Dr. Strangemonkey said:
If GnG does actually exist as anything other than a prejuidice than I definitely think that it doesn't know what it's doing as of yet. All too often the complaints I hear seem to bear little weight under investigation. I'm certain they represent a legitimate concern, I just worry that they don't yet know what they are articulating.
I've been trying to pin down the locus of your disagreement with GnG, but haven't had much luck. The above seems like an important statement though: are you asking whether GnG 'actually' exists in the way that high fantasy 'actually' exists? In other words, are you saying that a prejudice and a genre aren't the same thing? If that's the case, then I have to disagree: our way of constructing and ordering texts into genres is one way; it is far from the only way. Look at this passage from Borges (supposedly from a Chinese Encyclopedia):
Borges said:
animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l)
et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher,
that from a long way off look like flies.
So, when you say GnG is 'only' a prejudice, my response is: so is genre itself--so are all our cultural taxonomies. One construction doesn't have any more objective validity than the others; both are merely projections of our ways of handling texts, which are far from the only ways. I think I may be reading too much into what you're saying here though, because you argued earlier that knowledge of a genre is necessary for reading work in that genre, in the sense that knowledge of English is necessary for reading work in English, and in both cases the sort of foreknowledge we're talking about is
prejudice. Maybe you're saying that the difference between high fantasy and GnG is that no such foreknowledge is required to read (or play) GnG though, which would be an interesting argument, but I don't want to attribute it to you unless you actually wanted to make it.
Dr. Strangemonkey said:
I can't tell you how much I'd love to pursue this conversation further, but I can't help feeling that too much further will take us beyond the area where this helps to explore the issue at hand.
We've gone a bit afield here, that's true. I'll put my reply in a little block, and if you want to continue the discussion feel free to email me (I'm in the middle of finals right now so I may not get a good response in for a week or so). It's the sort of discussion I've often wanted to have in the books forum, but have found people resistant to.
[sblock]I also think it's an
important conversation to have for people who read genre fiction, even moreso for people who write it, or for people who complain that their professors, or academics in general, don't take it seriously. Fantasy is not 'beneath' literature in any a priori sense: it's a question of the fantasy that
has been written, not the fantasy that
might or
could be written. There's a real argument here; it isn't as simple as wanting fantasy to be legitimate as more than a mere form of entertainment. Not taking genre fiction seriously isn't so much handwaving on the part of academics.
Tolkien stood at the beginning of a development, not at its end--but what genuine
advances can we say have been made since (and by advances I don't mean improvements, but advances quite literally--how have we moved forward)? There's a sort of counter-teleology to fantasy in that people tend to think as if it was given its fullest form in the moment it was brought into existence, which shouldn't be the case.
Dr. Strangemonkey said:
Suffice to say that were we to have this conversation, I would argue that genre in fact predicates writing and that you can't, in fact, read a work without an idea of the genre involved.
Yes, but consider that the
first genres, in the work of early classical commentators, actually had nothing whatever to do with genre in the sense that we think of it now (and the Borges quote I posted above is another example of this). They actually grouped texts according to their metrical forms and not anything to do with what they were about (in the sense that, on a basic level, we consider texts as being 'about' something now, which historically has not always been the case--we inherit it mostly from medieval criticism of scriptural texts and the invention of allegory). This sort of taxonomy survives in some ways, as we have different expectations reading novels than we do reading poems or manuals. Our ways of organizing texts, of theorizing genre and other sorts of groupings, say much more about us than about those texts themselves, and in this way I think that your reading can be the victim of your expectations, in the sense that you creatively force the text to comply with your prejudices about it (this is only a very cursory and half-hearted example, but several of the reviews of Episode III I've read were clearly written by people who'd decided not to like the movie before the lights went down; a better example might be Achebe's reading of
Heart of Darkness and his proclaiming Conrad "a bloody racist").
I'll grant you that, in a way similar to but abstracted from the way one has to speak English to read books, one has to speak tragedy to read tragedy. And yet, the English one speaks is the least significant thing about the English one reads; the tragedy one speaks is the least significant thing about the tragedy one reads. I assume the audience of the first tragedy ever performed didn't have any trouble 'getting' it, and in a way we today, with all our 2000 years of theory about tragedy as a genre, our Aristotle, our Nietzsche, our Benjamin, will never get it. How were they able to get along so many years without any theory of tragedy? The answer, of course, is in your statement:
Dr. Strangemonkey said:
Hopefully, if you don't know the genre from somplace else the work or the context you are reading or seeing it in will teach it to you, but if you don't learn the genre or figure it out then you will never get the work in question and, on a very basic level, you will fail to produce the work in question whether as a reader or a writer. You mention that a lot of kids go into Shakespeare with no knowledge of the genre, but of those who come out of it will there be any who actually got or enjoyed the works in question who won't have learned something about the basic genre mechanics of the tragedian form?
My response to this is merely that while the work
will teach itself to you as genre, as abstract meanings and procedures periphrastic to the text itself, the genre it teaches itself
as is not the genre it
is, because there is no fact of the matter of what genre it is in itself, or of what genre itself is. In the case of tragedy, much like Romanticism, there really is no concensus. How much do you need to know to read Shakespeare, or to see him preformed (heh, that was a typo for 'performed,' but considering the nature of the discussion I'll leave it =P)? Do you need to know that his tragedies have nothing to do with the Greeks', that they're based on Senecan closet dramas meant to be read and not acted out, that Shakespeare and Sophokles actually have essentially nothing in common? How much knowledge teachs understanding? I'm reminded of an old statement of T. S. Eliot's: "it is essential that each generation should reappraise everything for itself. Who for instance has a first-hand opinion of Shakespeare? Yet I have no doubt that much could be learned by a serious study of that semi-mythical figure." In the case of fantasy, I might posit that its future belongs to its past, and will originate with a new and violent reading of Tolkien and appropriation of his work for completely other ends (which would of course offend all kinds of fantasy 'readers'--it's a lovely bit of irony that the traditionalists, the ones who want Tolkien to be taken seriously as an author, think identically to the traditionalist professors keeping him out of serious literary discussion, whereas there are courses at major universities on, for example,
The Simpsons!).
Dr. Strangemonkey said:
I'm not saying that you have to have a perfect understanding or that your reading of an individual work will not outstrip or underperform in terms of your understanding of the genre, but that there is an essential correlation between your ability to read a thing and your capacity for understanding its genre.
Of course, there never is any perfect understanding; but part of reading in general is the reduplication of meaning that creates genre by abstracting away from the text itself and reducing it to a preconfiguration of narratives and meanings. Culturally, we read in such a way as to be able to answer the question "What is this text about?" And our overemphasis on this sort of reading is what lead to the rise of a variety of deconstructive styles of reading--not only deconstrution itself but psychoanalysis, queer theory, economical critique (a.k.a. Marxist reading, which ceased to have anything to do with Marx long ago) and so on--over the last 1/2-3/4 of a century.
As far as GnG goes, my points, loosely based on all this, are that: a) GnG exists as a genre just as much as high fantasy, not because GnG or high fantasy have any sort of objective existence in themselves, but because people agree on their existing--they have a social reality; and b) that high fantasy, and every other so-called genre, are every bit as nebulous as GnG. As far as the writing of genre: in
good literature--and in principle I believe that fantasy
can be good literature, only that so far it hasn't been--genre, like form, like language, is something we are always trying to contradict or get away from. We want the literature to recreate the language so that it comes forth in a new and invigorating existence, almost as if it had no history (though often it is precisely by going into a language's history that this polishing is achieved) and existed solely to achieve the shining of its present meaning. Ditto for form and genre.[/sblock]
