On the Unhealthiness of "Genre"

What’s the most interesting part of a Venn Diagram? Correctamundo — the overlapping bits. Now, see, why I don’t like genre much is that genres value themselves in terms of purity — at their purest, their conventions function most strongly, with greatest efficacy, that is true. But to appreciate their specialized conventions requires specialized study of almost ritualistic immersion. Readers become experts in all the tricks of their various trades, be they detective, romance, horror, noir, SF, poetry, whatever. Each one is expert in one tiny field, that patch of the interacting Venn Diagram of possible story-fields that isn’t sullied by intercourse with any other type of genre. You often hear strident defences of rock ’n’ roll against the intrusions of jazz, or hysterical complaints about “improper fusions” between reggae and African beats. Or the “pretension” of inviting a string quartet to back a heavy metal band. When it comes to genre, miscegenation is a big no-no.

But I think you’ll find the real action is in these overlaps. It’s where fictions collide and mash-up. That’s where sessile genres can acquire some hybrid vigour — all genres stale in proportion to how many followers adhere to their conventions. Especially if the followers never ask questions. Every now and then, for the good of its health, a genre requires upheaval. This is hardly a revelation. But it’s fanciful to believe revitalization can come from within. There must be upheaval and intrusion: the vital, buzzing borderlands between genres wrestling with their contravening tensions and energies to resolve their flux is where new synergies will come from. Even if these aesthetic “solutions” are temporary, and many, one random result after another, at least they will spin off further ideas – more paths to follow – than some new masterwork generated from within a genre’s core established territory.

In a sense, when genres are brought closer together they behave like tectonic plates. There’s friction and energy as they grapple and try to avoid each other, even as each asserts the primacy of its world-view over the other (even Romance fiction believes it has more to offer the world than Horror! Everyone is the hero of their own story). And there, all over that interzone where tectonic genres contend, there’s vitality, life, experimentation, energy, passion, exotic alloys compounded from fresh insights — possibilities far more exciting than anything available through slavish adherence to genre conventionality. By ignoring the clichés of science fiction, the works of the American magical realist Steve Erickson achieve something far more wonderful and imaginative than anything by any other living SF writer or fantasist. (It’s also because he knows how to write: another innovation few SF or fantasy writers would ever dare to consider.)

Even if some skilful conservative is able to bring about the Defining Masterpiece of a given genre (people often want to stamp the definitive imprimatur of “The Great American Novel” upon some innocent victim — the latest saint inducted into this foolish quest is Don DeLillo, for Underworld), what good does a defining masterpiece do? At best, someone might equal it one day. No, change and evolution is the only answer. And evolution does not percolate up from the stagnating strata of long-codified genres but boils out from all the fizz and steam happening at the edges. To raise idols is only to sanctify nostalgia further down the road. Forget about mastery. Masterpieces are often too safe. Breathe life into genres by getting radical. Hybrid vigour is the motto. Miscegenation is the creed. Get dirty.