In my moments of deepest despair at the capitalist system behind the present-day production of art, I have episodes of thinking about genre as purely a marketing category. This is obviously a naive view - one assumes that the distinction between lyric and epic poetry did not appear in a marketing context - but, given that genre is fuzzy and marketing categories are less so (although certainly there are books that have been shelved in more than one section), I think there is something to it in terms of people's apprehension of genres for which they don't typically seek out books in that marketing category. People who don't head to the speculative fiction section of the bookstore every time they go to the bookstore think that anything not in that section must not be speculative fiction; whereas a publisher who gets the exact same manuscript from either a famous mainstream author or someone whose previous books have mostly been shelved in the SF section may make a completely different decision about what the most effective audience would be to market that book.
And genre, as opposed to marketing categories, is very fuzzy indeed. As for 1984, quotations I've come across in my research include Harold Bloom - "Its very genre will be established by political, social, economic events. Is it satire or science fiction or dystopia or countermanifesto?" - and Sue Lonoff - "To some readers, it seems not to be a novel at all; it is a fantasy [I had not realized this was mutually exclusive with "novel"] or satire or tract for the times, a history lecture done up as prophecy." I think Lonoff's argument ends up being that the genre of the book is "nightmare" - which I certainly had not realized was an actual genre. I recently came across a somewhat tricky juxtaposition between 1984 and Archer's Goon where my first thought was that I could explain away the differences as a genre difference - but then I realized that the difference would be difficult to express - 1984 is satire with an overtone of science fiction versus Archer's Goon being fantasy with an overtone of science fiction? I'm not even sure that's right!
Then I just had the conversation last night with my brother about how it would be impossible to make Hexwood into a movie because the way it treats genre would make it extremely difficult to market - and I think that Hexwood's genre games are blatantly necessary to the kind of narrative it's telling - that there are certain kinds of narratives in which an understanding of genre and the uses of genre are fundamental to one's understanding of the narrative - which is why, as DWJ has pointed out herself, children's books and YA often allow more scope to authors than other marketing categories (I don't know what to say about children's books and YA as genres).
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Date: 2009-06-05 03:03 pm (UTC)And genre, as opposed to marketing categories, is very fuzzy indeed. As for 1984, quotations I've come across in my research include Harold Bloom - "Its very genre will be established by political, social, economic events. Is it satire or science fiction or dystopia or countermanifesto?" - and Sue Lonoff - "To some readers, it seems not to be a novel at all; it is a fantasy [I had not realized this was mutually exclusive with "novel"] or satire or tract for the times, a history lecture done up as prophecy." I think Lonoff's argument ends up being that the genre of the book is "nightmare" - which I certainly had not realized was an actual genre. I recently came across a somewhat tricky juxtaposition between 1984 and Archer's Goon where my first thought was that I could explain away the differences as a genre difference - but then I realized that the difference would be difficult to express - 1984 is satire with an overtone of science fiction versus Archer's Goon being fantasy with an overtone of science fiction? I'm not even sure that's right!
Then I just had the conversation last night with my brother about how it would be impossible to make Hexwood into a movie because the way it treats genre would make it extremely difficult to market - and I think that Hexwood's genre games are blatantly necessary to the kind of narrative it's telling - that there are certain kinds of narratives in which an understanding of genre and the uses of genre are fundamental to one's understanding of the narrative - which is why, as DWJ has pointed out herself, children's books and YA often allow more scope to authors than other marketing categories (I don't know what to say about children's books and YA as genres).