish and Wolfgang Iser in the early 1980s (see Fish, 1981 and Iser, 1981). Instead, the search for ‘short-circuiting’ must take analysis beyond the confines of the text as it is traditionally conceived.

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Genre theory has been, in the main, rather reticent in respect of audience studies’ evidence about textuality. It sometimes seems as though there is fear-fuelled conspiracy to keep the traditional notion of the text-as-thing alive lest the whole business of genre theory disappears down the drain, leaving concerned parties with nothing left to observe regarding what is ‘generic’. Those who have repeatedly argued against such traditional text-centredness have implicitly attempted to show that such fears are groundless (Altman, 1999; Cobley, 2000; Makinen, 2001). In fact, it has been demonstrated that the contrary is the case: genre theory has more work ahead of it than was ever envisaged in the heyday of text-centredness during the first seventy or so years of the last century. The following agenda for the study of genre as an expectation rather than as textual features will, it is hoped, alleviate the worst of these fears. First, if expectations work to ‘short-circuit’ the significations in texts then the short-circuiting is not a product of those significations. The expectation that is genre will be suspended in, and primarily determined by, what Tony Bennett (1987, 1990) dubs a ‘reading formation’. The Althusserian derivation of the term is important in this context because of what has been discussed regarding homologies of capitalism and genre. Althusser, following the example of Lenin, rejected traditional Marxist base/superstructure models in favour of a notion of ‘relative autonomy’ of different, uneven levels of social existence and of ‘overdetermination’, in a quasi-Freudian sense, between those levels (1977: 94-97).

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Customarily, Marxism demanded that each level, in the last instance, must be determined by the level of the economic; yet, as Althusser recognised, the ‘economic’ did not always manifest itself in determination as a ‘thing’. Hence, ‘From the first moment to the last, the lonely hour of the “last instance” never comes’ (Althusser, 1977: 113). However, Althusser insisted upon the ‘social formation’ as characterised by uneven relations between features of the economy (and, by association, all brute facts of existence) and features of the discursive world, each of which operates according to its own rules and circumstances. It would be folly, Althusser recognised, to rely on a strict relation of determination between single levels. It is this idea of multiple and mutual determination that is extended in the concept of ‘reading formation’. Bennett (1987) stresses the importance of a number of discursive practices that operate on readers before, and simultaneous with, the texts which make up the discursive sphere, ordering the relations between texts in a definite way such that a text is never a ‘text-in-itself ’ but always a ‘text-to-be-read’.

One of the ways in which a reading formation might be interrogated more closely is through signs that more obviously pertain to specific generic texts. This can embrace both ‘below-the-line’ and ‘above-the-line’ signs. It takes only a limited knowledge of the institutions of television and film for a viewer to realise that an actor is giving an interview on a chat show not as a matter of fortuitous happenstance but in order to promote a film in which s/he appears. In fact, such below-the-line publicity has become so routine and aggressive that it has even generated public disdain (the blanket publicising of the 2002 James Bond film, Die Another Day, is an example of this). Another institutionalised spur to expectations might be reviews of generic texts which, ostensibly, add up to judgments of some level of quality. The same might be said of industry-supported ‘backslapping’ awards ceremonies, from the Grammys to the Oscars to the Booker Prize. In the

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Among the many elements that a reading formation will comprise and which need to be considered in relation to a generic expectation are: literacy training; knowledge of authorship; knowledge of how various institutions (the film industry, publishing, broadcasting, advertising, publicity) work; popular, word-of-mouth, assessments of texts; as well as such nebulous and seemingly daunting aspects of the contemporary social world as ‘history’ (itself caught up in the discursive realm of public opinion and information disseminated through different kinds of medium). The sheer enormity of reading formations need not be an occasion for despair, though. Both before and after the emergence of ‘new historicism’, in different media (and, admittedly, with significantly different characters) there have been persuasive studies of reading formations (on the one hand, see House 1960 [originally 1941] or Finley 1979 [originally 1954] and, on the other, Spigel 1992). Principally, such studies have shown that the reading formation is the natural habitat for the expectations which make up a genre at any given time.

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analysis of the contribution of above-the-line publicity, however, Altman (1999) counsels caution in the face of apparently obvious attempts to cue audience responses. This is not merely because above-the-line signs such as posters for films, billboards for books and television or radio programmes, and all sorts of advertisements are also financed by producers. In his work on film, Altman shows that it is short-sighted to attribute too much power to the producers’ publicity machine in the production of audience expectations. Through an examination of film publicity he demonstrates that producers’ discourse contributes surprisingly little to the generic character of films (1998) and, if anything, ‘critics and not studios lie at the origin of most generic language’ (1999: 127).

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The fortunes of genres are also an index of their varied existences as expectations. Thus, the crucial factor which will sustain a genre’s currency and longevity is verisimilitude. The phrase ‘perceived verisimilitude’ has been avoided here for the simple fact that it is a tautology; rather, verisimilitude, because it is bound up with genre, once again, relies on expectations. Famously, Todorov (1977) invoked two axes of verisimilitude: the ‘rules of the genre’ and ‘public opinion’ or doxa. Both are part of generic expectation in general: when somebody bursts into song during a musical, this does not confound expectations; likewise, expectations of generic rules will be dependent on the doxa, a regime of verisimilitude in itself constantly shifting according to a complex set of checks and balances which characterise the world of discourse in general. Some genres have maintained a reasonably steady level of verisimilitude in the realm of generic ‘rules’ by constantly pursuing close relations with ‘doxalogical’ verisimilitude (for example, the romantic narrative; the thriller; see Cobley, 1997); other genres have sometimes fallen on lean times as a result of a split between ‘rules’ and doxa which have rendered the genre almost untenable (melodrama for example); some, with seemingly the strongest of rules surviving many mutations, threaten to pass into oblivion even though their prominence occurred already generations after the passing of the real-life conditions which might have informed a doxa (the western for example). The investigation of ‘generic rules’ and the doxa of a genre in general or a specific generic text at a given moment – particularly if it experiences popular ‘success’, resurgence or some other kind of prominence – will reveal more about the signs in question than a treatment of them as stable things. If these characteristics of genre are insufficiently close to the ‘text itself ’, then the final item on the agenda might provide some succour. Indeed, derived from the work of Rick Altman, it actually pulls from the wreckage of ideological-structural analysis a component of genre investigation which seems, at first glance, intimately related to close reading of texts as containing ‘things’ (or the ‘text-in-itself ’, as Bennett would suggest). Altman considers two fundamental and inseparable constituents of genre: its ‘building blocks’ and the ‘structure in which they are arranged’. He calls these, respectively, genre’s semantic and syntactic aspects

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(1986: 30), a distinction which not only betrays its provenance in twentieth-century linguistics but also pays tribute to the dichotomous peregrinations of film theory. Altman (1987) applies semantic/syntactic analysis primarily to the Hollywood musical but it is clear that the theoretical separation between the two terms allows for a consideration of print and other genres’ equivalent of filmic iconography or mise-en-scène. Fundamentally, in film production it is possible to distinguish the ‘pro-filmic’ event incorporating what takes place in front of the camera, not to mention the framing and narrative positioning of those events, from the acts of editing, cutting and structuring of all that is filmed. This separation in, say, print fiction, is not so obvious even though it is integral to the definition of ‘narrative’ as complemented by ‘plot’ and ‘story’ (see Cobley, 2001: 4-6). ‘Plot’, the chain of causation in narrative genres, is undoubtedly a part of what is shown, as is ‘story’, in both print and audio-visual media. Yet, ‘plot’ is also crucial to how events are shown and is complicit with ‘narrative’ (re)structurings of chains of events in such genres. So, plot is, on the one hand, part of the syntactic dimension, referring to all those ‘structural’ features identified by previous genre theorists: for example, eventual revelation of the murderer in the ‘whodunit’, a climactic gunfight in the Western, a marriage or consummation of a relationship in the romance. Yet it is also, on the other hand, the factor of causation in a story; it is the catalyst which, along with ‘narrative’, leads to some events being narrated and not others. Plot is just one example of a slippage between the semantic and syntactic realms and, thus, as Altman insists, neither realm should be considered as discrete textual zones.

Genre’s ‘stability’ in an age of supposedly ‘unstable’ signs serves both the producer and consumer of generic narratives. However, it also augments the profound bad faith of a great deal of genre theory in a number of fields where textuality is studied.

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Where genre theorists have defined genre in terms of the semantic realm (textual ‘contents’) or, as is more often the case, its syntactic realm (textual ‘structure’, etc.), Altman suggests a more profitable understanding of generic expectation in terms of readers’ investment in the combined semantic/syntactic realm. Roles repeatedly considered ‘syntactic’ by theorists after Propp – ‘hero’, for example – should not be analysed as separable from supposedly ‘semantic’ aspects such as his/her good looks, his/her ‘goodness’ or, if the text is a film, how the hero is shot or positioned in each scene. Indeed, this apparently indissoluble bond is always already an act of short-circuiting and it is a further indication that short-circuiting does not find its basis in textual ‘things’. Altman therefore strongly advocates the exploration in genre theory of the use-orientation of expectant readers. Generic meanings are not merely created by publicity; nor are they unproblematically the products of already existing broad belief. And, centrally, they require an investment which economically realises readers’ expectations in an array of powerful condensation points. The combined semantic/syntactic realm is a good starting point for interrogating the power of such condensation points.

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Much of this latter derives from an ongoing conflation of ‘things’, ‘objects’ and ‘signs’, an error which, as Deely (2001, 2003) is at pains to point out, has had extensive ramifications for philosophy. In the sphere of textuality it was never tenable to think of generic signs as ‘things’ or even as ‘objects’; since genre is a relationship of expectation, the sign in the generic text is always in a state of ‘becoming’. It is sustained by a relation of expectancy. Generic signs – like all other signs – require sign-users and, undoubtedly, genres depend upon the attitudes, values and experiences of readers: these always already flesh out as ‘interpretations’ the putatively given foci of ‘ideations’. But, the knowledge relation in signs is not all that is at work in generic texts, for genres’ ‘expectant’ character also suggests the roles of emotions and pleasure (cf. Jost, 1998). Clearly, expectations can be met and this can take place when a complex set of conditions are favourable in sustaining genre. However, when signs pass from one set of historical conditions to another, the character of genre is exposed: expectations are sometimes more easily met, or, alternatively, they can be smothered at birth. Bibliography Althusser, L., ‘Contradiction and overdetermination’ in For Marx, trans. B. Brewster, London, New Left Books, 1977. Altman, R., ‘A semantic/syntactic approach to film genre’ in B. K. Grant (ed.), Film Genre Reader, Austin, University of Texas Press, 1986. Altman, R., The American Film Musical, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1986. Altman, R., ‘Re-usable packaging: generic products and the recycling process’, in N. Browne (ed.), Refiguring American Film Genres: Theory and History, London and Berkeley, University of California Press, 1998. Altman, R., Film/Genre, London, BFI, 1999. Austin, B. and T. Gordon, ‘Movie Genres: Toward a Conceptualised and Standardized Definition’, Current Research in Film 3 (1988), pp. 12-33. Bennett, T., ‘Texts, Readers, Reading Formations’, in D. Attridge et al. (eds.), Post-structuralism and the Question of History, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1987. Bennett, T., Outside Literature, London, Routledge, 1990. Brent, J., Charles Sanders Peirce: A Life, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1993. Buscombe, E., ‘The Idea of Genre in the American Cinema’, Screen 11:2 (1970), pp. 33-45. Cobley, P., ‘The Specific Regime of Verisimilitude in the Thriller’, Synthesis in Diversity: Proceedings of the 5th Congress of the I. A. S. S., Berlin, Mouton, 1997, pp. 389-392. Cobley, P., The American Thriller: Generic Innovation and Social Change in the 1970s, Houndsmills, Palgrave, 2000.

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Cobley, P., Narrative, London, Routledge, 2001. Cranny-Francis, A., ‘Gender and Genre: Feminist Rewritings of Detective Fiction’, Women’s Studies International Forum 11 (1988), pp. 69-84. Deely, J., The Human Use of Signs; or, Elements of Anthroposemiosis, Lanham, MD., Rowman and Littlefield, 1994. Deely, J., The Four Ages of Understanding: The First Postmodern History of Philosophy from Ancient Times to the Turn of the 21st Century, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2001.

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Deely, J., ‘The Quasi-error of the External World’, Cybernetics and Human Knowing 10: 1, pp. 25-46. Finley, M. I., The World of Odysseus, Harmondsworth, Pelican, 1979 (1954). Fish, S., ‘Why No One’s Afraid of Wolfgang Iser’, diacritics 11 (1981), pp. 2-13. Hess Wright, J., ‘Genre Films and the Status Quo’, in B. K. Grant (ed.), Film Genre Reader, Austin, University of Texas Press, 1986. House, H., The Dickens World, revised edition, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1960 (1941). Iser, W., ‘Talk Like Whales’, diacritics 11 (1981), pp. 82-87. Johnson, S., ‘No. 125’, The Rambler, in W. J. Bate and A. B. Strauss (eds.), Works, vol. 4, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1961 (1751). Jost, F., ‘The Promise of Genres’, Réseaux 6:1 (1998), pp. 99-121. Kitses, J., Horizons West, London, Thames and Hudson, 1969. Lipsitz, G., ‘Genre Anxiety and Racial Representation in 1970s Cinema’, in N. Browne (ed.), Refiguring American Film Genres: Theory and History, London and Berkeley, University of California Press, 1998. Makinen, M., Feminist Popular Fiction, London, Palgrave, 2001. Palmer, J., Thrillers: Genesis and Structure of a Popular Genre, London, Edward Arnold, 1978. Peirce, C. S., ‘Some Consequences of Four Incapacities’, Journal of Speculative Philosophy 2 (1868), pp.140-157. Peirce, C. S., Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, A. Burks et al. (eds.), Cambridge, MA., The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1931-1958. Peirce, C. S., ‘Deduction, Induction and Hypothesis’, in Chance, Love and Logic: Philosophical Essays, M. Cohen (ed.), Lincoln and London, Bison Books, 1998. Porter, V., ‘Between Structure and History: Genre in Popular British Cinema’, Journal of Popular British Cinema 1:1 (1998), pp. 25-36. Roth, M., Foul and Fair Play: Reading Genre in Classic Detective Fiction, Athens and London, University of Georgia Press, 1995. Ryall, T., ‘The Notion of Genre’, Screen 11:2 (1970), pp. 22-29. Ryall, T., ‘British Cinema and Genre’, Journal of Popular British Cinema 1:1 (1998), pp. 18-24. Spigel, L., Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Post-war America, Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 1992.

Watt, W. C., ‘Sebeok at 80, Semiotics at 2,350’, in M. Danesi (ed.), The Invention of Global Semiotics: A Collection of Essays on the Life and Work of Thomas A. Sebeok, Toronto, Legas, 2001. Welsch, T., ‘At Work in the Genre Laboratory: Brian De Palma’s Scarface’, Journal of Film and Video 49:1/2 (1997), pp. 34-51. Wright, W., Sixguns and Society: A Structural Study of the Western, Berkeley and London, University of California Press, 1975.

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Todorov, T., The Poetics of Prose, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1977. Tudor, A., ‘Genre: Theory and Mispractice in Film Criticism’, Screen, 11:6 (1970), pp. 33-43.

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The Genericity of Montage: Derrida and Genre Theory Jeff Collins To begin with some fragments of a conversation, perhaps unfinished, and perhaps not easily contained within the category of the historical: All that matters is the book, such as it is, far away from genres, outside the categories– prose, poetry, novel, chronicle–with which it refuses to align itself, and whose power to impose its place and determine its form it denies. A book no longer belongs to a genre, every book pertains to literature alone. (Blanchot, 1995: 141).

Literature ruins genres: thus Maurice Blanchot pronounced in 1959 the struggle of the literary text, le livre, against the determining and emplacing powers of genre. For Blanchot, informed by phenomenological-existential traditions and Heidegger’s thinking on art, genres had become worn out and insignificant. He had claimed this earlier: it was absurd to ask if Finnegans Wake could be called a prose work or a novel; genres were under siege from an ‘impetuous pressure of literature’, the affirmation of the essence of literature in the ruining of distinctions and limits. And yet, in 1976, Blanchot’s statements were pressed into service in a powerful defence of genre theory and history. They offered Tzvetan Todorov the opportunity for a counter-proposal: genres are inescapable. A new genre is always the transformation of an earlier one, or of several ... Today’s ‘text’ (which is also a genre, in one of its senses) owes as much to nineteenth-century ‘poetry’ as to the ‘novel’, just as ‘la comédie larmoyante’ combined features of the comedy and the tragedy of the previous century. There has never been a literature without genres; it is a system in constant transformation. (Todorov, 1990:15).

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Where Blanchot envisaged a ‘space of literature’ opening to the beyond of the text and of genre, Todorov pictured a field of mutations in which genres arise out of ordinary language use, heterogeneous speech acts, becoming genres ‘properly speaking’ when recurrent textual features are identified and marked in codes: an institutionalisation that establishes norms informing textual production and reception. This process is verifiable, because it leaves its deposits in empirically ascertainable, historical discourse on genres. In this respect, no text escapes: even Blanchot has to allow that the transgressive text affirms the generic norm that it marks in the act of its own disobedience.

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These concerns or motifs – the artistic text, the constitution of genres – might have a continuing resonance, at least where genre studies concern themselves with questions of textualisation. The conversations engaged by Blanchot, Todorov and others intersected the concerns and interests of the journal Tel Quel and also from 1970 those of Poétique, co-edited by Todorov and Gérard Genette. For all the subsequent influence of the genre theories proposed by Todorov and Genette, it has been easy to forget that they were engagements in debates on textualisation: what might count as a text, the limits of coherence of a text, its modes, subjects and politics. In 1979, those debates also provided occasion for Jacques Derrida’s ‘The Law of Genre’. Derrida’s essay has multiple strands of connection with others in the debates. In fact it could almost be read as an implicit unravelling of Todorov’s contribution, reversing its order of procedure and unpicking its treatments of Blanchot’s texts and of speech acts, two of Derrida’s long-standing interests. But Derrida also introduces a gesture unusual to genre theories: a refusal to allow the term ‘genre’ to be annexed entirely to the classification of cultural texts, for instance distinguishing between poetry and prose or species of the novel. Taken in the widest sense, genre concerns delimitations, the drawing of lines of demarcation and separation, forming types, kinds, classes or categories in general. By contrast, most genre studies have purchased their promises of clarity and utility through a certain economisation: making the term ‘genre’ do as little as possible.

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With this in mind, it is not surprising to find Derrida in partial agreement with Todorov on the question of artistic texts. He allows that such texts are no strangers to the rulings of genre, that it is always possible to declare genres of art, or to announce art itself as a genre. If transgressions arise, as he indicates in his reading of Blanchot’s ‘The Madness of the Day’, they are products not so much of an impetuous pressure of literature, but of an encounter between a law and a counterlaw: genres must not be mixed, it is impossible not to mix them. This formulation is not easily reducible, as if it announced no more than the existence of mixtures and hybrids. It carries a twofold uncertainty: that which allows texts their composition and enables their classification is also that which undoes texts and classes. Derrida writes of citation and participation. It is citation that engenders the impurities, corruptions, contaminations, perversions or degenerescences that infect the law of genre and the classification of texts (Derrida, 1980: 57). The necessary possibility of citation, as the necessity of repeatability-beyond-context in all language and signification, ensures the impossibility of any securely demarcated inherences or identity of a text. In spite of all protocols, academic or otherwise, no one can tell with absolute assurance when a citation has occurred or when a text performs itself as itself. As Derrida notes

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elsewhere, textuality is constantly composing with the forces that threaten to annihilate it. Textual identity, as presupposed by much genre theory, is placed in doubt. And there is another corrosion at work. It might well be thought, in what Derrida calls a ‘very humble axiom’ but one that is ‘hardly contestable’, that texts in any group or class must have some feature or features in common, some common trait, that has to be coded in order to render it recognisable and intelligible as the marker of that class (64). But in Derrida’s view, the trait must lie both in the text (or we lose hope of classifying that text), and yet, by dint of its need for coding or re-mark, also outside the text, in the realm of the code and of coding, no longer pertinent to the text. The text is divided, spatialised in difference from itself, and so is the genre. In Derrida’s terms, there is no belonging of a text to a genre, no replete membership, but rather the ambiguous condition of participation: belonging in the manner of not belonging. Questions of identity and belonging are not confined to texts and genres, and there are extensive implications. But a more difficult question is whether it should be of concern to genre studies, especially those concerned with empirical and historical categories. Derrida claims that what he writes about the law of genre ‘does not particularly concern either genres, or types, or modes’, and that he does not know ‘under what title the field or object submitted to this law should be placed.’ Perhaps, he conjectures, it might be the ‘limitless field of general textuality’ (63). If, given that degree of specificity, cultural theorists or historians began to think that Derrida’s contribution was of questionable relevance, he is quick to assure them that they are right. He insists that his essay will ‘keep to the liminal edge’ of genre theory and history (63), and in the introduction to the French edition, he disclaims the proposal of conclusions that are ‘the responsibility of literary criticism, poetics, narratology, rhetoric, linguistics or semantics’ (Derrida, 1986: 12). To Derrida’s critics in these fields, those statements could be taken as an unassailable alibi. His contribution, if it ever was one, can be set aside.

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Another aside, to return momentarily to the conversation: Blanchot in 1957 had written with a certain approval of Roland Barthes’s newly published Mythologies, taking the opportunity to note that contra-generic literature opened the path most opposed to the suffocating world of consumer myths, as Barthes himself would surely know. In 1977, Barthes published A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments. This text could be described as a montage, even if its author’s introductory discourse and titling do not use the term. It is a text of fragments, figures of discourse, in which ‘pieces of various origin have been “put together”’ (Barthes, 1978: 8). Moreover, it seems to evade recognisable genres, even down to its content, its figures:

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It is the very principle of this discourse ... that its figures cannot be classified: organised, hierarchised, arranged with a view to an end (a settlement): there are no first figures, no last figures. (7-8).

Barthes’s design for this text, or his wish, is that it resist narrative, Western culture’s Love Story or any biographical history of a love, as well as the forms of the non-narrative, the philosophy of love or criticism of amorous literature. So is it absurd to ask after its genre? Barthes characterised it as a speech act: it is an aside, or rather fragments of an aside, of that discourse or soliloquy that accompanies the Story and the History, the ordered forms of affective culture (7).

58 Genre Matters

But perhaps Barthes’s text is also a montage: another motif in the conversation, coupling in a re-openable chain with the artistic work, genres, textualisation. Could montage be taken as a proper object of study for genre theories and histories? What kind of generic status or consistency might it have, if any? Its case seems at once both clear and confused. Montage is a term of ubiquity and authority, widely circulated, familiar and assuring, evocative of expectations, yet also a term of capacious, inconsistent reference and erratic application across heterogeneous fields. Scarcely confined to the so-called legitimate arts, distributed across many practices, confounded with its synonyms and homonyms (collage, assemblage, compositing, editing), it is a disastrous, ruined term, resistant to monosemy or univocality. In addition, this ruined term organises a great deal of cultural discourse and practice. If, as Todorov promised, genres ‘bring to light the constitutive features of the society to which they belong’ (1990: 19), what might be brought to any such light by the categorising gestures of discourse on montage? A sketch is needed, some points towards an outline at least, that might picture the difficulties. This requires a certain step away from literature, because it is perhaps in the visual arts that montage as a generic term has been most exhibited and tested. I will not attempt to call up their definitions of montage, nor descriptions of techniques or forms. What is of concern is the figure that might appear to culturalhistorical genre studies, or at least to those studies that take genres as formations of texts, categories, institutionalised discourses of identification, production patterns and systems of expectation. There will be many abridgements in this sketch, and I indicate two especially: it primarily concerns aspects of the institutional uses of the term ‘montage’; and, for reasons of brevity, it allows the term to cover collage and other practices which sometimes, though by no means always, have been held distinct from it. Discourses on montage, for all their diversity, have persistently offered it certain orders of recognisability. It has been distinguished by its association with canonic

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authorial or group identifications, theoretical-conceptual models and principles, and modal, formal, technical or semantic criteria. These are neither mutually exclusive nor exhaustive.

Proper Names Academic art history has offered little appearance of difficulty in dealing with montage. It has been identified with the practices of a canonic body of modernist artists operating especially in Germany, the Soviet Union, France and Italy between the 1910s and 1930s, and the canon is more or less extendable to encompass later artists or movements. The identification of montage is folded into the identification of groups or of representative figures and authorially designated bodies of workHeartfield and Höch, Marinetti, Braque and Picasso, along with artists such as Klutsis, El Lissitzky and Rodchenko in Constructivist and Production Art circles, Bayer or Ernst among Surrealists, and so on. In the most reductive exemplary schema, montage is what John Heartfield and Berlin Dada artists did.

These problems have been traditionally more discernible in the arts than in other generic fields. But montage is a conspicuously unstable case. It is not confined to

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This is, of course, a much more complex process than the schema suggests. It usually involves other specifications such as phases of practice, aesthetic orientations or analyses of textual characteristics. It is also subject to the vicissitudes of naming and authorialisation, and of signing and counter-signing (not necessarily locked into proper names and authorial corpora), that Derrida and others in different ways have noted (for instance Derrida, 1994:15-18). But for genre studies, it raises particular problems. Authorial categories have often been rejected, debarred from proper generic status, partly on grounds of their cultural exclusivity and hierarchising effects, partly on theoretical grounds. Todorov for instance argues that works allocated to an identified author need not bear significant textual features in common; authorial categories are socio-historical, leaving behind the realm of poetics, of the semantic and syntactical features that he takes as necessary to genres properly speaking (1990: 19). There might seem little reason to disagree: an author’s name need tell us nothing about textual characteristics; the name ‘Heartfield’ need summon no thought of ‘montage’. The problem is that it can do so; and what is suggested here is more than a collision between historical discourse and the categories recognised by genre theory. To put it aphoristically: we might consider, with Derrida, that a name as well as being a name is also a word, and it can take on many semantic functions. This is recognised by film theorist Jacques Aumont: the most typical discourses produce an identification, in which ‘Eisenstein equals montage’. What is more, a proper name as a word can fold history and poetics together. A genre theory that rejects authorship categories is unlikely to be able to deal with these characteristics of discourse and their functions in the formation of genres.

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the arts, and its canonic names can recede or be radically challenged. One symptom of this: in 1992, Matthew Teitelbaum’s curatorship of Montage and Modern Life, 1919-1942 did much to circulate montage as an identifiable and highly consumable art-institutional product. Yet Teitelbaum’s project proposed an extension of the canon, in a move that could hardly avoid announcing some replacement of it: study of montage should embrace popular visual culture, advertising, publishing, commercial art. This might have seemed a modest proposal, since montage had long been associated with such practices (it was acknowledged by Hannah Höch and Raoul Hausmann in their ‘discovery’ of popular calendars, postcards and advertisements in 1918, and it has been identified with nineteenth-century domestic albums, print publication, cartes-de-visite and other so-called ephemera). But with the displacement of familiar author and group names, a question arose with some urgency: how far was there any commonality among works and texts across such diverse times, places, institutions, markets, political conditions? Could the term ‘montage’ subsume all of them? Critics identified problems familiar to genre historians: failure to account for earlier historical instances or for exceptional instances (montage as an integrative device in Leni Riefenstahl’s films, for instance), tendencies to homogenise dissimilar practices or works, and neglect of significant institutional uses such as the deployment of photomontage in state propaganda (Taylor 1993, Kear 1995). A certain de-canonification of montage might have been proposed, but by putting pressure on other generic criteria.

Principles and Concepts

60 Genre Matters

Couching montage as a concept or principle is a commonplace of artistic discourse. It informed for instance the titling of part of Berlin’s 1999 millennial show of German art, Prinzip Montage/Collage, a title that assumed the mobilisation of audience expectations and the granting of a certain recognisability to the works. Montage is far from unique in this respect, since artistic genre formations habitually involve categories and corpora premised on some adherence to, expression of, or information by, concepts and principles – whether explicitly announced in a discourse or ascertained by inference, inter-textual reference or other means. Again there are challenges to mainstream genre studies, which have often refused to recognise such categories as proper genres. In Todorov’s style of argument, they would be cultural-historical phenomena, aspects of the field of production informing certain texts and corpora, but not necessarily entailing any shared, codifiable textual features. Nevertheless, these historical phenomena are categories of a kind. Their institutional formation can be complex, invested in a dense web of manifestos, programmes and protocols, along with theoretical and critical texts of many kinds. But they take on a high degree of visibility in the construction of tendencies, movements and traditions (these terms all having been

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used for montage). That such categories can gain powerful currency is indicated perhaps by avant-garde art, Surrealism, or Dogme films, all of them institutionalised, recognisable terms of designation. Recognisability in a market place of artistic designations might be a generic function, but it carries no guarantees of conceptual coherence. Montage – again not uniquely, but prominently – has been richly furnished with theoretical discourses that are conceptually incompatible and subject to competing interpretations, even if harnessed to canonic figures. To take the most familiar examples, we could recall Eisenstein’s shifts between intellectual and expressive or overtonal montage, and also his later emphasis on synaesthetic construction; or Godard’s defence of Eisenstein against the anti-montagistes Bazin and Metz, later rescinded. From the point of view of cultural genre formation, little assurance or consistency arises from bids to adjudicate the legitimacy of concepts, for instance to discriminate montage properly speaking as a dialectical conception. We could note Annette Michelson’s insistence on Eisenstein’s obedience to dialectical principles, against Georges Didi-Huberman’s view – based partly on Eisenstein’s brief association with Georges Bataille – that Eisenstein was pursuing not dialectics but a species of the informe (Michelson, 1999). While, if Roland Barthes chose not to couple the term ‘montage’ to A Lover’s Discourse, it could have been to shear away certain associations from a text whose discourse was, in Barthes’s declaration, ‘not dialectical’.

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The interpretative schisms connected with montage have touched directly on questions of genre. In some formulations, montage is attributed a capacity for generic disruption. André Salmon’s declaration in 1919 that Picasso had achieved work ‘liberated from the imbecile tyranny of genres’ might be highly questionable, but it was part of a shared circuit of similar critical opinions (Poggi, 1992). To Walter Benjamin in 1930, the novel seemed a genre riddled with the crises of individualism, and the force that exploded it was montage, the staging of events of interruption between citable, communally available fragments – an explosive force in which painting would also give way to film, the always-unfinishable, incomplete art form (Caygill, 1998). Yet, in other uses, montage has been situated within established generic patterns. Eisenstein’s directorial genres are problematic (what if he had indeed filmed Marx’s Capital, as planned in the 1920s, or Joyce’s texts, as Joyce himself is said to have thought fitting?), but in his pedagogic practice he considered knowledge of montage as a pre-requisite for work within generically inscribed film specialisms (Eisenstein, 1996). His prescribed genres were to be as broad as possible, but in the pedagogic interest of presenting the greatest range of problems. Montage as figured here is neither liberated from genres nor necessarily disruptive of them.

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Modes, Forms, and Thematics From some perspectives of genre theory, it might seem better to consider montage as a formal device or method, maybe a means or technique, perhaps informing texts and genres but never itself amounting to generic status.

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One of the most rigorous bids to articulate such distinctions is provided in Genette’s analysis of literary genres (1992). For Genette, genres are defined thematically: the texts of an identifiable genre will share some manifest subject matter or content. Genres are distinguished from modes, taken as manners of enunciation and address, and from forms, in the primary sense of perceptual configurations but also implicating media. This is not necessarily easy to transfer to the visual arts, given the low order of priority and specificity it gives to notions of medium, materials and techniques. But allowing that modification is possible, Genette’s major distinctions promise some certitude: if genres are defined by content, and montage is considered content-independent, then montage is not a genre. In this view, it might best be considered as a mode of visual textualisation, or perhaps a formal device. As Genette is aware, conceptual schemas and historically articulated categories can diverge sharply, and that is precisely what occurs in the case of montage. Artinstitutional discourses have used the term in all of Genette’s ways, and more, with no easily ascertainable regularities or priorities. ‘Montage’ has designated form and also style, and techniques, methods, means and sometimes medium, often in imbrication with the authorial or conceptual identifications mentioned above. And folded into this is the further difficulty that modes, forms and other features of textualisation might not be entirely separable from content. They can acquire a semantic function, as when montage as a technique or formal device is taken as itself an image of modern culture, or of its condition of fragmentation, as Benjamin saw it. Montage as technique or form has in fact accrued a large repertoire of thematisations, including articulations of cultural vanguardism, rationalism, internationalism, modern technology, the cultural empowerment of the machine or the engineer, the dynamism of sport and the city, and not least ‘foreignness’, as Sally Stein suggests in her study of U.S. indifference towards montage in the 1930s (Teitelbaum, 1992). Christopher Phillips is far from alone in offering montage at least a double identity: in his view, it served ‘not only as an innovative artistic technique, but functioned too as a kind of symbolic form, providing a shared visual idiom that more than any other expressed the tumultuous arrival of a fully urbanised, industrial culture’ (Teitelbaum, 1992: 22). Introducing a strict conceptual regularity into this scenario can always improve it, that is, produce a more consistent genre catalogue, in the manner of reduction: reducing the normative criteria by which montage properly speaking is held to be a proper genre, reducing thereby the extent of the appropriate corpus and reducing

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the promise of cultural genre studies to inform us about the constitutive features of the culture in which it occurs. A rather different approach, though remaining with Genette’s vocabularies, would be to grant montage the status of an archigenre, a term that in the visual arts might function perhaps like ‘painting’ or even ‘architecture’. But if so, the theoretical schema would again cut violently across prominent institutional uses which have been neither medium-specific nor disciplinary nor vocational (the montagist remains a rare figure). Montage, moreover, seems almost to invite reversals of level: ‘photomontage’ in some cases has inscribed photography as a sub-category of montage, in others, placed montage as one among many sub-sets of photography. Even for genre theory accustomed to a kind of classificatory vertigo, this is a complex condition. Recent practices have not simplified that condition, given that questions of montage have been embedded in digital reconfigurations of forms and techniques (Manovich, 2001). These developments have also contributed to an increased porosity of boundaries between practices, amid shifting fields of epistemological and ethical discourse (Batchen, 1994) and claims and counterclaims concerning the effectivity of ‘new montage’ in cultural politics (Kennard, 1995; Druckrey, 1994). Another claim arising is that montage has now become ubiquitous in the arts or even in visual culture: in some characterisations (Matthew Teitelbaum’s, for instance), montage is a way of seeing or mode of visuality, culturally pervasive and operative across art, mass media and everyday life. From the perspectives of cultural genre studies, montage is a complex and perhaps recalcitrant phenomenon. It challenges widespread notions of what might count as a proper genre, and of what might be taken as historical evidence for the existence of genres. If questions of genre are not to be evacuated altogether – a move which would pass over in silence every force and power of classificatory normalisation – then some address is needed to at least two issues: broadening the sense of what is understood by genre, and drawing attention to cases that might seem aberrant or resistant.

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There are recent tendencies in genre studies that have done both. In film studies, for instance, Steve Neale (2000) argues for a meeting or dovetailing of mainstream approaches with the more extensive conceptions of genre promoted by speech act theory, pragmatics, and also Derrida’s writing (though placed here in unlikely alignment with speech act theories). In Neale’s account, categories such as film, fiction film, Hollywood film, and narrative feature film are no less generic than the Western, even if these genres are formed, and operate, in different ways. Art film and avant-garde or experimental film are not exempt; they are genres, and the texts allocated to them can belong at the same time to genres formed on the basis of authorship, aesthetic tendency or other characteristics (25). This kind of approach marks a major and perhaps irreversible departure from single- or dominant-

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principle genre theories and the limitation of the term ‘genre’ to a highly restricted set of identificatory norms. It also has other features that might be useful in the case of montage: attention to the diversity of ways in which genres are formed, to degrees of predictability even in avant-garde or experimental art, and to the differences between academic or aesthetic formulae and those of capital-intensive commercial markets (27). Yet in spite of this – and even assuming a degree of transferability to the visual arts – it might be questionable how it would confront the degree of incoherence, the vivid interchanges and clashes of classificatory modes that occur in the case of montage. Neale’s treatment of film noir, a genre notoriously unstable in its criteria and designations, offers suggestive parallels. But it is almost as if, to pursue the comparison, we might be uncertain whether ‘film noir’ was a technique involved in film manufacture or a category at the level of the fiction film or documentary, competing with them, whilst gathering identifications elsewhere but not as film.

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If montage appears as some kind of aberrant case, difficult to ascertain, it might indicate not so much a failure of its discourses as a need to think differently about genre. It provokes in particular a questioning of the relations usually established between aberrant cases and genres about which there is ready consensus. Neale notes that mainstream film studies still tend to be confined to ‘single wellrecognised genres’, suggesting the need for studies of ‘unrecognised’ genres like racetrack films, of semi-recognised genres like drama, of cross-generic cycles and production trends like overland bus and prestige films, and of hybrids and combinations of all kinds (254). In style, at least, this is not a new consideration in genre studies. It can be detected in different guises even in the constructions of Todorov and Genette, both of which betray a certain anxiety or fascination about that which lies beyond the orbit of genres about which there is a discernible consensus. In Todorov’s essentially dynamic view, heterogeneous speech acts and mutating genres constitute a highly unstable field, in which proto-genres, not-yet, not-quite, or otherwise underdetermined genres must arise, threatening to escape closure in the point or moment of identification by the genre historian. And Genette, whilst envisaging an encompassing, three-dimensional structural model of literary genres, also pictures an unlimited proliferation of genres, giving rise to ‘unforeseeable genres ... species yet to come that are still unimaginable to us today’ (65), along with ‘occasional surprises, repetitions, capricious decisions, sudden mutations, or unpredictable creations’, calling into play not only ‘the sheer fact of generic memory (texts recalling other texts)’ (78) but also ‘generic feeling’. These approaches share a common procedure. They take as the standard case an ideal of assured generic presence – the proper genres, the products of properly verifiable designation or fully accomplished mutation – and treat other cases, the not-quite or maybe genres, the surprises and caprices, as aberrances, relegated to the margins or to the marginal orders of the deficient, the corrupt, the unexpected

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or simply the hard to discern. For Derrida, this is a procedure inextricably bound up with the metaphysics of presence: All metaphysicians proceed from the simple, intact, normal, pure, standard or selfidentical ... to treat then of accidents, derivation, complication, deterioration. ... Hence good before evil, positive before negative, pure before impure, simple before complex, the essential before the accidental, the imitated before the imitation. This is not just one gesture among others ... it is the metaphysical exigency, the most constant, profound and potent procedure. (Derrida, 1977: 188).

In creating and designating ‘aberrant’ cases, genre theories constitute themselves as proper theories of genre properly speaking. Yet we might ask, how would it be if the procedure was at least reversed, to take as the necessary case that which is usually designated non-standard or secondary? That is what Derrida asks us to consider: the law of generic non-mixing can take hold only on that which is already condemned to internal division, overflow and mixture; the counter-law takes precedence, constitutes the law, offers the law its possibility (1980: 58). This draws attention to generic limit-cases, and does so not in order to colonise them, to assimilate them to an improved genre catalogue, but to allow them their exhibition of the play between the law and the counter-law. Montage might figure in this, if montage is construed as a field of processes and formations which give rise, with some persistence, to genres or to a genre difficult to assimilate to genre theory.

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That montage is not only resistant to classificatory order but actively disruptive of it might be one of the conclusions to be drawn from Greg Ulmer’s ‘The Object of Post-Criticism’, an account that also brings Derrida’s writing into the scene. Some of Ulmer’s characterisations are familiar: montage and collage are located historically, identified with the work of certain artists such as Picasso and Braque, and associated with concepts adduced from Eisenstein, Benjamin and Brecht. A process is also involved, that of découpage – cutting or severing elements from works, objects or pre-existent texts or materials – and assemblage, inserting them in a new creation, playing on the sides of rupture, discontinuity or heterogeneity, not entirely suppressing the alterity of the elements (84-7). But ‘collage/montage’ is also treated in terms of repeatability, citation and grafting. In Ulmer’s usage, collage is citation and cross-contextual grafting, montage is the dissemination of those borrowings through the new setting. And collage in literature and ‘postcriticism’ is the limit-case, the extreme, of citation (89). Ulmer offers no explicit account of genre. However, it seems that much of the disruptive force of collage/montage is brought to bear on generic markers. It violates property and propriety, both authorial and textual. Form and content tend to lose their relation of exteriority. And materials can de-form each other, contaminate each other’s

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content, or be mutually rejecting. In Derrida’s terms, this is a practice of the allogene, the transplant into a dissimilar and perhaps rejecting body, though not as a one-way process: ‘Each grafted text continues to radiate back towards the site of its removal, transforming that too, as it affects the new territory’ (Ulmer: 90). From the point of view of cultural genre formation, collage/montage presents a paradoxical case. It takes on whatever generic coherence it may have in the guise of generic incoherence. It brings to the forefront precisely those features one might wish a text did not have, were that text to be assigned securely to a proper genre. The more assuredly it takes shape, becomes recognisable and expectable through such traits, the more it announces its resistance to generic emplacement.

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There is another aspect to this, though. Ulmer has in fact evoked two entwined senses of collage/montage, one bound into historical and cultural practices, designating particular works and corpora and subject to the vicissitudes of cultural genre formation; and one in which it is construed as citation, grafting and dissemination. We deal with both, not one. If we take the first of these senses, collage and montage have achieved certain generic recognisabilities, however unstable, contradictory or incoherent these might seem to mainstream genre theories. This is a complex condition, in which collage and montage cannot be allocated an unreserved power of generic and textual disruption, as if in complete liberation from all the strategies of containment which play on the side of unity and closure: the recurrent authorial and conceptual ascriptions, residual uses of pictorialist space and other devices. But taking up the other hand, it could be said that montage is writing, in Derrida’s sense: not so much writing as the order of scripted representation, vehicle for the communication of ideas, but writing as the possibility of disengagement and citational graft, the possibility of breaking with textual limits and borders, with origins, intentions and contexts. Montage as writing can scarcely take on the profile of a genre. It inhabits all language, marking, signification, as their condition of possibility. None of them can get under way without it. And if montage is writing, it is at work in those works customarily signed and counter-signed around the names Titian, Lartigue or Cartier-Bresson. Montage is perhaps one of the names that a certain culture has had to grant, in its institutional discourses, to processes and formations of textualisation in which writing asserts itself. Montage, then, is figured in that culture several times over: as a generically aberrant case, resistant to construal as a proper genre, yet also taking on in certain situations a generic force, inscribed by borders or limits that separate it from its others, from those assumed to have the condition of normalised, unciting, non-montaging textuality (the organic text, the unified text). And montage is writing, the possibility inhabiting all of them, the standard case of textualisation.

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To attempt a summary of this condition, which is hardly reducible, is difficult. But perhaps these figures might be taken as partial responses to the most presumptive question: is montage a genre? •

Ascertainably so. The word ‘montage’ demarcates and separates, gathering the assurances of expectation and recognition, of institutional designation and market operability, granted by a term of genre.

•

With scant plausibility. Passed through the most habitually operative procedures of genre theories, subjected to inspection in the interests of conceptual coherence and reliability of record, montage is a genre only incoherently, contradictorily, in ruin or in reduction.

•

By no means. Montage is writing, a resistance of genre and its excess, a point where genre falls apart, in all language, all discourse and signification.

Montage, in this difficult condition, draws together questions of textualisation, of genre and of art. And it might leave genre theory with a certain dilemma or glimpse of impossibility. How can empirically oriented, historical studies proceed if the procedures have to take place in fields marked by categorial instabilities and ineradicable de-limitations? In Derrida’s style of answer, perhaps, we cannot give up on either side. His text ‘The Law of Genre’ performs in that way. It might not belong to genre theory or history, but it does participate, addressing issues raised in Todorov’s discourse, commenting on Genette’s text, on romanticism and its literary genres, and offering an account of Blanchot’s text with features still reminiscent of a literary case study. But also, the term ‘genre’ is paleonymised, allowed something of its usual meanings yet also its more extended senses, and taking on undecidabilities that escape calculation. Derrida’s text offers no choice or decision between two ways of thinking, or two territories, with a line of demarcation holding between them, ensuring their existence as separated. And Derrida has noted, in other ways and in different situations, the difficulties of the double demand that arises is such that

(1994: 28).

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it is always necessary to take the analysis of the historical, political, economic and ideological conditions, to take that analysis as far as possible, including the history of the specific art form. But if the analysis of all those conditions is exhaustive, to the point where the work is ultimately only there to fill a hole, then there is no work. If there is a work, it means that the analysis of all the conditions only served to, how shall I say, make room, in an absolutely undetermined place, for something that is at once useless, supplementary, and finally irreducible to those conditions.

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Between the analysis of specific conditions and the non-utilisable excess of the work, a play of passages: each punctuates or interrupts the other, perhaps in something of Benjamin’s sense of interruption, that word of form-(de)construction in montage. Bibliography Barthes, R., A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, trans. R. Howard, London, Jonathan Cape, 1978. Batchen, G., ‘Phantasm: Digital Imaging and the Death of Photography’, Aperture, 136 (1994), pp. 47-51. Blanchot, M., ‘The Disappearance of Literature’, in M. Holland (ed.), The Blanchot Reader, Oxford, Blackwell, 1995, pp. 136-142. Caygill, H., Walter Benjamin: The Colour of Experience, London, Routledge, 1998. Derrida, J., ‘Limited Inc. abc...’, in Glyph 2 (1977), pp. 162-253. Derrida, J., ‘The Law of Genre’, trans. A Ronell, in Critical Inquiry 7:1 (autumn 1980), pp. 5581. Derrida, J., Parages, Paris, Editions Galilée, 1986. Derrida, J., ‘The Spatial Arts: an Interview’, in P. Brunette and W. Wills (eds.), Deconstruction and the Visual Arts, Cambridge University Press, 1994, pp. 9-32. Druckrey, T., ‘From Dada to Digital: Montage in the Twentieth Century’, Aperture 136 (1994), pp. 4-7. Eisenstein, S. M., ‘Teaching Programme for the Theory and Practice of Direction’ [1936] in R. Taylor (ed.), Eisenstein: Selected Works, Vol. 3: Writings, 1934-47, London, BFI Publishing, 1996, pp. 74-97. Genette, G., The Architext: an Introduction, trans. J. Lewin, Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1992. Kear, J., ‘Montage, Modernity and its Histories’, Word & Image, 11:3 (July-Sept. 1995), pp. 3206. Kennard, P. and S. Read, ‘New Labour’, Creative Camera (June1995), pp. 10-13. Manovich, L., The Language of New Media, Cambridge MA, MIT Press, 2001. Michelson, A., ‘Eisenstein at 100: Recent Reception and Forthcoming Attractions’, October, 88 (spring 1999), pp. 69-85. Neale, S., Genre and Hollywood, London, Routledge, 2000. Poggi, C., In Defiance of Painting: Cubism, Futurism and the Invention of Collage, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1992. Taylor, B., ‘Montage and its Comedies’, Oxford Art Journal, 16:2 (1993), pp. 91-6. Teitelbaum, M. (ed.), Montage and Modern Life, 1919-1942, Boston, Institute of Contemporary Art, and Cambridge MA, MIT Press, 1992.

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Todorov, T., ‘The Origin of Genres’, trans. C. Porter, Genres in Discourse, Cambridge University Press, 1990, pp. 13-26. Ulmer, G. L., ‘The Object of Post-Criticism’, in H. Foster (ed.), Postmodern Culture, London, Pluto Press, 1985, pp. 83-110.

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II. Genre in Adaptation and Translation Ohio Impromptu, Genre and Beckett on Film Garin Dowd

Samuel Beckett’s choice of the title Ohio Impromptu to name the play first performed to an audience of academics and scholars at Columbus, Ohio in 1981 is one manifestation of its author’s interest in the question of literary genre; more generally, in Beckett’s dramatic works one encounters a meticulous attention to the activity of categorisation, even if the energy is often directed toward the creation of phantom genres for spectral exemplars. This essay concerns itself with Ohio Impromptu in particular because by means of elements specific to this play (including the context in which it was first performed) it comments upon its own very failure to occupy its designated genre co-ordinates (these include its identity both as a play and as an ‘impromptu’). This play, which is so apt to incorporate other genres, however, is presided over by a stage direction which locates it firmly in the theatrical context. It is in its deliberate failure to attend to this stage direction that the Beckett on Film version of the play goes beyond the mere treacherous fidelity that is inevitably a feature of any adaptation. In arguing this, the essay analyses the foregrounding in the play of questions that can be said to pertain to genre (in several senses). Its more specific intention is to suggest that, via a combination of casting and special effects, the adaptation succeeds not only in cancelling the critical reflection on the ‘genre gesture’ that is lodged in Ohio Impromptu, but also in eradicating the very disjunction between Reader and Listener upon which the play depends. Ohio Impromptu, Genre and Beckett on Film 69

In 1979 Jacques Derrida delivered his paper ‘La Loi du genre’ (Derrida, 1980) to an international colloquium on Genre in Strasbourg; in 1981 Samuel Beckett, on the invitation of the Beckett scholar Stan Gontarski, wrote Ohio Impromptu for an audience derived from the delegates attending Samuel Beckett: Humanistic Perspectives. It is not only the intervention authored by Beckett that does not belong to the genre of discourse known as the conference address. The paper by Derrida is remarkable for the extent to which, through a deconstructionist manoeuvre, it performs as well as states its topic; in its complex reading of Blanchot’s récit, La Folie du jour (1949/1973) it is simultaneously a statement on genre and a performance at the limit of the genre of conference address, or as Derrida himself puts it:

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Submitting myself to the subject of our colloquium, as well as to its law, I have sifted ‘A récit,’ La Folie du jour. I have isolated a type, if not a genre of reading from an infinite series of trajectories or possible courses [...] I could not say what exactly has happened in this scene, not in my discourse or my account. What was perhaps seen, in the time of a blink, is a madness of law – and, therefore, of order, reason, sense and meaning, of day. (Derrida, 1992: 251; 1980: 227-8).

For his part Beckett had been asked to write a dramatic piece to be performed to the delegates at the conference devoted to his work. His first instinct was to head in the opposite direction to that taken by Derrida – in a gesture towards conventional conference address and away from drama proper in the form of a monologue delivered to the delegates by a spectral apparition (Beckett in Beja, Gontarski and Astier, 1983). That false start behind him, Beckett eventually settled on a play which enacts a certain paradoxical relation between literary criticism and its object of scrutiny, wherein exegesis and literature at once fuse and refuse each other. Beckett stages this encounter by means of a series of what will here be referred to as ‘genre gestures’.1

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Derrida’s essay asks: ‘What if there were, lodged within the heart of the law itself, a law of impurity or a principle of contamination?’ (Derrida, 1992: 225; 1980: 204). More of this paradox later, but in the first instance, genre is to be defined, in the words of Derrida, as ‘the identifiable recurrence of a common trait by which one recognises, or should recognise, a membership in a class’ (1980: 210-11). Participation in a genre, he points out, is inevitable. Literature, art or any discursive text must, Derrida asserts, ‘bear the mark[s] of a genre’, even if these marks are diverse and not necessarily compatible. By genre here Derrida means both classification as, say, a dramatic, or narrative work, or as a novel or a récit (the distinction which is at the heart of the analysis the Blanchot text occupying the major part of his essay), and genre in the several other senses in which the term is being employed here.2 But he is also addressing the more specific question of the genre gesture, or the classificatory impulse. This is one of those instances of what he has elsewhere, in Archive Fever, identified as the archival impulse – the drive to archive (see Derrida, 1996). Belonging to, or participating in a genre is, then, unavoidable: it is in this respect that the genre gesture is tantamount to law, which in this instance takes the form of a diktat: you will belong to a genre. In this sense, moreover, the genre gesture precedes and antedates any volitional or inaugural act on the part of an author, as it does any hermeneutic action on the part of the reader or viewer of a work of literature, art or film: ‘The mark of belonging need not pass through the consciousness of the author or the reader’ (Derrida, 1992: 230; 1980: 211). Hence,

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when the author whose genres are addressed here – Samuel Beckett – deliberately makes a genre gesture and calls one of his works a ‘radio play’ or play for television, that gesture does not override what Derrida calls the law of genre. The law of genre however has another side: Derrida asks us to consider that the marks of belonging (the traits that allow generic classification) to a genre do not themselves belong. This gives rise to the formulation that, while there is no genreless text, all texts participate in genre without that participation ever amounting to a belonging (1995: 230; 1980: 212). This is an instance of the characteristic Derridean moment or locus wherein an identification – a closure – is simultaneously prey to a constitutive opening: interiority is contaminated and infiltrated by a constitutive outside. This indeed is the case with the coinage ‘clusion’ with its double and paradoxical sense of both inclusion and exclusion.3 Conterminous with this moment is the movement of what he calls ‘degenerescence’ , the failure of genre co-ordinates and of the gesture which installs these. It is the intention here to ask if Beckett’s work is attentive to precisely this paradox, formulated it must be said by Derrida at a very marked and indeed remarked upon (not least by Derrida himself) distance from the work of Beckett. 4 A second, but allied concern, will also be addressed here through an analysis of the particular case of Ohio Impromptu: namely that certain transpositions or adaptations appear to be so inattentive to the consequences of Beckett’s genre gestures as to create versions of the work which lose any right to claim participation or belonging to the very genre, or species identified with the name Samuel Beckett.5

Beckett’s corpus of works for the stage is open to classification in several ways. On occasion the author himself makes the classification, as when he states in its subtitle that Waiting for Godot is ‘a tragi-comedy in two acts’. However, there are many further instances of classification in the Beckettian dramatic corpus, to

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Beckett declares his interest in the question of genre by means of his decision to classify certain of his works according to their belonging, and often partial- or nonbelonging, to a given genre (even if the genre in question is not an established and generally recognised one). Indeed because the genre gesture in Beckett is often aberrant and extraordinary, the identification of the texts in this way constitutes an internal system of classification which works to prohibit their easy classification under the categories of existing and accepted genre categories (Clément, 1994: 111). All of Beckett’s works, in their nominal genres, according to Clément ‘ne conservent du genre que le nom, ils ont peu à peu, les livres succédent aux livres, sapé les fondements mêmes du genre, en rendant la pratique dérisoire, ou seulement nostalgique’ (Clément, 1994: 111).6 Hence it is possible that the genre classification and the Beckett-generated taxonomy become transitory tools to reveal the resistance of the text to form and order in the shape of hermeneutics, of which genre-based criticism is but one example.

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restrict oneself only to those to which he explicitly draws our attention by means either of a title or a subtitle.7 These instances are not genre denominators in the same way Godot is identified as a tragi-comedy. Hence, Endgame is ‘A play in two acts’; Act without words I ‘A mime for one player’; Act without words II ‘A mime for two players’; The Old Tune ‘An adaptation’; Come and Go ‘A dramaticule’; Happy Days ‘A play in two acts’; All that Fall ‘A play for radio’; Embers ‘A piece for radio’; Words and Music ‘A piece for radio’; Cascando ‘A radio piece for music and voice’,’ Play ‘A play in One act’; Eh Joe ‘A piece for television’; Ghost Trio ‘A play for television’; and ...but the clouds... ‘A play for television’. In addition, the titles of Ohio Impromptu, A Piece of Monologue, Film, and Rough for Radio II include to a greater or lesser degree a genre gesture.

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Other dramatic works such as Play and Film, by means of a ludic manoeuvre, suggest that they might enjoy a complete identification with their genre (see also Clément, 1994: 109). Beckett’s foray into film is an example of what Ruby Cohn calls a ‘genre-jumping’ exercise – but of course genres are already being mixed when what is under scrutiny are plays not for theatre but for radio, and when works staged in theatres are not plays but mimes. Indeed a work such as Words and Music is a play for radio which deliberately mixes genres at another level: here literature – if it is a genre or a genre of genres (as in Maurice Blanchot’s conception) – mixes with musical composition and dramatic performance, on the radio.8 With oddities of classification that identify works as ‘roughs’ for radio and theatre respectively the received notion of dramatic genres is perhaps suspended entirely; if not it is with the consequence that one invent a new genre or mode which might be described as ‘outline’ or ‘draft’: a genre of incompletion (which has its correlate in the idea of miniaturisation inscribed in another subtitle: ‘dramaticule’) which lays claim to status as a genre or as the name of a category of work for stage or for radio. Perhaps by virtue of his invention of genres which by their very nature draw attention to the arbitrariness of the constitutive genre gesture, to its evanescence, or to the inadequacy of classification tout court, Beckett is participating in a tradition identified by Blanchot when he wrote of works by authors which display – in what remains once they have been ‘abandoned’ – the wounds of their repeated reworking and their falling short of completion and wholeness (Blanchot, 1993: 53). As Genette remarks, genre theory (and the taxonomic gestures carried out in the name of genres) is always retrospective, being founded on a false projection into the Greek past (Genette, 1992).9 In this respect the Beckett on Film project is an interesting new addition to the range of ways of classifying Beckett’s dramatic works, because this new category is a latecomer in every sense: unlike the other ways of classifying the work, this one is not of Beckett’s own making; nor is it in any way internal to his oeuvre. The question arises, then, what is one to make of this ‘genre’, so to speak, of Beckettian work, or work deriving from Beckett’s work? The characteristic which these diverse productions share is that their support is film

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rather than video; these are artefacts whose existence as a finished work is determined by the identity of film as a distinct medium. The present essay cannot dwell on the cluster of questions to which this quasi-generic classification gives rise, but can deal only with a particular facet. For one particular plane of the project is devoted to what turns out to be a genre-jumping exercise in more than two dimensions. In Beckett’s work in general the manner in which individual works bear the mark of genre is sometimes in a fashion with a passing resemblance to the paradoxical distinction (between récit and roman) at the heart of the analysis of Blanchot in Derrida’s essay. For although the addition as a subtitle of récit or roman (and occasionally the subsequent removal of that generic designator) specifically does not characterise Beckett’s work (as it does Blanchot’s),10 one does necessarily confront in his prose works the implicit paratextual distinction between novel and short prose piece, or the names invented for the various non genres included in this category such as ‘fizzle’ or ‘text’ (as in Texts for Nothing). As for the plays, Ohio Impromptu is a crystallisation of Beckett’s procedure of a genre gesture accompanied by a sign of ‘de-generation’ or the generation of a sliding away from genre – a fall from genre. This is a play which, belonging as it does to the category grouping together the ‘late plays’, shares with its related works an acute attention to aspects that can be said to constitute the ‘specificity’ of drama as a medium; in this sense it isolates one of the qualities which – in a certain use of the term – enable one to identify it as a genre of literature (theatre) in which ‘the actor’s body never ceases asserting itself in its material, physiological facticity’ (Garner, 1994: 44). The stage directions specify: L=Listener R=Reader

Light on table midstage. Rest of stage in darkness. (Beckett, 1986: 445).

Specifically, Beckett’s play plays with the idea that two actors, no matter what degree of likeness they embody, and disregarding the extent to which they converge in appearance, always and in advance differ and diverge: they must occupy distinct spatial (and as we shall see temporal) co-ordinates.11 In short, if one is thought of as a copy of the other, then the first will have preceded him even if in an existence imagined offstage; in an alternative conception, which would take them as two cloned beings separated from their model, their very replication would separate

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As alike in appearance as possible.

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them in space.12 The situation which the play potentially evokes is that to which philosophy has ceaselessly returned (and which genre theory addresses at quite another level): difference and repetition.13

74 Genre Matters

But before addressing directly the problematics of difference and repetition opened by the divided and ruined One of Ohio Impromptu, what can be said of the many genres, in the several meanings of that word, staged in the play? Genres staged, commented upon, or evoked? An awareness of these can be gleaned by relating something of the muthos of the play. Two figures very similar in physical appearance sit at a table at night. R (Reader) reads from a book, the other (L) listens. The only action of the Listener is to knock on the table a total of six times to demand the repetition of a passage of the text being read, an action which on one occasion prompts Reader to depart from his text and utter the word ‘Yes’. The narrative as it is revived by R displays characteristics associated with the autobiographical and memoir genres, and concerns two entwined memories, one of them involving walks with a man on the Isle of Swans, the other concerning a relationship with a woman. In both narratives a mood of nostalgia and regret prevails. There is, however, a reflexivity here that cannot be avoided: the narrative account of the past also seems to comment on the occasion of its present rendition. For example, the book from which the Reader reads in the present is in some sense the selfsame worn volume referred to in the narrative. In this way the past narrated in the book and read in the present by the Reader becomes the present. The narrating present moment embodied in the act of Reading, moreover, is already past: Reader’s actions, the principal one of which is to come and to read, in the present are subject to a pressure which makes them finished, long since completed. Once the reading has finished in the other sense – once the book on stage has been closed – the two figures remain in silence and the light fades to black. One can in the first instance make a provisional list of the genres of literary writing that are presented on the basis of relatively immediately identifiable shifts in level. First the framing genre is drama; then there is an embedded prose narrative; this latter can be more precisely classified as belonging to the sub-genre of memoir, or of confessional or autobiographical narrative. Parts, then, of the play can be said to have a connection to non-dramatic genres. This of course is in conformity with the observation familiar to theorists of genre, namely that every genre slides into those other genres by means of which it defines itself, even if it is for that fact alone – that is, that it defines itself by means of an exclusive disjunction. The play itself, however, is not as easily identified as a drama as one might at first glance believe. Its first audience consisted of 450 conference delegates gathered to hear academics reflect on the purported relation of Beckett to something identified as humanism. The play, it is possible to assert, is not a play, or not only a play. Ohio

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Impromptu is in part a perverse and irreverent conference address; at the very least it takes the place of such an address, while simultaneously standing in for its author in the spotlight of what professed itself to be a humanistic perspective. As a play it is unable entirely to shake off or to erase these duplicitous origins (which in Genette’s terms occupy the space known as the paratext). Now Beckett is clearly aware of the ability of the play he wrote to perform this twofold substitution. That this is so is signalled by the decision to name the play Ohio Impromptu: the play is thereby stamped with spatio-temporal co-ordinates – the geographical location (‘Ohio’) and the occasion (‘impromptu’ for Stan Gontarski and the 1981conference). Moreover this stamping of the play in such a way as to cause it always to trail behind it a legacy of its inaugural performance has consequences – of which Beckett was only too well aware – for the Beckett scholars who would subsequently come to interpret the play; for those stage directors and actors intent on reviving it; and for those who might later come to the play aiming to adapt it for another media form, or genre.

Ohio Impromptu, Genre and Beckett on Film 75

That, however, is not the full extent of the inscription of a genre problematic. This is not least due to the fact that the very concept of genre is subjected to a disorientation in the play (via a slippage from genre co-ordinates), in the sense that this play does not even belong to its most general category; it is incapable of even this degree of adherence (much like several of Blanchot’s récits which have a tendency to lose or gain this generic designation as they move through successive editions). Indeed, pulling the optical instrument by means of which one might perform categorisation back further, does the specimen even belong to literature? After all, this work does not call itself a play, nor even a ‘dramaticule’ – that shrivelled vestige of a play to which Beckett is drawn in another title. It names itself by way of a genre that properly belongs to music (the impromptus of Schubert, Schumann and Chopin being well known to Beckett), not to literature as such (although there are instances in the modern and contemporary period as noted separately by Gontarski, 1982 and McMullan, 1993). Arguably, then, every instance of identification via classification that one might perform upon this play is subject to a de-stabilising force that forestalls the classificatory drive, the drive to archive according to the exercise of what Derrida calls the ‘hermeneutic right and competence’ (Derrida, 1996: 2). (Both prospective and retrospective adherence to genre designators are problematised.) For, as the splendid example of Borges shows, just because there is a species of creature, examples of which, ‘de lejos parecen moscas’ (‘from a long way off, look like flies’), does not mean that the creatures in question are flies (Borges, 1952: 124). Moreover, it is quite likely that those fabulous insects belonging to this category of from-a-long-way-offresembling-flies do not themselves form a genus, other, that is, than a genus defined by its resemblance to another genus. Even their identification when arrived at by an observer or instrument measuring them against that genus will only corroborate the genus identified in advance as the standard or model. In short the

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category of from-a-long-way-off-resembling-flies is not a genre; if so it is an absurd and exorbitant genre, an a-generic genre. The same is true of Beckett’s play, conference mal-address, still-born impromptu, withheld gift: from a long way off, whether measured in time (say, from the vantage point of the year 2004) or in space (from the back of the conference theatre in Ohio) it may resemble a play, but yet it is not really a play, not entirely a play. Ohio Impromptu does not belong where it purported to be located; it was never quite there; it will always remain somewhat exorbitant. The genre gestures however are even more pervasive than this would suggest. If we follow Jean-François Lyotard in understanding genre as ‘genre of discourse’ (Lyotard, 1988), then, as many commentators on the play are swift to point out, in Ohio’s ‘characterisation’ there is the self-reflexive interrogation of the genre of literary criticism (commentary) or hermeneutics: face-à-face the play presents a reader and a receiver-interpreter.14 The two roles demand that one sees and hears on stage two genres of discourse at work (or at play): literary criticism and literature itself. If these are genres which are, to employ a Leibnizean term, ‘incompossible’ – L can only make R stop, elide, and return or repeat, what he cannot do is make it mean any more or less than it does – with one of them reduced to near silence (and to a total silence as far as verbalisation is concerned), in Lyotard’s terms what the play can be said to stage is a differend between literature or writing and critical exegesis. These two – like R and L – resemble each other so much and yet refuse each other (the subtext of Derrida’s statement on not reading Beckett, which for him means not writing on Beckett). From a long way off they might be said to be the same, but close up they do not belong to each other; they are not even related.

76 Genre Matters

Another possible reading would attest to the mixing of genres that contravenes the prohibition mentioned at the beginning of Derrida’s essay: ‘ne pas mêler les genres’ (Derrida, 1980: 176). The table on the stage in Ohio becomes a mixing table via which spectral voices representing literature and literary criticism respectively are overlaid one upon the other: from the Latin Quarter hat which is positioned on that table is summoned the author of Finnegans Wake (Joyce [1939] 1977) who famously wore one very like it (literature), while the conjunction of reader and interpreter furnishes an undeniable echo of the origins of Beckett’s reading of that particular work in progress in his essay ‘Dante...Bruno.Vico..Joyce’ ([Beckett 1929] literary criticism).15 However, these autobiographemes could equally direct one to the genres of writing and of interpretation, and to the limit which the play itself is attempting to touch. The second genre however is mute: criticism and interpretation do not speak in Ohio Impromptu: only the work speaks; all that can be heard is the murmur of the neutre as identified by Blanchot (Blanchot, 1955: 56). Yet simultaneously both speaking and listening functions are, as it were, switched on by Beckett and he plays them alongside one another.

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When, however, it was adapted for screen under the umbrella of the Beckett on Film project (in a version starring Jeremy Irons) two important alterations are made to Beckett’s stage directions. As a direct consequence of these changes, far from being an instance of the very mixing of genres that Derrida’s paradoxical law of genre would advocate as integral to the act of generic classification in the first place, and contrary to the ‘degenerescence’ of genre distinctions which Beckett’s work promotes, Ohio Impromptu on film in fact excises the traces, precisely, of contamination. It does so by forcing Beckett’s play in a direction to which – if its stage directions are respected – it is fundamentally resistant. In place of the ‘degenerescence’ (and the ‘formlessness’) at work in the play for theatre, the version for television generates a form and reinstates the problematic diktat identified by Derrida at the start of his essay: ‘ne pas mêler les genres’ (‘genres are not to be mixed’, Derrida, 1980: 202; 1992: 223).16 The first significant departure is the use of Jeremy Irons in both roles, the second the fading out of the reader at the end of the film. Both departures of course are made possible by characteristics specific to film as a medium and would be impossible to achieve in stage drama. The first departure can be suggested (as in Beckett’s stage directions concerning the similarity in appearance of R and L) on stage but not actualised. The second could be suggested by means of lighting effect or a certain use of the stage set. The point is however that neither the duplication nor the selective fade is authorised by Beckett. It is the contention of this essay that the combination serves to deprive the play of some of its core concerns, not least its micro-textual reflection on the question of genre.

Ohio Fades

Ohio Impromptu, Genre and Beckett on Film 77

In giving his play the title Ohio Impromptu Beckett makes what is perhaps his most corrosive genre gesture: the event that it names does not arrive, cannot arrive, other than in its non-arrival, its non-self-coincidence at the Beckett conference in Ohio. In the play itself the theme of non-arrival is also addressed. It is the book on the table lying between the Listener and the Reader that is the archive of this nonarrival, just as it is the archive of their own non-coincidence.17 Thus Beckett’s characters testify, to borrow the words of Blanchot from the year before Ohio Impromptu, that the event is ‘the advent of what does not happen, of what comes without arriving, outside being, and as though drifting away’ (Blanchot, 1986: 5). The book is on the one hand a bond between them, but it is also simultaneously that which separates them.18 Any questions of chronological priority pertaining to either character must go through the complex detour of the archive represented by the book from which the Reader reads; while any sense in which the Listener precedes the Reader is thereby undermined by what Abbott incisvely identifies as the Möbius strip effect of the embedded narrative (Abbott, 1996: 175). It is an effect which makes it impossible to disentangle the haunter from the haunted, so that if, as Derrida asserts, ‘Le spectre, ce n’est pas simplement quelqu’un que nous

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voyons venir revenir, c’est quelqu’un par qui nous sentons regardés, observés, surveillés’ (Derrida, 1995: 135), the play establishes the possibility of a double spectrality, a stereospectrality. 19 This structure of double and reversible haunting is ousted in the Beckett on Film version; the paradox of waiting in Beckett’s work is thereby rendered in such a way as to fit into a comfortable teleological template (which is simultaneously a mimetic template). The fade-out makes the Reader merely a ghost, or an imagined or hallucinated double – a Platonic ‘descendant’ of the ‘ascendant’ Listener. In its seeking out of this ‘ground’ or foundation, the screen version deprives the play of its bodies plural and dispersed, a structure which it replaces by having two host bodies inhering in one (Jeremy Irons). While there is on screen a representation of two bodies, the director installs a Platonic hierarchy of form and copy, and even makes the copy slip into a simulacrum, by simply fading it away: a question of degrees of belonging to the stellar person of Jeremy Irons. Moreover, in filming a disappearance not part of Beckett’s play – in making the book and the Reader disappear together – the director absorbs the destabilising temporal effects created by Beckett and re-orders temporality into an unproblematic linearity.

The State of Ohio Address20

78 Genre Matters

The non-belonging to genre which Beckett remarks upon in his title and which, by virtue of his stage directions and intended casting he underlines, and seeks to reinforce, may in the end have an affinity with the statement about the abeyance of genre in the neutrality and passivity named by Blanchot ‘literature’ or the Book. Perhaps the various genres laid bare on the table of Ohio Impromptu – critical exegesis (it should be recalled that the play is performed to academics attending a conference), autobiography, memoir21 – all subside in the movement of slippage from co-ordinates that is literature or the Book. Blanchot sums up the characteristics of this genre-smashing phenomenon in the following terms (it must be underlined that genre and classification are explicitly addressed by Blanchot in the paragraphs from which the quotation is taken): A preoccupation...which never directly reveals, confirms or justifies itself, which one only approaches by turning away from it, which one only grasps when one goes beyond it, in a pursuit which must in no way be concerned with literature, with what it ‘essentially’ is, but which, on the contrary, is concerned with diminishing it, neutralising it, or, more accurately, with descending, in a movement which ultimately eludes and disregards it, to a point where all that seems to speak is impersonal neutrality. (Blanchot, 1995: 141).

The Book is linked to the concept in Blanchot which names the interminable awaiting, the non-arrival at or attainment of the goal, the non-arrival of dawn. The

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vigil as it functions in the thought of Blanchot necessarily falls short of the goal of illumination, revealing, or aletheia. The night vigil of Ohio Impromptu as Beckett intended it to be staged is resonant both of Blanchot’s conception of the book to come, and of Derrida’s reflection on the non-arrival of genre in ‘La loi du genre’: This axiom of non-closure or non-fulfilment [clusion] enfolds within itself the condition for the possibility and the impossibility of taxonomy. This inclusion and exclusion do not remain exterior to one another; they do not exclude each other. But neither are they immanent or identical to each other. They are neither one nor two...The clause or floodgate of genre declasses what it allows to be classed. It tolls the death knell of genealogy or genericity, which it however also brings forth to the light of day. Putting to death the very thing that it engenders, it cuts a strange figure; a formless form, it remains nearly invisible, it neither sees the day nor brings itself to light. (Derrida, 1992: 231; 1980: 213).

The act of holding the play within the orbit of its theatrical specificity alone, as marked and remarked in Beckett’s stage directions, enables Ohio Impromptu to maintain the vigil it seems to perform in a manner close to the concepts of Blanchot and Derrida. At one level this exigency might motivate the conclusion that there has only ever been one (solicited but impossible) performance of Ohio Impromptu; at another it might mean that certain stagings or indeed screen versions to come of the play might approach what Beckett achieved in this first and/or only performance.

Ohio Impromptu, Genre and Beckett on Film 79

To conclude, it is necessary to mention the possibility that if genre co-ordinates tend to be presented in Beckett the better that they are subject to ruination, and if he is a willing participant in this failure, then there might be some scope for suggesting that in the very works themselves there is an implicit sanction for departures from the letter of his text, for relocations, recontextualisations, in short for a comprehensive de-generation in part bequeathed to us by Beckett himself. However, as the case of Ohio Impromptu reveals, Beckett’s genre gesture writes in advance against the deviations from his text made by the Beckett on Film version and hence undermines them. In its removal of two elements central to the performance of the play’s embedded reflection on genre and genericity, the screen version becomes merely a film about, rather than a film version or adaptation of, Ohio Impromptu.22 Finally it is even possible to read the film as an attempt to resurrect the Beckett play in line with the ‘humanistic perspective’ agenda of the conference at which it was first staged; but whereas the conference happily hosted the non-belonging to the genre humain (human species) which the Ohio stage marked and remarked upon, the film restores the pure, unmixed species to centre stage.

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Notes 1. Writing with literary criticism in mind, David Duff begins his introduction to an anthology of Modern Genre Theory (2000) by making an assertion which those working in areas other than literary studies may find a little anachronistic. Genre, he says, has been democratised and redefined. He continues: ‘not only is the term enjoying renewed currency in literary discourse; it also shows signs of becoming a general cultural buzzword, used in contexts increasingly remote from literary criticism, and applied to forms of writing and speech that have little or no relation to literary genres’ (Duff, 2000: 2). In the light of this it is hoped that the present essay – in sticking for the most part to a literary-critical register in the use of the term ‘genre’ – is not found to be too undemocratic and ‘un-redefined’. 2. For reasons of space the aspect of genre which includes the question of gender, of what Mary Gerhart has called ‘Genre choices, gender questions’, is addressed briefly in the editorial introduction in this volume. See Gerhart (1992). 3. I am grateful to the audience at the paper upon which the present essay draws and in particular to Brian Caraher for reminding me of the importance of the neologism clusion. I am also grateful to Jeff Collins for reminding me of the various versions of Derrida’s text: the original French version and English translation in Glyph 7 1980, and in Critical Inquiry in 1981, whereas in the perhaps now better known edited version reprinted in Acts of Literature (Derrida, 1992), based as this last is on Derrida’s own edited version of the essay for publication in Parages, certain sections are omitted. See both Caraher and Collins in this volume. In clusion ‘the limit of the frame or the border of the context always entails a clause of non-closure. The outside penetrates and determines the inside’ (Derrida, 1988: 153). 4. See Derrida (1992: 60-62) for an account of how he has tried and failed to write something on the work of Beckett. 5. The executor of the estate of Samuel Beckett, the author’s nephew Edward Beckett, chose the occasion of a 2003 symposium on the work of Beckett in Sydney to lament the increasing number of adaptations, stagings of prose works and versions of plays which disregard Beckett’s stage directions. Thus an attempt was made to close down the production of Waiting for Godot (running in tandem with the conference and attended by many of its delegates) directed by Neil Armfield for the extensive use it made of live music. It is beyond the scope of the present essay to enter this debate – nor to follow up Edward Beckett’s suggestion that academics should police aberrant productions – other than to make an attempt to discuss the consequences of a specific deviation which may or may not be in a relationship of fidelity. 6. Trans: ‘keep of the genre only its name; book after book they have undermined the very foundations of genre, rendering the practice derisory, or merely nostalgic.’ 7. For the purposes of this essay I refer only to the texts in their English versions. 8. Blanchot’s conception has an affinity with the notion put forward by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy that ‘the literary absolute’ is a genre of genres. See Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy (1988). 9. For more on this see Genette’s well-known correction of the long-standing and widespread error of genre commentators in attributing the famous tripartite distinction of epic, lyric and dramatic genres to Aristotle. Genette (1992).

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10. Thomas l’Obscur began by being identified as a roman (Blanchot, 1942) and ended up with all the traits of a récit (Blanchot, 1950), aside that is from its being so classified by its author. For more on this see Dowd (1999). 11. The necessity of conformity to, or of matching the ‘specifications’ of a species or genre, determine the inclusion or exclusion of an individual from that genus. It is perhaps only at this microcosmic level that it is true of Beckett’s work that it explores the human condition, despite the many claims made for Beckett’s work in this regard, even in the title of the conference to which the play was a contribution. 12. See Derrida (1971) on the ‘anoriginal’ structure of mimicry. (I should stress that the term anoriginal is taken from Andrew Benjamin [1993], not Derrida.) 13. The best and best-known account of the play of difference and repetition in Beckett’s work is Connor (1988); see also Abbott (1996) for a critical interrogation of this account. See also Deguy

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(1992) for a reading of mimesis and repetition reflecting on Aristotle’s Poetics and Ricoeur (1992) for an account of Aristotle on narrative. 14. Reading has a special place in the ethics of the différend according to Lyotard (see Lyotard, 1988). For more on Lyotard’s philosophy as a genre see Crowell (1991). 15. Beckett confirmed to his biographer James Knowlson that he had in mind Joyce, both in the form of the hat and of the anecdote about the île des cignes (Knowslon, 1992: 665). The fact that Beckett occasionally assisted Joyce, reading to him and writing down dictated passages of the work in progress which was to become Finneans Wake (1939) is, as many have been swift to remark, another autobiographeme that is difficult to avoid. In an irresistible coincidence, as far as the present essay is concerned, Derrida’s essay on Joyce makes much of Joyce’s ‘marking’ of Ohio in Ulysses (Derrida, 1992: 271, Joyce, [1922] 1960: 129). 16. For Derrida’s comments on degenerescence and formlessness see Derrida (1980). 17. Just as the book is an index of the non-coincidence of R and L, so also is it the trace of what Deguy, in his reading of Aristotle, identifies as the relation between techne and nature: ‘La mimesis est au centre, verbalement, d’une des plus illustres sentences: He tekhne mimeitai ten phusin; au centre comme le mot de la relation; c’est la Relation qui est dite, le “au commencement était la Relation”. Le faire de la mimesis, et son contrefaire, fraye la relation, et “dépose”, aux deux pôles, de l’art (tekhne) et de la nature (phusis)’ (Deguy, 1992: 326); trans: ‘Mimesis is verbally at the centre of one of the most illustrious sentences: He tekhne mimeitai ten phusin; at the centre like the word of relation, it is Relation that is stated, the “in the beginning was Relation”. The making of mimesis and its unmaking opens up relation and “deposits” art (tekhne) and nature (phusis) at two poles.’ 18. In Leibniz’s monadology the degree to which a zone of clarity predominates in a monad is indexical of the degree of its perfection. Every monad has an obscure zone, and shares transmonadically in this obscurity. It only falls to some monads to accede to the clarity and light of an enhanced clear zone. See Leibniz (1983). 19. Trans.: ‘The spectre is not simply someone whom we see returning; it is, rather, someone by whom we sense ourselves being watched, observed and under surveillance.’ 20. In the holograph text reprinted in Beja, Gontarski and Astier Beckett jokes about ‘the state of Ohio’. 21. Beckett confided to one of his biographers, James Knowlson, that the woman with the ‘dear name’ was evoked by Beckett’s wife Suzanne and that the walks on the Ile des Cignes were intended to allude to Joyce (Knowlson, 1996: 665-6). 22. In a companion piece to the present essay I have elsewhere explored at more length the complex relation of the Beckett on Film version to Beckett’s play proper. See Dowd (2003).

Bibliography

Beckett, S., ‘Dante ... Bruno . Vico .. Joyce,’ in Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress, Paris, Shakespeare and Company, 1929. Beckett, S., Ohio Impromptu, in Samuel Beckett. The Complete Dramatic Works, London, Faber and Faber, 1986. Beja, M., S. E. Gontarski and P. Astier (eds.), Samuel Beckett: Humanistic Perspectives, Columbus, Ohio, Ohio State University Press, 1983. Benjamin, A., The Plural Event, London, Routledge, 1993. Blanchot, M., La Folie du jour, Montpellier, Fata Morgana, 1973. Blanchot, M., The Space of Literature, trans. A. Smock, Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1982. Blanchot, M., The Infinite Conversation, trans. S. Hanson, Minneapolis, Minnesota University Press, 1993.

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Aristotle, Poetics, trans. with an introduction by M. Heath, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1996. Abbott, H. P., Beckett Writing Beckett: The Author in the Autograph, Ithaca,Cornell University Press, 1996.

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Blanchot, M., The Writing of the Disaster, trans. A. Smock, Lincoln and London, University of Nebraska Press, 1986. Blanchot, M., ‘The Disappearance of Literature’ (1953), trans. I. Maclachlan, in M. Holland (ed.), The Blanchot Reader, Oxford, Blackwell, 1995, pp.136-42. Borges, J. L., ‘El idioma analítico de John Wilkins’, Otras inquisiciones 1937-1952, Buenos Aires, Sur, 1952, pp. 121-25. Clément, B., L’Oeuvre sans qualités: Rhétorique de Samuel Beckett, Paris, Seuil, 1994. Connor, S., Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory, Text, Oxford, Blackwell, 1988. Crowell, S. G., ‘Differend Notice: Philosophy as a Genre’, L’Esprit Créateur, Passages, Genres, Differends: Jean-François Lyotard 31:1 (1991), pp. 77-99. Deguy, M., ‘La vie comme l’oeuvre’, in B. Cassin (ed.), Nos Grecs et leurs modernes: Les stratégies contemporaines d’appropriation de l’antiquité, Paris, Seuil, 1992. Deleuze, G., The Logic of Sense, trans. C. Stivale, Columbia, Columbia University Press, 1991. Derrida, J., ‘The Double Session’ (1971), in Dissemination, trans. B. Johnson, London and Chicago, Athlone Press and Chicago University Press, 1982. Derrida, J., ‘La Loi du genre,’ Glyph 7 (1980), pp. 176-201. Derrida, J., ‘Afterword: Toward an Ethic of Discussion’, in Limited Inc., G. Graff (ed.), Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1988. Derrida, J., ‘The Law of Genre,’ in D. Attridge (ed.), Acts of Literature, New York, Routledge, 1992. Derrida, J., ‘Ulysses Grammophone: Hear Say Yes in Joyce’, in D. Attridge (ed.), Acts of Literature, New York, Routledge, 1992. Derrida, J., Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. E. Prenovitz, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1996. Derrida, J., and B. Steigler, Echographies de la télévision, Paris, Galilée, 1995. Dowd, G., ‘“Glisser dans le vide”: Blanchot, Thomas l’Obscur and The Space of Literature’, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 4:3 (1999), pp. 153-169. Dowd, G., ‘Karaoke Beckett, or Jeremy Irons, Mimicry and Travesty in Ohio Impromptu on Film’, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 13 (2003), Three Dialogues Revisited/Les Trois dialogues revisités, Marius Buning et al (eds.), pp. 169-182. Duff, D. (ed.), Modern Genre Theory, London, Longman, 2000. Garner, B. S. Jr., ‘Beckett, Merleau-Ponty, and the Phenomenological Body’, Bodied Spaces: Phenomenology and Performance in Contemporary Drama, Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press, 1994. Genette, G., Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. J. E. Lewin, Cambridge University Press, 1997 (1987). Genette, G., The Architexte: An Introduction, trans. J. E. Lewin, forward by R. Scholes, University of California Press, 1992.

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Gerhart, M., Genre Choices, Gender Questions, Norman, University of Oklahoma Press, 1992. Gontarski, S. E., ‘Review: The World Première of Ohio Impromptu’, Journal of Beckett Studies 8 (1982), pp. 133-5. Joyce, J., Ulysses, London, The Bodley Head Ltd., 1960 (1922). Joyce, J., Finnegans Wake, London, Faber, 1977 (1939). Knowlson, J., Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett, London, Bloomsbury, 1996. Lacoue-Labarthe, P. and J.-L. Nancy with A.-M. Lang, ‘Avant-Propos’, L’Absolu littéraire: Théorie de la littérature du romanticisme allemand, Paris, Seuil,1978.

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Lacoue-Labarthe, P. and J.-L. Nancy, ‘Genre’, Glyph 7(1980), pp. 1-14. Leibniz, G. W., La Monadologie, édition annotée par Emile Boutroux, Paris, Librairie Delagrave, 1983. Lyotard, J.-F., The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. G. Van Den Abeele, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1988. McMullan, A., Theatre on Trial: Samuel Beckett’s Later Drama, London and New York, Routledge, 1993. Ricoeur, P., ‘Une reprise de la Poétique d’Aristote’, in B. Cassin (ed.), Nos Grecs et leurs modernes: Les strategies contemporaines d’appropriation de l’antiquité, Paris, Seuil, 1992. Royle, N., After Derrida, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1995.

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Translating Genre Susan Bassnett

At first sight, it might seem to be anachronous to be discussing genre in this postmodernist age: is there anything left to discuss in literary studies which seem to have moved beyond genre categories? Recent discussions of literary texts are framed within a discourse that highlights difficulties of categorising and defining: we emphasise hybridity, liminality, in-betweenness and conceive of literary studies in the figurative language of mapping: we have traces, boundaries, thresholds, border crossings, frontiers, unstable categories that are always in a state of motility. As Trinh Minh-ha puts it: Working right at the limits of several categories and approaches means that one is neither entirely inside or outside. One has to push one’s work as far as one can go: to the borderlines, where one never stops walking on the edges, incurring constantly the risk of falling off one side or the other side of the limit while undoing, redoing, modifying this limit. (Minh-ha, 1991: 218).

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This figurative language reflects increased movement globally, just as it also reflects a shift in conceptions of what boundaries and frontiers signify. Since the collapse of the Iron Curtain, the end of the Cold War, we have seen a reconceptualising of Europe. As early as 1993 it was possible to draw attention to the revision of maps of Europe that extended the continent out to the Caspian Sea, while eliminating Iceland and parts of Northern Europe altogether (Bassnett, 1992). ‘Europe’ as a designator allows for flexibility in the selection of different countries according to different criteria (the Eurovision song contest is a case in point). There are all kinds of other configurations that are reflected in terminological shifts: no longer First World and Third World, but Northern and Southern Hemispheres or ‘Pacific Rim’ to refer to a transcontinental grouping of many countries and cultures. Despite the end of the Cold War, other global polarisations have emerged, often underpinned by divisions either generated by, or generative of, conflictual national, regional (and sometimes culturally specific) political (and/or ethico-political) agendas. The global phenomena of exile, migration on a massive scale; and millions of people in transit characterise the latetwentieth- and early twenty-first-century geopolitical spectrum. Reminders are abundant of the contrast between apparently fixed, stable states and unstable ones whose populations are in a state of flux. If it is commonplace to speak of ‘positioning ourselves’, it is because one must situate and continually resituate oneself. Co-ordinates can no longer be taken for granted anywhere by anyone.

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But it is not the purpose of this essay to generalise about global change. Rather, it is here contended, there is a necessity that the matter of genre return to the fore, not in prescriptive or formulaic ways, but in order to see what light can be shed on processes of intercultural exchange by thinking about genre cross-culturally. That may best be achieved through looking at translation. Translation has never received much attention in the English-speaking world. Less than 3% of the books published annually in the UK are translations, compared to over 60% in Sweden, for example. We talk about writers such as Brecht or Ibsen or Strindberg as though they were English-speaking playwrights. We nod in the direction of the Russian Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky, but it is still possible for an eminent novelist to argue for the impact of the Russian novel on the twentiethcentury English novel, without once mentioning the word ‘translation’. And if English speakers have not thought much about translation in the past, they have even less cause to do so now. Global English ensures that all over the world people speak, or aspire to speak, English.

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But there is a downside to global English about which native speakers need reminding: on the one hand, the sheer power of English means that many minority languages feel threatened. Many have disappeared, others are declining faster than anyone would have anticipated even a few years ago. On the other hand, the spread of global English disadvantages the many native English speakers who do not acquire another language, for anyone who adds English as an extra layer on top of their own language or languages enters the growing international community of people who are multilingual, who can operate across languages. In contrast, English speakers risk becoming ever more monolingual and, since language is the heart in the body of culture, monocultural. It is not by accident that interculturalawareness training in the business community is a huge expansion area in the English-speaking world, as knowledge of other languages declines at precisely the time when the need to understand more about other cultures should be high on the international agenda. In 1965, Paul Ricoeur wrote about a tension between national culture and what he called ‘universal civilisation’, suggesting that in the move towards modern civilisation, cultures would have to let go or even abandon their past, at the very moment when holding on to that past was an essential aspect of the forging of a national spirit (Ricoeur, 1965: 276-7). It is interesting to bear this in mind, because one of the arguments for disregarding the importance of translation revolves around ideas of universalism. It has been suggested that if there can be such a thing as universal understanding, then meaning can be translated unproblematically, so the task of the translator is not an especially onerous one.

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But this, of course, is nonsense. Umberto Eco in an essay entitled ‘Translating and Being Translated’ puts it very succinctly: Equivalence in meaning cannot be taken as a satisfactory criterion for a correct translation, first of all because in order to define the still undefined notion of translation one would have to employ a notion as obscure as equivalence of meaning, and some people think that meaning is that which remains unchanged in the process of translation. (Eco, 2001:9).

Translation Studies, as it has developed since the early 1980s, started as a small group of radicals from several countries, notably Belgium, the Netherlands, Israel, Czechoslovakia (all multilingual societies), all of whom were dissatisfied with what they saw as the limitation of approaches to translation by linguists on the one hand and literary scholars on the other. The linguists in those days tended to decontextualise translation, while the literary people were (on the whole) dismissive of translation which they saw as a second-class, derivative activity and they would only engage in making evaluative pronouncements. The scholars in the interdisciplinary field of Translation Studies wanted to look again at translation, both at what was involved in the actual process of transferring a text across a linguistic boundary and at the relationship between the translation and the source text in their different contexts. They wanted to understand what happened to a text once it had been translated and was received in another literary system, and to investigate the norms that applied in translation at different moments in time and in different places. At the outset, the key issues being debated were ‘equivalence’, ‘faithfulness’ and ‘untranslatability’. There was and always has been a lot of talk about what gets lost in translation, often couched in esoteric statements about the ‘spirit’ or ‘essence’ of a work that the poor translator could never grasp (Bassnett, 2002). Faithfulness was another loaded word: the translator was always supposed to be faithful to the text, acting as the servant or facilitator of the text. The objective was equivalence, so that the reader of the translated text could be assured that he or she was reading the same text as the one read in the source language. Underpinning all these discussions was one fundamental principle: belief in the superiority of the original text over any other versions. Translation, as was often pointed out, was more or less a copy of the original, and copies never have the same value. Translating Genre 87

The emergence of Translation Studies as a discipline in its own right, a discipline that has drawn upon linguistics, literary studies, history, anthropology, sociology and cultural studies saw an attempt to reinterrogate notions of universality and of the pre-eminent original, to which enterprise the notion of difference was crucial. A useful starting point was Edward Sapir’s statement about cultural relativism: ‘No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the

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same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached’ (Sapir, 1956: 69). Once the difference between cultures is acknowledged, the role of the translator changes: it becomes that of a mediator, a negotiator, someone who has to show responsibility not only to the source, to the original author’s work, but also to the target audience. The translator is therefore both reader and writer; s/he has to decode the text in one language and re-encode it in another, bearing in mind the different conventions and expectations of the second set of readers. Whatever equivalence might be, once the process of decoding and re-encoding has happened, it certainly cannot be sameness. The translated text will be different, will be read differently, will be received differently because it exists in a different context. This may be interpreted negatively, as a process that involves loss, distortion and betrayal or more positively, as Walter Benjamin did when he proposed that we should think of translation as ensuring the afterlife of the text, as giving a text a new form of life in another time and place. Translation seen in this way becomes not traducement but resurrection (Benjamin, 1923, 1968: 69-82).

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Early research under the banner of Translation Studies relied heavily on structuralist models, but quickly moved on as the subject developed and began to draw extensively on cultural theory. For it became clear very quickly that this approach to translation, which started out inspired by the polysystems theories of Itamar Even-Zohar and Gideon Toury, was foregrounding the ideological in translation (Even-Zohar and Toury, 1981). What had once been viewed as a fairly marginal literary activity was being seen in a different light. Translated literature, Even-Zohar proposed in a seminal paper, tends to occupy a marginal position in the target literary system (Even-Zohar, 1978). This would certainly be the case if we were to look at the impact of translations in the UK today, for example. That marginal position means that translators, aware of their lowly status, tend to take fewer risks, they experiment less and are governed by more conservative norms. But this is not always the case nor, if we look diachronically at translated literature, does it appear that translation has always had a low impact on the target literature. The reverse is often true, and one of the tasks set by Translation Studies scholars was to establish a genealogy of translation practice that might shed light on the ways in which translation had either been marginalised or, at the other extreme, played a major shaping role in the history of literature. For translation has indeed done just that. New forms have crossed cultural frontiers via translation: the sonnet, for example, or, much earlier, the shift across Europe from epic to romance might be mentioned in this context. Indeed, the movement from epic to lyric and romance that took place in the twelfth and early thirteenth century, is an example of genre shift on a massive scale effected through translation. So powerful was that shift that we can see its aftermath in the story of

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a great European genre that failed to make any headway at all outside its own linguistic boundaries. That is, the Icelandic sagas, written down at a time when the Germanic epic was being supplanted by the Franco-Celtic romance which led on to the masterpieces of writers like Ariosto and Tasso. The Icelandic sagas had no impact on European literature and remained virtually unknown until discovered in the nineteenth century when they were translated, rewritten and repackaged by writers in search of a heroic Germanic past. In The Vikings and the Victorians, Andrew Wawn discusses the Victorian fascination for the sagas, the attempts to translate them more (or mainly less) successfully and the popularisation of Viking myths and sagas through boys’ fiction in particular. In his conclusion he looks at the aftermath of that Victorian vogue for Vikings: Yet in post-war Britain, Vikingism resurfaced more or less intact and has continued to generate more coffee table books, films, television exposure, tales for children and adults, advertising slogans, cartoons, comic books, and (now) web-sites than its onetime opponents, the Anglo-Saxons. (Wawn, 2001:371-2).

Computer games, model-making, and Viking battle re-enactment societies could be added to Wawn’s list, but the point that is being made here is that a literary genre, the Icelandic saga, which failed to make any headway in the European mainstream for centuries was rediscovered in the nineteenth century by that mainstream when there was a surge of nationalist consciousness and a desire to demonstrate that the developers of the British Empire derived from a warrior past. The history of genre shifts is intimately bound up with translation and, as has been suggested, translation cannot be separated from the historical moment in which it happens. Translation is an act of bridging that takes place both interculturally and intertemporally. One of the tasks of Translation Studies has been, through a series of case studies, to identify points in the history of cultures when translation is more or less likely to happen on a large scale. Even-Zohar proposed that conditions for heightened translation activity are threefold: When a polysystem has not yet been crystallized, i.e. a) when a literature is ‘young’, in the process of being established; b) when a literature is either ‘peripheral’ or ‘weak’, or both, and c) when there are turning points, crises or literary vacuums.

Hence a developing literature would be far more likely to be translated than one that perceives itself as highly developed. Cases in point here would be English literature in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, when there was a vast amount

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(Even-Zohar, 1978: 24).

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of translation activity linked to a political agenda that defined translation as ‘Englishing’ (cf. Martin Luther’s verdeutschen [Germanising] of the Bible), or the intense translation activity in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century into Czech, as the nationalist movement gathered strength and the Czech revival got underway. Or we might think of the rich tradition of translation in Scotland or in Finland, for example, when both perceived themselves as ‘peripheral’ to other European literatures. Examples of Even-Zohar’s third category might be Turkey in the 1920s, with its systematic programme of literary translation as part of the Westernisation project of Kemal Ataturk or China today where interest in translation is enormous.

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Translation never happens in a vacuum, but rather in a continuum. Nor, if we were drawing a diagram of the translation process, does it happen horizontally, since rarely are two literary systems considered to be equal. In some cases, a literature or an individual writer can be seen as having such high status that any translation is perceived as somehow diminishing. In other cases, the opposite applies, and the target system is viewed as superior to the source. This has tended to be the case in the translation of non-European literatures for example. We need only recall the (in)famous remark by Edward Fitzgerald, translator of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayham when he said that: ‘It amuses me to take what liberties I like with these Persians, who (as I think) are not Poets enough to frighten one from such excursions, and who really do want a little Art to shape them’ (Fitzgerald, in Bassnett, 2002: 13). When translating texts that have no formal counterpart in the target literature the translator can either introduce a completely new form or genre into that literature or subvert the source to fit into the horizon of expectation of the target readers. Fitzgerald, confidently writing in the age that had inspired Macauley to declare that all the literatures of India and Arabia were not worth one shelf of a good European library, had no qualms about manipulating the Persian, even to the extent of adding elements that could not possibly have been in the source, elements identified as both Christian and Hellenic (Macauley, in Curtin 1971: 178). While from the vantage point of the early twenty-first century this might appall, it must also be acknowledged that Fitzgerald’s is one of the few translations that has entered the English literary system and acquired canonical status. So great is its status, that when Robert Graves, working closely with a Persian speaker, tried to produce a translation that would expose the extent of Fitzgerald’s manipulations and recontextualise the poem, it failed completely to appeal to readers. What Fitzgerald managed to do was to introduce a new genre, the roba’i or quatrain into the English literary system, and it was arguably the success of the genre even more than of Fitzgerald’s poem that prevented readers from responding to an alternative version (Graves and Ali-Shah, 1967).

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Sometimes translators succeed beyond all expectations in introducing new genres. The haiku is a case in point. It has entered Western poetics and, though obviously different from its Japanese starting point, is a form used by poets in many different languages. But other genres resist translation and so remain unknown despite their long histories or canonical status. A good example of this is the Arabic verse form, the qasidah. André Lefevere has looked at the problem of translating Islamic poetics into Western literatures and argues that differences of form, conventions and the genres offered by Western poetics form unsurmountable obstacles. He comments on the strategies employed by some would-be translators: Jones (Sir William, C19th) translated part of Labid’s description of sunrise in the desert as: ‘the waking birds, that sung on eve’ry tree/ Their early notes, were not so blithe as we’ (343), totally overlooking the fact that the presence of birds, let alone trees, in the desert is rather unlikely, even though they were a staple of the ‘eclogues’ into which he wanted to turn the quasidahs. Nicholson (1922) drastically shortens the description of the camel in his translation of Labid, but without telling the reader so. Traditionally, the poets who produced early poetry in the Islamic system went to great lengths describing their camels, while proportionately devoting far fewer lines to the description of the women they loved. Western poetics has always tended to take a rather different view of proportions in this matter. (Lefevere, 1992: 84-85).

A starting point for the book Constructing Cultures (Bassnett and Lefevere, 1998) was to develop the idea of ‘textual grids’, based on Bourdieu’s work. A textual grid is that which a culture makes use of; it is the collection of accepted ways of writing; hence French, German and English literatures make use of pretty much the same textual grid that derives from the Graeco-Roman tradition. There may be variations in translations of Homer, but Homer is still a central canonical figure. When we move outside Europe, the grid system is different. Chinese and Japanese cultures, for example, have unique textual grids that they do not share with other cultures. These grids can be seen not so much as fixed and rigid systems, but as a set of norms and expectations that have an impact on all literary production. They generate rules and conventions and, of course, they also determine genre.

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Let us take a brief look now at an example of how translation focuses attention on genre issues: one of the most frequently translated texts of Western culture, Homer’s Iliad. The history of the translation of this epic is fantastically rich and has been the source of enormous debate in most European literatures. In eighteenth-century Germany, for example, the impact of Homeric translation enriched German literature immeasurably, and along with the translation of Shakespeare gave new directions both to the German language and to literature. In

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France, Homer was adapted to the conventions of the age. According to Antoine de La Motte, writing in 1714: I have followed those parts of The Iliad that seemed to me worth keeping, and I have taken the liberty of changing whatever I thought disagreeable. I am a translator in many parts and an original author in many others. I consider myself a mere translator wherever I have only made slight changes. I have often had the temerity to go beyond this, however; I did cut out whole books, I did change the way matters were set forth and I have even invented new Material. (cited in Lefevere, 1992a: 28-9).

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The Iliad is, of course, the archetypal European epic poem, and one of the problems translators have had to face since the eighteenth century is the decline, indeed, the demise of the epic. But in the nineteenth century when Greek was taught in every public school in England, and ancient Greece was held up as a model of political philosophy and of literary, architectural and artistic achievement, dozens, if not hundreds of translations appeared. Translators tended, on the whole, to produce versions in some verse form or another, though some opted for rhythmic prose, and it is an interesting point of debate as to whether a poem translated into prose has undergone a genre transformation. James Holmes, who has written so lucidly on the translation of poetry, sees the prose translation as a stage beyond verse translation, on the way towards the critical essay (Holmes, 1988). Common to most of these translations is the use of archaic language obviously intended as a means of signaling the epic quality of the source. The same archaic language is used in nineteenth-century Norse saga translation. In the twentieth century, strategies changed, as readers with access to Greek declined. Richmond Lattimore in his very successful 1951 version stresses the pace of Homer’s writing and the speed and rhythm. He claims to be using a free six-beat line, not quite an English hexameter, and to be writing in ‘the plain English of today’ (Lattimore, 1951: 55). In the 1950s, E. V. Rieu’s version was also published. Rieu had produced a version of the Odyssey in 1945, a radical version because he claimed that with the death of the epic, the realist novel had effectively become the equivalent genre. Accordingly, he sought to produce versions of Homer that could be read as novels, adjusting stylistic factors accordingly: ‘In the very attempt to preserve some semblance of the original effect, I have often found it necessary – in fact my duty as a translator – to abandon, or rather to transform, the idiom and syntax of the Greek’ (Rieu, 1945: xvi). What both Rieu and Lattimore, in different ways, were struggling to answer was the question faced by any translator of the epic in the modern world: how to produce a version of a dead genre for a new generation of readers, and to translate in ways that

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will both preserve some sense of the power of the original, while enabling readers to enjoy the text they have before them, despite its strangeness. The problem of genre in translation is particularly acute when a text is remote from target language readers. Significantly, much of the most innovative and exciting theorising about translation and genre is coming today from outside Europe, from those parts of the world where the task of contesting the canon is being undertaken in a post-colonial context. The cannibalistic theory of the de Campos brothers in Brazil sums up a post-colonial perspective on both translation and genre transformation. The translator, it is argued, necessarily cannibalises the source; it has to be devoured in a ritual that is both destructive and restorative, just as the cannibalistic practices of early Brazilian tribes involved the devouring only of the best (i.e. the bravest, wisest, most devout of their chosen victims). Haraldo de Campos in his Ruptura dos Generos na Literatura Latino-Americana (Genre breakdown in Latin American Literature) argues that although genre categories have been disintegrating since the eighteenth century, the process in Latin America has seen an acceleration of this trend (de Campos, 1977). There are broader implications for translation in a post-colonial world. Briefly, if a colony is a ‘copy’ of an original source somewhere else, a ‘translation’ of that source, then as the colony reasserts its identity and moves to independence, it will necessarily reconsider the relationship between the texts it produces and the sources that may have influenced those texts. Accordingly, a post-colonial perspective on translation calls into question the whole idea of originality (Bassnett and Trivedi, 1999). Hence Octavio Paz claims that translation is the principal means we have of understanding the world we live in, since every text, though unique, is also always a translation of another text, while de Campos has described translation as blood transfusion, as ‘parricidal dis-memory’ (de Campos, 1981: 209). It is parricidal because it involves killing off the power of the source and reasserting the right of the translator (the colonised) to speak in her own voice, whilst simultaneously recognizing the source as inspirational. This is about as far from Fitzgerald’s view of translation as it is possible to get, since it both accords respect and dignity to the source while at the same time acknowledging that it is the responsibility of the translator to transform that source for another different set of readers. The de Campos brothers produced a forty-page version of Goethe’s Faust, for example, and a visual, concrete version of Blake’s ‘The Sick Rose’.

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The limited space of this essay does not allow for elaboration of the ways in which translation can alter the status of an author and so also transform a genre. The poetry of Ossian had a huge influence on literatures of Southern and Eastern Europe, for example; Burns and Byron are among the most translated poets of all time in Russia; Jack London is a canonical figure in Eastern Europe and in China; Robert Louis Stevenson and A. J. Cronin are the most widely translated Scottish writers in the world. Moreover, the history of who, or what, is not translated is of

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equal importance. What makes the Harry Potter phenomenon so interesting is not only that the books resurrected a genre that educationalists felt was totally unacceptable for contemporary children, but that the books have sold in millions, have been translated into dozens of languages and are now even marketed separately for adults and for children. In fact, the whole issue of the categorisation to which children’s literature and its translation over the last couple of centuries have been subjected provides probably a better set of case studies for the consideration of genre transformation than anything else. It is unquestionably an area that invites further research. To those who think that in the twenty-first century genre categories are a thing of the past it might be objected that, on the contrary, the contemporary moment is more ‘genred’ than any other. Books are routinely marketed in terms of the genre categories to which they belong or to which their publicists make them adhere, a fact which helps new categories continually to emerge. The contemporary bookshop will feature so-called popular history alongside popular science. Within categories there are further sub-generic divisions: in fantasy literature for example, swords and sorcery are shelved apart from the comic, while vampire stories and dragon tales are also housed on distinct shelves. It is inaccurate to claim that this phenomenon is due only to economic forces. At the risk of being far-fetched, it is as though genre categorisation provides an acceptable framework, a safe structure within which to market books, and, in this way, that it represents the antithesis of the bold challenge to genre categories that comes from post-colonialism. This essay began with Trinh Minh–Ha’s image of pushing out to the borderlines, walking on the edges, endlessly incurring the risk of falling off one side or the other of the limit while undoing, redoing, modifying that limit. This is exactly what happens in translation, and through translation we can see, perhaps at their clearest, processes of genre transformation as processes of limitless modification. Bibliography Bassnett, S., ‘At the Edges of the World: drawing new maps’, Comparative Criticism 15 (1993), pp. 35-56. Bassnett, S., Translation Studies, 3rd edition, London and New York, Routledge, 2002. Bassnett, S. and A. Lefevere, Constructing Cultures, Essays on Literary Translation, Clevedon, Multilingual Matters, 1998.

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Bassnett, S. and H. Trivedi (eds.), Postcolonial Translation. Theory and Practice, London, Routledge, 1999. Benjamin, W., ‘The Task of the Translator’ (1923), trans. H. Zohn, in Illuminations, New York, Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968. de Campos, H., Ruptura dos Generos na Literatura Latino-Americana, San Paulo, Perspectiva, 1977. de Campos, H., Deus e o Diabo no Fausto de Goethe, San Paulo, Perspectiva, 1981. Eco, U., ‘Translating and Being Translated’, trans. A. McEwen, in Experiences in Translation, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2001.

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Even-Zohar, I., ‘The Position of Translated Literature within the Literary Polysystem’, in J. Holmes, J. Lambert, and R. van den Broeck (eds.), Literary Translation. New Perspectives in Literary Studies, Leuven, ACCO, 1978. Even-Zohar, I., and G. Toury (eds.), Translation Theory and Intercultural Relations: Poetics Today 2:4 (summer/autumn 1981). Gentzler, E., Contemporary Translation Theories (revised 2nd ed.) Clevedon, Multilingual Matters, 2001. Graves, R, and O. Ali-Shah, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayham, London, Cassell, 1967 Holmes, J., Translated Papers on Literary Translation and Translation Studies, Amsterdam, Rodopi, 1988. Lattimore, R., The Iliad of Homer, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1951. Lefevere, A., Translation, Rewriting and the Manipulation of Literary Fame, London and New York, Routledge, 1992. Lefevere, A. (ed.), Translation/ History/ Culture: A Sourcebook, London and New York, Routledge, 1992a. Minute addressed by Lord Macauley to Lord Bentinck, Governor General of India, 2 Feb. 1835, reprinted in P. Curtin (ed.), Imperialism: The Documentary History of Western Civilization New York, Walker and Co, 1971, pp. 178-91. Minh-ha, T. T., Framer Framed, New York, Routledge, 1991. Paz, O., ‘Translations of Literature and Letters’, trans. I. del Corral, in R. Schulte and J. Biguenet (eds.), Theories of Translation from Dryden to Derrida, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1992, pp. 152-163. Ricoeur, P., ‘Civilization and National Cultures’, in History and Truth, Evanston, Illinois, Northwestern University Press, 1965. Rieu, E. V., Homer, The Iliad, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1950. Sapir, E., Culture, Language and Personality, Berkeley, Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1956. Vieira, E, and R. Pires, ‘Liberating Calibans: Readings of Antropofagia and Haraldo de Campos’ Poetics of Transcreation’, in S. Bassnett and H. Trivedi (eds.), Postcolonial Translation. Theory and Practice, London, Routledge, 1999, pp. 95-114. Wawn, A., The Vikings and the Victorians, Cambridge, D. S. Brewer, 2001.

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Tess, Jude and the Problem of Adapting Hardy Jeremy Strong

The process of adapting a work of literature for the screen necessarily entails, among other things, an act of interpretation. While the resultant text may seek to alter or subvert elements of the original, all adaptations have at least this in common: that they are generated by an encounter between the adapter, or adapters, and a given literary work. The manner in which that work is read, and the strategies of interpretation and understanding at play in the transposition, determine the character of the new text in a way which is revealing not only of genre conventions, but also of factors related to medium specificity, audience expectations and of ideological outlooks either prevailing in an era or locale or promulgated by a film director. It will be argued in this essay that the last two novels of Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) and Jude the Obscure (1894-5), are liable to a variety of different readings. In particular it appears that both novels have affiliations to a range of literary genres and modes, many of which the films based on them eschew. An examination of the elisions, inclusions and additions that are effected between page and screen reveals the readings that their filmmakers favour. In addition, the derived texts might even be seen as arguments about how to read or, more particularly, how to define the originals.

While celebrated for characters whose stories were seen to reveal fundamental truths about human nature as well as for descriptions of the countryside that chronicle a vanishing way of life, Hardy’s work was also regarded as suffering from a variety of faults. Paramount among these shortcomings were his attraction to melodrama and his reliance on coincidence – itself a common feature of

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In her essay ‘Tess of the d’Urbervilles: Sexual Ideology and Narrative Form’ Penny Boumelha describes Hardy’s book thus: ‘structured primarily as a tragedy, the novel draws also on a number of other genres and modes of writing: on realism, certainly, but also on a melodrama that reaches into balladry, and, of course, on polemic’ (Boumelha in Widdowson ed., 1993: 54). This mixture proved awkward to tolerate for many early readers and critics (an interpretive tendency stretching long into the twentieth century) who struggled to reconcile Hardy’s detailed rendering of rural life with his enthusiasm for the heightened emotionality and reduced credibility of melodramatic style. Peter Widdowson charts the development of this species of Hardy criticism, culminating in the 1970s vogue for ‘humanist-realist’ approaches to literature which assume both an externally knowable real world and the capacity in language to apprehend that world accurately (Widdowson, 1998: 4). ‘Hardy, against the grain of much of his writing, has, from the earliest reviews, been hauled into consonance with such a world-view and such an aesthetic’ (4-5).

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melodrama plots – as well as his pessimistic tone and sometimes awkward or uncomfortable style, particularly his rather clumsy references to art (5). These supposed inadequacies had in common a tendency to undermine realism, to threaten the verisimilitude that the ‘best’ aspects of his writing fostered. Interestingly, more recent interpretations of Hardy have celebrated the variety, the mixture of voices, in his novels as evidence of his work anticipating postmodern devices. In ‘The Violence of Style in Tess of the d’Urbervilles’ Jean-Jacques Lecercle maintains that Hardy deliberately opts for a polyphonous approach: (T)o let violence erupt on the surface of the text, to follow the lines of flight it indicates, to let the minor voices engage in their babble/Babel, in other words not to erase the contradictions from the text. To describe this choice we can borrow Bakhtin’s term, ‘polyphony’.... (Hardy) accepts the violence of an unstable language as an integral part of his style, he lets the different languages within him speak out and contradict one another. (Lecercle, in Widdowson ed., 1993: 154).

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While Lecercle’s reading finds Hardy’s choosing boldly to adopt a polyphonous style, Merryn Williams discerns a writer so concerned with the quality of his prose that he began ‘studying Addison, Macauley, Newman, Gibbon, and leading articles in The Times in an effort to polish up his style’ (Williams, 1977: 26). This raises an important question: was Hardy striving to create a seamless finish, to plane away the discrepancies, or are the different voices deliberately in conflict? Does a critical intention underpin the jarring polyphony? With his adaptation Tess (1979), Roman Polanksi excises most of those original scenes that have a pronounced flavour of melodrama as well as those elements which contribute to the novel’s polemics. The latter is relatively straightforward to effect as the polemical aspect of the original resides principally in the authorial voice. For example, when Tess’s infant child Sorrow is buried, Hardy describes an area of the churchyard as ‘that shabby corner of God’s allotment where He lets the nettles grow, and where all unbaptised infants, notorious drunkards, suicides, and others of the conjecturally damned are laid’ (Hardy, 1985: 148). The film does not repeat – through voice-over for example – these judgments and criticisms; viewers must form their opinions on the basis of what unfolds in the diegetic world, such as the refusal of the Vicar to give Sorrow an official burial because of the censure this would provoke from his parishioners. Most obviously, Polanski plays down the novel’s social critique by not beginning with Hardy’s provocative epigraph: ‘A pure woman faithfully presented.’ Michael Winterbottom’s Jude (1997) likewise omits the original title page’s opening salvo: ‘The letter killeth.’ With the first subtitle Hardy frames an argument that Tess is pure despite her possible compliance with her seducer; bearing an illegitimate child; becoming a ‘kept woman’ and eventually

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a killer. With the second he expresses the view that the binding law of Christian marriage is stifling, even fatal. It is, however, in the approach of the adaptations to melodramatic material that the process of ‘straightening out’ the multi-form generic identity of Hardy’s originals is most evident. This systematic practice of omission seems likely to arise from the filmmakers’ desire not to compromise the tragic narratives and realism of the new texts with improbable material that might damage the credibility of characters, events and causality. One suspects that a working assumption underpinned both adaptations – that the most plangent moments would (if faithfully included) severely alloy the intended tragic realism by posing an interpretive and emotional difficulty for audiences unaccustomed to reconciling such different elements in a single screen text. Most criticism of Hardy has, until comparatively recently, maintained that this original mixture was not entirely successful in literary form, and it seems apparent that his adapters have sided with the early critics in preferring a clearer generic identity.

Polanski’s adaptation does not include this scene, which is described here to convey how extravagantly Hardy merges melodramatic action and a high gothic setting. In Conversations in Ebury Street (1924), George Moore specifically criticised the sleepwalking scene (in Pettit ed., 1996: 111) and it appears that Polanski was anxious to avoid such brickbats, even if the many omissions of this type ran the risk of his work being judged unfaithful. However, what is remarkable

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Perhaps the most plausibility-straining and emotionally heightened scene in Tess of the d’Urbervilles occurs days after Tess has acquainted Angel of her past and he fails to forgive her. In the middle of the night she sees him, crossing a ‘stream of moonlight’, and entering the bedroom. A false hope is raised, both for Tess and the reader, that Angel has forgiven her and decided to consummate the marriage. Unfortunately, his ‘eyes are fixed in an unnatural stare’ and we realise he is sleepwalking. Murmuring to himself, ‘Dead! dead! dead!’, he picks Tess up and rolls ‘her in the sheet as in a shroud’. Angel carries Tess to the landing where it seems for a moment that he might be intending to drop her, or both of them, to their death below before beginning an increasingly unlikely somnambulistic journey. Tess is carried, ‘the absence of clothes taking much from his burden’, over a ‘voluminous and deep’ river, the sleeping Angel managing to negotiate ‘the bare plank...lying a few inches above the speeding current’. Their journey culminates in a suitably gothic location, ‘the ruined choir of the Abbey-church’, where Angel places Tess in ‘the empty stone coffin of an abbot’ and kisses her lips before falling into a deep immobile slumber. After several minutes Tess begins to shiver, ‘the sheet being but a poor protection’, so she walks the still-sleeping Angel back to the house where she leaves him on the sofa bed. The next day he has no recollection of the night’s events (317 – 320).

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about the exclusionary approach taken by both directors is that it does not result in allegations of infidelity. Widdowson notes how positive reviews of Tess consistently praised the film’s faithfulness (Widdowson ed., 1993: 97), a critical tendency which suggests either that those reviewers were simply unfamiliar with the novel or – as seems more likely – that they shared the view that such scenes are instances of Hardy writing aberrantly and that to elide them does not constitute infidelity. In essence, they believed some elements of his writing to be more ‘Hardy’ than others and were prepared to forget sections which always failed to sit comfortably with preferred readings of the texts and their author. Both adaptations eliminate original material which relates to the supernatural. Tess, for example, contains no reference to the ghostly carriage – a device worthy of Poe or Hawthorne – which is understood to be of ill-omen to whoever hears it. In the novel, on the morning of her wedding Tess shudders inexplicably at the sight of the old carriage which will take her to the church, a phenomenon which Angel blithely explains as her having heard ‘the legend of the d’Urberville Coach – that well-known superstition of this county’ (Hardy, 1985: 280). However, Tess denies any knowledge of the legend and the novel thereby allows the possibility that Tess, an authentic ‘blood’ d’Urberville herself, may be subject to a slow-working Fate that punishes her family for the misdeeds of its forebears. Indeed, after Tess is raped by Alec, Hardy asks ‘why so often the coarse appropriates the finer thus?’ (119) and seeks to explain the event partly as a protracted retribution: Doubtless some of Tess d’Urberville’s mailed ancestors rollicking home from a fray had dealt the same measure even more ruthlessly towards peasant girls of their time. But though to visit the sins of the fathers upon the children may be a morality good enough for divinities, it is scorned by average human nature; and it does not mend the matter.

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(119).

Similarly, Jude excises the story told by the churchwarden while Jude and Sue work at the re-lettering of two stone plaques of the Ten Commandments in an old church. Although the adaptation retains the scene to demonstrate how Jude and Sue’s unmarried condition hinders their employment prospects, particularly in ecclesiastical work, it omits the rural ghost story of hard-drinking stonemasons working at exactly the same task in a nearby church a century earlier. The job goes on late and the men eventually fall down drunk. They recover their senses in the middle of the night with ‘a terrible thunderstorm a-raging’ and see the ‘dark figure’ of the devil finishing their work. The next morning when the service begins it is observed that the Commandments have been painted with the ‘nots’ left out. Another tale which the adaptation omits is Widow Edlin’s macabre story, recounted to Jude, Sue and Little Father Time, of the man whose wife left him to stay with

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friends, taking their child with her. The child dies and the wife refuses to allow him a burial alongside his family, prompting him to break into the house to steal the body. Being caught, he is tried, hung and gibbeted for burglary. This story is told on the night before Jude and Sue intend to marry and it prompts the little boy to exclaim ‘If I were you, mother, I wouldn’t marry father!’ (Hardy, 1985: 349-50). Jude the Obscure’s most dreadful incident is doubly foreshadowed in this tale: the hanging anticipates the means by which Little Father Time will kill his siblings and himself, while the dead child in a coffin anticipates the triple funeral that follows. His presence as a listener suggests that the story provides a partial inspiration for his actions and his words point specifically to dreadful consequences arising from a union between Jude and Sue. The concept of Fate is key to both novels. In conversation with her brother, Tess likens their circumstances to that of a blighted apple surrounded by other, splendid fruits. Their own world or ‘star’ is simply a bad one and this unfortunate fact determines the course of their lives (69-70). Likewise, Jude is placed at the end of a family history which merges unpleasant facts, folklore and superstition. In chapter eleven, Jude asks his aunt Drusilla about his parents and discovers that his mother had drowned herself after a final argument with his father. Drusilla explains that: ‘The Fawleys were not made for wedlock: it never seemed to sit well upon us. There’s sommat in our blood that won’t take kindly to the notion of being bound to do what we do readily enough if not bound’ (116).

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The adaptations omit these and other references to those forces which determine the fate of their title characters. In doing so, the films make themselves less amenable to many of the interpretations which critics have brought to bear on the novels. For example, Holloway and Wotton argue that Tess’s decline is caused by an inner flaw, a consequence of her heredity. Tony Tanner posits a wider justification for Tess’s suffering, arguing that Hardy is not so much condemning ‘specific social anomalies’ as describing ‘a universe of radical opposition, working to destroy what it works to create, crushing to death what it coaxes into life’ (Tanner in Widdowson ed., 1993: 39). Boumelha suggests that Hardy may be offering so many potential or partial reasons for Tess’s downfall in order to question whether events are explicable at all: ‘the multiplicity of ‘explanations’ offered for Tess’s tragedy form part of the novel’s onslaught on moral dogma and absolutism, and... they have as their primary effect to undermine the authority of the whole notion of explanation’ (Boumelha in Widdowson, ed. 1993: 57). Indeed, one might continue Boumelha’s argument to claim that Hardy is seeking to undermine the authority of the novel itself as an explanatory form. The conclusions of Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure so emphatically reject the Victorian/Christian conception of Providence which prevailed in many other contemporary novels as to suggest an increasingly bitter relationship with the medium that had made him famous. In his analysis of Jude the Obscure, Widdowson argues that satire and not tragedy is the

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appropriate term to describe Hardy’s fiction and particularly his last novel. He describes the operation of this satire as dual: first a critical depiction of sexual relationships in a class society and second an undermining of realism as a fictional discourse. Approaching Hardy’s work from this perspective enables the reader, Widdowson contends, better to explain the multiplicity of modes and elements in his fiction which so many critics have regarded as flaws and faults (Widdowson, 1998: 174). If the principal goal of his novels is not the evocation of tragic realism but its subversion, then such anti-realist features as melodrama, a reliance on coincidence and authorial interjection become instrumental rather than aberrant. Widdowson’s argument is especially relevant to a study of Hardy adaptations for it is just such material which is omitted and it is precisely a tragic realist tone that is sought by such a scheme of omission.

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Widdowson argues that Hardy’s satire was directed at ‘readers who are seduced by the fictions constructed on behalf of a specious Christian/humanist society by its dominant cultural mode of representation; tragic realism’ (8). Of course, most readings, criticism and adaptations of Hardy position him as a practitioner rather than a castigator of this mode. Focusing on Hardy’s construction of tragic realist narratives but sweeping under the carpet the strategies he employs to debunk the assumptions that underpin such narratives results in an inaccurate estimation of the author and his texts. Although the oppositional relationship to Christian orthodoxy and contemporary sexual mores is discerned, the internal critique of realism and tragedy as authentic modes of representation is not. Interestingly, Widdowson senses (though he provides no evidence) that the ‘late-Victorian flak’ which Jude the Obscure prompted was motivated not only by its ‘immoral’ content, particularly its representation of marriage and marriage laws, but also by its ‘discomforting’ textual strategies which assault the ‘cherished tenets of humanism’ and ‘its handmaiden, realism’ (177). Viewing the adaptation, Widdowson finds compelling proof of his reading of the original as satire: ‘Hardy’s anti-humanist, anti-realist satirical fiction can only be granted the status of classic tragic realism precisely when all those elements of his text which make such a reading tenable are stripped out or suppressed’ (195). In their article ‘Cinema/Ideology/Criticism’ Jean-Luc Comolli and Jean Narboni distinguish and categorise films according to their relationship to ideology. They describe a grouping of films ‘which attack their ideological assimilation on two fronts’, first by taking a directly political subject and second (the act without which the first part is politically ineffective) through a ‘breaking down of the traditional ways of depicting reality’ (in Mast, Cohen & Braudy eds., 1992: 686). Hardy’s Jude the Obscure would seem to operate at this level, challenging not only the signified but also (and by means of) the signifier. Conversely, Winterbottom’s Jude may be interpreted as belonging to that grouping of ‘films...which have an explicitly political content... but which do not effectively criticise the ideological system in

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which they are embedded because they unquestioningly adopt its language and its imagery’ (687). Two broadly ‘authorial’ possibilities may be inferred from the fact of Jude taking the shape that it does. First, that Winterbottom – and his screenwriter, Amini – read Jude the Obscure as it is widely and popularly understood, namely as a tragic-realist novel and regard the mixture of other conflicting elements as flaws. Excising these elements, they have striven to produce what they believe to be an otherwise faithful work, where the updating of dialogue and other modifications are fundamentally in tune with the tone, as they interpret it, of the original. Second, there is the possibility that Winterbottom and/or Amini have sensed that Hardy deliberately sought to undermine realism but have chosen not to follow that path. This may be because they prefer the interpretation of Jude as a tragic hero, despite what Widdowson convincingly identifies as Hardy’s ‘deconstructive’ intent. In either case it seems clear that to highlight the multiplicity of elements – the satire, the melodrama, the anti-realism – would not have been a wise commercial decision. A century of readings has not favoured this approach, nor has most criticism, nor previous Hardy adaptations. It is doubtful that audiences would appreciate a Jude or Tess that sought fidelity to their originals by dismantling cinematic realism. Combining such an approach with Hardy’s unhappy subject matter would certainly have resulted in uncomfortable (if not unpalatable) texts, since audiences would inevitably be figured as ideological dupes in the majority of their viewing. Alternatively, the satirical/deconstructive intent might go unrecognised – just like Hardy’s – with the muddling of genres and modes and the undercutting of realism interpreted as failures of taste and judgment rather than purposeful devices.

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Since in both Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure causality is a murky mixture of social and supernatural forces, fate and authorial privilege, the trimming of these elements causes difficulties for both films in terms of creating a new causal register. Searching for an explanation of Tess’s downward spiral and death, the film invites us to blame Alec, Angel, and (implicitly) Society. Alec rapes Tess (though there are attempts to mitigate this by describing the rape as a ‘violent seduction’), then makes her his mistress. Angel, despite his abstract intellectualising, is still bound by conventional morality and fails to judge her as he wishes to be judged himself, thereby precipitating her return to Alec. We may also infer a degree of blame for a society that afforded men like Alec such power and which structured the moral codes that condemn Tess. However – and this is key to certain criticisms of the film – we are now far more inclined to debate Tess’s own role in her fall, to question whether she might at various junctures have been shown to act more forcefully or intelligently to determine her own future.

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In an angry review Jane Marcus condemns Polanski for not showing us ‘Tess the powerful’, arguing that Nastassja Kinski portrays a meek and submissive girl who repeatedly acquiesces to masculine dominance: He will not let Tess speak or act. She is passive throughout, and lying down for much of the film. Hardy’s Tess is upright. She walks and talks and works and struggles and grows from child to woman under the loving hands of her creator who subtitles his novel ‘A Pure Woman’, taking the part of a male sympathiser of heroic womanhood. Polanski is a voyeur of victimisation who infantilises our Tess. (Marcus in Widdowson ed., 1993: 93).

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However, much of what Marcus identifies as Polanski’s unfaithful alterations to the novel can be seen to originate in Hardy’s portrayal of Tess. Boumelha describes how she is already in a trance-like or sleepy state for much of the novel:’(P)articularly at moments of... erotic response, consciousness is all but edited out. Tess is asleep, or in reverie, at almost every crucial turn of the plot... Tess is most herself – and that is, most woman – at moments where she is dumb and semi-conscious’ (48-49). The crucial difference, of course, is that where the original’s mixture of tragedy, melodrama, balladry and polemic so clouded the issue of causality as to distract the reader from a critical analysis of Tess’s actions, the adaptation has no such smokescreen. In the novel we understand that Tess faces an array of insuperable adversaries, ranging from the ‘President of the Immortals’ to her own inherited shortcomings. In the novel the very weight of opposition she must face affords her a heroic aspect and she is liable to interpretation in such terms. (Indeed, a year after its publication Hardy was asked to become Vice-President of the Women’s Progressive Society, an offer he turned down ‘because he did not believe in their main aim, namely women’s suffrage, as he explicitly told the lady who invited him.’ [Butler in Pettit ed., 1996: 50]) As with Jude the Obscure the procession of unlikely (but seemingly predestined) encounters, successive miseries and tantalising but always stolen hopes feels so irresistibly plotted as to render any serious contemplation of the protagonist’s determining power a virtual nonsense. But with those original elements dismantled we are, sadly, led to ask the same questions and reach the same conclusion as Tess’s tormentor, Alec (played by Leigh Lawson), who asks: ‘What is this strange temptation misery holds for you?... There is a point beyond which obstinacy becomes stupidity. Are you in love with this drudgery?’ The problem is not merely that Tess and Tess have no answer – neither does the novel. Rather it is that Alec’s question now has a pertinence that it previously lacked. With a new (broadly realist) conception of causality proffered it has become

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the audience’s question too. For Polanski has not, as Marcus claims, altered Tess: he has altered the world through which she moves. Jude is rather more successful in explaining the downward trajectory of its title character. As with Tess, genre is at the root of the problem; the realist intentions and concomitant streamlining of the multiply generic original might threaten to result in a void where Hardy had structured a tangled but nonetheless substantial causality. However, genre also provides the solution in that Jude is crafted to lend itself to comparison with certain British television programmes and films, of a body of texts the temperament of which fills this aetiological gap. The generally depressing perception of life invited by the events of Jude’s story maps quite well onto this genre. One key element is the casting of Christopher Ecclestone in the title role which provokes associations with the television dramas in which he has previously appeared – Cracker, Hearts and Minds and Our Friends in the North – as well as his film role in Danny Boyle’s Shallow Grave. These texts have in common a largely negative view of society and human nature. Characters are often cruel, or perform cruel acts and the texts’ realism is understood at least partly in terms of the representation of selfishness as a dominant tendency while altruism and idealism are either absent or impossible to implement. This world view also informs Trainspotting – another Boyle-directed movie – which culminates in its ‘hero’, Renton, choosing to abandon his erstwhile friends and disappear with their loot. Jude feels thematically and visually bound to their bleak creed. In a Sunday Times article, Brian Appleyard described this strongly nihilistic aesthetic thus:

(Appleyard, 1998: 27).

It is precisely this conception of realism which informs Jude and marks it as different from other literary adaptations. Michael Atkinson’s review in Film Comment stressed how the film differs from that genre of literary adaptations that have come to be known as heritage films: ‘As modern, sinewy, and seriously stuck in the bog of poverty as recent adaptations of Austen, Forster, James and Wharton have been nervelessly romantic and entranced with the leisure of wealth, Winterbottom’s movie basks in the clean truth of catastrophe’ (Atkinson, 1998: 47).

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British Television has, for years, been in love with a very narrowly conceived idea of realism. Shows such as Cracker and Prime Suspect are based on the view that realism consists of a sort of bleak, gritty pessimism about human nature. Indeed, whenever a police-type show was praised by the industry and by critics, one could invariably predict its style – grainy, harsh – and its content – depressing... The underlying belief was that reality is intrinsically nasty and brutal, and that it was the broadcaster’s job to expose this.

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In fact, the dual effort to make the adaptation reverse the heritage aesthetic and conform to the genre of modern British cynicism is so pronounced that it compromises both literary fidelity and the other ‘realism’ of Hardy’s locations. The television and film texts recognised as key constituents of this genre are almost without exception set in the North – either the North of England or Scotland – and they can be said to have engendered a set of conventions upon which Jude draws. Thus it borrows from an established scenic repertoire, deploying locations, a colour palette and lighting which are intended to convey the hardness of his life. The decision to film in such locations as Durham and Edinburgh, and in particular to render the urban environment as generally grim, is highly revealing and suggests that Winterbottom regarded the bleak aesthetic, which as a Cracker director he had helped establish, as a paramount consideration.

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Hardy’s Christminster is universally understood to represent Oxford. Indeed, his substitution of fictitious names for real place-names is so well documented that many editions of his novels contain a glossary for matching the two and a map of his ‘Wessex’ with its surroundings. Yet Jude is so eager to evoke a version of realism constituted in ‘Northerness’ and dejection that it does not employ Hardy’s ‘real’ setting for fear of contrary values being evoked. Television series which have used Oxford as a backdrop, such as Brideshead Revisited and Inspector Morse, tend to lean heavily towards nostalgic/idyllic representations of the city and its dreaming spires. In these and other texts, images of College quadrangles, the Bridge of Sighs or the domed roof of the Bodleian library function as a visual shorthand for Oxford and are invariably intended to carry pleasant associations. In rejecting Oxford as a location (and one assumes that Edinburgh’s Royal Mile was not a cheap alternative) the adaptation studiously avoids such meanings and manages to convey Jude’s rejection by the college and its indifference to his dreams as part and parcel of the city’s harsh aspect. Images of the parade where hard-faced Dons process along a cobbled thoroughfare certainly succeed in suggesting the meanness of the city – even in its ostensibly glorious moments – as diagnosed by the chastened Jude. Jude also bears a considerable similarity to a number of films directed by Ken Loach – not least in their shared Northern texture. Like the child in Loach’s Kes the young Jude is a physically vulnerable and socially isolated figure, subject to various forms of bullying, who finds something (in his case the ideal of Christminster) in which he then takes an obsessive interest. Jude’s beating at the hands of Farmer Troutham recalls the treatment of the child in Kes by his Games Master and his elder brother while the shot of a gibbet of dead crows – never mentioned in the novel – recalls the fate of the protagonist’s kestrel. The remarkable opening of Loach’s Poor Cow in which the female lead is filmed giving birth also seems a probable inspiration for the particularly graphic childbirth scene in Jude, another addition to the original.

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In his article on Trainspotting, Bert Cardullo notes how it is related to Loach’s films by their common rejection of the dominant cinematic mode of representing English society – a mode he describes variously as an ‘Oxbridge-Thatcherite view of the world’, ‘the view through yuppie eyes’ and the ‘British-Museum tradition of Alexander Korda’ (Cardullo, 1997: 158). He cites Sense and Sensibility (1996) and Emma (1996) as examples of this tendency and is clearly addressing and targeting the heritage genre. Although Jude may be grouped with such texts simply by virtue of having a celebrated literary original, it appears in all other respects to structure itself in an insistently oppositional relationship to the heritage film. Northern rather than Southern, not dissipating the central narrative focus either by emphasising subsidiary performances or offering visual pleasures of architecture, landscape and costume, Jude consistently reverses the heritage aesthetic and the reassuring view of Britain which heritage film perpetuates and exports. It thereby bridges the British traditions of literary adaptation and contemporary socialproblem picture, borrowing from the latter to re-figure the past so often represented in the former. Made at the end of a long period of Conservative government in Britain, it shares and expresses the growing public sense of disillusionment with that administration and rejects its nostalgic view of the national past. By other standards, however – especially those of Comolli and Narboni – Jude is not the critical/political text that it might be. It plays the realist tragedy too straight, sustaining the very idiom that Hardy sought to sabotage. One is minded to believe that Hardy’s original, with its ‘problem’ of competing genres, is truly the more dangerous text. Bibliography Appleyard, B., ‘Mind your Language’, The Sunday Times (25 January 1998), pp. 26-27. Atkinson, M., ‘Michael Winterbottom: Cinema as Heart Attack’, Film Comment Jan/Feb (1998), pp. 44-47.

Butler, L., ‘Stability and Subversion: Thomas Hardy’s voices’, in C. Pettit (ed.), Celebrating Thomas Hardy: Insights and Appreciations, London, Macmillan, 1996, pp. 39-53. Cardullo, B., ‘Fiction into Film, or Bringing Welsh to a Boyle’, in Literature/Film Quarterly 25:3 (1997), pp. 158-162. Comolli, J., and J. Narboni, ‘Cinema/ideology/criticism’, in Mast, Cohen & Braudy (eds.), Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1992, pp. 682-689. Hardy, T., Jude the Obscure, London, Penguin, 1985. Hardy, T., Tess of the d’Urbervilles, London, Penguin, 1985. Lecercle, J.-J., ‘The Violence of Style in Tess of the d’Urbervilles’, in Widdowson (ed.), 1993, pp. 147-156. Marcus, J., ‘A Tess for Child Molesters’, in Widdowson (ed.) 1993, pp. 90-94. Mast, G., M. Cohen, and L. Braudy (eds.), Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, 4th edition, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1992.

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Boumelha, P., ‘Tess of the d’Urbervilles: Sexual Ideology and Narrative Form’, in Widdowson (ed.), New Casebooks: Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Contemporary Critical Essays, London, Macmillan, 1993, pp. 44-62.

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Pettit, C. (ed.), Celebrating Thomas Hardy: Insights and Appreciations, London, Macmillan, 1996. Widdowson, P. (ed.), New Casebooks: Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Contemporary Critical Essays, London, Macmillan, 1993. Widdowson, P., On Thomas Hardy: Late Essays and Earlier, London, Macmillan, 1998.

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Williams, M., A Preface to Hardy, London, Longman, 1977.

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III. Genre in Television Broadcasting and Film Publicity ‘Mixing and Matching’: the Hybridising Impulse in Today’s Factual Television Programming Richard Kilborn Throughout the history of television, one might legitimately assert, there has been a strong tendency to produce hybridised formats. In contrast to cinema, whose history is so clearly and significantly marked by separate generic distinctions and classifications, television has arguably been less dependent on clear generic divisions. Television has been less about the consumption of discrete programme units and more about the provision of a ‘flow’ of programmes, many of which do not carry the same clear generic markings as their cinematic counterparts (Altman, 1999: 13-29). This does not mean to say that generic categorisation, applied to television, has not proved useful in carving up the sprawling mass of programme material which the medium is ceaselessly generating. It does mean, on the other hand, that the medium’s compelling need to hold the viewers’ attention with a mixed diet of offerings has resulted in considerable slippage and spillage between those identifiable categories. Television programme-making has, in short, always involved the constant transgressing and blurring of generic boundaries, as new ways have been sought to connect with the viewer (Turner, 2001: 6-7). As broadcasters seek to meet the challenges of the new media age there has been a significant increase in this hybridising activity. Driven by the popularising imperatives of an ever more commercialised broadcasting environment, commissioning editors responsible for factual programming have, for instance, encouraged programme-makers to develop strands of programming which accentuate the entertainment component. In response to this injunction, programme-makers have resorted more and more to what one might call ‘cross genre manoeuvres’. The continuous quest has been for a blend of tried-and-tested ingredients drawn from established television genres (both factual and fictional) and combined into new programme products aimed at satisfying the perceived demand.

Most observers of current trends in broadcasting are agreed that, in today’s new media order, traditional forms of documentary (ones characterised by a serious engagement with the socio-historical world) are steadily being eroded and being replaced by more forms of entertainment-oriented factual programming, which place fewer intellectual demands on audiences.1 Viewers have – in the self-serving phrase beloved of broadcasting executives – ‘developed an appetite’ for more

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The Changing Broadcasting Environment

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diverting forms of real-life entertainment. The reasons for the growth and proliferation of these ‘softer’ formats offering factually informed entertainment lie, of course, in the economics of contemporary broadcasting. Broadcasters today are forced to operate in a markedly different and much more competitive media environment than the one in which ‘public service’ requirements once had a major shaping influence. As far as British television is concerned (and the situation is not markedly different in other European countries with strong public service traditions), the passing of the Broadcasting Act in 1990 set in train a chain of developments which meant, among other things, that much higher premium than ever before was placed on cost-efficient modes of production and on programming which developed ratings commensurate with its designated place in the daily schedule (O’Sullivan, 1998: 198). From now on, there was an increasing pressure on factual producers to come up with more ‘accessible’ forms of programming. Such material was always required to adhere to strict, broadcaster-determined criteria. In practical terms, this meant that, in order to stand a chance of being included in any part of the prime-time schedule, a factual programme had to provide evidence that it could entertain, just as much as it could inform or instruct. Small wonder then that, since the 1990s, we have witnessed the inexorable rise of ‘infotainment’ in the television schedules.

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In order to maximise the accessibility of their products, programme-makers also began to adopt what was effectively a policy of limited risk. They turned more and more to tried and tested formulae in the attempt to develop what might appear to be exciting new formats, but which, on closer inspection, proved to be little more than amalgams of previously existing forms and styles. Programme-makers may have sought to justify the mixing of disparate generic elements on the grounds that ‘new depictive energies [were] being released’ (Corner, 1996: 181). In fact, however, this hybridising activity was primarily motivated by harder-nosed commercial considerations, relating to what mix of components would be likely to prove popular with a prime-time audience. The explosion of the various forms of ‘factual entertainment’ in recent years has met with stern disapproval in some quarters, since it is seen to diminish the potential of television to be a democratising force. The argument is that the proliferation of these lightweight hybridised factual formats has been little short of disastrous since, over the same period, it has been accompanied by a steady decline in the number of serious and challenging forms of documentary. Critics have argued that, if most forms of contemporary television programming (including many ‘factual’ categories) are now having to aspire to the condition of soap opera, then the capacity of the medium to be a culturally enlightening force is thereby much diminished (Dunkley, 2000).

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The picture which emerges, then, is one where producers of factual programming have been gently cajoled by ratings-conscious television executives into producing material that is easily digestible. The principal demand has been for nominally ‘factual’ formats which would attract the attention of a wider public than would have been wont to tune into traditional forms of documentary.2 To achieve this end, producers have freely borrowed structures and components from other television genres and incorporated these into the newly developed factual hybrids. In developing these formats, programme-makers have sought much of their inspiration in narrative techniques and modes of address familiar from the world of popular television drama, especially soap opera. At the same time ‘factual’ producers have, for their own purposes, skilfully adapted styles and approaches from other ‘people-centred’ television genres such as the game show and the talk show. In some cases the qualities and characteristics which the resultant actuality-based hybrid has inherited from the various donor genres have become so dominant, that it becomes a moot point as to whether one can still legitimately apply the term ‘factual’ to the new hybrid formats. One could, for instance, justifiably maintain that docu-soaps, the format which enjoyed unprecedented popularity in the UK in the late 1990s, owe so much of their success to their talk-show antecedents and to the fact that events are manifestly staged in the manner of a soap opera, that these works virtually forfeit any claim to be considered ‘documentary’. Suffice to say, that whilst these new hybrid formats may sometimes seek to persuade us that they are providing us with insights into real-world issues or allowing ordinary folk (People Like You And Me) to speak about what moves or affects them, at bottom almost all of them represent attempts to commodify the real.

The Proliferation of Hybrid Reality Formats The factual entertainment formats which have come to the fore since the 1990s cover a wide range of subjects, though the main focus has tended to be on leisure and on lifestyle themes. While employing a variety of presentational styles and a

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The other point which should be emphasised about these new hybridised factual formats is that they all represent a highly calculated attempt to respond to the needs of television schedulers. Television viewers have, it is generally accepted, developed a series of expectations about what type of material will be made available at certain times (expectations which have, of course, been largely nurtured by television programme-providers). In response to the forces of commercialisation in today’s broadcasting, programme-making has, to an everincreasing degree, become a matter of simply meeting the demands of the schedule. Most of the factual formats with which we are currently concerned have been designed to be accommodated in the mid-evening slots and this has had a powerful determining impact on the nature of the products thus created.

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range of different structuring techniques, the element which is almost always present to some degree is what will be referred to here as the ‘reality component’. All such programmes contain the promise that they will centre on contributions of real-life individuals or on snippets of action which are demonstrably drawn from the real, as opposed to the fictional world. This is a simple, but important point to make, since one of the major selling features of the new reality formats (and one which has made them so popular with schedulers), is that – at least for a time – they were seen to be refreshingly different from the other fictional genres (mostly sit-coms and television drama series) which had till then jostled for viewers’ attention in the early evening television schedule. By and large, the new reality formats eschewed the glossiness and artificiality which audiences had come to associate with Hollywoodised types of dramatic fiction. What the new reality formats offered, for instance, was an opportunity for viewers to confront characters and events which were much more closely connected with their own lived experience. What was not so apparent on the other hand (not until these formats were exposed to closer analysis) was that the means by which the quotient of a purported ‘reality’ was created were significantly indebted to the structuring devices and narrativising techniques of the very same formats from which they had sought to distance themselves. (There is indeed a particular irony in the fact that the new reality formats rely just as much on dramatic contrivance, on judicious editing and on the careful balancing out of different narrative components as any piece of dramatic fiction.) The other point one needs to bear in mind when analysing the new hybridised formats is that most of them depend on the readiness of often celebrity-seeking individuals to contribute the reality ‘bites’, which constitute one of the genre’s major appeals. This calls for a particular type of performance ability on the part of the real-life individuals, who volunteer to take part in these entertainment spectacles. Hence, the ‘reality’ to which viewers are given access through the vehicle of the new reality formats is one that is very much of television’s own making, in that it is constructed in accordance with very specific criteria. The promise of these shows is that audiences will be entertained by glimpses of reallife ordinariness, of spontaneous utterance and of authentic interpersonal exchanges. But this is essentially a media construction like any other. Reality itself has become commodified. The programmes are literally being sold on the strength of their ability to bring us closer to world of the real, from which, however, – partly as a result of our obsession with media-delivered entertainment – we are becoming increasingly distanced. Another factor which accounts for the proliferation of these hybrid factual formats is that most of them are relatively cheap to make. This, combined with the fact that certain programmes showed an ability to pull in large numbers of prime-time viewers, quickly led to frantic attempts to gain as much mileage as possible from this

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form of programming. Successful programmes were rapidly cloned and programmemakers actively encouraged to invent new reality concepts. Companies were established, specialising in the development and production of reality programming (the best-known to date is Endemol, begetter of Big Brother). Moreover, just as with all other successful television genres, programmes and formats began, to an increasing extent, to be traded in the international television markets.

Different Modes of Hybridising While the hybridising impulse is clearly discernible across a wide range of actuality-based programming generated within recent years, there are a number of different ways in which the hybridising is managed and conducted. Hybridising as an activity, even when applied to the interbreeding of plants or animals, is one

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Given the popularity of the new reality formats, almost all major television channels felt compelled to acquire and/or produce their own reality series. As well as buying in products from the likes of companies such as Endemol, UK mainstream channels began to commission their own series and to develop their own reality strands. Perhaps rather surprisingly – mindful of the strong commercial orientation of the new reality hybrids – the BBC was in the vanguard of some of these developments.3 Its factual and documentary division was, for instance, the moving force behind the docu-soap, the hybrid format which enjoyed unprecedented popularity in the late 1990s. Following the unexpected success of series such as Airport (BBC 1, 1996) and Driving School (BBC 1, 1997), BBC network controllers commissioned both in-house and independent production teams to produce further programmes in this category in order to capitalise on what was perceived as a broad demand among viewers for character-centred factual entertainment. By late 1998 the BBC had virtually cornered the market in docusoap provision, having in just over two years produced and aired no fewer than thirteen such series. Though some of the early docu-soaps had clearly captured the public imagination with their larger-than-life characters and their soap-like appeal, the audience’s appetite quickly began to diminish as ever more series began to be aired. Critics also began to complain that the ruthless over-commissioning of docu-soaps had led to ever more blatant cloning of material and a subsequent rapid loss of generic vigour. This dissipation of generic energy was especially noticeable in some of the docu-soaps produced by the ITV network as the latter sought to match the notable success of the BBC in this sector. In fact, audience interest in docu-soaps was probably already on the wane before ITV finally began to compete with the BBC in this area of programming. The programmes which ITV devised, however, were manifestly pale, effete imitations of docu-soaps already in circulation.4 The ITV series Dover (1997), for instance, was clearly modelled on the BBC’s Airport, while Chalet Girls (ITV, 1998), a series chronicling the adventures of young women working in the tourist industry, was very heavily indebted to the BBC’s Holiday Reps (1997).

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where the outcome is often far from predictable. Patience, tenacity and a constant readiness to experiment are called for in the development of formats, which just may strike a chord with a contemporary television audience. The business of hybridising is, in other words, far from being a quasi-mechanical process where disparate generic components are welded together in the confident assumption that what is produced will necessarily find favour with its intended group of users (here members of the mainstream television audience). Having said this, one can still make a broad distinction between what can be referred to as ‘additive’ and ‘integrated’ modes of hybridising.5 In the case of the ‘additive’ mode, I have in mind the category of reality format where the original generic components are still readily discernible within the new hybrid mix.6 This is clearly the case with series such as the long-running Crimewatch (BBC 1, 1984) and many of the other formats within the broad ‘crimestopper’ category. Introductory sequences fronted by regular presenters give way to special on-location reports, while action-packed crime reconstructions are superseded by tips on crime prevention from serving officers as well as requests for viewer assistance in the solving of particular crimes. Programmes such as these fall in line with traditional expectations of a television magazine format in that audiences will anticipate that the various ingredients will be packaged in a particular way. In other words, the set of expectations which audiences bring with them to programmes in the ‘additive’ generic category have to do both with the presence of the core ingredients and the manner in which the programme smoothly and efficiently moves between the various constituent segments.

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With the formats which belong to the second ‘integrated’ category, the diverse components are fused together in a much more thoroughgoing manner, to the extent that the original elements are scarcely discernible as such. This particular type of hybridising has resulted in some of the most popular brands of reality programming we have encountered in recent years, including the docu-soap and the reality game-doc. Both these factual sub-genres have been exposed to the criticism that they provide a bland and superficial form of factual entertainment, but the key factor here is the way in which, through the ingenious integrating of existing thematic, stylistic and structural components, these formats have cleverly succeeded in targeting a new audience and providing an entertainment product which, certainly in the case of the reality game-docs, has proved to have global resonance.

The Formatting Industry One can demonstrate the significance of hybridising in the factual formats of recent years by focusing on certain general patterns of development, as programme-makers have sought to come up with new styles and approaches likely to appeal to the ever-fickle audience. There can be no certainty, even with heavily

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promoted television programmes of the type we are discussing, that they will gain the approval rating from audiences which producers are looking for. On the other hand, the strategies which programme-makers have evolved to heighten the likelihood of this happening become that more visible when one compares the different tranches of reality programming which have appeared since the 1990s. Reality programming (sometimes referred to as ‘reality TV’) came to the fore in the late 1980s, when television production teams began to develop a type of programming, the main feature of which was a series of recorded real-life events (reality snippets) packaged into a thirty-minute show and usually presented by a celebrity host. The latter’s function was to link the individual items and occasionally conduct studio interviews with some of the people featured in the action-packed footage of heroic rescues or near disasters. Each series had its characteristic and tightly defined themes, but a frequent emphasis was on the work of the accident and emergency services, since this guaranteed the type of dramatic action which could be neatly encapsulated in those short, high-energy reality segments (Kilborn, 1994).

Docu-soaps By the mid-1990s audience interest in this particular type of reality programming had begun to ebb somewhat, although – in common with many other popular genres and formats – shows of this type continued to get made. (The two U.S. shows Cops [Fox TV] and America’s Most Wanted [Fox TV] have, for instance, showed quite astonishing longevity.) This was in part because the television reality genres had themselves moved on. And, following one of the ‘laws’ of generic ebb and flow, what the newly emerging factual reality formats revealed was not only a penchant to strike out boldly in a new direction, but also an equally strong tendency to revisit familiar territory. As far as developments in the UK were concerned, the new ‘market leader’ in television factual programming was the docu-soap. In terms of their preferred themes and also their general mode of address, docu-soaps were refreshingly different from their more action-centred forebears. They were more gently paced and much less dependent on dramatic action.

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Nevertheless, in certain important ways, docu-soaps still reproduced some of the characteristic features of earlier reality shows. The constant switching between a number of different real-life locations was one feature they had in common. Likewise the strong sense of directorial guidance provided by the unseen narrator – arguably one of the sub-genre’s defining traits – was a structural feature inherited from earlier reality shows where the foregrounded presenter played a similar ‘ringmaster’ role. But the overriding affinity between the two formats was that they both so clearly tilted in the direction of ‘factual entertainment’. Both were commodifying reality in the sense that the views and information about the world and its affairs were constantly and systematically being reduced to a series of short reality bites, centred on the personal experiences of individual contributors or

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performers. Measured in these terms, both formats were palpably tabloid presentations. The human interest element was always to the fore and any opportunity to engage with the wider socio-political implications of a topic was stoutly resisted.

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One could, with some legitimacy, claim that what accounted for the considerable success of the reality and docu-soap formats was that they were so manifestly televisual products. Both relied very heavily on the presentational, structural and narrational techniques borrowed from established television genres. The actionpacked reality formats depended on the strong anchoring presence of the celebrity host familiar from thousands of game shows and talk shows. Docu-soaps, for their part, whilst offering a series of documentary-like glimpses into how people conduct themselves in their everyday environment, were very clearly modelled on the structural design features of television soap opera. So powerful, indeed, was this particular structuring device in the case of docu-soaps that the viewing experience which these lightweight entertainments offered their respective audiences was quite remarkably akin to that of soap opera. One might even go so far as to assert that it was the recognition of this kinship on the part of those chosen by television professionals to assume major roles in docu-soap projects that caused them to assume the mantle of larger-than-life performers encouraged to act out a role on a conveniently provided stage. The appeal of the docu-soap format is, in other words, attributable in no small measure to the extent to which it reproduces the quality of a soap opera experience for viewers. Most docu-soaps, for instance, focus attention on a single contained location where viewers meet a set of characters with whom they become increasingly familiar as the episodes roll on. The importance of location is signalled in the titles of some of the more popular docu-soaps (Pleasure Beach, Paddington Green, Airport), just as in fictional soaps create a strong sense of a community living in a defined space (EastEnders, Coronation Street). Viewer familiarity with the characters grows with each successive episode, with the consequence that the documentary-like appeal of ‘being there’ evoked by the camera’s presence is enriched by viewers’ pleasurable sensation that they are themselves becoming a part of this micro-world through which familiar real-life characters move. Docusoaps work hard to create and maintain this special sense of place. Opening credits sequences play a key role in establishing the idea of being reconnected with sights and sounds of a familiar terrain, whilst the voice-over narration (frequently provided by an actor or actress with soap opera connections) ensures that viewers are fully oriented when switches are made from one scene to another. It is, however, the narrative structuring of docu-soaps which more than anything else aligns them with their soap opera counterparts. Docu-soaps adopt a serial mode of presentation which also encourages viewers to apply soap opera frames of

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reference (Feuer, 1987: 115). Docu-soaps also rely for some of their most characteristic effects on the contributions and performative ability of designated central characters. It goes without saying that docu-soap producers are very dependent on finding suitably qualified ‘social actors’ to take on these roles, but once this initial selection is made, the principal task for the production team will be to keep contriving situations where characters will be able to interact with each other entertainingly and to generate the kind of conversational discourse which arguably is the major source of docu-soap appeal. Just as with those earlier ‘accident-and-emergency’ reality formats, however, it is in the packaging of individual elements into an apparently seamless narrative flow which contributes crucially to docu-soaps’ appeal. Material is shaped and edited according to the requirements of a form of programming which will not make too many demands on its diversion-seeking audience. In the manner of a soap, a series of half a dozen or so storylines are created, all centred on the lives and thoughts of particular characters. These storylines provide a deftly interwoven (just as in a soap opera) narrative, with due regard being paid to moving the story along and to building in the necessary variety to the overall narrative mix.

Reality Game-documentaries Like many other reality formats, docu-soaps are seen by some critics as embodying those trivialising and ‘tabloidising’ forces by which matters of potentially serious import are reduced to the level of factual entertainment. They do, on the other hand, at a formal level, demonstrate considerable ingenuity on the part of programme-makers in devising a new style of television entertainment by bringing together previously unmatched generic components. The next wave of reality products, which began to capture the public imagination after the hullabaloo surrounding docu-soaps had died down, revealed an even greater facility for the mixing and matching of components than before. In contrast with the earlier reality formats where there were vestigial traces of more traditional documentary forms, the reality game-docs made no pretence about being about anything else other than full-blown entertainment vehicles.

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A close inspection of these highly popular game-doc formats reveals that, just as with the other contemporary factual categories, they are essentially hybridised artefacts. It is as if those involved in the business of format development have, with the fervour and commitment of medieval alchemists, sought to distil and combine the key elements of a number of television genres into a compelling new form of entertainment. It is not so much the ingredients themselves as the subtle manner in which they are blended which accounts for the success of these formats. The reality element is there in the shape of the group of ‘real-life’ housemates or participants, people who have volunteered to be party to what for them can be a highly lucrative and celebrity-bestowing exercise. The ‘reality’ to which these shows are making claim is also related to the levels of authenticity which audiences

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discern in the series of exchanges and developing relationships between the participating subjects. Audiences recognise, however, that in such a highly contrived situation where participants have been selected on their ability to maintain a high level of self-performance, ‘reality’ may not be a wholly appropriate concept to describe what is being played out and spoken in the presence of multiple recording devices. The claim is sometimes made in this respect, indeed, that one of the special pleasures of viewing such shows is waiting for subjects’ guard to drop occasionally and for ‘flickers of authenticity’ to be revealed (Roscoe, 2000). Viewed in these terms, reality game-docs like Big Brother have borrowed that confessional element from earlier shows (including docu-soaps) where subjects are encouraged to discourse freely about what moves or stirs them. In contrast to those earlier instances, however, where the moments of confession were incidental occurrences, here they have become much more foregrounded. In addition to this, whereas in the docu-soap the confessional talk mostly assumed the form of a more or less civilised exchange between subject and unseen confidant, here in the bolder and brasher game-doc world the inter-subject conversations are not only more extended, they frequently feature what many would view as indecorous exchanges centred on content of a sexual nature (in spite of the fact that it is a highly edited view of events which audiences get to see).

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The other major piece of borrowing which has occurred with game-docs has to do with the manner in which they position and involve the audience. Game-docs are, as the name implies, designed as elimination contests with audience members and participants involved in deciding who goes and who stays in the show. The various voting-off procedures – aided and abetted by interactive technology – provide game-docs with an edge and a level of excitement which was lacking in early reality shows. The use of interactive and multi-media technology which enables viewers to follow unfolding events when the show is not airing and to become part of chatroom networks also provides evidence of how a new format, with careful nurturing and by exploiting new ways of ‘speaking’ to its audience, can acquire the kind of resonance which few would have anticipated when it was first launched. For all the claims that game-docs are ground-breaking and innovatory in ‘breaking the mould’ of contemporary television (largely thanks to their very heavy promotion), they still rely on conventional means of engaging audience attention. There are no small number of parallels, for instance, with traditional U.S. style talk shows where guests are cajoled by a more or less manipulative host(ess) into interacting with each other or with members of the studio audience in ways which provide voyeuristic pleasure to the larger television audience (a pleasure which acquires a highly dubious edge when it involves the obvious humiliation of participants). Though game-docs have – like docu-soaps before them – abandoned the manifest use of host or anchor person, the functions which the host performed have, in the more recent reality formats, been subsumed under a series of other

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dramaturgical devices. With the docu-soap the ‘hosting’ function has, for instance, been partly incorporated into the figure of the unseen narrator who is felt to be guiding and controlling the unfolding events. With a reality game-doc such as Big Brother, it is the figure, or more correctly the voice, of the enigmatic ‘Big Brother’ which is symbolically charged with directing and orchestrating events. He or she summons housemates into the confessional box (aka diary room) and likewise issues participants with the various tasks and challenges they are required to fulfil. At bottom, however, it is the soap opera elements which remain the strongest shaping influence in the game-doc format. What game-docs are enacting for viewers’ amusement and delight is essentially a series of soap opera-like conversational exchanges between carefully selected characters within the tight confines of an internal or external setting. Game-doc producers contrive to stir tension and rivalry between subjects in the same way that scriptwriters manipulate soap characters, playing one character off against another in order to maximise the dramatic effect. In both cases the desired outcome is the production of a piece of audience-friendly entertainment with rich voyeuristic appeal and, just as important, with the capacity to inspire in its respective audience endless conjecture (‘soap talk’) as to how particular relationships will develop or which character will best survive the next series of challenges. What producers of game-docs have succeeded in doing, then, is to encourage viewers to apply soap opera frames of reference when attending and responding to these apparently innocuous pieces of television entertainment. Just as with soap opera, game-docs encourage intense forms of audience involvement, but at the same time, because they are so patently contrived, they also establish a far more knowing relationship with their audience. Viewers are able, in other words, to approach these texts in a more detached and sceptical manner which reveals a pleasurable awareness of the codes at work and a recognition of how they are being taken in.

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This essay has chosen to concentrate on some of the better-known reality formats to demonstrate the various hybridising tendencies which have become such a key feature of contemporary factual programming. It should not go unremarked, however, that – partly as a result of the phenomenal ratings success of these formats – the hybridising fervour has now extended to several other forms of factually based programming. In some cases the resultant programmes have little to recommend them in that they rely so heavily on established formulae. In a few instances, however, the hybridising has had the effect of releasing new creative energies and has given birth to a style of programming the innovative or informative nature of which cannot be ignored. One category of programming which has fused elements from factual and fictional discourses into a highly successful hybrid mix is the tranche of programmes which have followed in the wake of Channel 4’s series

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The 1900 House. These programmes (other titles include The 1940 House, The Frontier House and The Edwardian Country House) are, first and foremost, attempts to produce accessible, informative and, above all, entertaining accounts of life in a bygone age. Clearly modelled on some of the features already noted in the reality game-docs, this ‘country-house’ sub-genre brings dramatic recapitulations of what life might have been like in those specified times and places. Generically speaking, these programmes are closely aligned with traditional drama-docs in that the re-enactments are based on various types of historical and documentary evidence. Their appeal as televisual entertainment, however, is largely attributable to the manner in which they mobilised features from contemporary reality formats. Just as with any game-doc, carefully selected volunteers are conveyed, via the modern television equivalent of a time machine, to the specially prepared historical location in which, for a set period, they are then required to act out their designated roles. While the proven popularity of these programmes derives from a more general nostalgia for the past reflected in the public’s appetite for the many other brands of television history on offer, it is arguable that it is their affinity with the performance-oriented game-docs (where acting-out ability is a key requirement) which accounts for these programmes’ unprecedented popularity.

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As television is likely to continue to be dominated by the commercial imperative in the coming years, it is highly probably that we will see many more examples of hybridisation at work. The unwritten law that entertainment must be prioritised at all costs will doubtless mean that, say, natural-history programming will need to be dramatically enhanced in the way that series such as Walking with Dinosaurs (BBC 1, 1999) were by the regular inclusion of computer-generated sequences of imagined dinosaur behaviour and interaction. Given the strong entertainment orientation of most categories of television programming (including, dare one say, news and current affairs), it also seems likely that the boundaries of the ‘factual’ will continue to be traversed as new ways of engaging the viewer’s attention are sought. Increasingly, audiences will come to equate ‘reality’ with the versions of the real which television itself delivers. Correlatively, some of the old generic distinctions will become sufficiently blurred as to lose much of their original meaning. While many will view this optimistically as a sign of a capacity for dynamic self-renewal possessed by genres, others may take the more jaundiced view that we are being pushed inexorably in the direction where all television simply aspires to the condition of soap opera. Some may even fear that we are headed for that state, satirised in Peter Weir’s The Truman Show, where all life on the planet has come to revolve around the production and consumption of a real-life soap opera. Notes 1. Some critics have even gone so far as to assert that, at least as far as television is concerned, we may be moving into a ‘post-documentary age’ (Corner, 2000: 687).

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2. Producers of these programmes could still half-legitimately claim that they were attempting to engage with real-life subjects and issues, even though this fell far short of traditional notions of consciousness-raising. Those charged with promoting the new reality formats also make much of the fact that such programmes are marked by a level of authenticity and a ‘rootedness’ in everyday experience of life not found in other strands of programming. 3. The reason usually advanced to explain this apparent anomaly is that, during the period in question, the BBC, under Director-General John Birt, was actively seeking to transform BBC 1 into a channel which had a greater commitment to ‘popular entertainment’ (Kilborn, 2003: 47-51). 4. This was a source of considerable embarrassment to ITV programming directors. It led, among other things, to the hiring of a former BBC programme-maker, Grant Mansfield, who had been closely associated with some of the BBC’s highest rating docu-soaps, to take responsibility for factual programme making in the ITV network. 5. In using such labels one would not wish to give the impression of watertight compartments, but rather to indicate broad tendencies. 6. For a discussion of the distinction between the terms ‘genre’ and ‘format’ see Lacey (2000:205-207).

Bibliography Altman, R., Film/Genre, London, BFI Publishing, 1999. Corner, J., The Art of Record, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1996. Corner, J., ‘What can we say about documentary?’, Media, Culture & Society 22 (2000), pp. 68188. Dunkley, C., ‘It’s all downhill from now on’, Financial Times (20 September 2000), p. 20. Feuer, J., ‘Genre Study and Television’, in R. Allen (ed.), Channels of Discourse: Television and Contemporary Criticism, Chapel Hill and London, University of North Carolina Press, 1987, pp. 113-133. Kilborn, R., ‘How Real Can You Get?: Recent Developments in “Reality” Television’, European Journal of Communication 9 (1994), pp. 421-439. Kilborn, R. and J. Izod, An Introduction to Television Documentary: Confronting Reality, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1997. Kilborn, R., Staging the Real: Factual TV Programming in the age of ‘Big Brother’, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2003. Lacey, N., Narrative and Genre: Key Concepts in Media Studies, London, Macmillan Press, 2000. O’Sullivan, T., ‘Nostalgia, Revelation and Intimacy: Tendencies in the Flow of Modern Popular Television’, in C. Geraghty and D. Lusted (eds.), The Television Studies Book, London, Edward Arnold, 1998. Roscoe, J., ‘Real entertainment: Real factual hybrid television’, Media International Australia 100 (August 2001), pp. 9-20. Turner, G., ‘Genre, Hybridity and Mutation’ + ‘Genre, Format and ‘Live’ Television’ in G. Creeber (ed.), The Television Genre Book, London, BFI Publishing, 2001, pp. 6-7. Willis, J., ‘Breaking the Boundaries’, in J. Izod and R. Kilborn (eds.), From Grierson to the Docusoap, Luton, University of Luton Press, 2000. ‘Mixing and Matching’ 121

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‘So What Kind of Film is it?’: Genre, Publicity and Critical Practice Mike Chopra-Gant

This essay examines how some of the most popular films released in the U.S.A. in 1946 were generically identified by the film industry at the time of their release, using readings of publicity material employed in promoting these films to reveal the generic classes mobilised in offering those films for consumption by the public. If, as Thomas Schatz argues, film genres function as a kind of ‘contract’ of a mutually held set of conventions and expectations between filmmakers and audiences (1981: 16) then publicity materials used to encourage viewers to see these films should provide a clear indication of what kind of film is understood to be on offer – what contractual obligation will be fulfilled by the film – in terms which are equally meaningful to both parties. On the basis of this assumption, it is surprising that this set of popular Hollywood films, released in U.S. cinema’s peak year, should be so lacking in the familiar generic classes employed in film genre criticism; classes which have been assumed to typify Hollywood’s output. The complete list of films is as follows:1 Best Years of Our Lives (Wyler) The Jolson Story (Green) Blue Skies (Heisler) The Yearling (Brown) Saratoga Trunk (Wood) Notorious (Hitchcock)

The Harvey Girls (Sidney) The Razor’s Edge (Goulding) Till the Clouds Roll By (Whorf) Night and Day (Curtiz)

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Road to Utopia (Walker)

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Two Years Before the Mast (Farrow) Easy to Wed (Buzzell) The Green Years (Saville) Margie (King) The Kid From Brooklyn (McLeod)

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Ziegfeld Follies (Minnelli) Several of these films (The Jolson Story, Blue Skies, Road To Utopia, The Harvey Girls, Till the Clouds Roll By, Night and Day, The Kid From Brooklyn and Ziegfeld Follies) could be grouped together as musicals or some combination of musical, comedy and romance. Other key genres such as the gangster film and the western are notably absent from this list, but this might be explained by suggesting that there was a particular vogue for musical/comedy/romance in the early post-war period. The problem with this neat explanation is that it is inconsistent with the understanding of early post-war U.S. film culture most often encountered in academic accounts of the films of the period. In academic writing it is film noir rather than musical, comedy or romance which has been regarded as the particularly significant film type of this period. Furthermore, the understanding of film noir developed in film studies suggests that there is a particular resonance between these films and the mood of U.S. society as the nation moved from war to peace (see, for example, Schatz, 1981: 113 and 1999: 378, Belton, 1994: 201, Crowther, 1988: 9 and 157, Selby, 1984: 2, Harvey, 1998: 35, Kaplan, 1998: 17, Christopher, 1997: 208, McArthur, 1972: 67, Cook, 1985: 96). To judge from academic writing about the films and culture of the period, there is, then, an anomaly – if, that is, popularity and financial success are taken (and surely they are not to be discounted) to be any measure of the predominance of either a genre and/or a Zeitgeist. While the list of films presented here is admittedly limited, this discrepancy is significant because this set of popular films has been chosen for reasons other than its consistency with a particular hypothesis. This inconsistency may be accounted for as a result of the tendency Steve Neale has identified in film studies, to use genre as a way of ‘avoiding detailed study of anything other than selective samples of Hollywood’s art’ (Neale, 2000: 252) while simultaneously insisting on ‘the importance of genre as a means of conceptualising the links between Hollywood’s films and U.S. society’ (252). The lack of consistency between this empirical set of popular films and the type of film which might be expected on the basis of film noir and Zeitgeist theories problematises the relationship between film noir and the supposedly downbeat

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cultural tone of the United States in the early post-war period: if film noir was less ubiquitous than has been supposed, what justification is there for maintaining its privileged position as a genre which articulates the early post-war Zeitgeist, particularly when the predominance of musicals, comedies and romances suggests anything but the gloomy, pessimistic mood asserted by academic writing on film noir? It would be a mistake, however, to effect a simple substitution of the musical for the film noir in order to suggest that the mood of the time was lighter and more upbeat. This would amount to making the same mistake as the theorists of film noir, whose work assumes that the criteria by which they organised a diverse set of films into a (relatively) coherent class are the same criteria which other groups would have used to classify films. This is not, however, something which can be assumed. As both Neale (2000) and Altman (1999) argue, in moving away from a conception of genres as stable objective categories, and towards an understanding of genre which is related to the use and understanding of films by different groups, attention must be given to the terms employed by those groups to classify films. One source of data concerning the way the films in the above list might have been organised into genres by the film industry at the time of their release is the pressbooks containing publicity materials for the films. Analysis of these press-books suggests that the way these films were understood by their producers, in terms of genre, was quite different from the way they would be positioned in conventional academic accounts of film genre. Best Years of Our Lives, for example, has been extensively discussed by film scholars. It is less often thought of as a genre film than as an impeccable example of realist filmmaking (see, for example, Bazin, 1997), although Roffman and Purdy (1981) do discuss it in their book concerning the ‘social problem’ film. The pressbooks for the film indicate that the emphasis placed on realism in academic writing about the film is not solely a critical imposition, but was also important in the industry’s understanding of the film. However, the press-books also offer a number of generic positionings for the film. First, it is quite clearly promoted as a romance. Images of the film’s three couples are the dominant feature of early posters and advertisements, and the emphasis on romance is reinforced by headlines in the publicity material (my emphasis):

‘Pulsing Realism In The Romantic Crises Of a Hero Trio’ ‘3 Great Love Stories In One Great Picture’ ‘So Good So True So Full Of Love’ One poster for the film is particularly revealing of the industry’s conception of the

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‘Supreme Heart Interest In a Star-Studded Drama’

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film as not only a genre film, but one which is generically hybrid. The claim that the film is ‘the screen’s greatest love story’ is the dominant headline on the poster, confirming the positioning of the film as a romance. However, captions placed beneath a series of stills along one side of the poster offer a range of other generic positions for the film (emphasis in original): ‘Its Drama Makes It ... “The Best Picture Of The Year”’ ‘Its Romance Makes It ... “A Tender Film ... Brimming With Warmth”’ ‘Its Comedy Makes It ...“A Sure-Fire Hit”’ ‘Its Conflict Makes It ... “So True, So Dramatic”’

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In all but the last of these, the generic element of the caption is underlined in the poster. The generic terms employed in these captions are ones which are familiar in film genre studies, so although these are not terms which film scholarship has tended to use to discuss this film, the generic characteristics attributed to the film are, at least, recognisable within genre criticism. However, where genre scholarship has tended to concentrate on a single genre, these captions, taken together, clearly identify the film as generically plural. So far this essay has concentrated only on the generic identities the publicity material suggests for the film in terms of classes of film genre familiar to film scholars. However, there are also suggestions of another way of classifying the film in less familiar terms. The poster discussed immediately above also claims that the film is ‘the best film this year from Hollywood’. This is not an unusual claim, given the hyperbole characteristically employed in Hollywood film promotion. However, this claim can be seen in another light, as something other than the simple boastfulness of film publicists. A similar emphasis on quality is evident in publicity material for several other films within the group, and this emphasis is suggestive of a discourse of quality which signals the existence of a distinct generic class adopted by the industry in conceptualising its top-end productions. This discourse of quality became a more central strategy for promoting the film in a later pressbook for Best Years of Our Lives. This press-book contains publicity material produced after the film had achieved its outstanding success at the Academy Awards; indeed the publicity materials are dominated by references to the nine Academy Awards gained by the film, to the extent that, in some posters, the image of the couple, so central to the emphasis on romance in earlier publicity material, is pushed to the margins, and becomes almost insignificant alongside the images of the Oscars. Another element in the publicity material for Best Years of Our Lives forms a

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crucial part of the discourse of quality elaborated in the publicity materials for this and several other films within the group. The publicity material in the press-books for Best Years of Our Lives refers to the film’s origin in the novel Glory for Me by MacKinlay Kantor.2 A striking feature of the group as a whole is the number of films which are literary adaptations: The Green Years (A. J. Cronin), Saratoga Trunk (Edna Ferber), Two Years Before the Mast (Richard H. Dana), The Yearling (Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings), The Razor’s Edge (W. Somerset Maugham). Even The Harvey Girls, a musical with a western setting, has its origin in a novel of the same title by Samuel Hopkins Adams. Like the publicity for Best Years of Our Lives, some of the publicity material relating to these other films is characterised by a hyperbolic tone, proclaiming their high quality. One poster for The Green Years quotes reviewers’ opinions that ‘you will not find a picture full of so many ringing merits!’ In a similar tone, a poster for The Razor’s Edge claims that ‘the production is beyond all praise’, and that the film is ‘better than good...it is great!’ While the outstanding performance of Best Years of Our Lives at the Academy Awards reduced the number of awards available to other films, publicity material for The Razor’s Edge nevertheless employs references to the Oscars within its discourse of quality: ‘every performance Academy Award calibre!’ In a similar vein, posters for The Yearling place considerable emphasis on the Pulitzer Prize awarded to the novel on which the film is based, and the Redbook Magazine Award of Picture of the Year which the film received, to signal a more objective measure of the quality of the film than the mere claims of its publicists.

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The films discussed so far would be difficult to deal with as a group in the terms provided by conventional approaches to film genre. Best Years of Our Lives has, as already stated, been approached by theorists in terms of realism and as a ‘social problem film’. The Green Years could be classified in a number of ways. Looking at the film in the present day, it might be seen as a ‘coming of age film’, and this is probably also how The Yearling would now be classified. But at the time of their release both films were framed quite differently. In addition to foregrounding its literary origins, publicity for The Green Years uses images of a young couple and captions which emphasise a romance which develops late in the film and which is a relatively minor element in the film’s narrative: ‘the dreams, conflicts, and tender moments of youth in love’ and ‘at seventeen a girl’s heart is so wise – a boy’s so achingly unsure’. Similarly, publicity for The Yearling accents characteristics – ‘love’ and ‘thrills’ – which are not obvious on viewing the film today. While the classes of film provided by conventional theories of film genre suggest viewing this set of films as generically diverse, the emphasis which publicity materials for these films place on their high quality, a discourse reinforced by their literary background, does pull this thematically diverse group of films together into a relatively coherent set – as either literary adaptations or, in terms which were

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probably more relevant to Hollywood’s own understanding of the films, as quality narrative films, prestige ‘A’ grade films with high production values, big stars and, in the case of these literary adaptations, an aura of middle-class intellectualism which the middle-brow, ‘book-of-the-month-club’ literary background provides. Understanding this grouping of the films as generic requires a shift away from the academically defined classes of genre and toward the industry’s own terms for classifying its own productions.

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The type of literary-based narrative film discussed above does not exhaust the film industry’s use of the term ‘prestige film’. There would undoubtedly have been, for example, musicals which, because of their budgets and production values, would have been considered to be prestige productions. But there is a distinction to be made between prestige musicals and quality narrative films of the kind discussed here. Publicity for The Harvey Girls illustrates this point. As indicated above, The Harvey Girls could also lay claim to a literary background in having been (loosely) based on Samuel Hopkins Adams’ book of the same title. However, this is not foregrounded in material intended for public use. It might be argued that, because the film is a musical and its narrative dimension is accordingly diminished in importance, it takes so little from the novel that the connection between novel and film is much weaker: the film may have been inspired by the novel, but it is not an adaptation. While there may be some validity to this argument, a similar point could be made in relation to Two Years Before the Mast where, apart from the title and some of the characters’ names, the book and the film bear no resemblance to each other: the central character of the film, Charles Stewart (Alan Ladd), and the film’s major narrative strand involving Charles’ being press-ganged into service aboard a merchant ship owned by his father, are both entirely inventions of the film and do not feature in the book at all. The same question about the status of The Harvey Girls as a literary adaptation would, therefore, be equally applicable to Two Years Before the Mast. Yet, in the latter case the literary background is so important to the film that the writing of the book is made a central feature of the film’s narrative. This suggests a different explanation for the lack of emphasis placed on the book in the publicity for The Harvey Girls; that there is a generic distinction being made which puts The Harvey Girls in a different category of film from the other films with literary origins. This is related to the fact that it is a musical, but that alone is an inadequate account of the distinction. Understanding the generic distinction between The Harvey Girls and the other literary based films requires a more radical reconceptualisation of the generic identity of the musicals in this group of films. It has already been noted that the musical, romance and comedy genres figure prominently in the group of films as a whole. However, the publicity materials for these films make considerable efforts to avoid the impression that these films should be thought of simply as generic musicals, romances or comedies. While press releases do refer to the film in generic terms, posters for The Harvey Girls

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lack explicit references to genre. Instead they emphasise its star, Judy Garland; which probably communicated to potential viewers all they needed to know about what kind of film it was. Photographs of Garland either gazing into the eyes of, or locked in an embrace with, co-star, John Hodiak, allude to the romantic dimension of the film’s narrative. Finally, a small inset photograph of Angela Lansbury dressed as a saloon bar showgirl fixes the setting as the American west, if the intertextual reference to Samuel Hopkins Adams’ novel implicit in the film’s title was too obscure a signifier of this. Thus the publicity material engages in a complex intertextual process of manipulating the assumed cultural knowledge of potential viewers in order to convey the fact that the film is a musical with a western setting without explicitly referring to the film in generic terms.

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Similar in its avoidance of the use of simple generic terms, publicity material for Easy to Wed reworks the familiar generic triad of musical, comedy and romance into a variety of new phrases – ‘A-musical’, ‘musical whirlwind’, ‘tug-of-love’, ‘musical tug-of-love’ – which endow familiar signifiers of genre with a greater sense of individuality and a more proprietary gloss than would otherwise be the case. As well as these mutations of familiar generic terms, the publicity employs references to its male star, Van Johnson, in conjunction with generic references as another strategy for effacing the film’s status as a genre production. Poster headlines such as ‘Van sings! Van dances! Van romances!’ and ‘He sings! He dances! And how he romances! Van!’, present the film as offering something more than the generic pleasures of song, dance and romance; the pleasures it offers are the more unique and specific pleasures of Van Johnson singing, dancing and romancing. The same could, of course, be said of any musical: whoever the star of the film is, the pleasures offered by the film are always specific pleasures relating to the performance of that particular star. This does not detract from the argument that the emphasis on Van Johnson’s star character functions to distinguish Easy to Wed from other musicals. Rather, it illustrates the tendency of the Hollywood industry to attempt to individuate all of its products, rather than classifying them in generic terms, by emphasising the distinctive and proprietary aspects (in this case the star, contracted to the studio) of particular films and film cycles. The tendency to rework generic terms into more distinctive signifiers of a film’s type in publicity material, in an effort to obscure the generic character of films, is also evident in the press-books for some of the other musicals. Till the Clouds Roll By is described as a ‘wonder-musical in Technicolor’; the ‘love-and-song story of Jerome Kern’; a ‘Technicolossal musical ... the romantic life-story of Jerome Kern’. Some of the publicity for Blue Skies does refer to the film generically as a musical but, on the other hand it is also referred to as ‘America’s #1 musical movie’ and ‘your heaven on earth musical’, and these descriptions endeavour to distinguish the film from other generically similar films by invoking a discourse of quality similar to that already discussed. Posters for The Jolson Story refer to the film not as a musical at all, but as ‘the wonder film in glorious Technicolor’. However, here

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again, cultural knowledge provides vital generic information: audience expectation that a film about Al Jolson’s life was likely to be a musical would have been high. Publicity for Road to Utopia goes furthest of all the musicals or comedies in eschewing generic descriptions in favour of the sort of proprietary, branded identity which Altman suggests was common industry practice for its top-end productions (1999: 115-121). So although it is possible to recognise the film as a musical-comedy from its publicity material, this fact is communicated through the use of images of the film’s male stars, Bob Hope and Bing Crosby, rather than through explicit use of generic descriptors. In addition to communicating information about the generic qualities of the film, the prominence of images of Hope and Crosby simultaneously functions to mask those qualities by foregrounding the film’s status as part of the well-established series of ‘Road’ films. This emphasis on the film’s identity as part of a series, in preference to its generic qualities, is repeated in captions declaring the film to be ‘the latest and greatest “road” show of them all’ and ‘more socko than “Morocco” zanier than “Zanzibar” singier than “Singapore.”’ This foregrounding of proprietary features of the film and the series to which it belongs even extends to the film itself. In one scene, Chester (Bob Hope) and Duke (Bing Crosby) are travelling through the snow-covered wastes of Alaska when Chester refers to a mountain on the horizon as ‘bread and butter’. Questioned about this about this by Duke, Chester responds, ‘may be a mountain to you but it’s bread and butter to me’ while a ring of stars appears around the mountain peak and the words ‘Paramount Pictures’ appear superimposed over the mountain to form the familiar Paramount studios’ logo. While film genre criticism would suggest that these films should be classified as some combination of musical, romance and comedy, publicity for the films was at pains to obscure these generic identities by emphasising instead more individual, proprietary qualities of the films. Publicity materials for two of the other films within the musical-comedy group provide an alternative way of thinking about this group in generic terms and of conceptualising the distinction between the quality narrative films and the remainder of the original group of popular films. Both Ziegfeld Follies and The Kid From Brooklyn are musical/comedy hybrids, and this generic identity is evident in the publicity material. But the publicity also strongly suggests that these films offer something more. As has already been noted, film publicity is no stranger to hyperbole, so the claim, ‘here come the screen’s biggest laughs! brightest songs! loveliest girls!’ on a poster for The Kid From Brooklyn might not seem particularly remarkable in itself. However, the unusual phrasing of another caption (‘light up eyes – here come laughter, luxury, loveliness’) makes it stand out among the others and draws particular attention to the film’s appeal to the senses. Sensual appeal is also suggested in the publicity for Ziegfeld Follies, which offers ‘stars! spectacle! drama! comedy! song hits! the world’s most gorgeous girls’, all in ‘the greatest production since the birth of motion pictures!’, a film which is ‘bigger than anything you’ve seen on stage or screen!’

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Comparing publicity for the quality narrative films with that for the musicals and comedies, it is possible to see the mobilisation of two distinct discourses about the films. The pleasures offered by the narrative films are more directly comparable with the intellectual pleasures offered by their literary antecedents. The other films, the musicals and comedies, make a much stronger appeal to the pleasures of the senses and of the spectacle as such. The incorporation, in publicity material, of references to the Technicolor photography which dominates over monochrome in the latter group is also indicative of the foregrounding of the augmented sensory appeal and enhanced spectacle of these films.3 This distinction also explains the absence of references to the literary background of The Harvey Girls in publicity material for the film; this background is simply irrelevant to a film conceived primarily in terms of spectacle rather than narrative. Considered in terms of the classes of film employed in publicising these films, the generically diverse group of films identified at the beginning of this essay begins to cohere into two generic subsets: quality narrative films and ‘sensuous’, spectacular films. These new groupings are no more generically pure than more familiar genres, and several films exhibit characteristics of both groups. The Yearling, for example, is based on a novel, but its publicity also emphasises its Technicolor photography and more sensational aspects of the film, elevating what are actually quite minor incidents in the film into major selling points. Similarly, Notorious, while lacking the literary background of most of the films in the quality ‘narrative’ group, does claim prestige status for itself by invoking a discourse of quality in its publicity, emphasising the lavish production and the ‘hand picked and convincing high class cast’. On the other hand the publicity material also emphasises the film’s ‘emotional impact’ and calls it an ‘audience rocking melodramatic masterpiece’ (emphasis added), which description suggests an affinity with the group identified (in this essay) as ‘sensuous’ rather than as ‘narrative’ films. Even when genre is reconceptualised in the way suggested here, and reoriented towards industrydefined generic classes, it seems that hybridity rather than purity is the norm.

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The fact that the publicity material does not offer definitions of these films in the terms conventionally encountered in academic writing on genre, and the fact that the industry-defined classes discussed above do permit the formation of relatively coherent groupings for this diverse set of films, has several implications for future research into film genre. First, it is clear from examining this publicity material that industry conceptions of films do not always accord with those of scholars and, in particular it seems that the industry, with its eyes firmly set on maximising revenues, tried to position films in such a way that they would appeal to the largest possible audience. This was not simply a question of manipulating the definition of an already existing film to make it seem to be something it was not. Generic hybridity was probably at the heart of film production. Two Years Before The Mast illustrates this point well. In the film a female character is introduced as a

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passenger aboard the ship solely, it would seem, in order to allow a short-lived romance to develop between this character and the central male character, Charles Stewart. Contemporary reviews recognised the inclusion of this interlude as a strategy to give this rather ‘masculine’ film a greater appeal for women: being ‘strictly for the men [...] to offset this, the scripters injected a minor love theme’ (Variety, 28 August 1946). ). In order to accord this tendency towards generic hybridity its proper place, future research, instead of constructing canons of pure examples of genre, would be better directed to the examination of interconnections between genres, and the clustering of genres into hybrid configurations such as musical comedy, musical romance, comedy romance and so on.

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The second point is that there is, as Neale (2000) argues, a need for academic work on film genre to consider industry-defined genres such as the prestige production, and how these genres were understood by both their producers and audiences. The publicity material discussed in this essay relates to a very small set of films released in a very limited time span, but even with such a restricted sample the existence of distinctive ways of conceiving genre within discourses employed by the industry is detectable. Further work which expands the sample in size and extends over a longer period could reveal that genres such as the quality narrative film and the spectacular were as important for studios and contemporary audiences as more familiar genres such as the western and gangster film have been to film scholars. This essay concludes with an observation relating to the problematic relationship between conventional film genre scholarship and film history. As already argued, the degree of attention which has been given to film noir by film scholars, and the link between this kind of film and the mood or tone of U.S. society in the early postwar years, produces a misleading impression of both the films and culture of the period, elevating a type of film which was not the dominant style at the time to a privileged position in film studies’ historical understanding of the period. The problems which arise from the use of a limited set of cultural productions as a way of understanding the culture, values and attitudes of earlier periods inevitably beset any cultural history. However, these problems are compounded when the assumptions of film genre scholarship inform the attempt to write historical accounts of the films and culture of earlier periods: the promotion of a class of film which was not empirically dominant in the period to a position of theoretical dominance is specifically related to the practices of film genre scholars who have assumed the objective existence of the generic classes familiar in academic accounts of film genre rather than examining the broad range of Hollywood’s productions and the different ways these were configured into generic groupings by contemporary users of those films. This approach to genre proves to be rather limited when confronted with the complexities of history and these limitations can only be overcome by reconceptualising genre in relation to empirical data, and not by adherence to a preconceived and over-rigid conceptual framework. In

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attempting to address the question ‘what kind of film is it?’, film genre scholarship will in future need to move away from the apparently objective, trans-historical categories which have characterised it in the past and pay attention to the different answers which might be given to this question in relation to the same film by different groups of film users and at different times. Notes 1. This list represents the biggest financial successes of 1946 in the USA. Due to differences between sources of information relating to the financial success of films, three sources of data were triangulated to produce the final list; Lyon (1989), Steinberg (1982) and a table of ‘All-Time Top Grossers’ published by Variety in 1955. A film was included in the group considered here if it appeared in all three lists. 2. See Jackson (1988) for a full account of the film’s genesis. 3. Publicity for some of the films incorporates references to Technicolor photography into descriptions of the identity of films in such a way as to create a sense that the fact that a film is photographed in Technicolor is more than a technical detail, but is integral to the generic identity of the film. Till The Clouds Roll By, for example, is referred to as a ‘technicolossal musical’.

Bibliography Altman, R., Film/Genre, London, BFI Publishing, 1999. Bazin, A., ‘William Wyler or the Jansenist of Directing’, in B. Cardullo (ed.), Bazin at Work: Major Essays and Reviews from the Forties and Fifties, London and New York: Routledge, 1997, pp. 1-22. Belton, J., American Cinema/American Culture, New York, McGraw Hill, 1994. Christopher, N., Somewhere in the Night: Film Noir and the American City, New York, Free Press, 1997. Cook, P. (ed.), The Cinema Book, London, BFI Publishing, 1985. Crowther, B., Film Noir: Reflections in a Dark Mirror, London, Columbus Books, 1988. Harvey, S., ‘Woman’s Place: The Absent Family of Film Noir’, in E. Kaplan (ed.), Women in Film Noir, London, BFI Publishing, 1998, pp. 35-46. Jackson, M. A., ‘Uncertain Peace: The Best Years of Our Lives’, in J. O’Connor and M. Jackson, American History/American Film, New York, Ungar Publishing Co., 1988, pp. 147-165. Kaminsky, S., American Film Genres, Chicago, Nelson Hall, 1985. Kaplan, E. A. (ed.), Women in Film Noir, London, BFI Publishing, 1998. Maltby, R., Hollywood Cinema: An Introduction, Oxford, Blackwell, 1995. McArthur, C., Underworld USA, London, BFI Press, 1972.

Roffman, P. and J. Purdy, The Hollywood Social Problem Film: Madness, Despair and Politics, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1981. Schatz, T., Hollywood Genres: Formulas Filmmaking and the Studio System, New York, McGraw Hill, 1981. Selby, S., Dark City: The Film Noir, Jefferson N.C. and London, McFarland, 1984 Variety. Review: Two Years Before the Mast (28 August 1946).

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Neale, S., Genre and Hollywood, London and New York, Routledge, 2000.

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IV. Genre, Gender and Fiction Three Faces of Ruth Rendell: Feminism, Popular Fiction, and the Question of Genre Margaret Russett

It is commonplace in positive reviews of bestsellers to say that a book ‘transcends’ the classification under which it has been marketed. This claim is frequently made on behalf of Ruth Rendell, whose 1988 novel The House of Stairs was issued in paperback with a front-cover blurb from P. D. James (the competing British ‘Queen of Crime’), praising the way ‘Ruth Rendell writing as Barbara Vine has transcended her genre by her remarkable imaginative power to explore and illumine the dark corners of the human psyche.’1 Coming as it does from another popular ‘genre writer’ who has attempted to slough off the label’s negative connotations, James’ tribute suggestively blurs formal, thematic, and biographical categories. While on the one hand the formula seems predictable (genre + imagination = serious novel), James more surprisingly connects Rendell’s achievement to the marketing device of acquiring a pseudonym: Rendell’s psychological insight is presented as a corollary of her new persona. Though the logic may be backward, the authorial figuration is indeed integral to the so-called ‘Barbara Vine’ novels, which Rendell began publishing in 1986 and which represent twelve (to date) of the sixty-some volumes she has produced in her long and prolific career. A writer overdue for sustained critical treatment, Rendell supplies the terms for such an evaluation in the way she stages the debut of her persona.

I have wanted Barbara to have a voice as well as Ruth. It would be a softer voice speaking at a slower pace, more sensitive perhaps, and more intuitive. In A DarkAdapted Eye she has found that voice, taking a surname from the other side of the fam-

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My paperback edition of A Dark-Adapted Eye, the first novel to be published by Barbara Vine, is appended by an open letter glossing the pseudonym. ‘Dear Reader,’ it begins, ‘There is nothing unusual in having two Christian names, but perhaps it is less common to be called by each of them equally. This is what happened to me.’ Rendell goes on to explain that Barbara, the name used by her mother and Scandinavian grandparents, represents a side of her personality that contrasts with the ‘tougher, colder, more analytical, possibly more aggressive’ Ruth, the ‘professional writer’ who ‘has written all the novels’ and ‘created Chief Inspector Wexford,’ the hero of her well-known police procedural series. The ‘more feminine,’ unprofessional Barbara writes letters and sews. ‘For a long time,’ the letter continues,

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ily...for Vine was my great-grandmother’s maiden name. There would be nothing surprising to a psychologist in Barbara’s choosing, as she asserts herself, to address readers in the first person. (Vine, 1987: 281).

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As Ruth, Rendell has become famous in a genre that she – like many critics of detective fiction – associates with hard-edged masculinity; Wexford, she has acknowledged, is in large part a portrait of her father, although if he ‘had been born today, he would probably have been a woman.’ Herself born in 1930, Rendell sees her generation as ‘caught up in the web that one writes about men because men are the people and we are the others’ (Cooper-Clark, 1983: 139). Elsewhere she has disavowed interest in ‘women detectives,’ though the reason is ‘not because I’m not a feminist, because I really do hope I am’ (Clark, 1989: 232).2 The question of what ‘feminist’ means to Rendell is not easily answered: a full response would have to include her progressive voting record as a Member of Parliament (where she has campaigned on domestic violence) as well as her widely criticised condemnation of militant feminism in the 1985 Wexford novel An Unkindness of Ravens (see Rowland, 2001: 5).3 But whereas such topical considerations are important to recent, explicitly political Wexfords like Simisola and Harm Done, a different kind of feminism informs Vine’s departure from the police procedural, which links the assertion of a ‘feminine’ voice to a meditation on the relationship between gender and genre. Thus while Rendell has not, like other avowedly feminist crime writers such as Sarah Paretsky, revised the ‘hard-boiled’ tradition by creating a female detective, she connects her generic experiments with an exploration of feminine subjectivity.4 As the letter itself intimates, this exploration begins with the elimination of the detective and the substitution of a first-person narrator who participates more intimately in the mystery she unfolds. Vine’s ‘intuitive’ approach is further identified with a web of female relations who find their correlatives in the plots of the novels. The surprise is that not Barbara but ‘Ruth Rendell’ makes this announcement. Moreover, the letter is reprinted word for word on the following two pages, differentiated only by the typeface – an imitation of cursive handwriting – and the facsimile signature added to the printed name. Even while voicing her alter ego, Rendell undercuts the distinction between personae with a first-person address by Ruth. The duplication of the letter imitates the doubling of names, without demarcating fully separate identities. In fact, the Vine novels do not represent the first split in Rendell’s persona; in addition to the police procedurals, she has for many years been publishing novels of psychological suspense, popularly called ‘chiller-killers’ because they lack a detective hero.5 In this formal sense, at least, Rendell’s oeuvre evokes the doubleness and division that psychoanalytic feminism associates with the category of woman. Such concerns also frame the

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following discussion, but it will follow James’ lead in examining Rendell’s career primarily through the lens of genre. Beginning from what happens when a writer associated with the mass market articulates a competing identity as ‘literary’ author, it goes on to consider how the attempt to do so is inflected by her relation to gender.6 While there is certainly no necessary connection between literary aspirations and liberal-feminist politics, I suggest that Rendell’s bid to ‘transcend’ the mystery market correlates literary genealogy and gender in a way that usefully complicates the negative valuations of both femininity and genre as such. We can begin to connect authorship, gender, and narrative by noticing that feminine doubles are also a prominent motif in the Vine novels, beginning with the first, A Dark-Adapted Eye. The plot revolves around the relationship between two sisters living together in a British backwater during the 1930s and 40s; their peculiar intimacy is marked by reference to the sister-doubles Lizzie and Laura in Christina Rossetti’s ‘Goblin Market’ (Vine, 1987: 204). The narrative voice, however, belongs to Faith Severn, a woman whose age and background loosely parallel Rendell’s, and whose leisurely, meditative style makes her a plausible vehicle for the voice of Barbara Vine. Anna’s Book,7 a more recent Vine, is narrated alternately by Ann Eastbrook, another thoughtful, intellectual, upper-middle-class woman perhaps ten years younger than Faith, and Anna Westerby, Ann’s Danishimmigrant grandmother, whose diaries of London life during the first half of the century prove her ‘a novelist without knowing it’ (Vine, 1994: 7). Questions of identity and repetition are still more closely associated in The Crocodile Bird, whose teenaged narrator, Liza, has been raised in claustrophobic isolation by a single mother who might almost be her twin. The ‘Vine’ persona is thus not identified with a single figure so much as it links with doubles and a foregrounding of narrative per se. While the Rendell/Vine split responds to the thematic preoccupations of the novels, the doublings within those novels offer a reflexive commentary on the shifting relations of authorship and generic identity.

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Each of these novels, like The House of Stairs, explores the heroine-narrator’s psychology by situating her female antecedents within a specific socio-historical setting. The question of what she inherits from her family interweaves with the problem of narrative voice: Faith Severn’s story is catalyzed by a true-crime writer’s interest in her Aunt Vera’s execution for murder some thirty years earlier, while Ann Eastbrook, a professional researcher, becomes the custodian of her grandmother’s posthumously published journals. In both cases, the division that inaugurates Rendell’s new series is repeated by the proliferation of female voices in the novels. A Dark-Adapted Eye emphasizes its primary narrator’s imperfect knowledge of crucial events by incorporating fragmentary accounts and letters by her three aunts – one a victim, one a murderer, and one the surviving friend and surrogate mother of Faith. Anna’s Book not only juxtaposes the stories of Ann and Anna, but brings such diverse testimony as court transcripts and the recollections

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of Ann’s Aunt Swanny to bear on the lacuna in Anna’s autobiography. These novels present not one or even two, but several figures for the woman writer: professional or amateur, intuitive or analytical. In Anna’s Book, such figures of genre and generational difference also map onto questions of language and national identity; Anna’s diaries have been translated from their original Danish, a fragment of which provides the epigraph for each chapter. What, Vine’s novels ask in their different ways, is the relationship between narrative authority and genealogy? To what extent do sensitivity and authenticity correlate with fidelity to the mother tongue?

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These questions are further complicated by the repeated plot device of a choice between mothers. In Anna’s Book, the central mystery concerns the genetic identity of Swanny, who discovers in late middle age that she may not after all be Anna’s biological child. A Dark-Adapted Eye turns on an even more radical version of this dilemma. That Faith’s Aunt Vera killed her sister Eden is not in doubt; what remains permanently undecidable is a ‘bizarre point of genesis,’ a ‘doubt as to ... [the] maternity’ (Vine, 1987: 270, 272) of the son they both claim. ‘And that,’ Faith concludes, ‘is the heart of the mystery that has frustrated Daniel Stewart and let him down’ (Vine, 1987: 274). Stewart, a professional crime writer, cannot tolerate such a ‘doubt at the heart of things, for if it is true that an element of mystery as to what really happened may enhance a work of this kind, the unanswered question is always one of who did it or how it was done’ (Vine, 1987: 270). Leaving this central question conspicuously unresolved, the novel critiques formula-fiction’s emphasis on ends by returning to the problem of origins. And if this problem has, in detective fiction as elsewhere, typically been imagined as one of paternity – pater semper incertus est – Vine’s novel highlights the epistemological naivety of the assumption that mater est certissima. A revision of genre, then, overlaps with a challenge to the gender of an ancient narrative paradigm. The question of feminine voice has itself often been posed as a contest between foremothers and forefathers, at least since Virginia Woolf ’s famous dictum that ‘we think back through our mothers if we are women.’ Which mother to choose, however, may not be as simple a question as it first appears. Rendell’s adoption of the Vine persona links a thematic exploration of this problem to a reflection on her identities as a woman writer, and her position within a literary tradition that, far from being monolithic or even dualistic, has always consisted of many complexly interwoven threads. Of the Vine novels to date, it is The House of Stairs that most explicitly presents maternity as a generic question, by filtering its heroine’s dilemma through her literary inheritance. The remainder of this essay, accordingly, will focus the broad issues of genealogy, affiliation, and femininity by considering how The House of Stairs allegorises its relationship to a ‘feminine’ literary genre, as well as to the works of three authoritative male writers themselves concerned with the interweavings of gender, genre, and narrative voice. Through a detailed discussion of this exemplary novel and its intertexts, I hope both to

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establish a framework for further readings of Rendell and, perhaps more ambitiously, to offer some suggestions about the role of genre in constructions of feminine literary authority. Elizabeth Vetch, the heroine-narrator of The House of Stairs, lives under the constant threat of developing Huntington’s chorea, a degenerative genetic disease that killed her mother and that strikes exactly half of its victims’ offspring. Its latency period correlates roughly with a woman’s reproductive life: Elizabeth, forty years old at the novel’s end, is still a few years away from the certainty of having escaped. Early symptoms include unexplained aches and pains as well as diminished motor control; the disease can also manifest itself in ‘mental changes’, for ‘madness of a kind we are also heirs to’ (Vine, 1990: 20). An unwilled ‘inheritance’ and dark family ‘secret’ (2122), it propels Elizabeth into the family-romance on which the plot of the novel depends. ‘Turn[ing] from’ her parents and their ‘suspenseful waiting’ (21), Elizabeth chooses an alternative mother, her rich older cousin Cosette Kingsley. This brief account should begin to suggest how The House of Stairs, like several Vines including The Crocodile Bird, affiliates its heroine’s story with the historically feminine form of gothic romance – a genre haunted by doubles, divisions, and secrets.8 Orphaned by the time she reaches adulthood, Elizabeth also fears becoming her mother, echoing the threat implied in the early deaths and forceful confinements of gothic mothers from the eighteenth century onward. Lest this generic allusion be overlooked, Vine titles her novel after a house, explicitly recalling the early gothics The Castle of Otranto and The Mysteries of Udolpho, among others. The ‘House of Stairs,’ a ‘white elephant’ purchased by Cosette after the death of her husband, becomes home not only to Elizabeth but to a motley set of artists, hippies and drifters who form her pseudo-family. The house shares with other gothic mansions a spatial arrangement that diagrams the post-Freudian psyche. In Jane Eyre, for example, the interiors of Fairfax Hall’s upper storeys are much older than the cosily Victorian furnishings below; concealed at the top of the house is the madwoman Bertha Mason, the novel’s murderous personification of the unconscious. Six storeys high, the House of Stairs is similarly divided between its public lower rooms and the dangerous, inaccessible attic where the beautiful murderer Christabel Sanger lives. Three Faces of Ruth Rendell 139

Vine’s invocation of gothic romance in The House of Stairs and elsewhere may initially seem surprising for a writer wishing to disassociate herself from crime writing, given that the gothic is generally acknowledged as the historical progenitor of the ‘mystery’ or ‘suspense’ plot.9 Together with another of its offspring, the Harlequin romance, it is also the genre that has most persistently been associated with the negative senses of ‘popularity’.10 Its very conventionality, however, makes gothic romance function as a discourse about genre, and therefore as a way of foregrounding the multiple traditions in which the contemporary writer may situate herself. In its conspicuous fictionality and its dissimilarity to the realist police

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procedural, the gothic highlights the permeability of genre boundaries and their dialectical elaboration. By invoking the gothic genre in The House of Stairs, therefore, Vine both indicates her distance from Wexford-style detection and adopts a metafictional rubric for exploring the cultural associations of the suspense genre, somewhat as Stephen King does when he casts the hero of his neo-gothic Misery as a writer of serial romances. The genre of hysteria in nineteenth-century fiction, gothic romance is also the form devoted to problems of origin, inheritance (both legal and genetic), and the intergenerational repetitions that both secure identity and give a language to filial ambivalence. Thus it may not be overreaching to suggest that Elizabeth’s fearful maternal inheritance resonates with the situation of a contemporary woman writer, consciously evoking a tradition dominated by and long associated with women – Ann Radcliffe and the Brontës being only a few of the most famous. Gothic romance offers a ‘feminine’ genealogy for the ‘masculine’ detective genre, yet this is not so much an alternative to the contemporary image of crime fiction as it is a way of gendering ‘genre’ or formula fiction per se.11 Rendell’s interviews offer abundant evidence of her own ambivalence toward the category of ‘genre writer’. She detests being called ‘the new Agatha Christie’, protesting that she herself ‘functions as a real novelist’. Nonetheless, she proudly mentions having won ‘the Arts Council of Britain’s Award for a genre novel’. ‘I’ve found,’ she adds, that if I write a book that is good and is literate and critics like it, it gets raised above the genre level in reviews....I don’t mind being called a genre novelist because I think that if one can transcend it, that transcendence will be recognized, shall we say. (Carr, 1983: 227-30).

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Rendell asserts that she has ‘never written a formula novel’ and reiterates the familiar complaint that ‘the requisite structure and form of genre novels curtail a novelist’s freedom’ (Carr, 1983: 234). Asked why her epigraphs and casual quotations are typically borrowed from ‘canonical’ authors rather than mystery writers, she denies reading ‘much crime or mystery any more’ but notes that of course great writers do contribute to the detective – or, let us say, the suspense – genre...Crime and Punishment is a thriller. It’s one of the world’s greatest novels and if we don’t think of it as a thriller, and would indeed be shocked to hear it called so, this isn’t because its form and progress is not that of a thriller but because the writing and the examination of motive, guilt and remorse transcend to an amazing degree the usual suspense novel limitations. (Cooper-Clark, 1983: 125).

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While genre designations promise some community among writers, they more often denote limitation. Rendell’s remark about Dostoyevsky makes it clear that no writer can be canonised as a genre practitioner, for greatness is synonymous with the overcoming of such labels – as though, by winning critical recognition, a work could cease belonging to any category but the class of ‘great novels’. We might also note that while her pejorative name for genre is female, her honorific example is male. Extending the analogy with the imprisonment of gothic heroines, the coercions of genre link with constraints of sex: if, as Woolf suggests, all great writers are androgynous, to be simply a mystery novelist is to be merely another Agatha Christie or Ann Radcliffe. Thus wedded both to the sub-literary production that George Eliot damned in ‘Silly Novels by Lady Novelists’ and to a ‘mass’ audience that, as the example of King suggests, is gendered feminine whatever its empirical make-up, the writer of formula fiction bears a cultural stigma analogous to the mark of gender. In a paradoxical way, then, to write even ‘tough, analytical’ detective novels is to be feminised, merely generic. Yet by denigrating her most obvious female forerunners, Rendell does not necessarily dismiss her literary maternity altogether. The articulation of a ‘feminine’ or ‘intuitive’ voice intersects with a feminist literary project in its recuperation of a devalued feminine form: that is, when the woman who has regarded herself as ‘other’ speaks the language of otherness as it has been defined by canonical hierarchies.12 Vine chooses the gothic – both culturally feminine and unmistakably literary – as the alternative foremother of a riskier and more profound revisionary project than that undertaken by liberalfeminist crime writers like Sarah Paretsky and Sue Grafton.

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The House of Stairs features its own genre writer as heroine. After completing her university training and while living at the House of Stairs, Elizabeth embarks on a sequence of novels ‘written rapidly and badly and with the maximum injected sensation and violence and crude sex,’ and avowedly produced ‘for financial gain’ (Vine, 1993: 116, 166). Cosette describes the first of these as ‘a sort of cross between Gone with the Wind and Murder on the Orient Express’, significantly evoking two best-sellers by women, one of them Rendell’s nemesis, Agatha Christie (Vine, 1990: 153). ‘Oh, I have been too fond of literature one way and another, and produced too little of it myself,’ Elizabeth laments, acknowledging that she ‘could have created’ real literature had she so chosen (Vine, 1990: 135, 166). It is the feminine Cosette, seamstress and writer of letters, who, rather than Elizabeth, stands as the novel’s primary ‘Vine’ figure. And like Elizabeth, Rendell has admitted to writing the Wexford series for ‘money’: ‘people ask for it. . . .they are popular’ (Clark, 1989: 232; Cooper-Clark, 1983: 138). Rendell’s career was in fact launched by the Wexfords. As she tells the story, she had been working as a journalist and attempting without success to break into fiction-writing when From Doon With Death, the first of what was to become her signature series, was finally accepted by a publisher (Clark, 1989: 230). In this sense Rendell, like Elizabeth, is a genre novelist by mere accident. Again like Rendell, Elizabeth finds that she

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cannot doff her generic mantle at will. She only assumes more Vine-like qualities when she relates ‘this account or record or whatever you want to call it’ (Vine, 1990: 230), the story she tells in propria persona but which revolves around Cosette. Elizabeth melodramatically calls Cosette ‘my salvation’ (Vine, 1990: 331), an identification we might be tempted to link with Rendell’s elevation of the maternal in her choice of pseudonym. Yet Elizabeth’s love of Cosette is only purchased by the rejection of her biological mother, somewhat as Vine invokes a gothic genealogy to complicate her more obvious association with Christie. Elizabeth is not to be saved by becoming Cosette, any more than Rendell achieves transcendence by electing one set of generic markers over another, or by disavowing the formal affiliations that energise all writing. The House of Stairs both qualifies the idea of a maternal inheritance, and critiques the gender binary on which such figures rely, by filtering its narrative through three masculine literary influences – each at once the alternative to a limiting genre, and a way of acknowledging its persistence. In each of these texts, gothic romance figures as the ‘other’ of authoritative writing, not fully repressed because it is also intimately entwined with the idea of the feminine around which each revolves.

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To hear Rendell tell it, the contemporary writer’s most powerful ally against the reductiveness of genre fiction is psychoanalysis. Rendell has told one interviewer that she often reads ‘Freud, Jung and Adler’, and she ascribes ‘the concern with good and evil in the detective novel’ to ‘the proliferation of the knowledge of psychology and psychiatry’ (Cooper-Clark, 1983: 128, 131). Psychoanalysis thus presents an antidote to the more formulaic versions of gothic, even while it shares and theorises the gothic preoccupation with hysterical women. One model for Vine’s overlay of gender and epistemology, then, may be the Freudian case history, not only because of the way Freud sophisticates the traditional detective’s role, but also because of the way psychoanalysis responds to the problem of voice.13 Each focused on the reconstruction of an unwitnessed primal scene (as is suggested by the title of A Dark-Adapted Eye), the halting, interrupted, and non-sequential narratives produced by Vine’s heroines also recall Freud’s complaint that his patients usually give a very indistinct picture of the course of the illness. I begin the treatment, indeed, by asking the patient to give me the whole of his [sic] life and illness, but even so the information I receive is never enough to let me see my way about the case. This first account may be compared to an unnavigable river whose stream is at one moment choked by masses of rock and at another divided and lost among shallows and sandbanks.

These reports, Freud claims, invariably leave ‘gaps unfilled, and riddles

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unanswered’; the ‘sequence of different dates is uncertain’, and the ‘patients will repeatedly correct a particular or a date’ (Freud, 1963: 30-31). This ‘state of affairs’, he goes on to argue, is constitutive of hysteria, the most common ailment of his female patients and the disease that founded psychoanalysis. The telos of the analysis, therefore, should be ‘to repair all the damages to the patient’s memory’, bring her secrets into the open, and arrive at ‘an intelligible, consistent, and unbroken’ story (Freud, 1963: 32). Just as the reading of symptoms articulates literally muted thoughts, the record of the analysis should restore an authoritative voice to the patient. Yet if the patient’s voice, as various feminist critics have complained, remains subordinated to the analyst’s, the record itself may never arrive at the ideal closure Freud imagines.14 In a fashion that mimics the progress of an analysis, Vine’s narrators consciously withhold information as well as calling attention to their inadvertent lapses, continually revising the past in the light of subsequent realisations. Their narratives oscillate between the heroine’s ongoing present life and episodes that may predate her birth or have escaped her immediate knowledge. In A DarkAdapted Eye, Faith contrasts a clear but stereotyped account of Vera’s crime that she finds ‘in a library book’ with ‘the great gaps, the spaces’ in her own, nonetheless more truthful memory of these events (Vine, 1987: 6, 8). Asking not ‘whodunnit’ by why, to whom, or even precisely what was done, these narratives defer their reconstructions of the primal scene until the final pages. Thus linked both thematically and structurally with problems of origin which – at least in A Dark-Adapted Eye – remain technically undecidable, these scenes suggest that the temporal manipulations characteristic of the Vine novels owe something to Freud’s imbrication of fabula and sjuzet in such case histories as Dora and the ‘Wolfman’. In proportion as Vine’s narratives assume a more ‘intuitive’ form, they also, as Peter Brooks observes of Freud, destabilise ‘belief in explanatory histories as exhaustive accounts whose authority derives from the force of closure’ (Brooks, 1979: 78).

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Vine’s characters, moreover, symptomatise the deceptions of memory with technically hysterical behavior such as the tic by which Jamie, the disputed son in A Dark-Adapted Eye, registers his fantasied presence at the pivotal murder scene (Vine, 1987: 270). The physical effects of Huntington’s chorea also suggest the ravages of the unconscious, to the point that Elizabeth Vetch cannot tell whether her genetic predisposition is manifesting itself or she is merely developing a nervous affliction. Without necessarily applying Freud’s diagnosis to the psyches of her narrators, then, we may note that the formal model of hysterical narrative calls attention to certain thematic continuities between Freud’s Dora and Vine’s novels. Dora, like Vine’s heroines, is an intellectual and a feminist, but translates her feelings of entrapment into expressions of misogyny. Like Elizabeth, she prefers the company of her aunt to that of her ‘foolish’ and ‘uncultivated’ mother, on whom she ‘looked down’ and whom she ‘used to criticize. . . mercilessly’ (Freud, 1963:

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34). And like Dora rapt over the Sistine Madonna and Frau K.’s ‘adorable white body’, Elizabeth conflates maternal and erotic objects when she falls in love, via portraiture, with another childless widow a few years older than herself. Thus Dora, and psychoanalysis more generally, offers Vine a rubric for exploring memory in the context of specifically feminine desires and fears. More exactly, Freud’s case study suggests how the choice of female models, even for a character who proclaims (as Elizabeth does) that ‘I prefer the company of other women’, may be accompanied by a profoundly ambivalent relationship to the givenness of maternal origins, both genetic and generic. ‘Feminine’ voice does not arise from a sentimental assumption of female solidarity but from the ‘hysterical’ discovery that family history is inextricable from individual symptom, and that this history is always in the process of construction. By manipulating sequence in the manner of a case history, Vine produces a narrative whose conclusion aligns the reader’s discovery of objective truth with the narrator’s self-analysis, and whose closure mirrors the contingency and partiality of both. These contingent narratives stand in marked contrast with Elizabeth’s ‘cheap, sexy, romantic adventure stor[ies]’, which are also explicitly opposed to the novels of Henry James, about whom Elizabeth planned to write her academic thesis and whose works come to stand for the quality that distinguishes great fiction, its ‘examination of the human heart’ (Vine, 1990: 138). The contrast between James’ profundity and the sensationalism of mass-produced fiction, undertaken to evade ‘the terror and the bore’ (Vine, 1990: 135) of her maternal inheritance, suggests alternative genealogies for Elizabeth’s career that rhyme with, though they do not exactly parallel, the contrast between her hated biological mother and her beloved ‘adoptive mother’ Cosette (Vine, 1990: 171). Yet if the denigration of one tradition and the elevation of another tends (like Rendell’s praise of Dostoyevsky) to align serious writing with masculinity, the great irony of The House of Stairs is that its sensational plot comes directly from James.

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Christabel Sanger, the novel’s villain, ‘never read a book’; ‘Bell’s illiterate and proud of it’ another character notes (Vine, 1990: 192, 203). When, one day, she idly picks up Elizabeth’s copy of The Wings of the Dove, she can make nothing of it. As Elizabeth herself admits, if there was ever a novel to daunt the non-novel reader, the dipper into magazines, the desultory scanner of newsprint, this is it. The pages of text scarcely broken into paragraphs, uninterrupted by dialogue, as she viewed them with increasing dismay, brought such a look of horror to her face that, stepping back to get a clearer look at her, I burst out laughing. ‘What’s it about?’ she said. ‘It doesn’t even make sense, it might be in a foreign language.’

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(Vine, 1990: 193).

The incomprehension of the non-reader before the canonical text recapitulates a standard motif in fictional critiques of popular fiction, dating at least from Austen’s Northanger Abbey, in which Catherine Morland’s absorption in The Mysteries of Udolpho and its ilk – ‘all story and no reflection’ – leads her to avoid all other kinds of reading (Austen, 1992: 3, 84). Precisely because she does not read, because, ‘being on what Henry James calls almost irreconcilable terms with the printed page’ (Vine, 1990: 245), she passes hours indiscriminately watching television, Bell stands in for the ‘popular’ or ‘mass’ genre consumer who, like a modern-day Catherine Morland, ‘should like to spend [her] whole life in reading’ (or watching) Udolpho (Austen, 1992: 23). Thus, while Elizabeth’s career offers the negative instance of genre-fiction writing, Bell presents the demonic figure for this genre’s constituency. Like Catherine Morland, Bell reads only for the plot. ‘So,’ Elizabeth continues, sitting there cross-legged on the floor, Bell dropping to sit beside me and be close to me but still with the book in her hand, still disbelievingly turning its pages, I told her the plot of The Wings of the Dove. That was all I ever did, all. It wasn’t even the only or the first novel plot I had told her. . . .But Milly Theale remained in her memory, Milly Theale and Merton Densher and Kate Croy, though I don’t believe I ever told her their names. That wasn’t necessary, the plot was enough, the melodramatic central spring of the novel that James somehow makes not sensational but subtle, tenuous, like life. . . .She said slowly, wonderingly, ‘What a clever idea!’ ‘James was clever. There’s never been a cleverer novelist.’ ‘He could have fooled me,’ she said, typically Bell, ‘the way he goes wanking on.’ (Vine, 1990: 193-94).

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Elizabeth assumes, of course, that Bell is complimenting James on his literary skill, but later events show that she is actually referring to the conspiracy hatched by James’ characters. Reading for the plot, Bell devises her own ‘plot’ (Vine, 1990: 251), taking literally the ‘melodramatic central spring’ so attenuated in James’ novel. In this she behaves, again, like a reader of gothic romance – unable to distinguish between fiction and reality, and so predisposed to construct her own life as melodrama. To adopt the phrase of Radcliffe’s villain Montoni, Bell behaves ‘like a heroine’, attempting ‘to relive the plot of a novel’ (Vine, 1990: 308).15 The Wings of the Dove, which Elizabeth admires for its avoidance of sensation, is thereby reduced to a crime

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novel, just as Crime and Punishment, stripped of its canonical aura, becomes a ‘thriller’. Rendell has said that she ‘get[s] tired of plotting’; in the character of Bell, she imagines the conflation of fictional plotting and criminality, the most reductive figure for the crime writer’s task. Bell is not only a murderer but ‘one of the world’s grand liars’, one who lies, as Elizabeth speculates, ‘out of mere caprice’ (Vine, 1990: 81, 164). To call Bell a liar is obviously to pathologise her many ‘inventions’, as when Elizabeth accuses her of ‘juggl[ing] with truth’ (Vine, 1990: 213, 231). But given another name – fiction – her tale-spinning might bear less of a stigma. In fact, Elizabeth’s list of ‘things [she] liked...about Bell’ constitutes a brief restatement of the qualities Rendell values in other novelists. Bell was, recalls Elizabeth, quite as interested in people as I was. She was the only person I have ever known who really wanted to get inside people’s heads and know how they worked and the only person who could talk about other people for hours on end without getting bored or tired. Without any tutelage or training, she had a fine grasp of human psychology. I learned a lot about people from Bell, though I never had the wisdom to put any of it in my books, preferring to use stereotypes for my characters. And she had, has, will always have, a wonderful imagination.

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(Vine, 1990: 170).

Initially, then, Bell’s appropriation of James suggests an antithesis between art and sensation, literature and mere genre. This opposition reproduces a series of alternatives posed in the novel, from Elizabeth’s choice between her mother and Cosette to her final suspension between ‘Bell, who may be my fate, [and] Cosette, who would certainly be my salvation’ (Vine, 1990: 330-31). Repeatedly, however, these antitheses reverse themselves, and not only because Bell cannot be reduced to a generic response. For one thing, Bell physically resembles Cosette (as, in A Dark-Adapted Eye, Vera resembles Eden, ‘golden head by golden head,/ Like two pidgeons in one nest’ [Rossetti in Hares-Striker ed., 1997: 140]; as Liza of The Crocodile Bird reproduces her mother Eve; as, in Anna’s Book, Ann reproduces Anna). Bell, described as looking ‘like an actress in a Bergman film’ (Vine, 1990: 74), wears her hair in Cosette’s style and, by the novel’s end, has reached about the age at which Cosette first befriended Elizabeth. A minor character, thinking of Bell as he evokes the ‘Scandinavian face’ of ‘the most beautiful woman [he’s] ever seen’, seems to Elizabeth ‘also [to be] describing Cosette, or the way Cosette had tried, and with some success, to remake herself ’ (Vine, 1990: 9, 112-13). When Elizabeth takes to wearing a cameo brooch because ‘the face [on it] was Bell’s’, only Cosette notices the resemblance (Vine, 1990: 48).

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Cosette – loving, maternal, unselfish – is the antithesis of Bell but also her double, rival, and victim; Elizabeth describes her love for them both in highly physicalised terms. Bell models her own relationship with Cosette on the duplicitous affection of Kate Croy for Milly Theale, but it is Bell who ‘profoundly resemble[s]’ Bronzino’s portrait of Lucrezia Panciatichi. This is the painting most critics have agreed inspired the one Henry James describes in The Wings of the Dove as hanging in ‘the great gilded historic chamber’ at Matcham and calls ‘the pale personage on the wall.’ It resembles, of course, the doomed Milly Theale in her ‘eyes of other days, her full lips, her long neck. . .’ with its ‘face almost livid in hue, yet handsome in sadness and crowned with a mass of hair, rolled back and held high’. (Vine, 1990: 128).

Elizabeth, already becoming obsessed with Bell, buys a copy of the portrait and ‘carr[ies] it home secretly’ (Vine, 1990: 129) to her bedroom at the House of Stairs. Her infatuation with the illiterate Bell is thus part and parcel with her love for the high-canonical Henry James; each supplies the image for the other. Loving James, moreover, she fixates on the most gothic element of his plot, the generic resemblance between a heroine and the portrait hanging in an ancient mansion. The cover design for The House of Stairs reinforces this equivocation by showing a tiny female figure reeling sensationally before the painting that signifies both Bell and James. Always prone to catalogue her perceptions literarily, Elizabeth loves Bell as James’ heroine. One night, shortly after Cosette, who ‘wanted Bell’ as another residentcum-daughter, has persuaded her to move into the House of Stairs, Elizabeth asks Bell to wear ‘Cosette’s gown of “wasted” red. . .a dress that looked like Lucrezia Panciatichi’s’ (Vine, 1990: 175-76). Bell takes the dress and ‘the cameo that was herself ’, and leaves Elizabeth talking with Cosette about her newly published first book (Vine, 1990: 178). Then

(Vine, 1990: 179).

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the door opened and Bell came in. Or Lucrezia Panciatichi came in – or Milly Theale. She was wearing the pearls and the cameo and had found a gold chain of mine as well and a string of beads to wind around her braided coronet of hair. . . . Instead of smiling at our delight – Cosette actually clapped – she stood gravely between the Chinese screens, then sank softly into the high-backed chair and became entirely the portrait, her left hand closing over the carved arm, her right holding open the little-leather covered book she had brought with her.

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Cosette completes the picture by putting a bloodstone ring – the emblem of Elizabeth’s genetic inheritance – on Bell’s finger; then the two younger women leave the room, lighting their way up the stairs with candles, ‘as our ancestors had done’. Bell takes Elizabeth’s hand and leads her to where the painted Lucrezia looked down at the living Lucrezia. I thought – not then, but on the next day – how strange it was, how infinitely mysterious it would have been to that cinquecento girl if she could have imagined, while she sat for Bronzino in all her beauty and finery, the picture he made reproduced and the copy, no less brilliant and true, hanging in the room where two women, one of them surely herself, entered each other’s arms and made love. (Vine, 1990: 180).

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Bell, that ‘archjuggler in the circus of the world’ (Vine, 1990: 213), develops her plot by personifying the auratic object of a literary desire, leather-bound book in hand. This desire, however, is also situated within a world of mechanical mass production, exemplified by the gulf between the original Lucrezia and her poster image. Thus Elizabeth’s love for James and for the transcendence of genre realises itself in the hoarily gothic language of doubles, when – at midnight on a silent, starless evening – a shape-changing temptress enters her household and her arms. Loving James gothically, Elizabeth calls attention to the way generic motifs inform the most honorific literary oeuvres. More particularly, her romance emphasizes the persistent cultural link, even in the works of male modernists, between gothic secrets and the desires of women. By so firmly associating Bell and Cosette not only with each other but with James, finally, Vine suggests that the desire for an intuitive feminine voice cannot be pursued in isolation from the genre demonised in the figure of Bell. Whatever the affair between Bell and Elizabeth may owe to the homoerotic overtones of Kate Croy’s friendship with Milly Theale, its more explicit source is the poem to which Christabel Sanger owes her name – yet another meditation, by a male writer, on the mystery of female intimacies.16 Coleridge’s gothic tale, perhaps the most notorious literary allusion to an embrace between two women, also provides a subtext for Vine’s triangulation of heroine, mother, and mothersubstitute. Before the beautiful stranger Geraldine can seduce the orphaned Christabel, she must displace the ‘guardian spirit’ of Christabel’s dead mother; later, holding ‘the maiden in her arms’, she ‘seems to slumber still and mild,/ As a mother with her child’ (Coleridge, 1991: 223, 226, lines 212, 299-301).17 Geraldine is both the antagonist of the spectral mother, whom she adjures to ‘peak and pine’ and a parody-mother herself. ‘Christabel’ continually hints that the mystery of Geraldine’s origins and the mystery of the dead mother’s influence are somehow the same. To Elizabeth, likewise, Bell represents both a surrogate for Cosette and

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a distraction from her; and Elizabeth is only incidentally Bell’s target at the House of Stairs. Coleridge’s poem, which revolves around the ‘forced unconscious sympathy’ between the heroine and an enchantress whom she ‘passively did imitate’, thematises the role reversals that complicate and finally confound Bell’s plot (Coleridge, 1991: 234, lines 605-9). In The House of Stairs, it is Christabel who plays the part of Coleridge’s Geraldine, the temptress-interloper. Intending to displace Elizabeth as Cosette’s heir, Bell casts Cosette as Milly Theale when she convinces her lover Mark to impersonate Merton Densher.18 But as Cosette herself bitterly recognises, unlike Milly she is ‘not young and beautiful’; nor, contrary to Bell’s assumption, is she dying (Vine, 1990: 306). Bell herself physically resembles Milly, but takes on the scheming role of Kate Croy; Elizabeth, meanwhile – still in her early twenties and fearful of sharing her mother’s fate – is the most likely candidate for James’ ‘young person conscious of a great capacity for life, but early stricken and doomed, condemned to die under short respite, while also enamoured of the world’ (James, 1986: 35). By the novel’s end, the tables have turned; Elizabeth, ‘hold[ing Bell’s] hand while she sleeps’, has become her erstwhile lover’s ‘mother’ and even agrees to a will leaving ‘everything to Bell’ (Vine, 1990: 133, 329). Foiled in her plot, Bell still correctly intuits how Elizabeth idealises the ‘swanlike’ Cosette, her potential saviour, just as Kate both elevates and diminishes Milly by calling her a ‘dove’ (Vine, 1990: 24). Bell is right, moreover, to see that Cosette’s great desire – like that of the equally well-endowed Milly – is simply to ‘live’ (Vine, 1990: 78). And like James’ Kate, Bell grants this wish, however unintentionally, by introducing Cosette to Mark Henryson (son of James?), the love of her life. In this sense, Bell is not only the object but the agent of feminine desire. As Elizabeth writes,

(Vine, 1990: 190).

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I have never wanted any other woman before or since. On the other hand, I never felt it was a shocking thing we did or wrong or perverse. It seemed natural. Homosexual men who have occasionally slept with women have told me it was enjoyable, they like it, but they felt it wasn’t the real thing . . .So afterward I half expected my lovemaking with Bell, though delightful, though immensely pleasurable, not to be like the real thing. But my reaction was very different, for delightful and pleasurable were not words to be used, other hitherto undiscovered words had to be found, and as to the real thing, this was more real than whatever the real thing is. And so I come up against an inability to express my feelings, my desires, and my fulfillments, a blankness like a sheet of dark water, a pool on which float dazzling mysterious memories and whispered words, a drowning place where the thin branch I clutch at is the recollection that I was in love.

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‘A sight to dream of, not to tell!’ interjects Coleridge’s prurient narrator as Geraldine disrobes before Christabel (Coleridge, 1991: 224, line 253). And like that enchanted heroine, Elizabeth ‘cannot tell’ of a love that exceeds language and daylight knowledge. A figure of and for fantasy, Bell is also the kernel of Elizabeth’s reality, ‘more real than whatever the real thing is’ and equally elusive.19 That Elizabeth nevertheless does attempt to find language for her desire suggests how Vine inverts the Freudian-gothic trope of secrecy to supplement formal realism.

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To align a fantasy-figure with the real seems at first paradoxical. Yet Bell is in fact not only the novel’s prime fictionalist, but also its soothsayer: refusing ever to tell ‘social lies’, she ‘always expressed her feelings about things, her beliefs, with frank openness’ (Vine, 1990: 57, 81). Bell’s understanding of human motives is, as Elizabeth acknowledges, more profound than her own. Like Milly Theale, the ‘superficially. . .absent’ ‘centre’ of The Wings of the Dove, Bell resembles no one else Elizabeth knows; and like Kate Croy, she possesses the gift of seeing things as they are (James, 1986: 40-1, 487). ‘Half your trouble is you’ve read too many books’, she tells Elizabeth (Vine, 1990: 207). In both her honesty and her evasiveness, then, Bell stands in for the Jamesian ability to make the egregiously generic more ‘like life’, and to bring narrative closer to the truth of ‘consciousness’. But this quality is identical with her extravagance, the return of the lurid within a mimetic social and psychological context. Bell might indeed be described as the absent centre of The House of Stairs, and as the hole in Elizabeth’s psyche. When the narrative begins, she has just emerged from fifteen years’ imprisonment in what Elizabeth gothically calls ‘no-man’s land, the cloister fort et dure’ (Vine, 1990: 9). As Elizabeth relates the gradual progress of their acquaintance in the late sixties, Bell remains ‘something of a mystery’, a screen for others’ projections, and the repository of secrets that Elizabeth doesn’t ‘think she’ll tell’ (Vine, 1990: 54, 72; see also 213). The echo links her again with ‘Christabel’, in which the heroine’s muteness replicates the equivocations of a stranger who cannot, or will not, tell where she came from (Coleridge, 1991: 219, 234, lines 99, 619). In The House of Stairs, Bell is the only witness to several key events, but because she is also the most unreliable of narrators, the facts remain obscure to Elizabeth. This epistemological suspension combines with the opacity of Bell’s own desires in a way that recalls Freud’s exasperated query, ‘What does a woman want?’ ‘What did she want?’ Elizabeth asks of Bell. ‘I know now, of course I do, I have known for a long time, but I didn’t know then. It mystified me’ (Vine, 1990: 126). While The House of Stairs finally answers this question conventionally – Bell wants money – its echoes in the motivations and fantasies of other characters reiterate rather than rebuke Freud’s mystification. Just as Elizabeth cannot tell of her most profound feelings and desires, Bell herself, like an unanalysed hysteric,

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remains incapable of accounting for herself. ‘Am I a psychopath?’ she asks Elizabeth: ‘I suppose I must be, they all said I was. But I don’t feel like that, I feel just like anyone else.’ What she had said must have struck her as absurd or shallow, for she corrected herself. ‘Or I think I do.’ (Vine, 1990: 248).

Elizabeth, more conversant than Bell with social-scientific truisms, admits that ‘psychologists would say’ she herself ‘had been arrested in [her] sexual development by a shock, a trauma-making revelation.’ In this admission, of course, she bows to Freud, who consistently links hysteria with lesbianism and who speculates in a late footnote to Dora that the analysis foundered because he ‘failed to discover in time and to inform the patient that her homosexual (gynaecophilic) love for Frau K. was the strongest. . .current in her mental life’ (Freud, 1963: 142). But far from finding this a therapeutic insight, Elizabeth reiterates stubbornly that ‘it felt like being in love, it was being in love, it was the kind of thing you delude yourself that, if all goes well, will last a lifetime’ (Vine, 1990: 190). Not unconscious, Elizabeth’s avowal has the simultaneous effects of demystifying masculine fascination and of grounding authentic voice in the unspoken intimacies of women.

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Freud’s retrospective assurance on the subject of homosexual love – what Dora dreams of, rather than tells – does not, we may note, explain the mystery of woman so much as it reinscribes the gothic and Coleridgean figure of a desire too deeply buried for narrative recuperation. When Freud conflates homoeroticism with the more capacious ‘gynaecophilia’, however, he approaches a secret that remains unanalyzed in his own case history, but which is foregrounded in The House of Stairs: the possibility that, as he tells Dora after her first dream, ‘the mystery turns upon your mother’ (Freud, 1990: 87). Elizabeth’s love of Bell, in this final turn, may be understood as the flip side of her search for a mother – or, to put it differently, as an embrace of her role as gothic daughter. For if, as I have been arguing, Barbara Vine represents her aspirations to canonical (or simply ‘literary’) status as Elizabeth’s veneration of Henry James, her mapping of this relationship via Freud and Coleridge suggests that the desire for a respectable paternity cannot but return her to the inherited genre of feminine voice. This is so not because the woman writer is condemned to hysterical utterance, but because her fathers have never really left the gothic tradition, much less genre per se, behind them. Recognising that their transcendence of genre is effected by their deviously shifting identifications with inherited form – a mode of identification for which the gothic has traditionally provided a language – Vine figures her own transcendence as the contamination of life by high-literary fictions. This, the most gothic of plots, not only brings ‘masculine’ writing back within the embrace

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of the feminine; it offers an analytical perspective on the gender of authorial identity, revealing this problem as a generic rather than a biological or psychological one. And to quote Elizabeth’s praise of James, her reinscription of genre is made ‘subtle, tenuous, like life’ by the interchange of motifs and models, the fragmentation of inherited roles and their insistent reversal – as each character in turn discovers both the inevitability of literary antecedents and their unfitness to the plot in which she finds herself. Like Coleridge and James, then, Rendell/Vine theorises and critiques the genre with which she cagily identifies her own writing. Insofar as the ambition to ‘transcend’ genre names a wish to speak in the other’s voice, it must entail a willingness to confront otherness in its demonised as well as its honored forms – its Geraldines as well as its Cosettes, its gothic excesses as well as its Jamesian subtleties. While at first glance The House of Stairs aligns Rendell/Vine’s ambitions with a masculine lineage, I have argued that, instead, she evokes this lineage to triangulate her relationship with genre and femininity, the interchangeable terms of her own canonical status. The strategy might bear comparison with Catherine Clément’s appropriation of hysterical voice in ‘The Guilty One’ (Cixous and Clément, 1986: 3-59). And indeed, the price paid for authenticity by Vine’s novelist-within-the-novel is the return of hysterical symptoms. Overwhelmed by ‘a panic of horror. . .an indescribable fear of life itself, of reality’, she also notices ‘a tic, a twitching, a jumping of the muscles. The more I worry about it the worse it gets’ (Vine, 1990: 206, 327). Or in the words of Psalm 55: ‘Fearfulness and trembling are come upon me, and an horrible dread hath overwhelmed me. And I said, Oh that I had wings like a dove! for then I would fly away and be at rest.’ With fear still in the ascendant, Barbara Vine acknowledges her gothic maternity by playing traditions and genres against one another, reflexively exploring the limits of each. At once gynaecophilic and gynaecophobic, her pursuit of transcendence deconstructs canonical binaries while illumining the dark corners of feminine romance. Notes 1. Full-page advertisement for The House of Stairs, printed in The Armchair Detective 22 (1989).

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2. Rendell’s remarks about gender and detection suggest that she shares Roth’s assumption that ‘in detective fiction gender is genre and genre is male’ and that even ‘feminine notations’ may ‘perform a masculine function’ (Roth, 1995: xiv). In her study of six British women crime writers, Susan Rowland presents a dissenting opinion, suggesting that because fiction occupies ‘the role of other to the laws,’ it is ‘structurally gendered as feminine’ (Rowland, 2001: 17). 3. Rendell notes that An Unkindness of Ravens provoked MS Magazine to call her ‘the biggest antifeminist there is’ (quoted in Rowland, 2001: 193). 4. Recent work in cultural studies has produced several studies of women and detective fiction, mainly focused on female detectives and feminist revisions of the ‘hard-boiled’ genre. See, for example, Walton and Jones (1999); Irons ed. (1995); Klein ed. (1995); Reddy (1988). 5. For a typical evaluation of the two strands in Rendell’s career, see Barnard, (1983: 146). 6. See also Rowland’s remark that Vine’s ‘experimentation with detective-less crime novels aims to

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reinvigorate literary structures on more profoundly progressive and feminist lines’ (Rowland: 2001: 69). 7. Marketed in the UK as Asta’s Book. 8. Rowland also sees The House of Stairs as a gothic; see Rowland (2001: 133-4). 9. See for example Reddy (1988: 7-9). 10. For a more nuanced version of this thesis, see Russett (1998). 11. The critical bibliography on women and the gothic novel is too extensive to recapitulate here. I mention only a few of the most important interventions. They include: Moers (1976); Modleski (1990); Ellis (1989); DeLamotte (1990); Masse (1992); Hoeveler (1998). 12. For a similar claim, focused on gender mimicry rather than genre performance, see Hoeveler’s reading of Luce Irigaray in Hoeveler (1998: 10-13). 13. Roth notes that ‘the connection between detective fiction and psychoanalysis has been well discussed’ (Roth, 1995: 170). In his introduction to the case history of Dora, Philip Rieff comments on Freud’s similarities to Sherlock Holmes (Freud, 1963: 9-13). Peter Brooks (1979) nuances this analogy. Carlo Ginzburg links both Freud and Holmes with the nineteenth-century art historian Giovanni Morelli, arguing that the three suggest a paradigm shift in knowledge (Ginzburg, in Eco and Sebeok eds., 1983). 14. For the most subtle analysis of voice and narrative authority in the Dora case, see Hertz (1985). 15. Radcliffe, (1980: 381). 16. Bell’s name may also refer to the ‘child murderer’ Mary Bell; see Carr (1983: 246). 17. My reading of the poem, especially its relation to the discourse on hysteria, is much indebted to Swann (1984). 18. Mark’s namesake in The Wings of the Dove, furthermore, is not Densher but his rival, Lord Mark. 19. On the Lacanian ‘Real’ as ‘more real than whatever the real thing is’ and as ‘the embodiment of. . .radical negativity,’ see Žižek (1989: 47, 169-71).

Bibliography Austen, J., Northanger Abbey, J. Davie (ed.), introduced by T. Castle, Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 1992. Barnard, R., ‘A Talent to Disturb: An Appreciation of Ruth Rendell’, The Armchair Detective 16 (1983). Brooks, P., ‘Fictions of the Wolfman: Freud and Narrative Understanding’, Diacritics (spring 1979): pp. 72-83. Carr, J., Interview with Ruth Rendell in The Craft of Crime: Conversations with Crime Writers, Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1983.

Clark, S. L., ‘A Fearful Symmetry: An Interview with Ruth Rendell’, The Armchair Detective 22 (1989). Coleridge, S. T., ‘Christabel’, in Poetical Works, E. H. Coleridge (ed.), New York, Oxford University Press, 1991. Cooper-Clark, D., ‘Interview with Ruth Rendell’, Designs of Darkness: Interviews with Detective Novelists, Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1983. DeLamotte, E. C., Perils of the Night: A Feminist Study of Nineteenth-Century Gothic, New York, Oxford University Press, 1990. Ellis, K., The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of Domestic Ideology, Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1989.

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Cixous, H., and C. Clément, The Newly Born Woman, trans. B. Wing, introduction by S. M. Gilbert, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1986.

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Freud, S., Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, P. Rieff (ed.), New York, Collier Books, 1963. Ginzburg, C., ‘Clues: Morelli, Freud, and Sherlock Holmes’, in U. Eco and T. A. Sebeok (eds.), The Sign of Three: Dupin, Holmes, Peirce, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1983. Hertz, N., ‘Dora’s Secrets, Freud’’s Techniques’, The End of the Line: Essays on Psychoanalysis and the Sublime, New York, Columbia University Press, 1985: pp. 122-43. Hoeveler, D. L., Gothic Feminism: The Professionalization of Gender from Charlotte Smith to the Brontes, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998. Irons, G. (ed.), Feminism in Women’s Detective Fiction, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1995. James, H., ‘Preface’ to The Wings of the Dove, J. Bayley (ed.), Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1986. Klein, G. (ed.), The Woman Detective: Gender and Genre, 2nd ed., Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1995. Masse, M., In the Name of Love: Women, Masochism, and the Gothic, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1992. Modleski, T., Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-Produced Fantasies for Women, New York, Routledge, 1990. Moers, E., Literary Women, Garden City, N.Y., Doubleday, 1976. Radcliffe, A., The Mysteries of Udolpho, B. Dobree (ed.), New York, Oxford University Press, 1980. Reddy, M. T., Sisters in Crime: Feminism and the Crime Novel, New York, Continuum, 1988. Rieff, P., Introduction to S. Freud, Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, P. Rieff (ed.), New York, Collier Books, 1963, pp. 9-13. Rossetti, C., ‘Goblin Market’, in C. Hares-Stryker (ed.), An Anthology of Pre-Raphaelite Writings, New York, New York University Press, 1997. Roth. M., Foul and Fair Play: Reading Genre in Detective Fiction, Athens, University of Georgia Press, 1995. Rowland, S., From Agatha Christie to Ruth Rendell: British Women Writers in Detective and Crime Fiction, Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2001. Russett, M., ‘Narrative as Enchantment in The Mysteries of Udolpho’, ELH 65.1 (spring 1998): pp. 159-86. Swann, K., ‘“Christabel”: The Wandering Mother and the Enigma of Form’, Studies in Romanticism 23 (Winter 1984): 533-53. Vine, B., a.k.a. R. Rendell, The House of Stairs, New York, Onyx/Penguin, 1990. Vine, B., a.k.a. R. Rendell, Anna’s Book, New York, Onyx/Penguin, 1994.

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Walton, P. L. and M. Jones, Detective Agency: Women Rewriting the Hard-Boiled Tradition, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1999. Žižek, S., The Sublime Object of Ideology, London, Verso, 1989.

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The Historical Novel?: Novel, History and the ‘End of History’ Martin Ryle Historical novels are prominent in mainstream literary publishing and in the bestseller lists. Margaret Atwood, Pat Barker, Catherine Cookson, Sebastian Faulks, James Ellroy, Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie, W. G. Sebald, Zadie Smith: a sampling illustrates the range of projects recently pursued within the genre of historical fiction in English. Many works of these novelists (recently in Britain, Smith’s White Teeth) might be seen as characteristically postmodern in that they challenge notions of a single historical narrative, imagining a central place for once-marginal voices and experiences. Yet this persistence of historical representation might also be thought to call in question postmodernist claims that we have ‘passed that limit where... history ceases to exist as such’ (Baudrillard, 1992:43). Scepticism about grand narratives has made some historians reluctant to speak of ‘history’ (Jenkins, 1998; White, 1973), and post-structuralist and postmodernist critics have sought to subvert established ways of thinking about fiction’s historical reference (Miller, 1981; Ermarth, 1983; Musselwhite, 1987; Reilly, 1993). But while some critics may have become sceptical about the possibility of representing history, the continued popularity not just of historical novels but of recent television series, such as Simon Schama’s A History of Britain, BBC, 2001 or Niall Ferguson’s Empire: How Britain made the Modern World, Channel 4, 2003, shows we still need versions of it.

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So we still need critical approaches capable of discussing historical representation and addressing the questions about truth, narration and perspective that arise. Queries about the relation of the novel to its historical context or object are among the most naive, and insistent, that we pose when we begin reading. Is it or was it really like that? Is this a distortion of the truth or a way of telling the truth? To insist that everything is only textuality is to debar that question. But most novelists and novel-readers still proceed as if books are to be tested against an extra-textual point of reference. Fiction-writing and reading, along with scholarly historiography and popular television, are part of a social practice which mediates how collective experiences and events are summoned up, reconfigured, disputed over. Indeed all novels, and not only those which draw on the past, have this ‘historical’ aspect. In the literary work, as Sartre said, a society ‘sees itself as seen’ (Sartre, 1965: 75): writing invites assessment of the world from which it springs and of its own relation to that world. Since questions about the novel and history are raised alike in immediate response and sophisticated reading, only the most formalistic criticism can proceed without some way of addressing this theme, which can be traced back as far as the discussion of poetry and history in Aristotle’s Poetics (Daiches, 1967: 30 – 33).

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This essay is concerned mainly with the conceptual and methodological issues I have been indicating. I pursue them by way of some contrasts between recent postmodernist interventions and the work of Lukács, which appeared in Russian in the late 1930s but remains a point of critical reference as recently as Jim Reilly’s Shadowtime (Lukács, 1969: 9; Reilly, 1993: 20). I conclude with some comments on two recent British novels, Ian McEwan’s Atonement and Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans, which refer centrally, though to very different effect, to World War II. My aim is to argue for the continuing pertinence of historical fiction as a generic and critical category ‘after Lukács’ – but after postmodernism too.

After Lukács? Lukács speaks confidently of ‘the main lines of human development’, which Marxism grasps and whose laws it recognises. ‘The complete human personality’ has been distorted in ‘class society’, but the writer, if s/he is a ‘proletarian humanist’, can ‘reconstruct’ it (Lukács, 1950: 2-6). This strong teleology governs Lukács’s criticism. To his eye, the truth of history is legible in history itself; more or less clear-sighted novelists set about transcribing what they can of it. His evaluation of novels is simultaneously formal and ideological: we must assess how successfully the writer makes her or his understanding concrete in a particular representation, and how far that understanding is adequate. A false apprehension of historical development, which will result and be reflected in formal weaknesses, is enough to condemn a whole novelistic school to minor status. Zola’s naturalist fiction can never represent ‘totality’: immersed in ‘immediate reality’, it cannot give ‘a living and dynamic picture of the essential driving forces of history’ (Lukács, 1969: 162-3, 245). As for the modernists – Joyce, Musil, Döblin – they deal merely with ‘eccentric... personal destinies’. Their ‘punctilious probing into the human soul and their transformation of human beings into a chaotic flow of ideas destroy... every possibility of a literary presentation of the complete human personality’ (Lukács, 1969: 342; 1950: 8-9).

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For such a ‘presentation’ we must turn to the great realists, such as Scott, Balzac, and Tolstoy, who possess the ‘capacity to give living embodiment to historical-social types’ (Lukács, 1969: 34-5, and cf. 92). The central category and criterion of realist literature is the type, a peculiar synthesis which organically binds together the general and the particular both in characters and situations. What makes a type... is that in it all the humanly and socially essential determinants are present on their highest level of development, in the ultimate unfolding of the possibilities latent in them.... (Lukács, 1950: 6).

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Literary judgment thus involves a criticism of ‘characters and situations’ which refers not just to criteria of beauty, plausibility or verisimilitude, but also to the novel’s representation of historical development. I shall argue that in general terms, such a critical procedure has much to recommend it. But this is not to defend Lukács’s particular judgments, or the idea of history that underlies them. Lukács’s notion of history’s ‘unfolding’ is of precisely the kind that postmodernists reject. Overarching narratives of progress within which every event can be allocated its place depend, argues Keith Jenkins, on ‘the optimism of the modernist project’, which has now collapsed (Jenkins, 1997: 5). If with Lyotard we ‘define postmodern [sic] as incredulity towards metanarratives’ (Lyotard, 1984, repr. in Jenkins, 1997: 36-7), Lukács’s metanarrative – with its unitary subject and strong teleology – is a paradigm of what is no longer credible. Scepticism about Lukács’s grand narrative is not, of course, the sole prerogative of postmodernists. The ‘subject of history’ in Lukács, an idealised version of the enlightened bourgeois before 1848 and of the revolutionary proletarian thereafter, remains implicitly male and European, and his version of progress must be qualified if we attend to other histories of oppression and emancipation. This line of criticism, which parallels feminist and postcolonial critiques of post-war British social democracy and of the historical and critical project associated with it (Ryle and Soper, 2002: 197-8), leaves open the possibility that we can still sustain narratives of historical development, albeit in a less confident mode, more pluralist, more internally conflicted: narratives that would respect both the record of experience, and the aspiration for greater freedom. (We can invoke this pluralist progressivism in analysing many recent historical fictions.) Postmodernist critique is more absolute. It does not seek to challenge and extend Lukács’s particular politics, but calls into question the notion that texts ever can or should correspond to the truth of any extra-textual history:

(Chambers, in Jenkins, 1997:80-1).

When Derrida’s denial that there is anything beyond the text is applied in this thoroughgoing spirit, other conceptual and ethical casualties of course perish along with the ‘grammar of truth’. These, it is said, include ‘the idea of “natural” or

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Writing is re-presentation, a simulation of what has been lost to it. History comes to us not as raw, bleeding facts but in textual production, in narratives woven by desire (for truth) and a will (for power)... When every discourse is put together, articulated, fabricated, in the ambiguous territory between (or beyond) such poles [i.e., the poles of truth and falsehood], then the very idea of the ‘authentic’ subject and its grammar of truth is displaced. We are left discussing the event of a gesture, the sign, the signature, simulation, language.

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“human” ... rights... [and] the possibility of “representation” in political as well as aesthetic terms’; they include, too, the distinction between history and fiction (see, in Jenkins, 1997, Spiegel: 183; Ermarth: 52ff; Himmelfarb: 159-173). If we abolish the generic distinction between empirically based historiography and other kinds of ‘re-presentation’, the entire critical tradition that seeks to establish a dialectical relation between novels and their historical objects and contexts is abolished too. Some postmodernist and deconstructionist arguments rely on oversimplification: for example, to assert that historical accounts are subject to empirical verification by no means entails the naive belief that they consist of ‘facts’ (‘raw’ or otherwise). But there is no space here to set out the grounds on which I would reject the position taken by Chambers and others. We must return from historiographical disputes to matters of literary criticism. It is impossible to synthesise the opposed frameworks that I have sketched, since they are mutually incompatible. Nor is it easy to opt for either of their opposite poles. Since Lukács first wrote on this subject, however, and more especially since the 1960s (though Auerbach’s monumental Mimesis is an important precursor), many works of literary criticism have sustained – and depended on – discussions of the relationship between novels and history. These critics are more attentive than Lukács to discursive complexities. They are less inclined to pass reductive political judgments, and entertain a more complex account of the means of cultural as well as socio-economic power and emancipation. Relevant works include the feminist criticism that has traced parallels between the emancipatory projects legible in women’s fiction-writing and the socio-historical boundaries and openings that women have encountered, transgressed and taken (see, for example, Butler, 1975, and Poovey, 1984). In the main, however, this criticism has dispensed with explicit theoretical or conceptual discussion of the relations between fiction and history (although many books, especially perhaps Fredric Jameson’s The Political Unconscious, have relevant theoretical implications). Here, I return to Lukács, in order to focus on three aspects of his argument that open up general questions about history, the novel and critique.

158 Genre Matters

Rational and Historical Characters and Types Without accepting Lukács’s politics or his critical judgments, one can defend his identification of historical problematics as central to novel-criticism. He always seeks in the novels he discusses some conception of historical development, with which the reader must engage. Such an approach is productive because in the main tradition of European fiction since the early nineteenth century (and beyond the limits of the narrow realist canon invoked by Lukács), questions about history and its meaning animate the novel as a form. The European nineteenth-century understanding of the world was profoundly historical. It was in this context that James wrote in an essay on Trollope: ‘It is impossible to imagine what a novelist

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imagines himself to be unless he regard himself as a historian and his narrative as a history’ (Reilly, 1993: 133). ‘Imaginary history’ remains an apt characterisation of many later novels that break with realist conventions: judgment of Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum and Thomas Pynchon’s V, for example, would need to address the different ways they represent World War II. Moreover, the novel’s relation to the socio-historical is transitive – argumentative, interpretative – and not merely reflective. A narrative that seeks to be ‘regarded as a history’ lays claim to its own kind of historical truth. It is precisely in its fictional elements, those invented elements which do not and must not correspond with discrete facts of empirical history, that the novel’s project of historical argument is most legible. Lukács quotes from a review written by Balzac: ‘The characters of a novel are forced to be more rational than historical characters. The former must be roused to life, the latter have already lived. The existence of... [characters in a novel] requires general agreement’ (Lukács, 1969: 43). The novelist’s labour of characterisation gives to fictional beings this ‘rational’ consistency, rousing them to a life which will win our ‘agreement’ as readers. Analogously, Aristotle argued that the stories of the poet or maker of fictions have a more ‘universal’ meaning than those told by the historian: [The] poet’s function is to describe, not the thing that has happened, but a kind of thing that might happen, i.e. what is possible as being probable or necessary. The distinction between the historian and the poet ... consists really in this, that the one describes the thing that has been, and the other a kind of thing that might be. Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are of the nature rather of universals... (Aristotle, Poetics, in Daiches, 1967:31).

The Historical Novel? 159

Aristotle’s ‘probable’ and ‘universal’ creation parallels Balzac’s ‘rational’ character and Lukács’ ‘type’ – ‘a peculiar synthesis which organically binds together the general and the particular’. In all three formulations, fiction is in a paradoxical relation to history: fiction’s imaginary persons and events, although – or rather because – they do not correspond to ‘the thing that happened’, can disclose history’s truth (‘history’ meaning whatever takes place in socio-historical time). Inasmuch as novels seek to be ‘regarded as history’, their characters and plots make sense only as a ‘probability’, a ‘synthesis’, a metonymic or metaphorical image implying a generalisation about aspects of socio-historical reality. Lukács’s criticism is impoverished by the limited (though rhetorically universalist) sphere in which his idea of ‘historical development’ moves. However, the concept of the historically derived ‘type’ is relevant to kinds of text Lukács never discusses, for example the Jacobin and anti-Jacobin novels written during and after the ‘revolutionary decade’ of the 1790s. Recent feminist scholarship helps us read

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characters and situations in novels by women in this body of work as ‘typical’ representations, drawing life from arguments about the gendering of public and private spheres, the education of girls, and the cultural determinations of desire (Butler, 1990; Poovey, 1984; Ryle and Soper, 2002). Does this pursuit of fiction’s historical project work better with certain novels, which the critic will then identify as more serious, more interesting, better? Certainly the relevant concepts – in Aristotle and Balzac as in Lukács – are simultaneously analytical and normative: they tell us how poiesis, literary creation, works when it does its proper work. In my view this normative dimension makes them all the more useful.

‘Unable to Rise Above’: The Writer’s Freedom and ‘Spurious Creation’

160 Genre Matters

The line of argument just reviewed engages with the writer’s freedom to embody historical reflection in fictions. Fictions would seem to lack the constraints binding on empirically falsifiable discourses. Nonetheless, the novelist in relation to history is or ought to be – again the matter seems to involve categories at once descriptive and normative – unfree as well as free. I will not engage with Lukács’s general discussion; but the shape of the question is suggested in two phrases of his. Writers like Flaubert and Baudelaire, he declares, who ‘express the feelings of the best representatives of the bourgeois class at the time, were yet unable to rise above the onsetting decline of their class’ (Lukács, 1969: 279). ‘Unable to rise above’: the phrase at once implies and denies that the writer is free. Later, in the preface to Studies in European Realism, Lukács praises Balzac because when the ‘intrinsic artistic development’ of his works runs counter to his own ‘prejudices’ or ‘convictions’, he sets these biases aside. Balzac, unlike a ‘second-rater’, describes ‘what he really sees’ and refuses to distort reality to fit his world view, and ‘this difference in the ethical attitude of the greater and lesser writers is closely linked with the difference between genuine and spurious creation’ (Lukács, 1950: 11). This may sound naive, but I shall argue that the idea of ‘spurious creation’ refers to conditions of writing and reading which again set bounds, and should set bounds, to the writer’s freedom. When Lukács claims Flaubert was ‘unable to rise above’ the declining bourgeoisie he belonged to, and at the same time seems to berate him for this incapacity, at one level he is just criticising him because like most bourgeois he rejected proletarian socialist politics. Any critic may of course disclose and disagree with a work’s political implications (I do so in my concluding comments on McEwan and Ishiguro). Lukács’s phrase is worth dwelling on, however, because it expresses tensions which necessarily underlie historical criticism. Most critics regard sociohistorical circumstance, including literary-cultural genres and contexts (relations between writers, audiences and means of publication), as an important

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determinant of literary works. But pushed to its limit this would make the work nothing more than a reflection of what existed before it. The underlying questions of free will and determination are vexed, as are their practical implications in political, moral and legal judgment, where they must be resolved one way or the other. When it comes to representation and critique, the ambiguities are best kept open. We might quote the English novelist George Gissing, whose protagonist Osmond Waymark reflects in The Unclassed (1884) on the extent of his freedom: ‘Art, nowadays, must be the mouthpiece of misery, for misery is the keynote of modern life.’ Waymark later explains that in writing a novel about social questions, he obeys an impulse from the society in which he lives, but this should not be read as a sign of absolute unfreedom: ‘Every strong individuality is more or less the expression of its age. This direction may be imposed on me; for all that, I understand why I pursue it’ (Gissing, 1911: 165; 212, and see Ryle and Soper, 2002: 142-3). Gissing expresses the idea of a margin within which agency is possible. To write socially, historically, is to work on what is ‘imposed’ by history, a work undertaken, deliberately, on the basis of an understanding of determining conditions. The writer will find his or her words circumscribed, channelled, but (Gissing implies) this channelling is what makes them expressive. We can relate this insight to the fact that any novel which offers a historical understanding of its society (even in non-realist genres) has to internalise in its own narrative and characterisation some image of the history with which it engages. As Jameson writes: The symbolic act... begins by generating and producing its own context in the same moment of emergence in which it steps back from it... The literary work or cultural object, as though for the very first time, brings into being that very situation to which it is, at one and the same time, a reaction. (Jameson, 1983: 80-1).

So the writer produces an image of determining conditions, of what she or he is ‘unable to rise above’. We might suggest that this successful representation of ‘its own context’ is a specific kind of ‘rising above’ of which only the good writer is capable. The Historical Novel? 161

Who is to judge the question of success, of whether the writer has ‘brought into being’ an image that compels, in Balzac’s term, our ‘agreement’? Here we assess what is ‘genuine’ and what is ‘spurious’. Lukács poses the matter as one of novelistic ethics and implies it is easily judged (since the ‘spurious’ and the ‘genuine’ are offered as self-evident categories). Rather, such judgment can only be a matter of discussion. Readers assess the novel’s socio-historical image on the basis of their own experience and relevant knowledge of history. Teachers, critics

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and historians can intervene, invoking concepts, advocating ways of reading, maybe adducing ‘facts’. To return to one text already mentioned: White Teeth has enjoyed much success, but I find it ‘spurious’ in some respects (for instance, in its representation of ‘Islamic fundamentalism’ as a comical teenage disorder). Beyond Smith’s novel, a wider debate might consider other related works, such as Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia. Contributions to such argument(s?) must locate texts in the socio-historical contexts they draw on, address and represent; and also criticise them as interventions encoding historical arguments. These ideas from Aristotle and Balzac, Gissing and Lukács, can help specify that encoding. This cannot resolve questions in settled or peremptory fashion (as Lukács tends to), but without it the critical conversation cannot begin and judgment of what is ‘genuine’ and ‘spurious’ has no terms of reference.

‘A Uniform Horizon’: Contrasting Tales of War

162 Genre Matters

Among the clearest postmodernist critiques of fictional realism and its representation of history is Elizabeth Ermarth’s Realism and Consensus in the English Novel (1983). If for Lukács the great realist would be one who contrived a formal unity within the novel, bodying forth a teleological and unitary vision of history, for Ermarth the text’s harmonious forms are the mark of its humanist totalisation. She argues that realist narrative, like visual perspective, exploits multiple viewpoints by using them to create a unified temporal-spatial field: ‘points of view must intersect to create a uniform horizon’. Within this, ‘particulars [can] be relegated to the status of partial aspects’. The ‘indistinct faceless presence’ of the narrator is problematic because it constructs a vantage point outside ‘the particular world of events’ (Ermarth, 1983). Ermarth’s critique parallels Colin McCabe’s argument that the formal coherence of Victorian realism is linked with its project of ideological mastery. It can be compared, too, with Leo Bersani’s influential attack on realism as encoding a ‘fear of desire’, and with the strictures of post-colonial theorists on unitary subjectivities and histories (McCabe, 1979; Bersani, 1976, Chapter 2; Young, 1990). There is too much rhetoric here. Notions that there was a monolithic ‘realism’, whether admirable or deplorable, do not survive a consideration of the debates among writers that accompanied the evolution of the novel-form in Europe (see Becker, 1963) – or of nineteenth-century novels as diverse as Brontë’s Villette, Dickens’ Great Expectations, Flaubert’s L’Education sentimentale. These require complex readings, not acquiescence in some paradigmatically naturalising discourse. Conversely, the post-realist forms of Beckett or Robbe-Grillet, resistant to linear-historical narration, communicate no obviously progressive politics. Moreover, even novels whose formal closure runs in tandem with conservatism about class or gender – Mansfield Park, Middlemarch, Anna Karenina – can help us to ‘see ourselves as seen’, though we may need to read them ‘against the grain’ (Benjamin, 1970: 259).

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Suspicion of closure, distaste for ‘uniform horizons’, should not condemn an entire tradition imagined as monolithically realist-historical. One can, however, welcome the critical blows struck by modernist and postmodernist writing against oncepowerful organicist models of fiction (Lukács’s among them), according to which dissonance and incompletion were a mark of artistic failure. A novel’s capacity to engender uncertainty and disorientation may signal a different kind of success. In relation to some historical events and experiences – war, exile, dispossession and worse – we may judge that there is a paradox and even a moral difficulty about a book that pleases us by harmonious representation of what was painful and deathly. But is a dissonant and bewildering representation any better from an ethical point of view? I raise at the end this largest of problems, inherent in the fact that books give pleasure, even when they depict histories of pain – a problem which Lukács’s criticism, unlike that of Adorno or Benjamin, barely registers. I conclude with a comment on Atonement and When We Were Orphans, in which I put to use some of the ideas I have been reviewing, especially those just mentioned. Although both novels have a metafictional aspect we might think of as ‘postmodern’ (I return to this), both are historical novels in the full sense of the term, representing actions predating the birth of their authors and most of their likely readers. Both are evidently based on historical information and research. This is foregrounded in Atonement, where McEwan and his fictional author Briony Tallis acknowledge help from the Imperial War Museum. ‘This pointillist approach to verisimilitude... Like policemen in a search team, we go on hands and knees and crawl our way towards truth’: so Briony muses (McEwan, 2001: 359). However, the ‘truth’ of a historical fiction cannot be sought in its detailed accuracy or general verisimilitude; these are hard-won enabling conditions of most realism, but the imaginative writer does not finally show ‘the thing that has been’. As I have argued, it is the transitive relation between novel-text and historical topos that criticism must identify. We must ask how the novel’s narrative (including how this foregrounds or excludes aspects of the historical record), its characterisation, and its overall form interpret the history that it represents.

The Historical Novel? 163

This representation is a matter partly of metonymy, in the imitation of particular historical actions (the character Robbie Turner in Atonement, serves in France, Ishiguro’s Christopher Banks sees fighting between Chinese and Japanese) which stand as recognisable images of collective experience; but it is a matter also of allusion. McEwan and Ishiguro know their likely readers will already have a certain idea of the events we call ‘World War II’. How the two novels position themselves vis-à-vis their readers’ probable knowledge creates a fundamental difference between them. ‘Dunkirk’, central to McEwan’s war narrative, is central also to the intensively recycled version of the war that is current in Britain, with its connotations of British pluck and virtue and of cross-class masculine solidarity. Atonement, while it shows the hospital as the grim counterpart of the battlefield,

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also draws on this repertory of meanings, and ultimately enforces them as much as it qualifies them. By contrast, the context that When We Were Orphans alludes to will baffle most readers. Locating much of his story in Shanghai, Ishiguro presents a setting unfamiliar to most Europeans. In this setting, moreover, assumptions of British virtue (normally implied in any reference to the Second World War) are untenable. We are amidst the consequences of British imperialism. A Japanese colonel explains to the narrator/protagonist Christopher Banks, who is appalled at the ‘carnage caused by [Japan’s] invasion of China’, that while this may be ‘regrettable’, ‘“if Japan is to become a great nation like yours, Mr Banks, it is necessary. Just as it once was for England”’ (Ishiguro, 2001: 278).

164 Genre Matters

What is the meaning of these different uses of historical allusion? Both formal and substantive matters are involved: how the novels work, what they persuade us of. Let us say provisionally that McEwan wants us to feel secure and to entertain dominant versions of the war, while Ishiguro wants to disorient us cognitively and ethically. Other elements strengthen this initial contrast and help us interpret it. The metafictional aspect common to both novels achieves radically different effects. When the narrative voice of Atonement is revealed as the voice of one of the characters, this does not break the ‘uniform horizon’ of confident realism. Discovering the story has been told by Briony, a Briony whose triumph of atonement the novel finally celebrates, we do not go back over the ground and question what we have read. Ishiguro proceeds very differently. The investigation of the past begins in epistemological confidence: the narrator is a detective, and thinks he is a sophisticated one. ‘A magnifying glass may not be quite the crucial piece of equipment of popular myth, but it remains a useful tool for the gathering of certain sorts of evidence’ (Ishiguro, 2001: 9). This, we realise, is naive (no more naive, though, than Briony’s image of the police search team: but nothing comes to undercut Briony’s confidence). As the novel proceeds, so our confidence in Banks’s ability to understand and represent what he sees diminishes. However, he is not the kind of fallible narrator whose account we can readily correct by reference to an implied, authoritative truth. Ishiguro develops the highly original method of his previous novel The Unconsoled, a first-person narration where we sense the constant pressure of the desiring, vulnerable ego. Memory and its narratives are never reliable, because they can never free themselves of the need for solace, selfjustification, hope. The narrator is a bad historical detective because he has the ordinary good nature of the private citizen, and the crimes he investigates are of a magnitude he can hardly bring himself to realise. A third difference between the novels: the past absorbs Banks, it draws him and us back into a world of loss that cannot be wholly redeemed, and its theme, the damaging effects of war and empire, exhaustively defines its plot. Banks is only ever on the periphery of violence, but even there he sees what cannot be amended. Amidst brutal hand-to-hand fighting, he, by chance, encounters his much loved

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childhood friend Akira, now a Japanese soldier. Akira (like Robbie in Atonement) has a septic wound. He believes he may be dying, and entrusts Banks with what we can read as an undeliverable message for his son: Akira did not speak for a long time. Then he said: ‘When my boy. He discover world is not good. I wish...’ He stopped, either in pain or because he could not find the English. He said something in Japanese, then went on: ‘I wish I with him. To help him. When he discover.’ ‘Listen, you great ape,’ I said, ‘this is all far too morose. You’ll see your son again, I’ll see to that.’ (Ishiguro, 2001: 263).

Banks survives, but does not recover. At the close, he expects nothing beyond a pleasant, reduced bachelor life: ‘walks in the parks... a foolish pride in sifting through old newspaper reports of my cases’ (Ishiguro, 2001: 313). In Atonement, by contrast, the war episodes form a discrete element in the narrative. They are enclosed by the Tallis family romance. The extended pre-war narrative is strikingly accomplished, formally and psychologically, in its accommodation of different positions and experiences within the realist ‘horizon’. Its twists and turns will also satisfy readers who ‘retain a childlike desire to be told a story, to be held in suspense’: the phrase comes in the metafictional letter, from ‘Cyril Connolly’, which advises Briony to organise her story suspensefully rather than choosing a Woolf-like, modernist plotlessness (McEwan, 2001: 282). We read this as a championing of McEwan’s own practice, in which more or less elaborate plot lines have always figured, and more generally of English realism, which favours a good story. However, it is hard to integrate these elements: inventively suspenseful family romance, meticulously realistic quasi-document. This is not only to do with the dissonance of tone and genre, for if we read the family story as one of ‘types’ – that is, if we seek to give its characters a specifically historical weight – then its narrative of subordination and self-assertion (in terms of class and gender and sexuality) is not easily integrated with the war-narrative. The Historical Novel? 165

But these themes do figure in another familiar version of British history. After 1945 (so this goes), social-cultural revolution overthrew the barriers of class, and the sexual hypocrisies and double standards, which during the 1930s had been sustained with difficulty in the face of widening educational opportunity. The war, in this story, was not only good in itself, it was a decisive factor in the process of cultural democratisation. Atonement, soon to become a film, seems to me to draw on and reproduce this more general historical narrative as surely as it reproduces ‘Dunkirk’. This, much more than the equivocal intimation that Robbie may have

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survived the war, is what makes for the novel’s qualified but unquenched historical optimism, and gives us the sense that its ‘uniform horizon’ encloses a vision of progress as well as making for aesthetic harmony. Perhaps I should make it clear that I share the general view that Britain’s role in the Second World War is properly a matter of pride; and I value the achievements of post-war social democracy. But the historical novel is of course addressed to the moment of its writing, not of its setting. The extra-textual reference against which I want to test Atonement and When We Were Orphans is Britain in the early twentyfirst century, where social-democratic progress seems a story long broken off, but wars and rumours of war abound. Bibliography Auerbach, E., Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. W. R. Trask, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1974 (1946). Baudrillard, J., The Illusion of the End, Oxford, Blackwell, 1992. Becker, G. (ed.), Documents of Modern Literary Realism, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1963. Benjamin, W., ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, Illuminations, trans. H. Zohn, London, Jonathan Cape, 1970 (1950). Bersani, L., A Future for Astyanax: Character and Desire in Literature, London, Marion Boyars, 1976. Butler, M., Jane Austen and the War of Ideas, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1990 (1975). Chambers, I., Migrancy, Culture, Identity, London, Routledge/Comedia, 1994. Daiches, D., Critical Approaches to Literature, London, Longmans Green, 1967 (1957). Ermarth, E. D., Realism and Consensus in the English Novel, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1983. Ermarth, E. D., Sequel to History, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1992. Gissing, G., The Unclassed, London, Sidgwick, 1911 (1884). Himmelfarb, G., ‘Telling it as you like it’, Times Literary Supplement (16 October, 1992). Ishiguro, K., When We Were Orphans, London, Faber, 2001 (2000). Jameson, F., The Political Unconscious, London, Methuen, 1983 (1981). Jenkins, K. (ed.), The Postmodern History Reader, London and New York, Routledge, 1997. Lukács, G., Studies in European Realism, trans. E. Bone, London, Hillway, 1950. Lukács, G., The Historical Novel, trans. H. and S. Mitchell, Harmondsworth, Peregrine, 1969 (c.1937).

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Lyotard, J.-F., The Postmodern Condition, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1984. MacCabe, C., James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word, Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2002 (1979). McEwan, I., Atonement, London, Jonathan Cape, 2001. Miller, D., Narrative and its Discontents: Problems of Closure in the Traditional Novel, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1981. Musselwhite, D., Partings Welded Together: Politics and Desire in the Nineteenth-century English Novel, London and New York, Methuen, 1987.

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Poovey, M., The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley and Jane Austen, Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 1984. Reilly, J., Shadowtime: History and Representation in Hardy, Conrad and George Eliot, London, Routledge, 1993. Ryle, M., and K. Soper, To Relish the Sublime? Culture and Self-Realization in Postmodern Times, London, Verso, 2002. Sartre, J.-P., What is Literature?, trans. B. Frechtman, New York, Harper, 1965 (1949). Smith, Z., White Teeth, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 2001 (2000). Spiegel, G., ‘History, historicism, and the social logic of the text in the middle ages’, Speculum, 1990. White, H., Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe, Baltimore and London, Johns Hopkins Press, 1973. Young, R., White Mythologies: Writing History and the West, London and New York, Routledge, 1990.

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Contributors’ Details

Susan Bassnett

Susan Bassnett is Professor in the Centre for Translation and Comparative Cultural Studies at the University of Warwick. She is the author of Translation Studies (3rd ed. 2002), Comparative Literature: A Critical Introduction (1993), Sylvia Plath: An Introduction to the Poetry (2004), Constructing Cultures (1998) written with André Lefevere, and co-editor (with Harish Trivedi) of Post-Colonial Translation (1999). Brian G. Caraher

Brian G. Caraher is Chair of English Literature and Research Director in Modern Literary Studies at Queen’s University Belfast. He has published widely on topics in aesthetics, poetics, theories of literary reading, literary pragmatics, genre theory and cultural politics in journals such as Critical Texts, Criticism, ELH, JJQ, MLQ, The Irish Review, Philosophy and Rhetoric, Poetics, Textual Practice, as well as in numerous book collections. His books include Wordsworth’s “Slumber” and the Problematics of Reading, Intimate Conflict, Trespassing Tragedy (forthcoming) and Transatlantic Poetics (in preparation). Mike Chopra-Gant

Mike Chopra-Gant is Cultural Studies Course Leader at London Metropolitan University. He is the author of Hollywood Genres and Postwar America: Masculinity, Family and Nation in Popular Movies and Film Noir, I. B. Tauris (2005); Cinema and History, Wallflower Press (forthcoming) and The Waltons: Nostalgia, Myth and Seventies America, I. B. Tauris (forthcoming). Paul Cobley

Jeff Collins

Jeff Collins is Senior Lecturer in Art History at the University of Plymouth, where he teaches courses in contemporary art, photography and film theory. He is the author of Introducing Derrida (1996), Introducing Heidegger (1998) and Heidegger and the Nazis (2001), and of essays and articles on critical and cultural theory in the visual arts.

Contributors’ Details 169

Paul Cobley is Reader in Communications at London Metropolitan University. He is the author of a number of books, including The American Thriller (2000) and Narrative (2001). He is the editor of The Communication Theory Reader (1996), The Routledge Companion to Semiotics and Linguistics (2001), Communication Theories 4 vols. (2005) and co-edits two journals: Subject Matters and Social Semiotics.

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Richard Kilborn

Richard Kilborn is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Film and Media Studies at the University of Stirling. He is also a member of the Stirling Media Research Institute. He is the author of Staging the Real, Manchester University Press (2003), and (with John Izod) of An Introduction to Television Documentary: Confronting Reality, Manchester University Press (1997). Richard Kilborn

Margaret Russett teaches at the University of Southern California, Bogazici University in Istanbul, and the Breadloaf Summer Institute in Santa Fe. She is the author of De Quincey’s Romanticism: Canonical Minority and the Forms of Transmission, Cambridge University Press (1997), Fictions and Fakes: Forging Romantic Authenticity, 1760-1845, Cambridge University Press (2006), and articles on Romantic poetry and prose, literary theory, and contemporary fiction. Martin Ryle

170 Genre Matters

Martin Ryle is Senior Lecturer in Continuing Education at the University of Sussex. His recent publications include To Relish the Sublime: Culture and SelfRealization in Postmodern Times (with Kate Soper), Verso (2002), and George Gissing: Voices of the Unclassed (ed. with Jenny Bourne Taylor), Ashgate (2005).

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Index A Abbott, H. P.

77, 80n13

Batchen, G.

63

Adams, S.

127, 128, 129

Baudelaire, C.

160

adaptation

8, 69, 71, 72, 75, 77, 79, 80, 92, 97-107, 127, 128

Baudrillard, J.

155

Addison, J.

98

Bayer, H.

59

Adler, A.

142

Bazin, A.

61, 125

Beaujour, M.

14

Becker, G.

162

Beckett, E.

80n5

Beckett, S.

8, 25n22, 69-7980n4,5,11,13, 81n15,n20,n21,n22, 162

Adorno, T.

7, 163

Aeschylus

32, 35

Alberti, L. B.

18

Ali-Shah, O.

90

Althusser, L.

48, 49

Beckett on Film

69,72-3, 78, 81n22

Altman, R.

9, 16, 48, 50, 51, 109, 125, 130

Beja, M.

70, 81n20

Amini, H.

103

Antonioni, M.

17

Appleyard, B.

105

Ariosto, L.

89

Aristotle

7, 11, 12, 24n4, 29, 30, 33, 43, 44, 80n9, 81n13, 155, 159, 160, 162

Armfield, N.

80n5

Astier, P.

70, 81n20

Ataturk, K.

90

Atkinson, M.

105

Belton, J.

124

Belvaux, L.

17

Benjamin, A.

80n12

Benjamin, W.

20, 61, 62, 65, 68, 88, 162, 163

Bennett, T.

48, 49, 50

Benstock, S.

20, 21

Bergman, I.

146

Bersani, L.

162

bestsellers

135, 141, 155

Birt, J.

121n3

Blake, W.

93

Blanchot, M.

13, 55, 56, 57, 67, 69, 70, 72, 73, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80n8, n10

Atwood, M.

155

Auerbach, E.

158

Aumont, J.

59

Boccaccio, G.

36

Austen, J.

105, 145

Borges, J. L.

23, 75

Austin, B.

48

Boumelha, P.

97, 101, 104

Bourdieu, P.

91

Bakhtin, M.

21, 22, 30, 31, 38, 47, 98

Boyle, D.

105

Balzac,

13, 14, 156, 159, 160, 161, 162

Brantley, J.

8

Braque, G.

59, 65

B H.

155

Barnard, R.

152n5

Barthes, R.

21, 22. 25n23, 57, 58, 61

Bassnett, S.

85, 87, 90, 91, 93

Bataille, G.

61

Braudy, L.

102

Brecht, B.

65, 86

Brent, J.

43

Brontë,

C.

Brontës, the

162 140

Index 171

Barker, P.

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Broodthaers, M.

20

collage

58, 60, 65-6, 68

Brooks, P.

143, 153

Collins, J.

80n3

Brown, C.

123

Comolli, J.

8, 102, 107

Burns, R.

93

Connor, S.

80n13

Burton, T.

24n15

Cook, P.

124

Buscombe, E.

45

Cookson, C.

155

Butler, L.

104

Cooper-Clark, D.

136, 140, 141

Butler, M.

158, 160

Corman, R.

17

Buzzell, E.

124

Corner, J.

110, 121n1

Byron, G.

93

Cranny-Francis, A. 48

C canon

9, 36, 58-61, 90, 91, 93, 132, 140-41, (, 145, 147, 151, 152, 158

Caraher, B.

35, 37, 80n3

Cardullo, B.

107

Carr, J.

140, 153n16

172 Genre Matters

Cartier-Bresson, H. 66

Croce, B.

21

Cronin, A. J.

93, 127

Crosby, B.

130

Crowell, S. G.

81n14

Crowther, B.

124

Culler, J.

21, 22

Curtin, P.

90

Curtiz, M.

123

Cawelti, J.

24n10

Caygill, H.

61

D

Cézanne, P.

15

Daiches, D.

155, 159

Chambers, I.

157, 158

Dana, R.

127

Chartin, J.

12

Dante

36

children’s literature 89, 94

de Campos, H.

93

Chopin, F.

18, 75

deconstruction

24, 37, 38, 69, 103, 152, 158

Christie, A.

140, 141

découpage

65

Christopher, N.

124

Deely, J.

42, 43, 52

Cixous, H.

152

Deguy, M.

80-1n13

Clark, S.

136, 141

DeLamotte, E.

153n11

classification

7, 8, 11, 12, 18-20, 22, 23n1, 32, 56-58, 63-65, 7078, 109, 125-130, 135

Deleuze, G.

11, 12, 15, 16, 24n10

Derrida, J.

7, 11, 20, 21, 23, 23n2, 38, 55, 56, 57, 59, 63, 65, 66, 67, 69, 70, 71, 73, -75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80n3, n4, n12, 81n15, n16, 157

detective fiction

9, 30, 136, 138, 140-142, 152n4, 153n13

Dickens, C.

162

Diderot, D.

19

Clément, B.

71, 72

Clément, C.

152

clusion

38, 71, 79, 80n3

Cobley, P.

44, 48, 50, 51

Cobra

20

Cohen, M.

102

Cohen, R.

13, 14, 17, 19

Cohn, R.

72

Coleridge, S.

148, 149, 150, 151, 152

Didi-Huberman, G. 61 differend, the (le différend)

14, 15, 22, 76, 81n14

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Dixon, W.

17

Fishelov, D.

24n6

Döblin, A.

156

Fitzgerald, E.

90, 93

dominant, the

16

Flaubert, G.

160, 162

Dostoevsky, F.

86, 141, 144

Forster, E.

105

Dowd, G.

80n10, 81n22

Foster, H.

19, 20

Druckrey, T.

63

Foucault, M.

11, 12, 22, 23

Dubrow, H.

30

Fowler, A.

14

Duff, D.

23, 24n13, 80n1

Freud, S.

142, 143, 150, 151, 153n13

Dunkley, C.

111

Fried, M.

24n18

Frye, N.

7, 30, 31, 32, 33, 36, 37, 38, 44

Fluxus

20

E Ecclestone, C.

105

Eco, U.

87, 153

Edward III

36

Eisenstein, S.

59, 61, 65

Eliot, G.

141

Ellis, K.

153n11

Ellroy, J.

155

Empson, W.

44

G Garland, J.

129

Garner, B.

73

gender and genre

7, 9, 14, 20-21, 80n2, 135142, 151, 152n2, 153n12, 162, 163, 164, 165

Genette, G.

12, 13, 14, 24n4, 56, 62, 63, 64, 67, 72, 75, 80n9

English language

8, 20, 41, 86, 90

English literature

34, 86, 89, 90, 91, 92, 155, 161, 162, 165

Epic

21, 29, 32, 34-36, 80n9, 88, 89, 91, 92

Ermarth, E.

155, 158, 162

Ernst, M.

59

autobiography as 74, 76, 78

Even-Zohar, I.

88, 89, 90

botany and

19, 24n17

drama as

29, 30, 45, 64, 69-75

F

Genre: in Film Studies

9, 16-18, 45, 51, 59, 61, 63, 64, 105-107, 123-133

mixing of

9, 20, 29, 59, 65, 72, 76, 77, 79, 97-99, 103, 104, 109121

historical novel as 9, 155-166

Falguières, P.

19, 23n1

Farrow, J.

124

Faulks, S.

155

Federman, R.

21, 22

Félibien, A.

18

Feminism

9, 20, 135-152, 157-159

Ferber, E.

127

Ferguson, N.

155

Gerhart, M.

80n2

Feuer, J.

117

Gibbon, E.

98

film noir

64, 124, 125, 132

Gibbs, R.

30, 31

Finley, M.

49

Gibson, A.

24n11

Fish, S.

48

Ginzburg, C.

153n13

memoir as

12, 74, 78

music and

18, 21, 24n3, 72, 75

neutrality from

7, 19, 21-2, 76, 78

novel as

12, 13, 22, 55, 56, 61, 70, 73

role of industry in 46, 49, 115, 123-133 visual arts and

7, 18, 19, 21, 51, 58, 60, 6264

Index 173

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Gissing, G.

161, 162

Hope, B.

130

Godard, J.-L.

15, 61

Hopper, D.

17

Goethe, J. W. von

93

Horace

29

Gontarski, S. E,

69, 70, 75, 81n20

House, H.

49

Gordon, T.

48

I

Gothic, the

24, n15 30, 99, 139-142, 145, 147, 148, 150-153

Ibsen, H.

86

ideology

8, 16, 36, 38, 45-47, 50, 67, 88, 97, 102, 103, 156, 162

Goulding, E.

123

Grafton, S.

141

Innis, R.

44

Grass, G.

159

intertextuality

30, 60, 129, 138

Graves, R.

90

Irigaray, L.

9, 153n12

Green, A.

123

Irons, J.

77, 78

Guattari, F.

24n10

Irons, G.

152n4

H

48 9, 156, 160, 163-5

Hardy, T.

8, 97-107

Ishiguro, K.

Hares-Striker, C.

146

J

Harvey, S.

124

Jackson, M.

133n2

Hausmann, R.

60

Jacobus, M.

20

Hawthorne, N.

100

James, H.

105, 144-152, 158

Heartfield, J.

59

James, P.

135, 136

Hegel, G.

21

Jameson, F.

9, 16, 158, 161

hegemony

46

Jenkins, K.

155, 157, 158

Heidegger, M.

55

John, R.

34

Heisler, S.

123

Johnson, S.

44

heritage film

105-107

Johnson, V.

129

Hertz, N.

153n14

Jolson, A.

130

Hess Wright, J.

46

Jones, M.

18

Himmelfarb, G.

158

Jones, W.

91

history

9, 11-13, 16-19, 29, 31, 32, 36, 49, 55, 57-59, 67, 87-89, 91, 94, 109, 120, 132, 155165

Jost, F.

52

Joyce, J.

15, 22, 32, 61, 76, 81n15, 156

Jung, C.

142

Hitchcock, A.

174 Genre Matters

Iser, W.

123

Höch, H.

59, 60

K

Hodiak, J.

129

Kallberg, J.

18

Hoeveler, D.

153n11,12

Kantor, M.

127

Holloway, J.

101

Kaplan, E.

124

Hollywood cinema 9, 16, 17, 51, 63, 112, 123133

Kear, J.

60

Kennard, P.

63

Holmes, J.

92

Kern, J.

129

Homer

91, 92

Kilborn, R.

115, 121n3

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King, H.

124

King, S.

140, 141

Kinski, N.

104

Kitses, J.

45

Macauley, T.

90, 98

Klein, G.

152n4

Madsen, D.

37

Klucis, G.

59

Makinen, M.

48

Malevich, K.

20

Klutsis, see Klucis

Lyotard, J.-F.

14, 15, 22, 23, 76, 81n14, 157

M

Knowlson, J.

81n15, n21

Malraux, A.

19

Korda, A.

107

Manovich, L.

63

Krauss, R.

19

Mansfield, G.

121n4

Kureishi, H.

162

Mara, S.

13 104, 105

92

Marinetti, F. T.

59

Lacey, N.

121n6

Marx, K.

61

Lacoue-Labarthe, P. 80n8

Marxism

45, 48, 49, 61, 156

Ladd, A.

128

Masse, M.

153n11

Langland, W.

36

Mast, G.

102

Lansbury, A.

129

Maugham, W. S.

127

Lartigue, H.

66

McArthur, C.

124

Lattimore, R.

92

McCabe, C.

162

Lawson, L.

104

McEwan, I.

9, 156, 160, 163, 164, 165

Le Corbusier

11, 23n1

McLeod, N.

124

Leavis, F. R.

44

McLuhan, M.

44

Lecercle, J.-J.

98

McMullan, A.

75

Lefevere, A.

91, 92

Méliès, G.

9

Leibniz, G. W.

81n18

melodrama

Leitch, V. B.

14, 15

30,50, 97-99, 102-104, 131, 145

Lenin, V. I.

48

Metz, C.

61

Lévi-Strauss, C.

45

Michelson, A.

61

Lipsitz, G.

46, 48

migration

36, 85

Lissitzky, E.

59

Miller, D.

155

Loach, K.

106, 107

Milton, J.

37

London, J.

93

Minh-ha, T. T.

85, 94

Lotman, Y.

44

Minnelli, V.

124

Lucas, G.

17

Modleski, T.

153n11

156-63

Moers, E.

153n11

Lumière, A. and L. 9

Mondrian, P.

20

Luther, M.

90

montage

7, 55-68

8

Moore, G.

99

Lukács, G.

Luzzi, J.

Index 175

Marcus, J.

La Motte, A.

L

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Morelli, G.

153n13

Picasso, P.

59, 61, 65

Morris, R.

20, 24n18

Plato

24n4, 29

Morrison, T.

155

Poe, E. A.

100

Murphy, T.

24n10

Poggi, C.

61

museum, the

19

Polanski, R.

8, 98, 99, 104, 105

musical, the

15, 16, 50, 51, 124-133

Poovey, M.

158, 160

Musil,

156

Pope, A.

29 m

Musslewhite, D.

R.

155

Porter, V.

48

myth

30-38, 57, 89

post-colonial

93, 94, 157, 162

postmodern

9, 45, 85, 98, 155-158, 162, 163

N Nancy, J.-L.

80n8

Narboni, J.

8, 102, 107

narrative

14-17, 19, 24n4,14, 29-38, 44, 45, 50, 51, 57, 58, 63, 70, 74, 77, 81n13, 97, 99, 102, 107, 111, 112, 115, 116, 117, 119, 127-132, 136-139, 142-144, 149-151, 153n14, 155-166

Neale, S. Newman, J. H.

14, 16, 17, 24n12, 63, 64, 124, 125, 132 98

Nicholson, R. A.

91

non-genre

21-2, 73

44, 45, 51

psychoanalysis

136, 142-144, 153n13

Purdy, J.

125

Pynchon, T.

159

Q Queneau, R.

13

R Radcliffe, A.

140, 141, 145, 153

Rawlings, M.

127

realism

9, 11, 30, 92, 97-107, 125, 127, 139, 150, 156-165

Reality television

8, 9, 109-121

Ogden, C. K.

44

récit

13, 69-70, 73, 75, 80n10

orality

45

Reddy, M.

152n4

Orgel, S.

29

Reilly, J.

155, 156, 159

O’Sullivan, T.

110

Ossian

93

Rendell, R. (see also Vine, B.) 9, 135-8, 140-2, 144, 146, 152n2, n3, n5

O

Richard II

36

Palmer, J.

46

Richards, I. A.

44

paratext

13, 73, 75

Richardson, S.

13

Paretsky, S.

136, 141

Ricoeur, P.

81n13, 86

Paz, O.

93

Riefenstahl, L.

60

Peirce, C.

41, 42, 43, 47

Rieff, P.

153n13

Perec, G.

13, 23

Rieu, E.

92

Pettit, C.

99

Rivette, J.

17

Phillips, C.

62

Robbe-Grillet, A.

21-2, 162

philosophy

7, 9, 12, 14-16, 22, 29, 42, 48, 52, 58, 74, 81n14, 92, 159

Rodchenko, A.

59

Roffman, P.

125

P

176 Genre Matters

Propp, V.

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11-14, 21, 24n5, 30, 73, 80n10

Sidney, P.

21, 29, 43

Smith, Z.

155, 162

Romance

32-34, 51, 88-9, 124-132, 139, 140, 142, 145, 148, 152, 165

socio-linguistics

7, 31-38

Socrates

29

romanticism

11, 12, 17, 30, 50, 67

Sollers, P.

13, 22

Ronell, A.

20

sonnet, the

8, 21, 88

Roscoe, J.

118

Soper, K.

157, 160, 161,

Rosmarin, A.

30, 31

Speec h acts

55, 56, 58, 63, 64

Rossel, R.

31-3, 36

Spigel, G.

158

Rossetti, C.

137, 146

Spigel, L.

49

Roth, M.

46, 152n2, 153n13

Stein, S.

62

Rothenberg, J.

34

Sterne, L.

13

Rowland, S.

136, 152n2, n6

Stevenson, L.

18-19, 24n16

Rushdie, S.

155

Stevenson, R.

93

Russett, M.

153n10

Strindberg, A.

86

Ryall, T.

45, 48

Surrealism

59, 61

Swann, K.

153

synchronic

9, 44-5

syntactical

16, 50-1, 59, 92

S Salmon, A.

61

Sapir, E.

87, 88

Sartre, J.-P.

155

Saussure, F.

44

Saville, V.

124

Scaliger, J.

29

Schaeffer, J.

13, 14, 21

Schama, S.

155 123, 124

Schiller, F.

43

Schlegel, F.

14

Schönberg, A.

15

Schubert, F.

75

Schumann, R.

75

Scott, W.

156

Sebald, W.

155

Sebeok, T.

41, 153n13

Selby, S.

124

semantic

16, 20, 50, 51, 57, 59, 62

semiotics

Tanner, T.

101

Tarantino, Q.

17

Tasso, T.

89

taxonomy

12, 20, 22-3, 71-2, 79

Taylor, B.

60

Teitelbaum, M.

60, 62, 63

Tel Quel

56

textuality

7, 20-1, 29, 34, 41, 44, 47, 58, 51-2, 55-60, 62, 65-67, 77, 79, 87, 90-1, 102, 155, 157, 166

Titian

66

Todorov, T.

50, 55, 56, 58, 59, 60, 64, 67

Tolstoy, L.

86, 156

Toury, G.

88

translation

7-8, 15, 20, 45, 80n3, 85-94, 138

41, 42, 47, 48

Trivedi, H.

93

Shakespeare, W.

91

Trollope, A.

158

Sidney, G.

123

Tudor, A.

45

Index 177

Schatz, T.

T

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109

Turner, M.

30, 31

Tynyanov, Y.

16, 24n13

Page 178

U Ulmer, G.

65-6

V verisimilitude

8, 50, 98, 157, 163

Vico, G.

32

Vine, B.

9, 135-52

W Walker, H.

123

Walton, P.

152n4

Warren, A.

12

Watt, W.

41, 42

Wawn, A.

89

Weir, P.

121

Wellek, R.

12

Welsch, T.

48

Wharton, E.

105

White, H.

155

Whorf, R.

123

Widdowson, P.

97, 98, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104

Williams, M.

98

Williamson, C.

34

178 Genre Matters

Winterbottom, M. 8, 98, 102, 103, 105, 106 Wittgenstein, L.

14

Wong Kar-Wai

18

Wood, S.

123

Woolf, V.

138, 141

Wotton, G.

101

Wright, W.

46

Wyler, W.

123

Y Young, R.

Z

Žižek, S. Zola, E.

162

153n19 156

Genre.Qrk

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Page 1

Garin Dowd, Lesley Stevenson & Jeremy Strong are all members of the Media Subject Group in the Faculty of Arts at Thames Valley University. Garin Dowd is Reader, coauthor of Leos Carax (2003), and the author of several essays on Samuel Beckett. Lesley Stevenson is Principal Lecturer and has published widely on Art History. Jeremy Strong is Head of Media and has published on topics ranging from film adaptation to the semiotics of bodybuilding.

Genre Matters

This collection of new essays addresses a topic of established and expanding critical interest throughout the humanities. It demonstrates that genre matters in a manner not constrained by disciplinary boundaries and includes new work on Genre Theory and applications of thinking about genre from Aristotle to Derrida and beyond. The essays focus on economies of expectation and competency, genre as media form, recent developments in television broadcast genres, translation and genericity, the role played by genre in film publicity, gender and genre, genre in fiction, and the problematics of classification. An introductory essay places the contributions in the context of a wide range of thinking about genre in the arts, media and humanities. The volume will be of interest to both undergraduates and postgraduates, especially those following courses on Genre Theory and Genre Criticism, and to academics working in a range of subject areas such as Cultural Studies, Film Studies, Media Studies and Literary Studies.

Dowd, Stevenson & Strong

Genre Matters Essays in Theory and Criticism Edited by Garin Dowd, Lesley Stevenson & Jeremy Strong

intellect

9 781841 501079

Genre Matters Essays in Theory and Criticism

intellect PO Box 862 Bristol BS99 1DE UK / www.intellectbooks.com

ISBN 1-84150-107-7

Edited by Garin Dowd, Lesley Stevenson & Jeremy Strong