Tag Archives: genre

The Romance of Dystopia

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katniss-peeta-kiss

 
The Hunger Games and Divergent may have romance elements but they’re not romance novels. Katniss and Tris don’t, for the most part, have time to focus on boyfriends; they’re too busy trying to stay alive and fighting their oppressors. Romance is about love; the most popular YA dystopias are about freedom. That’s a fundamental difference.

Or is it? When you actually read romance novels, it’s not so clear. Especially in historical romances, the parallels with YA dystopias can be startling. For example, Laura Kinsale’s 1993 classic For My Lady’s Heart is set in Medieval Europe — a setting as alien, and in many ways as authoritarian, as Tris’ future Chicago or Katniss’s District. The Princess Melanthe, like her peers in YA, is hemmed in by rules and proscriptions, her every move monitored and enmeshed in plot and counterplot. Born in England, Melanthe married into an Italian house, and her husband’s death set off a cascade of political intrigue as various suitors vie for her lands and power. One of her husbands’ Italian rivals has forced her to travel with his son, a castrated assassin who sleeps in her bed to make sure she doesn’t betray his father even in her sleep. Her entire life is devoted to concealing her real feelings under an icy veneer of calculation. Her husband “had trained her to trust no one and nothing, to lie of everything to everyone.” That’s how you live under totalitarianism. Katniss pretending to love Peta;  Tris concealing that she’s divergent; Melanthe pretending to marry a man when she has no intention of doing so — they’ve all learned to dissemble in the face of power.

Rose Lerner’s recently published Regency romance Sweet Disorder is less grim — no one is threatened with death — but there are still parallels. Phoebe Sparks is a poor widow whose sister has become pregnant out of wedlock, and faces exile and shame As a woman without much money, Phoebe’s options are constrained by rules which are both arbitrary and cruel. There’s a local election, and both sides are willing to provide her with much needed cash since her vote is needed — except that it’s not her vote, but her husband’s. should she remarry. Because of the elaborate mores of a strange society, she has to sacrifice herself to save her sister…which is exactly the dilemma which faces Katniss in the Hunger Games.

All of these books, then, are devoted to dystopias, past or present — they all involve women trying to live their lives in the shadow of repressive power. Or, to look at it another way, they all concern women trying to negotiate between patriarchy and love.

It’s true that the exact nature of that negotitation is somewhat different in Hunger Games and Divergent than it is in For My Lady’s Heart and A Sweet Disorder. Most obviously, the YA novels involve significantly more guns. Katniss and Tris protect their loved ones, or try to, through violent political action; the response to exploitive power structures (which, significantly, aren’t always run by men in either book) is revolution. Romance novels, on the other hand, tend to look for non-violent, personal solutions to political problems. Pam Rosenthal’s Regency The Slightest Provocation, for example, concludes with the protagonists, an estranged husband and wife, reconciling and declaring their love as they work together to prevent agent provacateurs from goading laborers into a demonstration that the government can bloodily quash. Injustice is undermined by peace and love, both personal and political. YA responds to patriarchal dystopia with violent political resistance; Romance with nonviolence abetted by personal affection .

Again, though, the binary is less clear than it appears. The Hunger Games, for instance, is acutely aware of the limitations of violence as a response to violence. Katniss’ embrace of revolution ultimately destroys the sister who she was fighting for in the first place. The rebellion in The Hunger Games, led by a woman, doesn’t challenge the patriarchy. It just replaces one boss with another, cosmetically different, but every bit as vicious. And for its part, For My Lady’s Heart doesn’t exactly forswear violence; Ruck, the hero, fights for Melanthe on a number of occasions, and while the tourneys aren’t to the death, the novel still unequivocally glories in his prowess, and in might asserted on behalf of right.

Rather than seeing YA dystopias and historical romances as opposed, then, it makes more sense to see them as thinking through related questions in complementary or overlapping ways. Can you use the tools of patriarchy, such as violence and paranoia, against patriarchy? Does forswearing those tools leave you defenseless? Is love a weakness, which gives patriarchy a hold on you, sending you to the Hunger Games (like Katniss), or into an arranged marriage (like Phoebe, in A Sweet Disorder)? Or is love a strength,  which gives you the heart to resist oppression?

Despite the similarities, I wouldn’t necessarily insist that YA dystopias should be shelved with, Romances. Genre markers are fairly arbitrary. But as in YA and historicals, that arbitrariness is itself indicative of lines of power. YA isn’t generally seen in the context of Romance novels because Romance novels simply aren’t seen; mainstream conversations about genre fiction include sci-fi and mystery and children’s lit and YA, but the genre with the largest sales and readership is almost entirely ignored.  Seeing Hunger Games and Divergent as future historicals is a way to see them as not just about the dystopia to come, but about the dystopias we’ve already (and continue) to have. And it’s also a way, perhaps, to grant Katniss and Tris their love along with their violence, and to see that they aren’t the first to wrestle with those options. They have many sisters who came before them.

Teaching Zombies

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No More Zombies

 
Zombies stumble into my class all the time. They tend to be friendly but a little lost, uncertain whether they belong in a fiction workshop. They stare blankly when I explain that the course is focused on “literary” fiction, a species of writing they’ve heard of but only sporadically consumed.

It’s not an easy term to digest. Adam Brooke Davis, in his recent essay “No More Zombies!,” divides “the playfulness that is above seriousness from the drivel that is below it” by banning all “alt-worlding” from his advanced writing workshop and requiring his students to write about “real environments with real people, facing [real] problems.” So “literary” is narrative realism, and everything else is genre (sci-fi, fantasy, horror). Those are pretty much the definitions the publishing industry has been using for decades.

It sounds good, but when I open up a collection of O. Henry Prize-winning stories I find a range of alternate worlds. They involve androids, a village on the back of a whale, and a giant square from space that slowly crushes a town. If I reach to my next shelf, I can pull down a dozen top-tier literary journals that include equally nonrealistic stories, all quite serious and drivel-free. The range of narrative realism in the same issues is serious and drivel-free too. A story’s setting, real or speculative, predicts nothing.

Yet Davis bemoans the influence of pop culture, believing that all the alt-worlds infecting film, TV, and popular literature have mutated his students into lazy zombies instead of disciplined writers. If so, it’s got nothing to do with “alt-worlding”—all fiction writing is alt-worlding. There is no such thing as a work of fiction that takes place in the real world. Stories exist solely in words. That’s an unbelievably obvious fact, but even creative-writing professors can lose track of the implications.

A work of narrative realism is no closer to being “real” than a story about vampires, superheroes, or anthropomorphic chipmunks. By “real,” we usually mean “familiar,” sometimes lazily so. If a first sentence describes a pickup truck grinding over gravel, rather than a hovercraft quivering above landing lights, we perceive the story as existing “here” and “now,” not in some other place and time. The implied world is a ready-made. Instantly recognizable environments, Davis implies, force students to focus on more important story elements.

Sometimes that’s true. But if handed a choice, I will sooner read a student draft that takes place on a distant planet in a far-flung future than a story set in a campus dorm last weekend. Neither setting is intrinsically better, but even the most experienced writer needs some psychic (and so probably physical and temporal) distance to transform real experience into “realistic” literature. When a genre draft is bad, however, it’s probably because the writer has been consumed by the formula. That’s an easier problem to fix.

When I tell students they can write anything as long as it’s “literary,“ I define the term as “character-driven.” Nonliterary fiction, I explain, is plot-driven and includes any story in which characters act according to the needs of the plot rather than from an artfully crafted illusion of psychologically complex motivation. Plot is still important—without it, the best you can hope for is a beautifully chiseled character study that lacks any page-turning momentum. But, I ask, is the plot serving the characters, or are the characters serving the plot?

It’s not a perfect (or particularly original) definition, but it gets the job done. When I faced down my first zombie in a workshop, I didn’t flinch. I also didn’t chuckle and dismiss the story as a warm-up. I critiqued it the same way I would critique a piece of narrative realism. And, when the student turned in a revision, the story had transformed into realism. The zombies didn’t vanish, but the characters’ genre-determined behaviors did. Alternate worlds aren’t the only stories choked with clichés, but they do have more overtly defined sets of formula expectations. And that makes them easy to gut. Just ask one question: Is the world serving the characters, or are the characters serving the world?

Davis’s zombie ban sparked some outrage from fellow writing professors, but I agree with Lesley Wheeler, who wrote in her literary blog that Davis, despite the weaknesses of his argument, “seems like a dedicated teacher who wants to do the best he can by his creative-writing students.”

I’ll go a step further. Not only do Davis and I have the same good intentions, he and I want to help our students produce exactly the same kind of story. Davis confuses it with “real environments,” but that’s a surface element. He wants depth. He wants psychological realism. It doesn’t matter if the characters are androids, elves, or mere “humans”—as long they behave humanly. Does the zombie stumble through its life in all the messy and horrific ways readers recognize from their own lives? If so, the character is “real,” whether zombified or not.

“Literary” stories require readers to infer complex inner lives for artificially real characters. I won’t deny the pleasures of formula and its plot-beholden characters, but they’re nothing compared to the joys of eating an imaginary brain. Open a skull and explore all the flavors. I demand all my students to be zombies.
 

zombie writing

Romance and the Defensive Crouch

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4As someone who writes and reads about comics, I’ve see a lot of criticism practiced from the stance of defensive crouch. So Pamela Regis’ Natural History of the Romance Novel was, depressingly, familiar.

Regis’ position is certainly understandable. Romance novels are even more loathed than comics. As Regis says, academic discussion of romance has traditionally presented the romance genre as corporate crap and romance readers as deluded fools. There are almost never mainstream reviews or discussion of romance, even though (as Regis says) the genre is more popular than ayn other; 55.9% of mass market paperbacks were romance novels in 1999.

Regis stated goal is to confront and refute the prejudice against romance novels. The book is meant to show that “the romance novel contains serious ideas” (contra literay critics) and that it is “not about woman’s bondage” (contra feminist critics) but “about women’s freedom.”

Regis uses two main arguments here. First, she says that the happy endings of romance novels do not erase or trap the heroine, because marriage and happy endings are freeing, not constricting. Second, she argues that the romance novel has a long-standing, stable form, and that current romance novels are the direct heirs of classic, canonical works by Austen, Trollope,and Forster.

The first of these arguments is unconvincing. Regis argues that heroines in romance novels overcomes barriers to union with the hero. “Heroines are not extinguished,” she enthuses, “they are freed. Readers are not bound by the form; they rejoice because they are in love with freedom.” But if the choice is always the same choice, how is that freedom? Of course the novels present passionate monogamy as joyful. But critics like Janice Radway and Tania Modleski point out, with some justice, that monogamy and marriage, in real life are not always joyful, and that marriage as an institution is often constricting for women. They question whether the constant insistence that joy comes only with heterosexual marriage is actually liberating, or whether, instead, it might be in some ways a limiting failure of imagination. In Pamela, for example, which Regis sees as the earliest romance, is it really a happy ending when the heroine ends up marrying a rich asshole who has spent much of the novel attempting to rape her? Regis says that romance readers can tell rape in fiction from rape in real life, which I’m sure is true — but if fiction doesn’t influence real life at all, what’s all this about romance novels being freeing?

Regis’ second argument — that books like Pamela and Pride and Prejudice are romances — is much stronger, and in many ways does the work for romance that she wants it to. If Pride and Prejudice and A Room With a View are romance novels, after all, then most people would agree that romance novels can be great literature. Indeed, Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre are significantly more canonical than just about anything that mystery genre or sci-fi has to offer.

The problem is that Regis tries to prove the older works are romances by arguing that romance has a single structure, defined by eight narrative elements. Pam Rosenthal summarized these as follows:

definition of society (“always corrupt, that the romance novel will reform”); the meeting between the heroine and hero; their attraction; the barrier to that attraction; their declaration that they love each other; point of ritual death; recognition that fells the barrier; and betrothal.

The definition tself works as well as these things can be expected to (though I’ll talk a bit more about this later.) But once having established the rubric, it tends to put a straight-jacket on the rest of the discussion. Most of Regis’ book is given over to book summaries showing that the plots fit Regis’ categories. First classic works are discussed, and they fit — and then modern works are discussed, and they fit. But the fact that they fit doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re any good. Nor does Regis’ repeated assertions that Nora Roberts or Janet Dailey are masterful creators convince me that they are. On the contrary, Dailey’s books sound wretched, as do Jayne Anne Krentz’s. Perhaps they have some historical interest (Dailey was one of the first important authors to use American and Western settings) but Regis certainly doesn’t make the case for any merit beyond that.

In fact, the insistence on defining romance by eight narrative elements does the exact opposite of what Regis claims she wants to do. Rather than making romance seem serious, it makes it appear rote and formulaic. If the best you can say for someone like Dailey is that she knows the form and uses it, then why should anyone care about her? Even Austen and Forster and Bronte seem to wilt under the faint praise. They all filled in the blanks skillfully? Whoopee.

Regis’ difficulty is that she wants to defend all romance. She is fighting for the honor of romance as a genre, or as a whole. She never, once, in the entire book, admits that any single romance, anywhere, might be formulaic, or badly written. She acknowledges that the Sheik is racist only in order to dismiss it rather than (for example) to think about how the “dangerous man” fantasies in so many romance novels indebted to the Sheik might also be touched by class and racial stereotypes, or to talk about how white women’s liberation so often seems to be symbolically assured by association with non-white people.

I’m not saying all romances are evil crap. I don’t think all romances are evil crap. But many romances are crap, and it seems like you need to acknowledge that somewhere if you’re going to make the case that some romances are good. And one important way to start thinking about romances as various is, I think, to chuck the formula. Yes, many romances can be made to fit into Regis’ pattern. But then, many can’t. Wuthering Heights, Anna Karenina and Gone With the Wind are books that are very often discussed as romance novels, and which don’t fit Regis’ pattern in important respects.Regis talks about Gone With the Wind specifically, saying that readers who identify it as a romance are “misreading”; that they’re substituting in a happy ending based on their familiarity with the genre. In other words, Regis suggests that romance readers are so wedded to their narratives that their basic reading comprehension suffers. This is supposed to be a defense of romance fans how, exactly?

Why not, instead, accept that lots of romance readers see Gone With the Wind as a romance — which means, maybe, that romance novels don’t have to conform to a single formula? Similarly, Trollope’s most famous romance, between Lily Dale and Johnny Eames, didn’t end in a relationship — which was (as Trollope astutely noted) precisely why it was so famous and successful. Villette almost, almost consummates its romance, only to end in tragedy. And, for that matter, A Room With a View, which Regis sees as a romance with a happy ending, has an afterword which (as Kailyn Kent has noted) refuses and refutes the formula. Is A Room With a View not a romance if you include the afterword? Or, possibly, is there more room in romance than Regis’ formula allows?

Though Regis is reluctant to admit it, romance novels have been commodified and rationalized since the days of Forster and Trollope; the standard endings are, I think, more insisted upon. And yet, you can see leeway still. In Jennifer Crusie’s Bet Me, most of the characters get married off, but at least one, Liza, remains a serial dater, too restless to settle down, and happy enough in that restlessness. Ian McEwan’s Atonement, which is certainly devastatingly romantic, gets much of its power from its commitment to, and interruption of, the romance narrative as a narrative — by both giving and withholding the happy ending. I read Atonement like three times in a couple of weeks and cried every one. If that’s not a romance novel, I don’t know what is.

This isn’t to say that only books that refuse the romance ending to some degree can be great novels. But it is to say that the possibility of resistance seems to me central to the possibility of freedom, and even to the possibility of variety. Maybe, rather than saying that romance novels bind women, or that romance novels free women, it might be better to think of romance novels as fascinated by, or concerned with, the issues of autonomy and love. Some writers may handle those themes thoughtfully, others not so much. But all romance novels don’t speak with one voice, any more than all women do.

She’ll Take Romance: Reading Longbourn

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Ever since the moment, many decades ago, when my mom introduced me to Little Women, it’s been my pleasure to return the favor whenever I can. Sadly, the opportunities are rare, given what an informed and energetic follower of excellent midlist literary fiction Mom is. Zipping through The English Patient or People of the Book years before I get around to it, she waits patiently, reading list in hand, while I meander through Proust or Pynchon, linger in fiction’s demimondes, reading romance and erotica and writing my own.

9780385351232_custom-1e2c6e44582547b7fa06f4ed69b812312e09525a-s6-c30So it’s a special joy when we find common ground in a book of my choosing, as we did when I visited her recently, bearing a birthday present. The gift was a copy of Longbourn, Jo Baker’s stunning retelling of Pride and Prejudice from the point of view of its household servants. I also had it on my Kindle, so we settled happily at her kitchen table to read it together.

But as Mom turned pages and I flicked at my screen, we each were seized with palpable concern that things might not end happily for James the footman (“he’s so nice,” Mom sighed) and Sarah the housemaid.

Concern grew into anxiety. Were it not for the other’s presence, we each might have sneaked an illegitimate glance at the last page for reassurance. We were reading Longbourn the way Martin Amis remembers first reading Pride and Prejudice: “I… read twenty pages and then besieged my stepmother’s study until she told me what I needed to know. I needed to know that Darcy married Elizabeth… as badly as I had ever needed anything.” We read like the “Smithton women,” the sampling of readers Janice Radway interviewed in Reading the Romance, tearing through their most cherished recreational reading. Animated by our lust for a happy ending, Mom and I were reading like romance readers, even if the novel in question was one clearly marketed as literary fiction.
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And why not? Lots of mystery and horror, spy and crime fiction titles have lit fic cred bestowed upon them even as they’re appreciated for their characteristic genre frissons. Stephen King is regularly celebrated in The New York Times Book Review while remaining our supreme magus of high creepiness. Why shouldn’t a literary novel be read for romance’s particular pleasures? Longbourn – already justly recognized for its handsome writing and clever, deeply informed take on Austen’s fiction and Georgian England – ought also be praised for what it shares with my shelf of books all named something like To Love a Duke: the ache and throb and richness of yearning for a happy-ever-after ending.

Before taking on the romance novel or Longbourn’s complicated genre provenance, though, we should remember what a vexed and fluid thing “genre” actually is. Situated at the intersection of marketing categories, reader interaction, academic turf wars, and who knows what else, genres bump up against or devour each other. Like the glowing spheres in my time-waster computer game, Osmos, they emit gravitational fields, travel in orbits, clash, collide or piggy-back on each other.

You can read Longbourn as literary or historical fiction. Mom had been wanting to read it as “the Upstairs/Downstairs Pride and Prejudice,” and you can certainly read it as Austenlandia, which category probably had the most to do with its “set[ting] the British publishing market on fire… when it went on auction.”

Loving the book as I did, I think I read it in all of the above genre categories as well as a romance novel. In fact, a big part of the pleasure I took in Longbourn was not that it transcended genre but that it seemed to participate in so many of them. Part of the adventure was negotiating the category clash. And let’s not forget Baker’s own account of how she’d classify her book:
 

I think of Longbourn — if this is not too much of an aspiration — as being in the same tradition as Wide Sargasso Sea or Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. It’s a book that engages with Austen’s novel in a similar way to Jean Rhys’s response to Jane Eyre and Tom Stoppard’s to Hamlet. I found something in the existing text that niggled me, that felt unresolved…. [having] to do with being a lifelong fan of Austen’s work, but knowing that recent ancestors of mine had been in service. I loved her work, but I didn’t quite belong in it…

 
Is there a name for this literary tradition (that also, notably, includes Geraldine Brooks’ Pulitzer Prize-winning March)? I usually wind up calling them “no-I’m-not-Prince-Hamlet books,” but surely we can do better. “New Historical” fiction? No, that’s too academic (though it does recognize the wealth and depth of Baker’s historical spadework). I’m open to suggestions.

Baker isn’t the only reader who’s been niggled by a well-beloved text. How many of us do belong in the worlds we love to read about? “Caesar beat the Gauls,” Brecht said. “Did he not even have a cook with him?” In fiction as well as history, we identify with the principle actors, those whose names have survived. How do we make room in a text for the selves the text turns a blind eye to? (And how to keep that Brechtian PC hectoring tone out of our voices?)

A brilliant English professor I know once assigned a class of undergraduates to write about the servants in Pride and Prejudice. “And if you ask what servants –” I’m told she added – “read the book again.” But Austen makes so few direct mentions of servants that even after a careful rereading, they’re hard to spot. By my search of Pride and Prejudice’s digitized text, we read three times of a Mrs. Hill; once of “the two housemaids”; once each of a butler and a footman. Yet meals are cooked and served; messages delivered; somebody has to drive the carriage to this or that social event. Shoe-roses for the Netherfield ball are fetched in the pouring rain “by proxy”.

As in the New Testament, you know these servants by their works. “When a meal is served in Pride and Prejudice,” Baker tells us in an afterword, “it has been prepared in Longbourn. When the Bennet girls enter a ball in Austen’s novel, they leave the carriage waiting in this one.” Downstairs events are mapped upon the satisfaction of upstairs needs in Austen’s text.

And so Longbourn begins on a washday, before dawn in the village of the same name, of which (Jane Austen tells us) the Bennets “were the principal inhabitants.” The acres of fluttering muslin we’ve come to love on our PBS screens are shoved into washtubs: just think how much fabric must be washed, ironed, and hung out to dry in order to clothe a Georgian gentleman’s wife and five daughters for a week. Add that gentleman’s shirts, stockings, and high white cravats (stiffened with rice starch, Baker tells us), the sheets, pillowslips, napkins – and the servants’ underwear as well. It’s no wonder that the washing begins at four thirty, when the pump still painfully cold to the touch, especially for Sarah, the older of the two housemaids, whose hands are afflicted with chilblains.

I think Jane Eyre had chilblains, or some of the children at Lowood did; I once wrote a romance hero who almost gets them when he forgets his gloves. But I was never moved to look it up before now, when I learned from Wikipedia that exposure to cold and humidity “damages capillary beds in the skin, which in turn can cause redness, itching, blisters, and inflammation.”

That the malady can be cured in seven to fourteen days doesn’t help a housemaid bound to the wheel of weekly laundry. Add insult to injury when that same housemaid is obliged to scrub away three inches of mud caked onto Lizzy Bennet’s petticoat. In the opening scene of Longbourn, physical hardship reflects and amplifies emotional travail. Generously taking the lion’s share of the washing (the younger housemaid’s still a child), Sarah’s nonetheless as angry as any lively twenty-something would be, not merely at the discomfort but the invisibility of her situation. Chafed by cold and damp, she seethes with what James will describe as a “ferocious need for notice, an insistence that she be taken fully into account.” The irony is that as she scrubs away the mud from Lizzy’s petticoat, Sarah is stealing our attention from one of literature’s most beloved literary characters and her charming, hoydenish, country walks. Though we begin our reading eager to learn more about the Bennets (and though we do), Longbourn’s stealth dynamic is to make Sarah’s story the one we care about.

It’s a serious perspective jolt, and in more ways than one. I was more than a little discombobulated, for example, to realize that from Sarah’s angle of vision, there’s not such a wide distance between Lizzy and Lydia. Jane Austen appraised her characters according to an unsparing, Olympian ethical calculus, but the view from below stairs is more utilitarian. Because cook and housekeeper Mrs. Hill is worried about keeping her job after Mr. Bennet dies, shy, awkward Mr. Collins is besieged with cake and cosseting. For Sarah, alive with her developing sexuality, the Bennet girls constitute a sort of ladies’ magazine, a compendium of competing styles of female attractiveness; it’s here (rather than as a moral actor) that Lizzy wins hands down.

“Bright-eyed and quick and lovely… always ready with a what-do-you-call-‘em, a “witticism”: Sarah ponders Lizzy’s example as she plots how to attract the interesting new footman’s attention. “Natural manners were always considered the best,” she concludes, having “heard Miss Elizabeth say so.”

That “natural” manners are matters of laborious construction, is, of course, another irony, applied by Baker with Austen-esque subtlety. Since Georgian “naturalness” took some resources to pull off, sadly, Sarah’s “natural” greeting falls through. Meanwhile, James has his own reasons for staying aloof. Which situation not only drove Mom and me into a frenzy of reading to find out what could be keeping him from loving Sarah as much as we did, but which caused us to agree, a few chapters in, that this wasn’t an “Upstairs/Downstairs” book after all.
For while an “Upstairs/Downstairs” production like Downton Abbey purports to set two classes in satirical opposition, Upstairs is typically afforded primacy. For every Downton dressing-table vignette – Lady Mary’s charming, rueful bitchiness in the mirror of Anna’s elegant decency – there’s a view of Lady Mary through the adoring eyes of that butler guy with the eyebrows. In Longbourn’s dressing-table scenes, on the other hand, Sarah’s too distracted (both by work and her body’s demands) to pay more than dutiful attention to Lizzy.

And yet Elizabeth Bennet’s story remains a serious and important one, and a pillar upon which Longbourn is constructed. In her study, A Natural History of the Romance Novel, Pamela Regis has called Pride and Prejudice “the best romance novel ever written”. The right of a woman to choose a mate for love instead of material convenience is its great theme, Austen’s complicated take on the issue one of her great legacies. Unsentimentally engaging the limits of the possible, she created memorable loveless marriages as well as unforgettable happy ones. Even among the gentry, Charlotte Lucas doesn’t have the resources to hold out for the kind of love she knows she’s unlikely to get.

Will Sarah also settle for second best, we wonder – the question complicated by the fact that her second best, the Bingley family’s half-black footman, is a much more attractive alternative than Mr. Collins. In a deft stroke, Baker has the Bingley money coming from the West Indies, like the Bertrams’ in Mansfield Park. Bearing his master’s name, the freed slave Ptolemy Bingley might be Charles’s half-brother. In any case, Sarah could do a lot worse than this wonderfully named character. Tol is smart, sympathetic, quietly damaged, drop-dead gorgeous, in love with Sarah, and a glamorous reminder of a wide world she hungers to see. But he’s not James.

So, once again, Mom and I kept reading, loving the historical savvy, exquisitely layered period detail, and social critique, but still reading for the love story. Or to be more precise, we read it as social critique enlisted in the cause of its heroine’s right to have a love story. A story recuperated from the blank spaces within the best romance novel ever written ought itself to be a romance novel.
If Longbourn genuinely is a romance novel. Which brings us back to those complicated issues of genre, this time having to do with romance fiction.

It’s a noisy, enthusiastic discussion these days, fueled rather than inhibited by feminism. You can pick up on the debates at academic symposia, a peer-moderated journal, a host of blogs, and an energetic and inclusive professional association, Romance Writers of America (RWA). Romance fiction is a multimillion-dollar industry, a site of academic turf-building, and a ongoing sisterhood of remarkable, smart women (If anybody had told me in the radical feminist 1960s….). Encompassing vampire romance, Amish romance, romance for threesomes or same-sex partners: the genre is wildly protean in its themes and variations. Self-published on the web or mass-marketed: the business is pragmatic and wide open to entrepreneurial innovation. And yet (and quite differently from, say, science fiction) all its proponents are pretty much on the same page when it comes to what makes a romance novel a romance novel.

On its web-site RWA insists that the romance genre need a central love story and an emotionally-satisfying and optimistic ending: “In a romance, the lovers who risk and struggle for each other and their relationship are rewarded with emotional justice and unconditional love.” Pamela Regis’s Natural History of the Romance Novel expands upon these themes by identifying eight “narrative events” that must be present: definition of society (“always corrupt, that the romance novel will reform”); the meeting between the heroine and hero; their attraction; the barrier to that attraction; their declaration that they love each other; point of ritual death; recognition that fells the barrier; and betrothal.

Students of the formalist tradition (via Propp, etc.) won’t find much in Regis that’s unfamiliar. But trust me; I’ve been trying to bust her categories for years and they work. Simple, so economical they seem in danger of dissolving into tautology (but somehow don’t), they constitute a remarkably functional and hard-headed set of conditions by which to judge whether a work “of prose fiction” that tells “the story of the courtship and betrothal of one or more heroines” actually counts as a romance novel.

Gone With the Wind, for example, doesn’t make the cut: Scarlet and Rhett’s recognitions of their love for each other, Regis says, are too ill-timed to fell the barrier between them. GWTW readers may tack an imagined mutual recognition and happy ending onto the text (as I still do after multiple screenings of Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown). But imagined elements don’t count, and RWA would doubtless agree. If GWTW were entered in the RITA competition (the organization’s yearly version of the Oscars), it would have to in the category of “Novel with Strong Romantic Elements,” rather than Contemporary, Historical, etc.

In the case of Pride and Prejudice, Regis’s categories are clearly a much better fit: Elizabeth Bennet does survive both her ritual death (Lydia’s disgrace might well have been the death of all the other Bennets’ marriage prospects); and she and Darcy do indeed achieve a timely, barrier-breaking set of recognitions. It was, however, as I was reading Longbourn that I began to wonder about Regis’s first, seemingly anodyne “narrative event”: the definition of society (“always corrupt, that the romance novel will reform”).

Reform, really? No reader could gainsay the importance of Elizabeth Bennet’s right to love and marry Mr. Darcy, but it’s rather a stretch to think their union strikes much of a blow for the “reform” of Georgian society. And in fact, upon picking up Regis this time, I noticed that as she continues her argument, she restates the notion of “reform” quite a bit more softly. “The scene or scenes defining the society establishes the status quo which the heroine and hero must confront in their attempt to court and marry and which by their union, they symbolically remake.”

Right. Symbolically. Northrop Frye says it better in his Anatomy of Criticism when he assigns to the comic/romantic mode the work of re-integrating its characters into their social milieu (in opposition to tragedy, which alienates its suffering protagonist). As a brilliant realist, writing about the times she lived in, Austen doled out rewards and punishments according to the desserts of those times, but so exquisitely and exactly that she erected a romantic ideal on the foundation of the real. What actually happens in the final pages of Pride and Prejudice is a social/moral reordering of the status quo, each character precisely rated according to whether (or how often) they’ll be received at the gates of Pemberley in the years to come.

What then of Longbourn, written from our present purview of an earlier era whose social wrongs are painfully manifest and palpable? Does the love story hold enough primacy over all that historical actuality? Can a book that re-imagines Austen’s story with such keen historical double vision fit into the romance novel genre? Or is it perhaps after all merely a literary/historical/New Historical/ no-I-am-not-Prince-Hamlet/Austenlandia novel with strong romantic elements?
Like Elizabeth Bennet – and like Sarah – I’m still holding out for romance.

Firstly because Longbourn is not only an informed and touching book, it’s a sexy one – not very explicitly, but in a way that accords sex serious and intelligent consideration, along the way of developing both the love relationship and the world around it. I’ve stressed the harrowing details of daily labor below stairs. And believe me, there’s lot’s more where that came from. But in the matter of sex and sexuality I have to disagree with Sarah Wendell, on the pages of her popular romance blog, Smart Bitches Who Love Trashy Books, when she fails to find any “justice or balance of circumstance in the narrative to take the sting out of the reality of the servants’ circumstances.” By my reading, the erotic passages in Longbourn provide, not only a respite from “painful realism,” but a credible, if difficult, road to RWA’s necessary conditions of “emotional justice and unconditional love.”

Not to speak of some lovely, sensual writing: “She was dreamy with her new understanding, lulled with contentment, not thinking beyond the pads of her own fingers, the tip of her tongue.” Yes, there’s serious suffering yet to come; in fact James, who “knew better” than the just-awakened Sarah, thinks of their situation as “a beautiful disaster.” But not thinking beyond the pads of her own fingers? Those same fingers we’ve seen so painfully afflicted with cold and damp? You’ll have to excuse this romance reader for a moment as she shivers with pleasure, and this erotic romance writer as she loses herself in admiration, both for Baker’s writing and her smarts about female sexuality of the period.

Longbourn imagines a credible, if rather sad, erotic innocence for the Bennet girls (at least the ones who aren’t Lydia). A down side of Regency class privilege was certainly its fetishism of female purity. Straining against the limitations of what they ought to be – “smooth and sealed as alabaster statues underneath their clothes” – bored, curious, and adventurous girls of the polite classes might well have become Lydia Bennets while their more proper sisters make do with “uneasy half-suspicion of what men and women might do together, if they were but given the opportunity.”

Of Jane Bennet, moping around the house after the Bingley’s have decamped, Sarah thinks: “Sit and wait and be beautiful, and wan. Sit and wait and be in love. Sit and wait until Mr. Bingley shook off his sisters and returned to claim her. That was how things worked for young ladies like Miss Jane Bennet.” While for people like herself and James, “nobody looked askance at a big belly at the altar, nobody cared so long as it was under plain calico or stuff, and not silk.”

Comparative sexual freedom for the lower classes doesn’t come close to balancing the scales of justice, but it affords some nice compensations. And in the matter of “unconditional love,” I offer a few of the book’s simplest, most gorgeous sentences, from perhaps the book’s darkest moment, when James is gone and Sarah doesn’t know how to find him, and when the kitchen at Longbourn is all abuzz with news of Lizzy’s engagement to Mr. Darcy, with “carriages and the Lord knows what”: “Sarah went back to her work, her jaw tight. She would have been content with so little. She would have been content with just his company.”

And I’d also be pretty deeply content with only that last sentence, if I didn’t have an additional and final argument for Longbourn as a romance novel (and a wonderful one) that’s both like and unlike the one whose gaps it fills.

For if Pride and Prejudice ends its final chapter at the boundaries of Pemberley, Longbourn ends its penultimate chapter in the same place, with Sarah, who’s been lady’s maid to Lizzy, leaving “quietly, unattended, by a servants’ door,” Pemberley standing “silent and self-contained” behind her. Pride and Prejudice revels in its power to create an ideal – even a “reformed” – family within the gates of what it deems a great good place (Wickham never received, nor – as the text hints rather than comes right out and says – Mrs. Bennet either). But at the end of Longbourn, an astonished Mrs. Darcy will also have to do without Sarah, who’s off in search of James.
 

There would be others out there, on the tramp. There always were, around the time of hiring fairs and quarter days, these great tidal shifts and settlings of servants around the country.

I don’t know much about “these tidal shifts and settlings,” but I do know something about the massive economic uncertainty in England toward the end of the Napoleonic Wars. And I also know that great migrations of the poor take shape during uncertain times. And so it makes sense to me that it’s among nameless, shifting human tides (perhaps – if you want to do a Borges take on it – among the unnamed characters from other novels) that this novel begins to find its just and satisfying resolution. A resolution less perfect, and far less conclusive or secure than that of Pride and Prejudice, but one that creates, if not an ideal family, a redeemed one.

And if I’m giving you something like a peek at the final page – well, that never stopped a romance reader from reading all the way through, just to make sure.
______
Pam Rosenthal’s romance novel The Edge of Impropriety won Romance Writer’s of America’s 2009 RITA Award for Best Historical Romance, and Playboy called her erotic novel, Carrie’s Story (w/a Molly Weatherfield), “one of the 25 sexiest novels ever written.” Her website is http://pamrosenthal.com

Comics As A Genre

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I’ve been reading Jason Mittel’s book “Genre and Television” over Christmas break. In many ways, his take on genre is similar to John Rieder’s. That is, Mittell argues, like Rieder, that genres are constituted not by formal traits, but rather by social or cultural agreements or discourses. So (for example) it might make sense to call something a “comic” even if it were entirely text with no pictures, if the text was written by Dave Sim and came in a floppy format and was sold through a comics store and was part of an ongoing series that people thought of as a comic. Along those lines, a while back I defined comics as those things which are accepted as comics.

I still stand by that definition…but Mittell puts some interesting twists on it. Specifically, when I talk about what things are accepted as comics, I tend to think of the accepting as being done by folks in the comics world, who care about comics. That is, comics is defined by what comics folks (whoever they may be) think of as comics. That can be scholars, fans, readers, or whatever. But to participate in the process of definition, I was assuming, you need to want to be participating in the process of definition. People who don’t care about comics don’t care about comics — someone who has never read or seen a comic is not the person you want to go to for a definition.

Mittell isn’t so sure. For him, television genres are constructed socially, by everyone — even, and sometimes especially, by people who are not fans, or scholars, or even by people who have never watched or thought about the genre in question. Instead, genres are often shaped, or defined, by institutional forces or regulators…or even just by people who have heard something about a show and formed uninformed opinions about it. Thus, early television quiz shows were strongly shaped by federal regulations against lotteries. Even though the Supreme Court eventually determined that game show giveaways were not in fact lotteries, the federal scrutiny of the shows had a strong effect on which shows were made and how, and on public perceptions of the genre, which long had a whiff of scandal and illegitimacy associated with it — perhaps handed down to its progeny, the reality show. (The parallel here with the comics code is fairly obvious.)

As another example, Mittell argues that the genre of talk shows, and especially of daytime talk shows, was importantly shaped and understood through the opinions and ideas of people who did not watch those shows. That is, discussion of the genre — which is in many ways the genre itself — was based on an image of those shows as lowbrow, white trash fare for morons. That’s the vision of those shows that largely circulated as a genre marker in public perception.

Comics, then, is neither constituted by formal elements nor by fan or expert practices or discourses. Rather, it is constituted at least in part by those who do not necessarily read comics at all. And if that’s true, it’s possible that comics are, in fact, in many ways a genre — rather than a medium, which is what most fans and scholars and people who care about comics prefer to think of them as.

Certainly, in the world outside comics-centric blogs, I think there’s little doubt that comics tend to be treated as a genre. For instance, at Netgalley, where book critics can see previews of forthcoming books, comics is one option among many genres, listed as a search option alongside “mystery” or “nonfiction” or “science-fiction”, or what have you. On Amazon, too, there is no separate category for comics; they’re simply subsumed in books, rather than being broken out into their own larger block like movies or music.

Of course, the distinctions between genre and medium is fairly arbitrary anyway. There’s no real formal or ideological reason to think of television as its own medium, for example — it could just as easily be thought of as a genre of film, or both film and television could be thought of as subgenres of “screens,” or even of theater.

Still, the cultural subdivisions are what they are, and the fact is that film, and theater, and even television, are all much more firmly established — institutionally and culturally — as mediums than comics are — a fact which becomes especially clear if you start looking at places and people who maybe don’t care about comics that much to begin with.

So what does it matter if comics are a genre rather than a medium? To some degree, it probably doesn’t matter at all; a comic by any other name will smell as sweet, or as putrid, as the case may be. But, on the other hand, it seems like seeing comics as genre could in some cases shift the context in which comics are discussed, or point towards different questions.

For instance, Mittell talks about the Simpsons as a genre mash-up, in which the genre suppositions of sit-coms, and the genre suppositions of cartoons, are used to undermine or question each other. The formal potential and expectations of cartoons made it possible to create a sit-com with more characters and more venues; the genre expectations of sit-coms made it possible to see a cartoon as aimed at adults (and programmed outside of Saturday morning.)

220px-Bone-completeMany comics could be talked about along similar lines. For example, Maus might be seen as a mash-up of memoir and comics, using tropes of each to create a crossover audience that appeals to a greater number of people than either memoir or comic might have been able to attain on its own. Bone could be seen as mixing comics genre and fantasy genre in a similar way — and/or to tweak the conventions of both. And/or, a television show like Heroes might be seen as combining comics genres with serial evening soap opera.

None of these ideas are necessarily innovative or undiscussed or anything. But I think they might be inflected differently, and perhaps more central, if there were less concern with comics’ medium specificity, and more willingness to think of comics as one genre among many. In particular, there might be less focus on comics’ definitional project, and more focus on how comics has functioned, or been thought of, or been used at specific moments or in specific situations.

Seeing comics as genre might also help to explain, or help in a discussion of, the way that comics often seems to function in popular discourse as a kind of novelty. The “Bang! Biff! Comics aren’t just for kids anymore!” meme might be seen not so much as an insult to the comics medium, but rather as what the comics genre is most often perceived as offering the mainstream. Just as the Simpsons cartoon form, with its connotations of flexibility and childish freshness, helped reinvigorate the sit-com, so comics’ associations with wild fantasy and childishness may be precisely why people are so interested in a comic book Holocaust memoir, or a comic book fantasy epic, or a comic book piece of journalism, or what have you. Instead of “how is the medium of comics defined?” the question might be, “what pleasures or interest does the comics genre offer?” Rather than trying to figure out how to separate comics from everything else, it might be more useful to look at the many ways in which comics shamelessly and continuously hybridizes.

Grappling With Genre

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One of my favorite books by one of my favorite authors is The Player of Games by Iain M Banks. It is a Culture book, the vast anarcho-communist utopian space opera setting that Banks has designed from the ground up to be both self-consciously rational and pure wish-fulfillment for those of us who like their escapism with a hefty dollop of moral superiority. The Culture has no money and is made up of an aggregate of alien races and artificial intelligences, include self-aware spaceships with jokey names.
 

 
The Player of Games is about a man whose job is to play games (I told you the Culture was a utopia), who is recruited by the Culture’s dirty tricks espionage group Special Circumstances to help them engage with something they’ve never run into before: an empire that is built around a very large, very complex game. The victor of a population-wide tournament becomes the new emperor.
 

 
I do not mention this book to praise it, but rather to use it as an example as I discuss the complexity of the abstract concept that we call genre. If genre was a coworker, he’d be that guy at the end of the hall that is absolutely essential to ongoing operations but is also annoyingly pedantic about minor, almost trivial items.

Genre is used in a variety of different ways: as a marketing tool, as a critical tool, as a tool for readers to identify what they want to read next and as a stick that some people use to beat up on other people for their reading tastes. Genre also provides a veritable catalog of generic elements that creators can use when constructing their works.

The Player of Games is a science fiction novel. (If you want to get pedantic and insist that SF stands for speculative fiction, it fits under that rubric as well.) There are genre elements galore: spaceships, aliens, worldbuilding – the author even admits that he stole the primary setting for the first half of the novel from Larry Niven’s Ringworld. On paper, this has all the trappings of a generic novel; after all, the more genre elements that a work contains, the more generic a work becomes.
 

 
And if you were marketing The Player of Games, the smart money would be to lean very heavily on the “spaceships and aliens” angle. It’s a book that rewards an educated and opinionated reader, though, so perhaps the marketing could even be tweaked by indicating that it contains “spaceships and aliens, but smarter.” This reveals one of the main weaknessness of the genre concept – it reduces complexity to its lowest common denominator in an effort to attract as many readers as possible. In theory, every iterative step away from the core generic descriptors risks the alienation of readers who are only (dis)interested in the generic elements.

As a consumer, I rely very heavily on genre to help me make intelligent choices. For example: I do not enjoy the adrenal rush that comes from people jumping out from behind things, which happens to be a core element of the horror genre. As a result, I tend to steer away from the horror genre as a general rule, which has probably resulted in me missing out on work that is probably pretty good, despite the inclusion of jumpy-outy bits. And yes, there are plenty of other, non-horror movies that contain jumpy-outy bits – is Alien a horror film or a science fiction film? Why can’t it be both? Oh yeah, because marketing demands that it be given a straightforward handle that can be given to potential consumers.

I also happen to enjoy spaceships and aliens and I recognize that there is a vast gulf of difference between The Player of Games and Star Wars, despite the fact that both can technically be shelved under that particular heading. Because my tastes are broad, a listing of genre elements offers a good starting point. But when tastes are prescriptive (as in my blanket disregard of the horror genre, above), there is a very good chance that marketing by genre is not actually helping bring in customers.

Genre can also be challenging in a critical context. When I read a review that includes some variation of “this novel transcends genre conventions” I immediately read that as “the novel contains generic elements but doesn’t use them generically.” For example: The Player of Games contains spaceships, but those spaceships are self-aware and have names like GCU Of Course I Still Love You, Superlifter Kiss My Ass, GSV Unfortunate Conflict of Evidence and so forth. This is an obvious stab at the inherent conceit in most space operas that ships must have big, imperious names.

Banks also points out [1] that having names that are self-consciously jovial tends to disarm potential opponents because they are less likely to take the ships seriously. The worldbuilding that comes from such a simple inversion of the genre convention really adds to the glamor constructed by the novel, but it may or may not be what the standard genre fan was looking for when he picked up a book about spaceships (and aliens). But it is absolutely the kind of thing that a critic would hold aloft when praising a book for moving past the generic elements that it’s built on.

On the flip side, some critics are known for using genre as a kind of yardstick – separating genres into categories, most often of the “good vs bad” variety. Just as there are any number of essays written by any number of good critics imploring readers to look beyond genre conventions and try something new, there are any number of critics who look down their nose at genres they consider to be somehow less important. This critical shaming doesn’t just stop with critics, though. Margaret Atwood is well known for claiming that she doesn’t write science fiction, even though she clearly does.

Some people revel in this, repurposing labels for their own use: Nobrow and Lowbrow are the two most obvious examples. But for most, genre is a ghetto – a well-populated ghetto, to be sure, but still a ghetto. Part of that has to do with the mainstream culture’s attitude towards genre works and part of that has to do with the consumers of the genre, which is another topic entirely.

Banks, on the other hand, doesn’t shirk from claiming that he writes science fiction. In fact, it’s very obvious that he enjoys spaceships and aliens and is quite happy to continue to be paid to write them, thank you very much. And I’m happy to enjoy what he does with them because the results are interesting and original and not at all what is expected.
 

 
Unfortunately, most authors do not have the sheer creative energy that Banks brings to the table. Most use generic elements as a sort of construction set, building weird stories that tend to violate the “could this story be told in an ordinary setting?” rule as a matter of course. And that’s one of those places that genre falls down, in my opinion. Someone writes a good story that introduces a nifty concept and someone else comes along and uses that same concept without doing anything original or interesting with it. The result comes across as, well, generic.

I fully expect an entire cottage industry of Harry Potter and Scott Pilgrim clones to come along in the next generation of creators, the same way that the mid-70s were dominated by Tolkien clones and Black Sabbath knock-offs. In this way, successful creators could be said to become a genre unto themselves, regardless of what parent genre they were marketed under[2].

Given my druthers, I’d prefer that we did away with genre altogether. It’s a useful tool, to be sure, but it’s also a tool that is leaned on far too much, far too often. Unfortunately, it’s not a very versatile tool and, when all you have is a hammer, everything tends to look like a nail. I get that without genre, all of the books would just be in one big section marked “fiction” and that some kind of sorting mechanism is necessary to find what you really want to read (or really don’t want to read, as the case may be).

However, genre doesn’t really do a good job when it is applied to marketing. By virtue of how the two are used in conjunction, the most generic books tend to float to the top. The truly interesting books take a little time to find their niche and fall out of the marketing by genre idea because they don’t exactly fit into the standard genre boxes. Ironically, looking for exceptions to the rules of genre tends to lead to exceptional works.

In the end, genre is a tricky thing that works perfectly at separating works by element, except when it doesn’t. The Player of Games is a great example of this. It contains spaceships and aliens but is in no way the poster child for either generic element and searching for it under those terms would be a fool’s errand. Critics might look down upon it because it is absolutely science fiction (and happy to be so) and they would prove themselves foolish if they did because it is the kind of book that critics hold up to indicate that science fiction and literature are not mutually exclusive. Which is as it should be.

 


[1] A Few Notes on the Culture by Iain M Banks.

[2] See also: Stephen King

Sequence Without Origin

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I’ve been reading John Rieder’s excellent book Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction. There’s lots of fun discussion about nightmare invasion scenarios, lost worlds, time travel, constructed humans, and how imperialists love being imperialists, satirize being imperialists, and more or less constantly freak out about the possibility of being imperialized.
 

 
So maybe I’ll talk about all that at some point. In the meantime, though, Rieder also has some really interesting thoughts on genre. Specifically, he argues that a genre is best understood not through a strict formal definition, but rather as a group of texts that bear a “family resemblance.” The term is from Wittgenstein, and Rieder quotes a further explication by scholar Paul Kinkaid:

science fiction is not one thing. Rather, it is any number of things — a future setting, a marvelous device, an ideal society, an alien creature, a twist in time, an interstellar journey, a satirical perspective, a particular approach to the matter of story, whatever we are looking for when we look for science fiction, her more overt, here more subtle — which are braided together in an endless variety of combinations.”

Science-fiction is then a “web of resemblances.”

If sci-fi is a web of resemblances though, that has some surprising implications. Specifically, if the genre is the web, it can’t exist before the web. There can’t be a point of origin, because a point isn’t a web. For there to be family resemblances there has to be a family. Or as Rieder puts it:

The idea that a genre consists of a web of resemblances established by repetition across a large number of texts, and therefore that the emergence of science fiction involves a series of incremental effects that shake up and gradually, cumulatively, reconfigure the system of genres operating in the literary field of production, precludes the notion of science fiction’s ‘miraculous birth’ in a master text like Frankenstein or The Time Machine. A masterpiece might encapsulate an essence, if science fiction had one, and it certainly can epitomize motifs and strategies; but only intertextual repetition can accumulate into a family of resemblances.

This has some obvious implications for the much-bruted question, What Is a Comic? Like science fiction, definitions of comics (most notably Scott McCloud’s) generally focus on formal elements — a sequence of images, in McCloud’s case. As a result, McCloud includes in his definition things like hieroglyphs, while excluding single panel cartoons.

However, if comics are seen as a web of resemblances, then the effort to look for origins or predecessors or even formal tropes starts to look misguided. Instead, it’s more useful to focus on the center — on what things are accepted as comics, as I put it in a post some time back. Comics are not a formal template; they’re a genre that has taken shape since around the early twentieth century, and which can have, like science-fiction, any number of hallmarks — including (for example) sequences of images, superheroes, cartoony art, funny animals, autobiographical storylines, humor, adventure, serialized formats, word bubbles, panel borders….etc.

No doubt some comics folks flinched up there when I called comics a “genre”. And that does bring up a possible objection. Isn’t it wrong to think of comics as a genre, like science fiction? Shouldn’t they instead be compared to a medium, like prose or art or music? And if so, how useful is Rieder’s discussion of genre? Yes, genres may be webs of relations. But aren’t mediums defined formally? Art is always art; writing is always writing — shouldn’t, then, comics always be comics, whether created by the ancient Egyptians or on the internets?

I think the answer to those question is no, still pretty useful, not really and not really. Rieder does couch his formulation in terms of genre. But it works so well for comics that I think it forces you to either decide comics are a genre, or else to decide that the difference between medium and genre isn’t as great as it tends to seem. Egyptian hieroglyphs, after all, can either be writing, art, or comics, depending on which web of relationship you want to emphasize — and once you start thinking about webs of relationships, it’s in fact pretty clear that they aren’t that closely related to any current medium. Similarly, is a novel a genre? Is it a medium? It depends on how you look at it, surely — meaning, specifically, how you look at the web of relations of which it’s a part, and how those relationships are embedded in time and culture.

Comics straddles the line between genre and medium for various reasons — mostly having to do with the fact that (for reasons of commerce and credibility) it still hasn’t consolidated its cultural position the way science fiction has (as genre) or the way film has (as medium.) It’s betwixt and between, which makes the task of definition somewhat fraught and conflicted. But surely Rieder’s discussion leads to the conclusion that drawing these lines is always fraught and conflicted. A generic designation isn’t about dispassionately fitting a model, but about the more emotional task of finding and claiming one’s relations. The downside is that comics, as an origin and a form, doesn’t really exist; the upside, though, is that that leaves so many possibilities open for what comics can be.