Anomalies of Genre

Anomalies of Genre: The Utility of Theory and History for the Study of Literary Genres
Author(s): Hayden White

Source: New Literary History, Vol. 34, No. 3, Theorizing Genres II (Summer, 2003), pp. 597-
615
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
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Anomalies of Genre: The Utility of Theory and
History for the Study of Literary Genres
Hayden White
In this I will consider a topical thread that runs

commentary
through most of the essays comprising this issue of New Literary
History and the one before it. The topic is the relation between
and in studies. In his contribution to this
history theory literary
Michael Prince cites Ralph Cohen's suggestion that both
symposium,
the notion of (literary) genre and genres themselves appear to be
"resistant to Prince on to that resistance to
theory." goes suggest genre's
theoretical consideration tells us more about theory than it does about
itself. For if, as seems to agree, genre is an essential
genre everyone
element or aspect of literarity, then genre's resistance to theory implies
that theory itself is inimical to literature and should not, therefore, be
brought to bear upon the literary artwork. Indeed, Prince holds that it
may be genre's resistance to theory that generates the endless task of
not
literary interpretation,which has the role in criticism of mediating
only between literature and life but also between literature and theory as
well. Ifwe hold to interpretation and abandon theory we might be able,
Prince tells us, to produce a low-level "theory of genre" "without falling
into or self-contradiction." And in his on "mauvais
paradox essay genres,"
he provides a brilliant historical account of how eighteenth-century
to construct a "theory of genre," met
English thinkers, in their attempt
with a kind of resistance bygenre that left them in a wasteland of theory
a left them, that is, with little
and quagmire of logical contradiction,
more to do than turn over the question of genre to the newly emerged
field of aesthetics, where the paradoxes it generated could be assimi
lated to the idea of the sublime.
Thus, Michael Prince's alternative to a theoretical approach to the
is a this of the failure of one
question of genre history (in case, attempt
to construct an adequate theory) of genre. This is consistent with Ralph
Cohen's historical approach to the study of genre. Cohen's idea that
genre is resistant to theory is not itself a theoretical finding; it is a
historical or more precisely a historicist one. It is based on the fact that
no one has ever produced a compelling theory of genre in spite of the
New LiteraryHistory, 2003, 34: 597-615

598 NEW LITERARY HISTORY
millennial effort to do so.We are therefore justified in thinking that, in

all probability, there is something about genre that makes it inherently
"resistant to theory" but hospitable to historical treatment.
On the other hand, genre is not the only thing that has proven
resistant to theory. The philosopher W. B. Gallie once proposed the idea
of contestable such as
"essentially concepts" "democracy," "Christianity,"
"humanism," and the like, to which we add "art," "literature,"
might
"aesthetics," and so forth?concepts which are essentially contestable
precisely because they combine ontological with evaluative elements in
their constitution. When it comes to these kinds of concepts, you are not
only compelled to try to characterize or describe them but also confirm
that they are inherently good or valuable or desirable in themselves, at
one and the same time.
So it iswith genres?or so it seems tome. I have never been

presented
with a genre (of literature or anything else) that I didn't feel expected to
love or hate or at least feel ambivalent about. And this, not because the
genre had been theorizedone way or another, but because genre is one of
those things whose manifestation demands both recognition of what it is
or hybrid) and also acceptance of its value?positive or negative,
(pure
as the case may be. Theory is bound to run into resistance when
confronted with such as or humanism,
concepts genre?or democracy,
or art?because such as these are contestable. But
concepts essentially
this is what generates a specifically theoretical interest in them in the
first place.
A number of our contributors remark on the difference between a
a conundrum which can be to have a solution, and a
puzzle, presumed
a solution may or
problem, a theoretical or practical difficulty for which
may not exist. And some suggest that genre may belong to the second
category, that the very existence of genre raises problems?about its
nature, function, necessity to literary art, and so forth?for which there
may be no convincing, theoretical or practical, solution. But this is to
as both
assign genre to the category of insoluble mysteries, to which,
Jerome McGann and Gary Saul Morson suggest, the sacraments of the
Roman Catholic Church belong?the category of things which, like
infant baptism, we may have witnessed but of whose virtus we cannot
know.
It is because the sacraments?is "resistant to that
genre?like theory"
we can conceive it as a "nature" or "essence" but a
lacking having
"history."1 Indeed, most of the essays in this symposium take for granted
that the most productive way of dealing with genre is not theoretically
but historically. A historical treatment is typically seen as an alternative
and antidote to the corrosive effects of theory in literary study. (It is not
for nothing that Ralph Cohen's journal is entitled New LiteraryHistory.)2

ANOMALIES OF GENRE 599
But what, we may ask, ifwe happen to be theoretically and not only
are the virtues of a historical to literary
historically inclined, approach
studies and, a fortiori, the problem of genre? The (or rather a) historical
approach to the study of anything is supposed to be atheoretical, not
value-free and therefore in a certain sense but free also
only "objective,"
of the totalizing impulses of scientific and philosophical systematicity.
The historical approach lets you simply show the ways genre works in
different times and places in the development of literature, without
having to raise the vexing theoretical question of the value typically
assigned to specific genres, various notions of genre, and the idea of a
hierarchy of genres in both culture and society at large.
Everyone recognizes that the notion of generic purity is a supreme
value among aristocratic, conservative, and social
reactionary groups
and political parties. So one might be inclined to think that the notion
of genre purity in literary criticism serves much the same function as the
notion of species purity in racist notions of humanity and history.
as "shows" that the social uses to which the notion of
History, they say,
genre can be put are many and varied. If genre is resistant to theory, it
is certainly not resistant to use by bias, prejudice, and preconception.
Indeed, any simple historical account of the evolution of genre and
genre theory would show that genre has been the compliant servant of
political power and social privilege wherever they have been cultivated.
Stephen Bann's essay "Questions of Genre in Early Nineteenth
Century French Painting" shows how "history" itself was domesticated
and turned to the service of monarchy and reaction by being "re-genre
fied" after 1815 in France. Bann argues that the development of
modernism in France proceeds "not in spite of, but indeed because of,
the fact that the public display of French art was more assiduously
policed than that of any other European nation." This policing opera
tion and the resistance to it, in turn, had as its feature . . . the
"defining
question of genre." The hierarchy of genres of painting permitted to be
exhibited in the annual Salons in Paris was capped by the "history
painting," the purpose of which was to contribute to the legitimation and
glorification of themonarchy by assimilating it to?what else??history.
Painters themselves "transgressed" the rules informing this hierarchy
in ways seeming to conform to the political interests served by the art
police, by inventing new or hybrid genres, ofwhich the "genre historique,"
constructed by Paul Delaroche, was an example. Here the "history
painting" was adapted to "apply to subjects chosen from postclassical
[that is, modern] It was a move as radical as the move realist
history." by
writers such as Balzac, Stendhal, and Flaubert to treat "the as
present"
history.3 For thismove accomplished a metamorphosis of the genre of
a
history writing itself, change of its focus on the past alone to a focus on
the present (and future) of historical societies as well.

Were these changes in the genres of the history painting and the
genres of historical writing a result of theory or of practice? Both,
obviously, since the changes that occurred in the development of
realism by the new focus on the present as history could hardly have
been imagined had not the received practice of history-writing itself
already been subjected to theoreticalcriticism by thinkers such as Hegel,
Schiller, Comte, Walter Scott, Ranke, Manzoni, Michelet, Chateaubriand,
and the rest.
Changes in the genres of history-writing which marked the nineteenth

century in Europe and America were certainly a product of a reflection
more theoretical than "practical" in kind. How could itnot have been?
No one or even as such; because "his
practices experiences "history"
tory" is an abstraction from the experience of change in society and, as

Hegel established, presupposes the institution of the State as a condition
of its possibility. And while one can no doubt experience the effectsof
social change and of the power of the State, this is quite another matter
from the of
putative "experience history."
No doubt, the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century
was a period of what Michael Prince calls "genre instability" par
excellence. Itmay have been precisely this "instability" that got codified
and transformed into a solution to the problemof which it first
appeared as only a symptom. The mixed genre, the the para
fragment,
genre, and the metageneric genre are all celebrated in Romanticist
theories of genre. If the mixed or hybrid genre is subsequently thought
of as the norm rather than the exception, it is because the notion of the
pure genre disappeared with the notion of essences which modern
science finally demolished in the course of the nineteenth century.What
Michael Prince calls the "mauvais genre,'"which replaces the ideal of the
"bon genre" (pure and uncorrupted by mixture of any kind), is itself a
theoretical construction, inspired by the need to resolve the paradox of
how a thing could be both "pure" in its essential nature and "mixed" in
its appearance, which is simply another version of the problem of the
relationship or the same-different that has
part-whole relationship
worried race, and class discourses the modern
gender, throughout period.
suggests that "genre" is a construction of thought more meta
This
so that any attempt
physical than scientific in its founding formulation,
to treat it scientifically will always be met by the kind of resistance that
metaphysics (and religion) has posed for science since the time of the
Pre-Socratics.
Themetaphysical nature of the notion of genre always becomes
apparent when subjected to a serious historical treatment. According to
the various historical treatments of this problem included in the present
volume, the problem of genres arises from the theoretical idea that

have or can be shown to "essences" as the secret of their

genres possess
natures. Michael Prince says, "As long as the imagined connection
between and essence is need not be critical."
genre strong, poetics
Jerome McGann says, "Theory will not take us very far, as the history of
scholarship for the past fifty and more years has proved." And Joseph
Farrell agrees; he thinks that the ancients' thought about genre was
fatally bollixed by theory.Why? Because "Classical genre theory was a
powerfully essentializing discourse," he says (quite correctly, I am sure).
Ancient "theorists" tended to in this discourse and, conse
participate
quently, "Ancient theorists and critics do not recognize generic ambigu

as an issue."4 But the of arose as a result of the
ity "problem" genre
essentialist presuppositions shared by theorists and some poets, when
they spoke theoretically, alike. In fact, for the ancients, the problem of
genre, insofar as there was one, derived from "theory" itselfwhich, on
Farrell's account, insisted on the authority of "the law of genre" ("operis
lex," coined by Horace, Farrell tells us) which is the law of generic
essence. Itwas theory which, in defense of the doctrine of generic purity,
"forbade" the mixing of elements from different genres.
This essentialist position Farrell treats as a hindrance to the confident
performance of poetic practices. He points out that in most of the
recognized classics of the ancient period (from Homer through Pindar
on to Virgil, Horace, and Ovid), it is mixture or impurity (Prince's
"mauvais that the rule, the
genres") provides generic purity exception.
The poets were put in the position of having to affirm a rule which in
practice they could not but break. Indeed, Farrell writes: "The Roman
were . . . even obsessed with as a
poets demonstrably concerned, genre
discursive device, . . .But their interest in genre as a set of prescriptive
rules ... is powerfully undermined, even to the point of parody, by an
attitude of practical inventiveness and what looks like nothing somuch as
an interest in the untenability of any position founded on the idea of
essence." Nonetheless, Farrell also the made
generic recognizes point by
Stephen Bann regarding the relation between repression and creativity in

art (as in social life). Farrell says, "What seems clear,... is that (forwhatever
reason), after found the idea of genre as essence
generation generation
or recipe to be the perfect foil for a poetics that was more concerned
with teasing indeterminacy than with purity of kind." In other words, the
theory of genre as essence, whether in the form of a philosophical
doctrine such as that of Aristotle's or as a religious doctrine backed up
by the threat of political force, may have served as a goad, rather than a
hindrance to creative variation in in much the same
poetic practice, way
that Bann suggests the art police did in Restoration French painting.
After all, where is the frisson produced by transgression, poetic or
otherwise, if there is no law to violate in the first place? On this view,

Farrell himself suggests, the theory (or law) of genre forms a pair and
necessary basis for the writing of the kind of poetry that later genera
tions recognized as both generically mixed and "classic." The fact that
these classic poets both believed in the "law of genre" in theory and
violated it in their practice argues less for the dampening effects of
theory than for the dialectical nature of the relation between theory and
practice in any field of creative endeavor.
The simultaneous belief in the law and in the legitimacy of the felt
need to break it (under certain circumstances) is?as Derrida, whom
Farrell cites, has noted?a feature of the "genre of the law" to which
every specific statute belongs. It is one of the conventions of the genre of
the law that anyone governed by it not only could break it but "at the
right time and in the right circumstances"?I quote John Huston in
Chinatown?will be inclined to do so. Poets and writers of fiction
are inclined to break whatever passes for the laws of proper
especially
use and the conventions of genre simply because
language they take it
upon themselves to test the limits of the sayable. The difference between
ancient and modern notions of genre may be marked by the point at
which people began to disbelieve in "essences" of anything. So Jerome
McGann suggests. But liberation from the tyranny of essence does not
necessarily imply liberation from the ideal of purity or the temptation of
idealism in general.
Mixture, hybridity, epicenity, promiscuity?these may be the rule now
rather than whatever alternatives we may envisage for them. But as the
notions of the "authentic fake" and the "real simulacrum" in contempo
rary (postmodernist) criticism indicate, we are still enthralled by an
ideal of purity that promises relief from the contradictions we must live
between theory and practice and the paradoxes that attend our efforts
to live as both individuals and members of communities. It is no
accident that the quest for this ideal often takes the form of a liberation
from even and recourse to the of. . .
speech, language, thought refuge
silence. In any event, it is not theory that is the problem here; it is a
refusal to see that theoretical discourse is the best we can hope for in
those areas of human where science will not, because it cannot,
inquiry go.
With the exception of Gary Saul Morson's essay on the genre of the
aphorism, all of the essays in this collection suggest, when they do not
the of a historical over a theoreti
argue outright, advantages approach
cal approach to the problem of genre. This is not to say that theory is not
used bymost of the contributors. Professors Margaret Cohen and Susan
Stewart offer theoretically nuanced but richly elaborated storiesof interge
neric relations during the period of transition between traditional craft
labor and modern industrial labor, and both invoke a structuralist
functionalist method in their treatments of their subject-matter.

Margaret Cohen narrates how James Fenimore Cooper invented the

genre of the "maritime novel" out of a combination of traditional
materials associated with the travel story, the newly minted historical
romance (Scott), and a growing body of lore about life at sea in the
modern age. She cites Fredric Jameson's famous hypothesis, elaborated
in The Political Unconsdous, which considers literary genre as a symbolic
expression of the human experience of conflict among the modes of
a
production in play at different times in history. For Jameson, genre is
sublimated form of a class fantasy in which class conflicts themselves
achieve an "imaginary" resolution by means of narrativization. Thus,
and are as crucial
genre, genericization, genre-fication interpreted
elements of
ideology, providing imaginary matrices (Bakhtin's
chronotopes) on which real social conflicts can be given possible
resolution inways conformable to class aspirations and ideals.
(It must be added that the assimilation of genre to ideology in
Jameson's "theory" is not presented as a basis for the derogation of
genre. Like Lukacs, Jameson thinks that,when it comes to dealing with
social relationships in class-divided societies, ideology is the only game
in town, and that it is better to have a bad [which is to say, a reactionary]
no
ideology than ideology at all. More on this later.)
In any event, Margaret Cohen draws upon Jameson's theory of genre
in order to guide her reading of the history of themaritime novel as the
story of how different relations of production, work, and commerce
came into conflict and produced out of this agon a celebration of a new
kind of work: "know-how," a kind of work peculiar to the industrial age
in which man's relations with nature were mediated by new kinds of
tools, institutions, and the new milieux of an ocean sea tamed by
industrial technology.
But what does Margaret Cohen's story of this genre tell us about genre
in general, and how does it illuminate what others in our symposium
hold to be the paradoxes of genre and the contradictions between
theory of genre and its practice? One thing it suggests to me is the
value of the of or
questionable concept contradiction paradox for the
understanding of the kind of conflicts which theory and genre are
supposed to have with one another. Professor Margaret Cohen is dealing
with conflicts and their resolutions, conflicts between generic conven
tions, with new of
experiments techniques representation, experiences
of conflict between modes of production, of social relations, of conflict
itself. The conventions of the historical romance and of the travel
narrative did not exactly "fit," which is to say, they "resisted," the
materials from which Cooper and other maritime novelists (down
through Melville and Conrad to Patrick O'Brian) wanted to make
stories. These materials the invention of a new or
required genre

mixture of inherited generic conventions in the same way that what

Cohen calls "know how" required a new way of thinking about how to
solve problems on the great sailing ships of the late eighteenth century.
Margaret Cohen interprets "know how" as a kind of adaptation of a
traditional kind of improvisatory technology to the new systematized
technology employed on the great sailing (and steam) ships of the
imperialist age. This new kind of knowledge turns out to be not unlike
(analogous to) the very kind of "bricolative" narrative techniques
characterizing the post-romantic or "realist" novel. The detailed and
precise descriptions of ways inwhich sailors used their new technologies
to tame and exploit the sea can be taken as allegories of technical
changes thatwill result in the kind of novel thatwe will subsequently call
modernist. It as no accident, then, that the author who
appears
paradigmatically incarnates the moment of transition between realism

and modernism was himself a sailor: Joseph Conrad. Indeed, Jameson's
own analysis of Lord Jim and Nostromo in The Political Unconsdous makes
this point precisely in terms of a story of a combination of genres: the
conflict between the genre of the adventure tale of life at sea and the
characterless, and eventless modernist novel.
plotless,
But it is not enough only to say thatMargaret Cohen uses a historical
approach to her study of a specific literarygenre. A certain kind of theoryof
history itself guides her choice of thematerials to be used as themanifest
"content" of her "story."Nor is it enough to say that her work belongs to
the genre of the historical "narrative," because the historical narrative
admits of the use of many modes and many genres of narrativity.
Cohen's narrative?as I understand it?belongs to the genre of
Neomarxian cultural theory ("Neo" because, while continuing to posit
the base-superstructure relationship as fundamental to social analysis, it
no longer treats the latter as a "reflection" of the former, but as being
historically productive in its own right). This means that it is based on a
theory of historical change, periodization, and causation which features
the notion of the dialectic as fundamental to a scientific representation
of the relation of a cultural artifact to the world in which it arises.
A dialectical theory of history concentrates less on things than on the
a
dynamic relationships between things. Moreover, such theory foregoes
the conventional historicist search for origins and ideologically deter
mined outcomes of complex historical processes. The dialectical method
seeks to grasp the social world in process and follow it, not as a
determined course of events, but as the product of human work and
labor, continually having to improvise tomeet human needs and desires.
a
Contrary to the Leninist-Stalinist version of it, dialectical approach
to social evolution does not presume that "history" itself moves or
determines anything; rather, "history" iswhat the human species orga

nized into societies makes of itself. This ateleological drama of human

self-making is played out at different times and in different places in
different ways over the course of world history. In this drama, different
cultures' notions about the nature of generic identity play their parts.
And Margaret Cohen's story of the invention and evolution of the genre
of the maritime novel contributes to our understanding, not only of this
genre but of genre in general by showing how one genre expressed in its
structure a more of a new relation between nature
general way grasping
and society.
It is sometimes maintained that a structuralist approach to the study
of literary genre is not only inherently ahistorical, but also manifests the
limitations of any theoretical approach to such study as well. But a
structuralism of some kind is absolutely necessary for the characteriza
tion (or constitution) of a historical period. If there is any such thing as
"history," it is always inmotion, always changing, and always changing in
on the
different ways in different places temporal continuum, such that
the very idea of a "period"?in which the whole of this continuum
takes on a uniform a coloration, or a
suddenly appearance, homogenous
substantive unity?is virtually unthinkable. And yet, history could not be
much less written, unless one were to cut the
investigated, willing up
continuum, to segment and sequence it, in some way. Thus, "periodicity"
is a fundamental category of historical comprehension, "periodization"
an activity productive of a specific kind of historical object of study, and
the period a (para) theoretically constructed object of study.
By periodization, the movie is stopped, a synchronous moment is
marked out for examination, and the periodizing eye starts classifying
the elements of the picture in order to identifythe genre to which this
congeries of events can be said to belong ("Renaissance," "Enlighten
ment," "Age of Louis XIV," "The Industrial Age," "The Age of Imperial
ism," and so forth). On this view, historical reality too has its genres?
within which literary practices are inevitably turned to the cultivation of
those genres best suited to represent what is unique of their epochs.
Thus, Susan Stewart uses a historical approach to genre to account for
the revival of themes first and most paradigmatically treated in folk tales,
in a period in which the folk communities were being systematically
or transformed into a different, specifically urban and indus
destroyed
trial ethos. Her thematic analysis?structuralist in spirit if not in the
letter?identifies the spirit and the letter of the fairy tale within the cool,
materialist, and philosophically sophisticated prose of George Eliot's Silas
Marner, where, it should be added, it functions as what C. S. Peirce called
a "representarnen" to link themanifest story of Silas Marner to the kind
of fate featured in fairy tales, providing it thereby with a deep-structural,
content?what calls "the substance of content."
allegorical glossematics

Silas Marner, like Cohen's maritime novels, is a fable of work but a

fable of work in a period and in a place when work itselfwas undergoing
a
(generic) transformation so radical as to render its aspect "magical" to
those who were indentured to manual labor as their lot. But George
Eliot's fable is different from that informing themaritime novel, for hers
is a story about a victim of the metamorphosis of labor in the early
nineteenth century, while Cohen's fables are about protagonists who
have or believe they have some kind of control over the new instruments
of production fueling this metamorphosis. What both genres have in
common is that they belong to the class or genre of the work novel,
which in the nineteenth century, will finally displace and ultimately
replace the genres of the action novel that had dominated the literary
imagination from Homer to the eighteenth century. Henceforth the
protagonists of the novel will less "do" than "suffer" things, will less
wrestle with their "fate" than bend to it,will less "fulfill" a destiny than
come to the realization that they have none.
By the end of the nineteenth century, the convention of themaritime
novel becomes into two varieties: a romantic-comic, "adventure"
split
version of the kind which "Lord" Jim had read as a boy, and a darker,
more pessimistic, and horrifying version of the kind that Conrad turned
into a fable of the demonic nature of the very technology that had
originally promised control over a nature hostile toman. Susan Stewart
shows how the realistic novel's realism, at least in the case of Silas Marner,
at once accepts renounces
and the newly forming industrial world by
on the one hand, and displaying its alienating
affirming its inevitability,
effects, on the other. Here, too, the new literary genre composed of a
hybrid of fairy tale and social documentary explains by replicating the
new processes of production emerging at the end of agrarian culture
and society.
The genre of the historical period is also used as the framework for
Jerome McGann's study of Herbert Home's elaboration of a new genre
associated with the "religion of beauty" at the end of the nineteenth
a "transitional
century. He speaks of period" marked by "generic
upheavals" of the kind studied by Joseph Farrell, Michael Prince, Susan
Stewart, and Margaret Cohen in their essays for this volume. The genre
invented by Home might be called "the materializing poem" in which
the very distinction between the semantic content of a poem and its
material form is erased by the technique of using the design of the book
or text as a device. Home, on McGann's account,
meta-signifying
thereby realizes the aim of Rossetti to grasp the soulfulness of the body
and the bodiliness of the soul.
McGann argues that our problems with the question of genre do not
stem from any inherent weaknesses of a theoretical approach or of

"resistance to arise rather from our failure

genre's putative theory." They
"to execute in regular ways our theoretical views about the material and
character of textual works of In other words,
performative imagination."
the problem lies in our commitment to "referential and vehicular,
rather than to incarnational and performative, models of meaning."
The problem of genre, for McGann, requires attention to "the
cognitive functions of the material signifier,"which he finds manifested
in the "physical design" of the book. The material basis of the literary
work provides insight into the most primitive level of meaning produc
tion, where?as with the elements of the sacrament?"the book's
'outward and visible signs' incarnate its 'inward and spiritual condi
tion.'" It is a striking image McGann uses to speak of the relation
between content and form in the materialized text. For in his applica
tion of it to a reading of Home's Diversi Colores, he reverses the structure
of the image, interpreting the poems that comprise thework as rendering
service to the material elements of the book which contains them.
McGann purports to find in Home's book many if not most of the
conceits that characterize the celebration of the "materiality of the
signifier" in themodernist poetry of Joyce, Eliot, Pound, and Stein. But
in addition he suggests that ifwe wish to contribute to the understand
as that indicated
ing of certain critical impasses, such by the idea of the
enigma of genre, we would do well to study the physical aspects of
individual books rather than attend only to their verbal or linguistic
alone. This is not a "theoretical" recommendation, he insists, "it
aspects
is in a very sense."
practical specific
Thus, McGann views only a certain kind of literary theory as ineffec
tual in dealing with the problem of genre, namely, that which looks
through the incarnation of the text to its "incarnated" linguistic aspects.
Theory, he says, always arises on the foundation of a "metadistinction"
between "content and form" which obscures the extent to which the
book signifies both by what it says as itdoes in fashioning thematter out
of which it ismade. A proper interpretive method would not only avoid
this spiritualizing tendency, but would, on the contrary, direct critical
attention towards study of the ways inwhich thought is performed in the
very process of its incarnation in the gross matter of the book: ink,
paper, binding, and so forth, that is: "in the foul rag and bone shops
where typemeets ink and kisses paper and where paper gets gathered
and bound for glory." And this iswhat he does (or rather performs) in
his study of a single book, Herbert Home's Diversi Colores. He shows how
the material elements of Home's book individualize it,making of it a
of a a
genre with one member
product unique performance, only.
I am convinced thatwe should always attend to the physical form and
properties of the book we are reading, the ways in which the paratext

prepares us for the text itself, the ways in which the text is cut up and
segmented, and the ways in which a gap between two segments of

whatever length in a text signify quite as much as any title or epigraph or
intertextual citation. But if the best art is "performative and incarnational,"
should not the best criticism aspire to the same ideal? Ifwe hypotheti
cally entertained McGann's notion about the nature of the creative work
of literature, would we not be compelled to try to make our critical
writing modally articulated in a similar way?
This is not a criticism based on the requirement that a critic ought to
imitate the style of the work she is studying. It has to do rather with the
relationship between the genres of literary writing and the genres of
critical writing. In spite of his assertion that "theory will not take us very
far,"Jerome McGann's analysis of Home's book is theory-driven; it is not
a typically hermeneutic exercise.
Moreover, it offers or at least promises insights into the complex
relationships between the theory and the practice of genre invention in
a post-religious?by which Imean a not fully secularized?culture. What
McGann's analysis of Home's book shows me is the ways in which older
religious notions and concepts can continue to exist in cultures that are
not only post-religious but also anti-religious. He shows me how religious
or mythical ideas like those about the nature of the sacraments can
continue to exist inmaterialist culture and, when put to aesthetic uses
can succeed in endowing even themost brutal matter with the aspect of
"spirituality."
I take this to confirm Michael Prince's thesis about the ways inwhich
the category of the aesthetic was adapted in the late eighteenth century
to transform such anomalies as "the of into a value and
paradox genre"
an explanation of why works of art might appeal to us even though we
might be at first repelled by both their manifest "content" and their
apparent "form." Our first experience of a book or indeed any work of
art or craft may be visual or auditory, but we do not relate to it
existentially until we have touched, handled or otherwise "felt" it. The
tactile sensation is commonly thought of as the basis of the appeal of
which the as much as the ear, and
sculpture, engages body quite eye,
mind. We forget that our first experiences
no doubt of reading are
and that it is our bodily relationships to books that
physical experiences
may be formative of our attitudes towards them and their uses ever
afterward. Consequently, genre theory might very well profit from a
move toward something like the performative mode of addressing its
object?a move which has enjoyed massive payoffs in the fields of dance,
music criticism, and media studies. McGann, in his all too brief essay,
a theoretical argument for (as he might put it) "licensing" such
provides
a move in literary studies.

I am fast out of without come to the two

running space having essays
of this collection which interest me most. These are the two essays by
well-known practitioners of ideology critique: Morson's essay on the
genre of the and Jameson's essay on the genre of the Utopia.
aphorism
Both critics are well known for their suspicion of "theory" when not
corrected by proper attention to "history."Both of them also take genre
a kind of defining "substance" of the literary work of art.
seriously as
Both are openly engaged with Marxian theory,Jameson as an advocate
of a revised version of it, and Morson as an implacably hostile critic of it
as the very type of the kind of totalitarian thinking that itpurports to be
see how what can only be called their
fighting. It is instructive, then, to
respective theoriesof literary analysis deal with the "paradoxes of genre."
In these two essays the ideological implications of the very idea of genre
are confronted and assessed.
Morson approaches the problem by way of a reflection on the genre
of the aphorism. He proposes, he tells us straight away, to view genre?
even the shortest and seemingly least discursive form, namely, the
or a worldview. "There exists an
aphorism?as manifesting expressing
aphoristic consciousness," he writes, "that differs from that of a maxim,

a dictum, a witticism, a a and other forms."
hypothesis, thought, many
And he proposes to show how the aphorism manifests, expresses, or
incarnates a "basic worldview" graspable in terms of its opposition to
another short form, the genre of the dictum.
The inherent in a genre does not possess a fixed form,

worldview
however; indeed, it can be apprehended as similar to that famous
anomalous figure that appears as a rabbit or a duck according to the
as there are "some cases
identity projected onto it by the viewer. Just
where an can be read in . . . so too
expression contradictory ways,"
can be read in Thus, a short
genres contradictory ways. given expres
own sentence: and Peace is the
sion?such as, say, Morson's "Tolstoy's
War
longest aphorism in the world"?can arguably be read as either an

or a dictum, or for that matter, as a witticism or maxim,
aphorism
we
depending on the way it is construed or "taken" by the reader. Thus,
a no
might conclude, the generic identity of text in way determines how
a literary work or indeed any discourse has to be read. "There is no
correct classification Morson "We
single system," writes?dictalogically.
do best when we cease trying to account for the multiple and incompat
ible uses of a term and focus on classes of works," he says. And
specific
concludes : classes, rather than account
(meta-maximistically) "Identify
for terms: this is a maxim of genre
study."
But in his discussion of the differences between the aphorism and the
dictum, Morson also indicates how these two genres make a conceptual
pair and how each draws its authority for what it says by its relationship

of opposition to the other. This suggests that we might profitably consider

the problem of genre by identifying each genre's conceptual "other"
rather than by simply classifying genres according to a
principle of
similarity and difference. This "other" might be different in different
works, such that a drama be inflected in a
tragic might particular way by
its to a or romance or even
opposition particular counter-genre, comedy
farce, as the case might be. Applied to ancient Greek tragedy, for
instance, this might provide us with a way of distinguishing between
different kinds of the genre: Aeschylus could be distinguished from
Euripides by identifying the counter-genres embedded within the trag
edies of each. Every work could then be interpreted as an interplay
between two or more or as an of a number of
genres-types amalgam
genres.
The problem with Morson's model, as I see it, is that in his own
paradigm, the oppositional relationship between aphorism and dictum

is not value-neutral but rather ethical in nature: the aphorism is not only
positive and good, the dictum is decidedly negative and bad. On his
terms, any fall out of aphoristic into dictai utterance is a fall into
ideology, whereas the opposite would not be the case. Thus, when
Morson says of the dictum: "The dictum is implicitly and often Utopian,
and Utopian tracts and fiction incline to dicta" and "the dictum is
insulated from history," it is clear that he is demonizing the dictum as
bad ideology. The dictum, for Morson, is the paradigm of more
extended authoritarian discourses, such as philosophy of history, idealist
philosophy, Marxism, priestly cant, and religious dogma.
Morson's examples of dictalogical discourse include quotations from
Marx, Marx and Engels, Bentham, Descartes, Lenin, Leibniz, and the
Catechism of the Catholic Church. The last of these examples is
included, I presume, because it is a paradigm of dogmatic assertion. But
one can easily see what all of these "dictalogists" are supposed to have in
common: they all represent dogmatic or at least nomothetic-deductive
systems of thought; they are all expressions of totalizing systems of
thought and belief; and they are all, by Morson's lights at least,
oppressive in the effects they have on both thought and action. In this
model, the dictum isposited as themost evil of the short genres; indeed,
it is difficult on Morson's analysis to discern any redeeming feature in it.
And yet, the dictum is the paradigm of legal discourse, where it cannot
be dispensed with. A legal system cast in aphorisms could not be a system
at all and would have very little of the law-like in it.
I take "ideology" to be?among other things?the product of a
strategy by which ethical categories can be smuggled into putatively
scientific or generally objective descriptions of things and endowed with
the inevitability of a "natural" necessity. Morson's theory of the agonistic

a
relationship obtaining among the generic conventions informing work
of art or science (he takes Darwin's Origin of Spedes as a model of a
morally responsible scientific discourse) alerts us to the polemical
nature of intergeneric conflict. Nonetheless, his own inclination to use
the dictalogical mode in his discussion of the relationship between the
genres of aphorism and dictum suggests that, as in all ideological
discourse, the speaker tends to be contaminated by whatever it is he
wishes to neutralize or destroy, which suggests that an ideological
treatment of ideological discourse will end up becoming more ideologi
cal than itwishes to be. And so too, we might surmise, with theories of
genre considered as the discursive instrument by which to effect the
substitution of ethical for scientific descriptions of reality. The social
function of generic conventions seems to be to hide or elide that
difference between fact and value which, from Hume toWeber and L?vi
Strauss, has been seen as the fundamental problem of any possible
science of society.
One way of dealing with this problem is to view the literarywork as the
product (in part, of course) of a kind of dialectic of genres, in which
what the formalists called the "dominant" of the work is viewed as an
attempted synthesis of all the generic conventions used to justify the
work's claim to some kind of realism. This approach to the question of
genre gets us beyond any necessity to regard certain "paradoxical"
aspects of a discourse of genre as indices of a "problem" and allows us to
treat them as the solution to the question of why generic conventions
seem necessary to the presentation of a worldview in the first place.
Such seems to be the strategy of Fredric Jameson in his essay "Morus:
The Generic Window." He begins by crediting various opposed interpreta
tions of More's Utopia as either a na?ve fantasy of an impossible, ideal
no relation to the real world or as some kind of satirical
society bearing
inversion of the "real" economic, and social conditions obtain
political,
ing inMore's own time and place in history.
Jameson book features two
begins with the observation that More's
distinct genres, the first being that of the travel narrative of part 1 and
the second that of the Utopia proper, too fanciful to be taken seriously
and therefore best understood as a wish-fulfillment daydream or pseudo
satire. Thus, the work seems and even "contradic
political "paradoxical"
tory" in the way it seeks (and fails) tomeld two genres never meant to be
combined in a single discourse. But, Jameson remarks: "The best
method is to turn such a into a solution in its own
always problem right,
and make of this objective and incompatible alternation an interpretive
phenomenon at some higher (meta) level. Here reading and interpreta
tion confront the fundamental ethical question par excellence which is
also the fundamental political one, namely whether Utopias are positive

or negative, good or evil." But this question can be raised, Jameson tells
us, only after themanifest "interpretive signals" have been attended, and
these are "the ones." Because, writes: "Genre
generic Why? Jameson
or representa
presumably governs the interpretation of the narrative
tional details within its frame"?a generalization which, by the way,
us with a way of comprehending the enigmatic phrasing of the
provides
title of
Jameson's essay.5
I think that, of all the contributors to this symposium, Jameson has
been the one who has most consistently taken genre as a (if not the
a historically responsible to literary
principal) problem for approach
studies. His allegiance to a historical approach to literary study accounts
for what has to many appeared as a distinct hostility to "theory." In
he more than once identified "theory" with
Ideologies of Theory,6
and consigned them both to perdition because of
"postmodernism"
what he took to be their avoidance of "history." But as the title Ideologies
a
ofTheory suggests, Jameson distinguishes between specifically ideologi
cal use of theory and the kind of theory that isuseful in the deconstruction
of ideologies. This second kind of theory is deployed in the service of an
idea of history which takes the modes and means of production as
foundational to the understanding of how historical societies and their
various cultural endowments change over time. Therefore, Jameson has
a theory of literature and a fortiori a theory of genre, but these are
historical or, more precisely, historicist, theories. And he no more
envisions an inevitable conflict between a theoretical and a practical
sees a conflict between theory
approach to literary genre studies than he
and history.
A historical treatment of anything whatsoever is not something to
which you add a dash of theory; what you mean by history will be
some more basic level of existential awareness
theoretically determined at
of your "situation." When it comes to discourse and literature or any
other aspect of human culture, theory is simply a mode of thought by
which to grasp the (synchronie) structure of the diachronic process of
which "history" is a manifestation. Narrative is another mode of thought,
in discourse.
by which the diachronic aspect of reality is grasped
contribution to this issue of NLH on genre is a reprise of a
Jameson's
1977 essay on Thomas More's Utopia, entitled "Of Islands and Trenches:
Neutralization and the Production of Utopian Discourse."7 It is typical of
that, in revising his treatment of More for a
Jameson's procedure
volume on genre, he should now focus his attention?much more than
he did in the original treatment?on theways inwhich the generic aspect
of Utopia yields insight into the conflicts, not only of different worldviews
but also of their "imaginaries," which is to say, the different wish
fulfillment fantasies that give them their different ideological valences.

The 1977 essay ends with reflections on Louis Marin's discussion of

the Utopia as a genre. And there the text ofMore's Utopia was presented
as the artifact.
quintessential self-consuming literary Jameson:
The ultimate matter of Utopian discourse would turn out to be its own
subject
conditions of possibility as discourse. Yet such formalism, and the
desperate
spectacle of a genre liftingitselfup by itsown bootstraps, is perhaps only the
obverse and the corollary of its own most
genuine chance of for it
authenticity;
would follow, in that case,
that Utopias deepest subject, and the source of all that is
most
vibrantly political about it, ispredsely our inability to concave it, our incapacity
to it as a vision, our failure to the Other of what is, a failure that,
produce project
as with fireworks back into the must once leave us
dissolving night sky, again
alone with thishistory. (ITS 101; my italics)
The self-consuming nature of More's Utopia specifies the nature of its

function: it is "the converse" of "ideology,"8 which means that its
function is to "designate the still empty space of a scientific theory of
society" (ITS 101).9 Thus, More's Utopia is an example and paradigm of
a genre of
political discourse and social commentary which, far from
providing a blueprint for the ideal society, expresses a desire for a
"science" of the social that would rise above the sectarian and confes
sional conflicts that blocked access to such a science in the "situation" in
which More found himself in early-sixteenth-century England.
In this respect, the genre of Utopia gives us some insight into the
intellectual function of all generic fietionalities. They are to provide a
"window" not on the world whose "narrative and
only representational
details" they "govern" but also onto genres themselves, the "windowing"
(or framing) function of which is every bit as important as the world to
which they give access. Here we can recall Nietzsche's idea of interpreta
tion as a perspective provided by a kind of lens which permits us to focus
on a specific access of reality, and to focus on the lens itself and its
function in providing perspective, at one and the same time.
The function of genre in literary writing would thus be exactly the
"converse" of its in utilitarian or communica
equivalent category merely
tive discourse. Itmight turn out that, in literarywriting, the function of
genre is like the genre of Utopia in ethico-political discourse in the
modern age: to designate the "still empty space" of a perfectly commu
nicative practice of writing itself. It is in this sense that the genre of
Utopia can always be identified by the extent towhich the Utopian text
presides over the effort to escape the divisive and effects of
agonistic
genre itself.
So, not surprisingly, the genre of Utopia turns out to be comprehend
ible as a kind of Utopia of genre itself, in which all the divisions and

hierarchies separating individuals from one another and the whole of

humanity from the world itoccupies are sublated in an image of imperfect
unity. In this respect, the failures?logical, conceptual, and rhetorical?
of Utopia are, if anything, more important to its real project than its
successes. For if the tacit aim of every Utopian scheme considered as a
contribution to political and social theory is to show the impossibilityof its
own realization, then the "failures" of Utopia espied by all of those
champions of "realism" who want to consign the whole genre to the
domain of fantasy and delusion, confirm Utopia's own project.
It is not a matter, then, of choosing between the "historical" or
narrativized book 1 of Utopia and its theoretical or idealized vision of a
possible better world somewhere else or at a later time, and book 2, as
the "real" of the work. For, on
containing subject-matter Jameson's
reading, the theoretical part ismerely the flip side or mirror image of
the historical part, in the way that the factual superstructure of the
"realistic" text depends for its authority on the verisimilitude of its
infrastructure.
generic
And so itmay be for genre in the life of both realistic and
imaginative
discourses about "the real world." More's Utopia envisions a world in
which the conflict of discursive genres is resolved in a way consistent
with the conflicting imperatives of all the different sects and confessions
vying for dominance during the period of Reformations and Religious
Wars. In order to do this,More must identify the Utopian element in
each of the discourses clamoring for the right to speak authoritatively in
the void created by the declining authority of the Church. By incorporat
ing all of these images of Utopia into his own vision of how Utopia is to
be sought and what itmight look like when found, More at once affirms
and denies the validity of all of them. If the ideal of Utopian discourse is
to demonstrate its own impossibility, then More anticipates all of those
critics of later years who signal their own realism by the enthusiasm with
which they go about demonstrating thatUtopia is indeed impossible. In
thiswork, they confirm only what More was at such pains to demonstrate
himself by his creation of this generic "hapax legomenon" which was
"Thomas Morus' De rd statu sive de nova insula
?ptimo publicae Utopia."
In the last issue ofNLH, also on genre, Peter Hitchcock suggested that
the genre of postcolonial writing differed from itsmetropolitan counter
part by virtue of its project to dismantle genre in general, because genre
in literature is only another version of the idea of racial species which
served to justify imperialist oppression of native peoples. It appears tome
that, although this characterization of genre may be quite persuasive, a
direct assault on it will no more succeed than the assault
centuries-long
on the idea of genre purity. Another strategymight be that of More or
rather Morus, who struck the beast of prejudice and tyrannyfrom within

its own strongest element, the feigned idealism which made it attractive
not least to its victims. Perhaps it is the same with modern notions of
Here, as the best is
genre. perhaps, Tynianov argued, approach parody.
Stanford University
NOTES
1 on history: uMan, in a word, has no nature; what he has is . . . history"

Jos? Ortega yGasset
as a
("History System," in Philosophy & History: Essays Presented toErnst Cassirer, ed. Raymond
Klibansky and H. J. Paton [New York, 1963], p. 313).
2 Itmight be noted that the journal of History and Theory was founded, not in order to
put theory into history, but to examine the metatheoretical conflict between traditional,
humanistic, and belletristic historiography and such theoretically informed approaches to
historical studies as those represented by Marxism and the so-called "new social history."
3 See Erich Auerbach's characterization a the essential feature of literary realism in
France during the early nineteenth century: "In the Hotel de la Mole," chapter 18 of
Auerbach's Mimesis, tr.Willard R. Trask (Princeton, 1991), pp. 454-92.
4 It is questionable whether "theorist" is the right word here. The modern notion of
a connotation
theory, as in the "critical theory" associated with the Frankfurt School, has
different from that indicated ancient Greek theoria. Indeed, as Wlad Godzich
quite by
to Paul De Man's Resistance toTheory, ancient Greeks
pointed out in his foreword thought
theoriameant like "contemplation" or "consideration." Moreover, theoriawas
something
not set in opposition to praxis (meaning something like "action") but rather to aesthesis
(meaning something like the feeling of pleasantness). So the opposition between theory
and practice, which informs so many of the contributions to our symposium, would appear
to be more germane to the modern discussion of genres than to the ancient one. See Paul
De Man, Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis, 1986).
5 Morus [the Latin form of More's name] : [the mark a
punctuation introducing
or of the word or phrase preceding it] The Generic
quotation, explanation, example
Window, which suggests that it is an example of the name "Morus." Which suggests that the
phrase "The Generic Window" quotes, explains, or exemplifies the Latin form of More's
name. How so? "Morus" not only designates the author of the text, it also sends out signals
of "Latinity" which endow the text with a whole body of signifieds (connotations) not
found in the New English language taking shape in More's time. In this way Latin itself
serves as a
"generic window" onto the combination of realistic description of England's
then current condition (given in part 1 of Utopia) and the imagined community alternative
to England (given in part 2 of the text).
6 Fredric Jameson, The Ideologies ofTheory: Essays 1971-1986 (Minneapolis, 1988). Note:
the sub tide of volume 1 is Situations of Theory, while that of vol. 2 is Syntax ofHistory
(hereafter cited in text as ITS).
7 Jameson's essay "Of Islands and Trenches" was first published inDiacritics, 7 (1977), 2-21.
8 Referring to Karl Mannheim's Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sodology of
Knowledge (London, 1936).
9 Quoting Louis Mann's Utopiques: Jeux des espaces, of which Jameson's essay is a review
article.


Anomalies of Genre

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Anomalies of Genre: The Utility of Theory and History for the Study of Literary Genres

Author(s): Hayden White

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In this I will consider a topical thread that runs

New LiteraryHistory, 2003, 34: 597-615

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millennial effort to do so.We are therefore justified in thinking that, in

So it iswith genres?or so it seems tome. I have never been

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Changes in the genres of history-writing which marked the nineteenth

tory" is an abstraction from the experience of change in society and, as

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have or can be shown to "essences" as the secret of their

quently, "Ancient theorists and critics do not recognize generic ambigu

Stephen Bann regarding the relation between repression and creativity in

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Margaret Cohen narrates how James Fenimore Cooper invented the

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mixture of inherited generic conventions in the same way that what

paradigmatically incarnates the moment of transition between realism

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nized into societies makes of itself. This ateleological drama of human

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Silas Marner, like Cohen's maritime novels, is a fable of work but a

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"resistance to arise rather from our failure

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segmented, and the ways in which a gap between two segments of

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I am fast out of without come to the two

aphoristic consciousness," he writes, "that differs from that of a maxim,

The inherent in a genre does not possess a fixed form,

longest aphorism in the world"?can arguably be read as either an

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of opposition to the other. This suggests that we might profitably consider

paradigm, the oppositional relationship between aphorism and dictum

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This content downloaded from 147.91.1.45 on Sat, 14 Feb 2015 20:58:12 PM

This content downloaded from 147.91.1.45 on Sat, 14 Feb 2015 20:58:12 PM

The 1977 essay ends with reflections on Louis Marin's discussion of

The self-consuming nature of More's Utopia specifies the nature of its

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hierarchies separating individuals from one another and the whole of

This content downloaded from 147.91.1.45 on Sat, 14 Feb 2015 20:58:12 PM

1 on history: uMan, in a word, has no nature; what he has is . . . history"

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