Bonus Post! Blather on Genre!

Preamble: If you want to read Carolyn Miller's "Genre as Social Action," on which I comment in this post, it can be found on the Internet for free in incomplete form, or in a 1984 edition of the Quarterly Journal of Speech. If you read it, I cannot be held responsible for bruises and contusions you may receive as you fall alseep reading it. This essay, I imagine, has left many inert bodies and bonked heads in its wake.

I will admit, wrapping my saber-tooth tiger skin more tightly around me as I squat by the fire burning deep inside my cave, that, to me, genre has never meant very much outside of a vague notion that, like the dinosaurs and proto-mammals stomping and slithering about outside, bits of writing fall into different categories: Good or bad (both in taste and temperament).

But because even the dimmest Cro-Magnon can be induced to learn, I carry deep inside my skull the idea that writing – beyond my taste in it – falls into general categories: The novel, the essay, the short story, the poem, the article. There is of course a miscellany of writings that may very well constitute other genres, but to be frank, pigeonholing them has never interested me all that much. Perhaps that is because the benchmarks that set a novel apart from a poem, an essay apart from a short story, are stark and easy to recognize, while the differences between a progress report and a letter of recommendation are more subtle, or as is more likely, outside my range of interest. Shame on me.

Carolyn Miller, obviously, would be disappointed in me. She’d question my humanity and curiosity, since she cries “the urge to classify is fundamental,” and that “classification is necessary to language and learning.” But that my urge to classify does not go into the detail her urge drives her to does not mean my cave is a vacuum of learning. A Cro-Magnon may recognize the differences between the tyrannosaurus and the stegosaurus without needing to know the first is a Tyrannosaurus rex, the second a Stegosaurus longispinus. (And never mind that the tyrannosaurus hails from the Cretaceous, the stegosaurus from the Late Jurassic and the Cro-Magnon from the European Upper Paleolithic; their presence together here is for illustrative purposes only.)

So I am learning, as even a Cro-Magnon can.

Miller goes much further into defining what constitutes (and what does not constitute) a genre that I ever have. My rules are simpler: This bit of writing rhymes, has a distinct meter, or is arranged in short bursts of thought; it must be a poem. Going further: This poem is a limerick. That, a sonnet. But those are subgenres, pigeonholes inside pigeonholes. Those rules work just fine for the writings of Shel Silverstein and the poems of Shakespeare, but what about works like Moliere’s Tartuffe? It has meter and rhyme like a poem, but it has other forms more common to plays – so it is a play. Why? It has to do with genre’s relationship to form, as Miller points out: “Genre is a form at one particular level that is a fusion of lower-level forms and characteristic substance.” This is, as she points out, a lower-level benchmark of what makes up a genre. Moliere’s motives in making this story a play rather than a novel obviously plays in the desirability of showing his audience the hypocrite Tartuffe in the flesh – on stage – rather than merely in the imagination of a novel reader, where overt and covert textures in Tartuffe’s character might be more easily overlooked or puttied over. I contend, then, that form and genre are more closely tied together in hierarchy than perhaps Miller admits. She says herself that “the interpreter must have a strong understanding of forms at both higher and lower levels, in order to bridge the gap at the level of genre.” She does go on later to say that genre is more than a pattern of forms – with this I agree. I simply think genre and form are more equal than she does.

I will admit I’ve never thought much of motive and social action playing a role in genre development, so that vein of thought is intriguing. I say I’ve never thought of it; that does not mean I’ve never used it. “We learn to adopt social motives as ways of satisfying private intentions through rhetorical action,” Miller writes. “This is how recurring situations seem to ‘invite’ discourse of a particular type.” I can say I’ve sat down to write out a thought and, as I’m tinkering, decide “This is going to be a poem,” or “This is going to be a short story.” The motives behind my writing certainly drives me to the genre most fitting for those motives, though if I were asked to explain why those motives drove me to a particular genre I might be flummoxed. “It just worked better as a short story,” I’d say.

A sharper ability to study motives in relation to genre certainly has the potential to be an important rhetorical tool. “It suggests that what we learn when we learn a genre is not just a pattern of forms of even a method of achieving our own ends. We learn, more importantly, what ends we may have,” she writes. It’s a good reminder for any writer to keep in mind, because I’ve noticed many writers, even those skilled in using genre to fulfill their motives, often don’t recognize the motives in writing by others. I have that fault, and I’m learning to erase it.

(In other words, I find Miller’s thoughts intriguing and I wish to subscribe to her newsletter. She can share my fire if she wants.)