Genre between Literature and History

Roger Chartier

L et us start these concluding remarks with a paradoxical observa-

tion. At first glance, it may seem that the different forms of literary
criticism that dominated the intellectual scene during the twentieth
century did not need the old notion of genre for their understand-
ing of literary texts. Linguistic approaches emphasized the plural and
unstable linguistic construction of meaning, since, as Roland Barthes
has written, a text is un espace dimensions multiples, o se marient
et se contestent des critures varies, dont aucune nest originelle. . . .
un texte est fait dcritures multiples, issues de plusieurs cultures et qui
entrent les unes avec les autres en dialogue, en parodie, en contesta-
tion (a multidimensional space in which are married and contested
several writings, none of which is original. . . . a text consists of multiple
writings, proceeding from several cultures and entering into dialogue,
into parody, into contestation).1 The rigidity of the category of genre is
therefore unable to grasp such hybridity and lability. When attention is
centered on the response of readers and their decisive role in the pro-
duction of diverse receptions of the same text, genre is no longer a fun-
damental category, since it unsuccessfully tries to locate in a particular
register what readers may understand very differently. By displacing
attention onto the circulation of words, objects, rituals, or discourses
between the social world and the literary works that appropriate them
and return them in a new form to readers or spectators, the New His-

1 Roland Barthes, La mort de lauteur, in Le bruissement de la langue: Essais cri-

tiques IV (Paris: Seuil, 1984), 67, 69; The Death of the Author, in The Rustle of Lan-
guage, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1986), 5354.

Modern Language Quarterly 67:1 (March 2006): 12939. 2006 University of Washington.
130 MLQ March 2006

toricist perspective considers generic distinctions as always subverted

by the process of negotiations, transactions, and exchanges that give to
aesthetic forms of social energy (according to Stephen Greenblatts
expression) their capacity to shape collective experiences.2
Nevertheless, genre resisted. It resisted first in the New Criticism,
which postulated that any text is a structure of meaning in which aes-
thetic form and discursive content are inseparable. In such a perspec-
tive, genre is fundamental, as proven by the heresy of paraphrase,
to quote Cleanth Brooksthat is, the impossibility of the rendition
in prose of a poetic work.3 The more classical distinctions of the old
poetics are therefore endowed with the task of correcting the two falla-
cies characterizing traditional literary history: the intentional fallacy,
since the constraints that rule the autonomy of the work are indepen-
dent of any authorial intention, and the affective fallacy, since the
inherent generic regime of any work cannot be deduced from its effects
on its audience. The self-sufficiency of the literary verbal artifact gives
an essential importance to the oppositions between genresas, for
example, between poetry and history in the Aristotelian manner, or
between poetic and dramatic genres.
All efforts to liberate meaning from the textual machinery (recep-
tion aesthetics, reader response theory, etc.) mobilized the category
of genre as a powerful resource for avoiding the infinite dispersion of
meaning between innumerable acts of reading. Indeed, the distance
taken vis--vis textual tyranny and the imperialism of close reading
could lead to an unbound proliferation of interpretations. Concepts
like horizon of expectations, proposed by Hans Robert Jauss, or
interpretive communities, coined by Stanley Fish, addressed such an
issue by conceiving of reading not as an autonomous, free, and individ-
ual experience but as collectively framed by shared conventions, proper
to a time or to a community.4 Among these conventions, the ascription

2 Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in

Renaissance England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 7.

3 Cleanth Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (New York:

Harcourt, Brace, 1947).

4 Hans Robert Jauss, Literaturgeschichte als Provokation (Frankfurt am Main:

Suhrkamp, 1970); Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpre-
tive Communities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980). For an English
translation of Jausss essay see Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory,
Chartier Genre between Literature and History 131

of texts to specific genres was a key element that defined the system of
intelligibility or the common expectations allowing the appropriation
and understanding of the texts, literary or not. According to these per-
spectives, the notion of genre acquired a dynamic or dialogical dimen-
sion. By framing a set of assumptions proper to the reception, each tex-
tual genre imposed on the reader the intended identity of the text. But
such assumptions can also be challenged by revolutionary works that
subvert the conventional boundaries between generic distinctions and
disrespect the criteria characterizing each class of texts. If literature
can be a provocation (according to Jausss formula), it is because some
innovative works defy the inherited and canonical definition of such or
such a genre and, by doing so, create new aesthetic expectations.
The category of genre is not explicitly acknowledged by the New
Historicism, even if it was in the journal Genre that Greenblatt proposed
in 1982 (and for the first time) such a designation for a new form of
criticism. Nevertheless, generic distinctions find their place among the
systems of demarcation between the different discursive practices of
which transactions and exchanges are the very object of the analysis.
The very concept of negotiation, central to such an approach, supposes
a previous distinction between the social discourses that are appropri-
ated and the literary repertoires that endow them with a new literary
force. Hence follow a series of consequences. The first one is to widen
the notion of genre beyond the textual real and to consider that public
ceremonials, religious rituals, and everyday practices constitute differ-
ent genres, the social energy of which is encoded and refashioned
by their representation or appropriation. The second is that the genres
remain a pertinent way for delineating specific aesthetic experiences
(theatrical practice, for example, implies a manner for separating artis-
tic practices from social practices that is not the same in other literary
genres) and for characterizing even within the same realm of experi-
ences different types of exchanges between social anxieties and literary
writing. Generic distinctions are useful markers of different areas of
circulation, different types of negotiation, Greenblatt writes in the first
chapter of Shakespearean Negotiations, a book in which the four follow-

in Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti (Minneapolis: University of Min-

nesota Press, 1982).
132 MLQ March 2006

ing chapters each focus on a different one of the four classical genres
(classical at least from the eighteenth century on) among Shakespeares
plays: histories, comedies, tragedies, and romances. Butand it is a
third feature of the New Historicists use of genrethere is no exclu-
sive, categorical force behind the generic distinctions (20). If the dis-
courses of the social world are the very matter of literary creation, then,
conversely, aesthetic energy can invest texts that are deprived of any
artistic design. The travelogues that account for the marvels encoun-
tered in the new worlds are examples of such investment.5
In this issue of MLQ, two other cases of such transfer or hybrid-
ization are analyzed. The political reading in Renaissance England of
Ovids elegies, analyzed by Heather James, is the first one, since the
erotic poems are understood as an illustration of the freedom of clas-
sical republicanism and a critique of the despotic restriction imposed
on speech. The providential dimension of Richard Hakluyts Principal
Navigations, as stressed by David Harris Sacks, is the second one. The
collection of travels brought together by Hakluyt overcomes the classi-
cal definition of the genre by giving it the meaning of the knowledge,
lost after the Fall, of the world as it was created by God. In this sense,
the book is an example of the genre of ecclesiastical history, which
based on the erudition of the antiquarians the unveiling of Gods will.
Hakluyts compilation raises another issue about the notion of
genre. The category implicitly supposes that a book represents a coher-
ent work, assignable to a certain genre or to a generic hybrid. Hakluyt,
who acted more as an editor than an author and who drew on col-
lections already in print for constructing his own, reminds us that
a great number of books in the early modern age were anthologies,
compilations, and bibliothecae. Some were organic miscellanies (to use
Armando Petruccis paradoxical expression), because, like the Principal
Navigations, they gathered entire works or excerpts belonging to the
same genre or the same subject matter.6 But others were not; they put

5 See Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).
6 Armando Petrucci, From the Unitary Books to Miscellany, in Writers and Read-

ers in Medieval Italy: Studies in the History of Written Culture, ed. and trans. Charles M.
Radding (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 1011.
Chartier Genre between Literature and History 133

together, like manuscript books, texts without any generic unity. In

this case, it is clear that editorial practices and publishing strategies
profoundly challenged the classification of discourses. Historians of
the book have often inherited such a contradiction: even if dealing
with many books having multiple identities, their statistical approaches
to the production and ownership of books were strictly organized by
genres. They have often followed the example of the classificatory sys-
tem of Parisian booksellers of the eighteenth century, who divided the
books among five main categories: theology, law, history, sciences and
arts, belles lettres. It is not easy to locate in one or another of these five
classes the providential, historical, cosmographic, and epic dimensions
of Hakluyts book.
The generic plurality of some works, or books, and the mobility
of their assignation are reasons for the instability of the category of
genre. Editorial and publishing strategies sometimes changed the
generic identity of the same work, as when some Shakespearean plays,
published as histories in the Quartos (the 1603 Q1 and the 1604 Q2
of The Tragicall Historie of Hamlet Prince of Denmarke, or the 1608 Q1 of
the True Chronicle Historie of the Life and Death of King Lear and His Three
Daughters), were put among the tragedies in the 1623 Folio.
In other cases, it was the authors will that modified the genre
of the work at the same time that the text was slightly or profoundly
rewritten. Corneilles Le Cid was published in 1637 as a tragi-comdie,
but when it was reedited in 1648, it became a tragdie, and its text was
revised in accordance with the critiques made by the Acadmie Fran-
aise, even if Corneille rebuffed the accusations addressed to him. In
1660, for another reedition within the playwrights Oeuvres, the identity
of the play as a tragedy was maintained and led Corneille to a profound
rewriting of it, with a more uncertain ending and without the two first
scenes, which dealt with Chimnes marriage and belonged more to the
genre of domestic comedy than to the register of tragedy.7
The transformation of the generic identity of a work can also be
linked to the imposition of the rules of print publication on a work des-
tined to be circulated in the form of a manuscript. This is the hypoth-

7 See Pierre Corneille, Le Cid: Tragi-comdie, ed. Jean Serroy (Paris: Gallimard,

1993).
134 MLQ March 2006

esis proposed by Francisco Rico for the transformation of the epistolary

Lazarillo de Tormes, which belonged to the successful genre of carte
messaggiere, into different printed versions in the guise of a life story.
Such a displacement, or betrayal, imposed on the letter a marginal
rubric and a title (La vida de Lazarillo de Tormes y de sus fortunas y adver-
sidades), a biographical narrative of the young Lazarillo (a diminutive
never used in the text itself except as a pun on lazarillo/lacerado), and
stereotyped wooden engravings that reused figures already printed in
a saints life.8
The generic designation of a work can also be an object of conten-
tion explicitly addressed by paratextual elements. In the editions of
1499 and 1500 the Celestina was labeled a comedia. In 1502 the sec-
ond author, Fernando de Rojas, added a prologue in which he evoked
the dispute between those who considered the play a tragedy and those
who understood it as a comedy. To solve the quarrel, Rojas designated
the five acts of the work a tragicomedia (a category respected by the
English translator James Mabbe, who in 1631 titled the play a tragicke-
comedy). Thus the generic ambiguity of the Celestina was for Rojas
one of the reasons that the text had received very different interpreta-
tions, along with the summaries and rubric added by the printers (as
in the editions of the Lazarillo), and had been read in different ways:
for excerpting sententiae, for collecting pleasant anecdotes, or for
deciphering the meaning of the work.9
Finally, the works themselves can appropriate generic identities and
their subversion, or parody, as one of the motives of the fiction. Such
a game is played by Cervantes in Don Quijote on multiple scales. The
first one is the traditional opposition between historia and poesa.
Cervantes, or rather, Sansn Carrasco, reaffirms the principle underly-
ing the distinction: El poeta puede contar o cantar las cosas, no como
fueron, sino como deban ser; y el historiador las ha de escribir, no
como deban ser, sino como fueron, sin aadir ni quitar a la verdad
cosa alguna (The poet may describe or sing things, not as they were,
but as they ought to have been, while the historian has to write them

8 Lazarillode Tormes, ed. Francisco Rico, 2nd ed. (Madrid: Ctedra, 1987); Fran-
cisco Rico, Problemas del Lazarillo (Madrid: Ctedra, 1988).
9 Fernando de Rojas (and Antiguo Autor), La Celestina: Tragicomedia de Calisto y

Melibea, ed. Francisco J. Lobera et al. (Barcelona: Crtica, 2000).

Chartier Genre between Literature and History 135

down, not as they ought to have been, but as they were, without add-
ing to or subtracting from the truth).10 But the Historia de don Quijote
de la Mancha, written by the Arabic historian Cide Hamete Benengeli,
subverts the opposition. It is a history of things as they had to be in
the dream or madness of the hidalgo, and not as they were. Before the
imaginary biographies or the apocryphal texts of the writers of the
twentieth century (Marcel Schwob, Jorge Luis Borges, Max Aub), Cer-
vantes mobilized all the signs of authentication (references to actual
documents, archival records, learned controversies, the book itself
and its apocryphal continuation) for accrediting as historical what the
reader enjoys as a poetic fiction. The play with genres, their boundaries
or incompatibility (Carrasco recalls that the introduction in the book
of a novela, El curioso impertinente, does not fit history), is one part of
the textual machinery that produces what Borges has called the par-
tial enchantments of the text and therefore the readers suspension of
disbelief.11
A second scale of the play with genres in Don Quijote is given by the
different parodies of the different textual literary practices of its time.
The parody of the chivalric romances is not the only one, even if it is
the more essential. Cervantes also mocks the picaresque novel by attrib-
uting to Gins de Pasamonte the authorship of a manuscript titled,
like the Lazarillo, La vida de Gins de Pasamonte (1:22), as well as the
pastoral genre, imagining at the end of the second part of the novel an
Arcadia in which Don Quijote, condemned to retire for one year after
his defeat by the Caballero de la Blanca Luna, will name himself el
pastor Quijtiz and celebrate imagined shepherdesses by engraving
his poems on trees (2:67, 73). As Georgina Dopico Black has written, el
Quijote incorpora, parodia y transforma todos los discursos literarios
(y muchos no literarios) que lo anteceden (incorporates, parodies and

10 Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quijote de la Mancha, ed. Francisco Rico and Joaqun

Forradellas, 2 vols. (Barcelona: Instituto Cervantes, 1998), 1:64950; Don Quixote,

ed. Joseph R. Jones and Kenneth Douglas, trans. John Ormsby (New York: Norton,
1981), 440.
11 Jorge Luis Borges, Magias parciales del Quijote, in Otras inquisiciones (Madrid:

Alianza, 1997), 7479. For an English translation see Partial Enchantments of the
Quixote, in Other Inquisitions, 19371952, trans. Ruth L. C. Simms (Austin: University
of Texas Press, 1964), 4346.
136 MLQ March 2006

transforms all the literary discourses [and many others that are not
literary] that preceded it), not only the chivalric, picaresque, and pas-
toral novel but also the comedia, with Maese Pedro alias Gins de Pas-
amontes puppets; the proverb, or refranes, which gives its texture to
Sanchos speech; the romances; lyric poetry; and many other genres.12
In this sense, Don Quijote is the book of books, the compendium of the
entire literature of its age.
The same text can be located in different genres, and the same
story embodied in different textual forms. Marina Brownlee shows
how the story of the Abencerraje, his beloved Jarifa, and his Christian
friend Rodrigo de Narvez existed in three versions: as a chronicle
printed circa 1560, as an interpolation in Jorge de Montemayors Diana
(1561), and as a novel or short story in Antonio de Villegass miscellany
Inventario (1551)another example of the surviving importance of the
heterogeneous book in the age of print.13 More generally, this example
raises the question of the different textual embodiments of the same
historical fact, that is, the fall of Granada in 1492 and the disappear-
ance of Muslim Spain. The event was appropriated either by literary
fictions or by historical chronicleswhich leads us to discuss history as
genre and the category of genre within historical writing.
The notion is less familiar to historians than to literary critics. But
the attention paid in recent years to the constraints that rule the writ-
ing of any historical discourse has led to a reflection on genre, even
without the word. The category can be mobilized for constructing a
typology of the archival documents used by historians. All are texts that
belong to a series defined by peculiar conventions, codified forms, and
discursive regimes. Written records never give immediate, transparent,
unmediated access to the past, because their production has been gov-
erned by a particular relation to the reality they designate: depiction,
representation, prohibition, prescription, quantification, and so on.
Such a perspective can give rise to a typology of written records that

12 Georgina Dopico Black, Espaa abierta: Cervantes y el Quijote, in Espaa

en tiempos del Quijote, ed. Antonio Feros and Juan Gelabert (Madrid: Taurus, 2004),
348. My translation.
13 La Diana first appeared in 1559, but the 1561 edition, printed in Valladolid,

is the first to include the history of the Abencerraje. See Jorge de Montemayor, La
Diana, ed. Juan Montero (Barcelona: Crtica, 1996), 213n245.
Chartier Genre between Literature and History 137

stresses the relation between classes of documents and types of hands.

It also underlines the continuity between documentary practices and lit-
erary composition. In late medieval Italy, the writing habits of notaries
were the matrix for the authorial and autograph composition of poetic
texts. The familial ties or professional experience that linked notaries
and authors explain the similarities between the registers of legal docu-
ments and the unitary books copied by the writer himself. Petrarch,
for example, who was a scribe of his own works (to avoid the corruption
of his poetic compositions by ignorant or clumsy copyists), was the son
and grandson of notaries (Petrucci, 14568, 161).
Understood as a discursive series that can be labeled documentary
genres, the records used by historians are referred back to the differ-
ent situations in which (and for which) they were produced. Numerous
are the historical works dealing with the relation between the genres of
documents and the constraints imposed on the representations of the
past. The genre of lettres de rmission in the Middle Ages and the six-
teenth century entailed the elaboration of pardon tales by condemned
people and by their lawyers, who had to present excuses for a crime and,
at the same time, respect the verisimilitude of the facts.14 The inquisito-
rial records of early modern times construct uneven dialogues between
the judges and the accused, where the main stake was the categoriza-
tion of the suspected crimes by the former and the latter.15 The archives
of the Parisian police in the eighteenth century create situations in
which private affairs and public issues are mingled during encounters
between people and the authorities.16 These three examples, among
many others, show that the first object of any historiographical analysis
must be the elucidation of the effects produced on the historical evi-
dence by the rules governing archival records.
14 See Natalie Zemon Davis, Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and Their Tellers in

Sixteenth-Century France (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987).

15 See Carlo Ginzburg, The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Six-

teenth and Seventeenth Centuries, trans. John Tedeschi and Anne Tedeschi (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983).
16 See Arlette Farge, La vie fragile: Violence, pouvoirs et solidarits Paris au XVIIIe

sicle (Paris: Hachette, 1986); and Farge, Dire et mal dire: Lopinion publique au XVIIIe
sicle (Paris: Seuil, 1992). For English translations see Fragile Lives: Violence, Power, and
Solidarity in Eighteenth-Century Paris, trans. Carol Shelton (Cambridge: Polity, 1993);
and Subversive Words: Public Opinion in Eighteenth-Century France, trans. Rosemary Mor-
ris (Cambridge: Polity, 1994).
138 MLQ March 2006

It is such a relation between actions or experiences and the discur-

sive genres considered proper for representing them that is discussed
in the essays by Timothy Hampton and David Quint. The first deals
with the different possibilities during the Renaissance for framing
within written texts the practices and rituals of diplomatic actions.
The second explores in a comparative way how tragedy exposes in the
seventeenth century the loss of identity and power experienced by the
different European nobilities subjugated by the absolutist sovereigns.
In both cases, the failure of some form of public discourse (diplomatic
rhetoric or aristocratic proclamation) leads to the production of lit-
erature, understood either as private representation of the self or as
tragic vision of the world.
Literature is not the only means of expressing experience. As Rein-
hart Koselleck has shown, different forms of historiographical writing
are also attached to different modalities of the experience of time. To
the three categories of experiencethe perception of singularity, the
consciousness of repetition, and the knowledge of transformation
correspond three manners of writing history: history that registers the
uniqueness of phenomena, history that mobilizes comparisons and
analogies, and history that deploys critical methods and techniques.17
Nevertheless, these different forms of textual embodiment of the past
belong to the same generic category: history. In recent decades the
definition of history as a genre (according to the old Aristotelian defi-
nition) led to the inventory of the similarities that such a discursive
representation of the past shares with fiction: rhetorical tropes, narra-
tive structures, metaphorical figures. Works by Hayden White, Michel
de Certeau, and Paul Ricoeur made more complex the demarcation
held as evident by positivist tradition between historical knowledge and
fictional narratives.18 The vulnerability of the distinction was made still

17 Reinhart Koselleck, Erfahrungswandel und Methodenwechsel: Eine historisch-

anthropologische Skizze, in Historische Methode, ed. Christian Meier and Jrn Rsen
(Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch, 1988), 1361. For an English translation of the
essay see Transformations of Experience and Methodological Change: A Historical-
Anthropological Essay, in The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing
Concepts, trans. Todd Samuel Presner et al. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
2002), 4599.
18 Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century

Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973); White, The Content of the
Chartier Genre between Literature and History 139

more evident by imaginary biographies or histories that have appropri-

ated the techniques of authentication and proof proper to scientific
writing (notes, quotations, references).19
Is it reasonable to assume that because the form is the same, the
content is identical? Or that the regime of truth about the past is the
same in historical accounts and novelistic writing? I do not think so.
Quints claim about the need to identify the formal marks that allow
us to recognize a text as literary (even if the word could be anachro-
nistic) has a corollary: to characterize the criteria that permit designat-
ing historical discourse as scientific, if we understand by such a term
what Certeau has described in his book Lcriture de lhistoire as la pos-
sibilit dtablir un ensemble de rgles permettant de contrler des
oprations proportionnes la production dobjets dtermins (the
possibility of conceiving an ensemble of rules allowing control of opera-
tions adapted to the production of specific objects or ends) (Ecriture de
lhistoire, 64; Writing, 103). It is perhaps a way of thinking that there is
no contradiction between rhetoric and proof and that the blurring of
generic distinctions does not necessarily mean the identity of epistemo-
logical differences.20

Roger Chartier is directeur dtudes at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences
Sociales (Paris) and Annenberg Visiting Professor of History at the University of
Pennsylvania.

Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni-
versity Press, 1987); Michel de Certeau, Lcriture de lhistoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1975);
Paul Ricoeur, Temps et rcit, 3 vols. (Paris: Seuil, 198385). For an English translation of
Certeau see The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1988). For an English translation of Ricoeur see Time and Narrative, trans. Kath-
leen McLaughlin and David Pellauer, 3 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
198488).
19 Among others, see the two imaginary biographies written by Max Aub, Vida y

obra de Luis Alvarez Petrea (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1971), and Jusep Torres Campalans
(Barcelona: Ediciones Destino, 1999).
20 See Carlo Ginzburg, History, Rhetoric, and Proof (Hanover, NH: University Press

of New England, 1999).