Unpacking the Trash Can of Genre: Practical Literary Theory

I put this here, because no discussion of genre is complete without Red Harvest. It was originally a hardboiled fiction story…

I’ve written about genre before several times, and I’ve generally warned artists away from using it as a starting point – I want to discuss, here and now, why that is. Fundamentally, this is about creativity: while constraints can definitely breed new and interesting expressions (consider Many Subtle Channels, about the OuLiPo school, written about by Edgar in a previous book roundup,) choosing the right limitations is key. When you select a genre and decide your going to produce a book, comic, film, or similar within it, you’re essentially taking a whole set of unexamined assumptions and saying that you’re going to abide by them to the exclusion of everything else. This is a mistake.

…was adapted first into Meiji-era Japan by Akira Kurosawa as Yojimbo and then to the Old West by Sergio Leone as A Fistful of Dollars (comparison from Indiewire)

Much as Slavoj Žižek’s statement about “eating from the trash can of ideology” is about a lack of awareness or reflexivity in the political arena, we could easily talk about “eating from the trash can of genre” in the arts. As a caveat, I would argue that the definition of “genre” is much bigger than people tend to give it credit for – “literary fiction” or “dramatic film” or “superhero comics” and the like are all genres, they’re just the unmarked default (much like I proposed masculinity as the “unmarked default” of gender.) They’re centered, but they’re also simply other genres: as other forms become more prestigious, they have to readjust.

…And finally back to gangsters with Last Man Standing (1996). It’s the same story. Genre doesn’t matter.

In the realm of fiction, this has led to the development of the MFA-style short story: a plotless maundering about upper-middle-class white people who feel alienated in some way that culminates in some revelation that largely dwells inside of the Oedipal triangle. When this formula is broken in an acceptable way (like by, say Jhumpa Lahiri writing the same sort of story about south-Asian immigrants) it’s hailed as revolutionary. In my analogy back to the gender piece, this is the equivalent of the angry young man in the throes of the crisis of masculinity.

This genre and, indeed, I would say, all genres, needs to be killed as our dominant conception of how narrative art comes together. I say this, largely, because what we call “genre” is actually an assemblage of different elements – as I would put it, as a particular constellation of paradigm (in the case of more formalized genres, a myth) and syntax.

Today, I want to look at genre, divide syntax and paradigm/myth out dissect the syntax in particular. The reason this is important for creators is that genre encourages thinking in terms of maximum acceptable difference – how far can you push this an still have it match the genre? It’s a difference-averse approach that is unnecessarily limiting creativity (Of course, there’s also the Principle of Minimum Contradiction to keep in mind — part of this may be due to audiences being novelty-averse.)

I talk about science fiction a lot. Instead, let’s look at the detective story (I’m playing Disco Elysium right now, so it’s on my mind. Expect a piece more focused on that game in the future.) This is a super-category of sorts, containing within it hard-boiled fiction, the police procedural, the conspiracy thriller, and others.

Enough with the image rush, take this cover image from my 2019 game of the year and we’ll cool it with the graphics.

Since the 1980s, the basic ideas of the mystery have eaten a lot of other genres – given the postmodern skepticism towards grand narratives and the resultant state of indeterminacy, the detective story is unavoidable as a conceptual tool – and everyone is basically familiar with the structure. A person whose life is a mess is tasked by some agency with greater authority than themselves – either a person (as in the femme fatale who walks in and gives the detective a job,) an actual agency (the police force,) the world of inanimate and/or partial objects (e.g., the will in The Crying of Lot 49, the ear in Blue Velvet) – and proceed to display competence in gathering information, but invite violent retribution in the process (generally without much proximal explanation – the violence just seems to happen, like the weather,) there is generally a subplot dealing with sexual desire (an encounter with an attractive person of protagonist-appropriate gender is most common,) and the object of this sexual desire is usually entangled with the events in question or has a thematic mirror to the events in question.

A caveat: the sexual entanglement is generally an outgrowth of hard-boiled fiction, and is rare in mysteries from before about 1920. However, this element generally finds an acceptable expression in all iterations of the plot now (other elements may be substituted for the sexual desire, but there is an element of desire itself here.)

Eventually, the truth is uncovered, and the whole edifice comes crashing down. With the revelation of the truth, the mythic construction collapses into the mundane (notably, The Crying of Lot 49, previously touched upon here, avoids this, cutting off the narration just before the revelation of the truth. As such, the labyrinth of potential answers remains standing, indifferent to theory.)

So, when we get down to it, we have a hero defined by highly selective competence trying to answer a question that is simultaneously mirrored by the pursuit of the object (as in grammatical object – let’s call it “patient” in the case of a person) of desire. This is the kernel of the detective genre. It drives the whole thing. Without the highly selective competence, you have a farce dressed up as a mystery; without the question being answered, you have a romance; without the pursuit of the object of desire to pantomime the pursuit of an answer, it lacks depth.

So the question of genre becomes about what clothes you can dress this up in and have it still be recognizable. Can you do it without an answer? Yes, The Crying of Lot 49. Can you do it in the future? Yes, Blade Runner. Can you select a protagonist other than a detective? Well, the Pynchon up above will also do, but check out Scoop by Evelyn Waugh. What about a weird setting? Can you do it in high school? Yes, Brick. Can you do it without a male protagonist? Yes, some might say Veronica Mars, but I would put forward the Claire DeWitt books as my preferred example.

In fact, the need for there to be a pursuit of desire element in detective fiction, I think, is visible in nearly every adaptation of Sherlock Holmes — the audience reads it into the Holmes-Watson relationship even when they’re two uninteresting white men with zero chemistry.

The fundamental truth is that, to have a detective story, you need those three elements: a detective, a question, a desire. That’s as simple as the mechanism can get and still do what it’s trying to do.

But all of this is still at the level of syntax. At the level of paradigm, it boils down to the quest for an answer. The question is the only paradigmatic element – the other two are making it intelligible to a human reader. The reason I say this is that detective fiction usually has something to say about the quest for answers, but there tend to be other, more favored vehicles for an examination of character and desire.

So here we get to the point: might it be possible to build other syntagmatic structures on top of the same paradigmatic foundation? Maybe you can take the driving question, and write a story about someone fleeing from the answer (perhaps this is what the movie Pi is?) Maybe the question is about something more fundamental than a whodunit – Twin Peaks, when you get down to it, is about asking a deep moral question (that, I think, may be the secret of David Lynch’s weirdness: he’s fundamentally a bit of a moralist, concerned with what makes people good or bad; the actual events that surround it are just grounds for assessment.)

But I’m not writing about detectives here, I’m trying to answer a question about genre – this is all just fodder for the analysis.

Fundamentally, when you get to genre, a lot of people boil it down to an aesthetic: this is why they might sort Blade Runner and Brick into different piles. This is a science fiction story, this is a neo-noir. I believe that how it looks is secondary to what it does. You could take Blade Runner out of the future pretty easily (it might slot into the antebellum South way easier than it does into the modern day, but it can be taken out of the future.) But Blade Runner and Brick are both about a selectively-competent loner answering a question.

I don’t know why I’m using blockbuster as the framework for my hypothetical here, but it seemed natural.

It first becomes about the setting, which is a question of aesthetics. In fact, I would say that the very first concern of genre is with aesthetics. Blade Runner is a neo-noir, Star Wars is a fantasy, but they both ended up in the same section of the Blockbuster when that was still a thing, despite sharing nothing but a general used-future aesthetic and Harrison Ford. Their structure, their philosophy, every deeper element of the structure was fundamentally different.

So that’s the first element of the syntax, the setting. Of course, now that I’ve canonized this, you might point out that Close Encounters of the Third Kind fell between the two on the shelf in the Blockbuster – and it shares no setting details with the other two. How do you square this?

The second issue is a question of scope: Close Encounters of the Third Kind takes the reasonable approach that there probably is other life out there in the universe, but the unreasonable idea that they might just show up and try to contact us. Going over to a different section of the fantasy blockbuster, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, Fight Club, and Pride and Prejudice don’t give a shit if there are aliens. Think about it: would anyone think of asking Keira Knightley if there were aliens in the Pride-and-Prejudice-(2005)-verse? No. The question doesn’t make sense, because it’s immaterial to the story: either they don’t, or they’re inaccessible, either way, they don’t matter.

Quit making out and tell me if you believe in aliens. The people want to know.

If questions like this matter and receive focus – are there aliens? Is there magic? Is there a god and which one? What happens to us when we die? Who’s the murderer? Who’s the thief? What lesson is this straight, middle-class, white, male character going to learn? – then you have found yourself in a genre (whether it’s acknowledged by the author or not, it’s a genre.) In short, they make up part of the philosophical character of the story, whether or not it has a definitive answer about the question or not.

Third, we might address the question of co-occurrence, which is a somewhat narrow question, but bear with me: why is the Lord of the Rings trilogy on the same hypothetical Blockbuster shelf as Star Trek or Mad Max or similar? Why, when you go into the book store down the street, does Moby Dick sit cheek-and-jowl with Infinite Jest, Don Quixote, Catch-22, and To the Lighthouse? What do any of these books have to do with each other? Surely, any two of them could be connected with work, but finding the unifying factor to the set of five is most likely impossible.

In short, the umbrella headings that we use for genre don’t tell us anything – Star Trek has more in common with Moby Dick than Catch-22 does, but putting the two of them next to each other feels somewhat absurd. Admittedly, partially for aesthetic reasons, but not wholly so. These umbrella terms don’t inhere in the art: they are pasted on by advertisers after the fact to make them easier to sell – and, honestly, if we’re going to have capitalism, that’s fine. But writers shouldn’t start from the label and work out. They should develop the kernel of their story and push it outward from there.

And when you mix center (Foundation) with the periphery (Neuromancer), you get something unstable, like a cyberpunk story about cops. Which can manage until you cast a white woman as a Japanese character. Or don’t really have Japanese people in Tokyo.

Of course, this question of Association is a big one, but I think the strongest books are the ones which cast their nets of association beyond the boundaries of a single genre. Neuromancer may get slotted into the shelf just a few letters over from Foundation, but it has more in common with The Italian Job or various attempts at punk literature. While both Neuromancer and Foundation were influential, the former pushed beyond the boundaries of the genre while the latter sits in the middle of it – and I would caution creatives that there’s always more space in the margins than the middle.

In short, don’t push for matching an archetypal, basic story: push for difference, push for alterity, and push for mutation in your artwork. Anything less is just that: less.

And that’s the three syntactic – or para-syntactic, I suppose – ideas that determine genre: Setting, Scope, and Association. How you play with these is more important, I would argue, than how well you fit into the mold of the traditional detective, fantasy, science fiction, or literary story.

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