Notes and Fragments

Genre Fiction and "The Origin of the Work of Art"

Nancy J. Holland

I

FIRST, A CONFESSION. Like, I suspect, many of my readers, I am an unpublished fiction writer. Unlike most of the closet fiction writers in academia, however, I write genre fiction. The question that immediately follows is how that writing is related to the intellectual work I do in philosophy.

This question, of course, is open to a broad range of answers, from the possibility that the two aren't related at all, to potential Freudian answers it might take years of therapy to unearth. Teaching informs one's life, however, as much as the reverse, and in teaching Martin Heidegger's "The Origin of the Work of Art" to my Metaphysics class last year, I began to understand at least one dimension of the appeal that writing genre fiction has for me as a philosopher.

But first, let me explain what I mean by genre fiction. In what follows, I will be referring primarily to four forms of genre fiction that have clear roots in the nineteenth century in Western Europe and North America: two gender-segregated genres, the western and the romance, and two gender-marked genres, science fiction and detective novels. I will be comparing these to two other forms of "popular culture" that also developed in the nineteenth century and have, I would argue, similar relationships to the older, more "legitimate," more elite art forms which they closely resemble: photography ¹ and popular music, [End Page 216] especially those forms of popular music such as ragtime, blues, jazz, and rock that are informed by the African-American experience in the United States. ²

These "low brow" art forms all appear to have arisen out of the growth of the middle class in developing parts of the world during the nineteenth century and the correlative confluence of greater leisure, greater aggregate prosperity, and higher levels of education across a broader spectrum of society. Further, these art forms all combine the surface appearance of their respective "high brow" correlate arts with the reassurance of repetition that is the cornerstone of the folk arts with which they are also correlated. Each of these forms of popular culture balances itself, then, between a demand for more and more "works of art" (and/or class aspirations based on the appearance of such) and a demand for the familiar in a rapidly changing, materially challenging world.

Thus, photography gives us a frozen and thereby purified visual reality, an icon of memory to which we can return at will. The truth it reveals is most often starker than that of folk painting and portraiture, but also gives the appearance of being free from the subjectivity of the artist. Great iconic photographs such as the kiss on V-E day, I have heard it said, become more real than the reality they encapsulated.

Popular music similarly combines often amazing musical complexity (which is not unknown, although rarer, in western folk music) with the reassurance of a form that not only repeats itself within a song, but also between songs of the same genre. Thus, blues can be recognized by both the minor chords in its melodies and the characteristic rhyme pattern of its lyrics. Moreover, most western popular music, even to some extent free-form jazz, has a familiar and reassuring beginning-middle-end structure, both melodically and dynamically, that locates a listener immediately within the song's "story-arc." ³

This same beginning-middle-end structure is one clear hallmark of genre fiction. Another is repetition. We all immediately know the plot of a detective novel or science fiction adventure: where it will begin, what the key stages of the story will be, and how it will end—not just happily, but with a specific form of reassuring outcome, be it the victory of well-intentioned intelligence over cunning evil or humanity's ability to survive even the most alien (and so most familiar) of threats. At the same time, genre fiction also represents a form of truth either "real," as in the western, or "ideal," as in the romance. Here, again, there is a [End Page 217] resonance with the folk stories from which these genres evolved, combined with the illusion of "objectivity" from an educated and distant author.

Finally, each of these fiction genres produce works that are not only repetitions in the abstract, but also repeatable in the particular, that is, they create iconic moments to which readers can return over and over again to reassure themselves of the idealized reality represented by the work. Good films based on genre novels catch these icons and give them visual form: Rhett Butler carrying Scarlett O'Hara up the staircase; Shane riding off alone into the sunset; the witness declaring his guilt and absolving Perry Mason's client; Darth Vader in his black cape striding the corridors of the Death Star.

While genre fiction, so defined, is often thought of as a conservative art form, I would like to argue that a closer look at how such writing functions, taken in light of Martin Heidegger's "The Origin of the Work of Art," might allow us to understand such works as potentially subversive. This subversive capacity of some genre fiction arises, on this view, from the fact that their supposed verisimilitude combined with their function as almost mythic idealizations of our cultural values can reveal the hidden difference between ideology and real social relations. This capacity, moreover, is there in spite—or perhaps because—of the fact that the way in which these genres highlight the contrasts between social myth and social reality can be so subtle as to be almost invisible even to those, like myself, who create them.

II

One way in which all of the art forms listed above achieve their quality of reassurance is through the apparent clarity of their medium. Photographs seem to give us an unmediated visual reality. Popular music seems to offer a pure expression of emotion in both music and lyrics (which most often reinforce each other's emotional validity). The language of genre fiction is similarly transparent. Readers are meant to feel as if they are experiencing the story, rather than reading it. Thus, "artful" language that would call attention to itself is a serious flaw in this kind of writing. We are not meant to think, "Boy, that's beautiful. I'd never thought about it that way before"; we are supposed to think "Okay, what's going to happen next." This is one major difference between The Name of the Rose, say, and The Sign of the Four, between Wuthering Heights and Gone with the Wind. This transparency of medium [End Page 218] is what allows these popular art forms to create an illusory world that we can know in advance will be, or rather feel, both "real" and safe.

For this reason, one might be tempted to say in Heidegger's terms that these popular art forms are not works of art at all, but rather a kind of linguistic equipment the purpose of which is to make us feel secure in a changing and challenging world. In Heidegger's words, "In fabricating equipment [the material] is used, and used up. It disappears into usefulness. The material is all the better and more suitable the less it resists perishing in the equipmental being of the equipment. By contrast [the work of art] does not cause the material to disappear, but rather causes it to come forth for the very first time. . . ." ⁴ What these genres do, and do as part of their essential nature, is to make their own existence as works invisible, to make the worlds they present to us seem both natural and inevitable. They are the epitome of what Roland Barthes calls "readerly" texts. ⁵

We must remember, however, that for Heidegger even relatively "readerly" works of art, such as the Van Gogh shoes (as he describes them ⁶) or C. F. Meyer's poem "Roman Fountain," are, or can be, "the truth of being setting itself to work" (p. 36). That is, they disclose or create a world, even in concealing it, even in creating the sort of bourgeois illusions of order and stability that Barthes traces in such detail in S/Z. Barthes himself suggests that the text of Balzac's story can be unwoven precisely because it is "as though, having filled the text but obsessively fearing that it is not incontestably filled, the discourse insisted on supplementing it with an et cetera of plentitudes" (p. 217). The literary realism of "Sarrasine" discloses its own enclosure, if nothing else, to the extent to which it overcompensates, as it were, embroiders itself too much and so indicates where the weakness in the fabric an be found.

But the Balzac story Barthes dissects is not genre fiction. Presumably, like the Van Gogh shoes, it rises to a level worthy of comment in part because of a textual/visual richness (or over-richness) that reveals a world it might at some level have meant to conceal. That is just what genre fiction does not do. Its created reality is not only transparent, but also flat, without depth, something one returns to not to discover some new richness, but to see the same thing, the exact same thing, again. What can this obsession with a safe reality disclose? Perhaps a clue can be found in the fact that the "reality" of genre fiction is not at all the realism of a Balzac—quite the contrary.

The reality of genre fiction, it must be remembered, is reassuring by [End Page 219] virtue of the fact that it is not "real," but rather an internally coherent, idealized "reality," much like a photograph. It is very like our reality in many ways—even in science fiction, where the "reality," the humanity, of the characters is played off against the exoticism of their circumstances—but it is a reality in which things are as we wish they were. This is why transparency is so important to these genres. Were the medium to call attention to itself, it would instantly remind us that its world is not ours and thus destroy the very illusion it must create. "Sarrasine," by contrast, is too real to be genre fiction.

III

What I would like to point out, however, is that precisely because Balzac's world is grittier, more real, than Jules Verne's, we may be seduced more easily into accepting its apparent inevitability. Verne's science fiction, conversely, by presenting just a slightly different, better world, may have the paradoxical effect of making us less content with the one in which we live. Genre fiction, then, has at least the potential to be as subversive as "literary" fiction, because it can work against, rather than reinforce, the process of normalization that Barthes, at least, finds at work in Balzac.

Not that all genre fiction does this. Perhaps even most does not. I would like to make two claims, however. The first is that good genre fiction clearly does do this and often does so without violating the strict rules of the genre. The works of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brönte (but not Margaret Mitchell, whose Gone with the Wind violates the cardinal rule of the genre, the happy ending), Zane Grey, Larry McMurtry, Edgar Allan Poe, Walter Mosley, H. G. Wells, and Ursula K. le Guin all can be considered "middle brow" genre fiction because of their ability to question within the reproduction of the selected genre. The same is true of great photography—Matthew Brady, Ansel Adams, Richard Avedon—and good popular music, as the recent "rediscovery" of Carlos Santana and Bob Dylan's Oscar attest. All of this should be familiar enough.

But I would like to take my argument one step further to claim that even works squarely in the middle of these genres of popular culture can serve to subvert the social order they seemingly replicate and ostensibly reassure us about. Some supporting evidence for this claim might be found in the disappearance of the western novel. Why is this particular genre, so overwhelmingly popular for so many years, all but [End Page 220] absent from bookstores these days, except in the inverted form found in works such as McMurtry's, while the other genres under consideration continue to thrive?

One reason that the particular form of reassuring fantasy the western represents is less central now in popular culture may be that the primary function of the western is to help us believe that the solitary righteous individual can triumph over chaos and evil. In the last decade or two, this argument would go, the solitary (white collar, male) individual has had access, or has been led by the culture to believe he has access, to power and wealth in ways in which nineteenth-century male readers, and even readers in the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, may have felt that they did not, at least not as individuals (as opposed to members of families, social classes, or business organizations). Given the individualistic ideology of our culture, these earlier readers may have found in westerns a vicarious freedom of individual action they were denied in their own lives. At the same time—and this is my point—westerns may have served to remind them of the autonomy they had been promised by our culture, and thus of what they lost in being co-opted by the corporate/industrial world. Shane, on this view, would be the favored reading of The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit, but perhaps not of Generation X dot.com workers who understand themselves, rightly or wrongly, to be genuinely empowered as individuals in our contemporary world. ⁷

A second clue to the subversive potential of genre fiction can be seen in the way romance novels have recently tracked the concerns of women as those concerns are interpreted and expressed by the mass media; in so doing, romance depictions have remained ahead of the actual situation of the majority of women. These novels, then, pull their readers into a different if not necessarily better world than most women actually live in, socioculturally as well as emotionally. Two major changes in the romance novel began in the late 1970s. First, the traditional perky, virtuous heroine was transformed into a woman characterized more by her strength and integrity. After generations of portraying working "girls" who wanted nothing more than marriage in their lives, romance novels started championing the working woman's right to have a lifelong career. Second, and perhaps more significantly, woman was granted, within the genre, the right to her own sexuality. "Spicy" series romances became, by the 1980s, if not soft-core pornography, at least fictionalized manuals on how to have better sex and, more subversively, on how to help your partner become a better lover. Then, [End Page 221] in the 1990s, motherhood became a dominant theme in the romance genre, just as a new generation of young women, already sexually freer and career-oriented, began to wonder how they might "have it all." Certainly "it all" still means first and foremost "a good man" in romance novels, but fulfillment has come to include more than just that, and more than most women still have. Compromise, current romance seems to say quite clearly, but never, ever settle.

Genre fiction does not create entirely new worlds (not even the worlds that science fictions seems to create, which must always be variations on an already given world), but it does disclose our world as less than the ideal reality that genre fiction reproduces. Just as photographs reveal a purified visual reality and popular music a purified emotional one, genre fiction reveals a world in which the good guys always win, love conquers all, the bad guys always get caught, and humans always prevail. In disclosing this to us, genre writing gives us not "truth" but worlds just a little bit different from our own, familiar enough to reassure us, but also, I would argue, different enough to show us ways in which we might make our world a little bit better.

Which would remove at least some of the ethical and political reservations that might be raised about my moonlighting as a writer of genre fiction. When confronted by colleagues who write literary fiction about the frivolity of my genre, at least I can say that the sort of books I enjoy writing, whatever their limitations as literature, may for all that subvert, one transparent story at a time, the cultural regime of bourgeois normalization just as well as the more legitimate literary forms that their muses lead them to create.

 

Hamline University

I would like to acknowledge the contribution the students in my Spring term 2000 Metaphysics class made to my thinking on this topic, and express my appreciation to my colleagues in Hamline's English Department, Kristina Deffenbacher and Michael Reynolds, to my husband, and to Nancy Easterlin of the University of New Orleans, all of whom made helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.

Notes

1. For other views of photography, see Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981).

2. See also my "Purple Passion: Images of Female Desire in 'When Doves Cry,'" Cultural Critique 10 (1988): 89-98.

3. I owe this insight, and many others, to Susan McClary of the University of California at Los Angeles.

4. Martin Heidegger, "The Origin of the Work of Art," in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper, 1975), p. 46.

5. See Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), p. 4.

6. On this limitation, see my "Heidegger and Derrida Redux: A Close Reading," in Hermeneutics and Deconstruction, Hugh Silverman and Don Ihde, eds. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985), pp. 219-26, and "Two as an Odd Number: On Cumming on Derrida on Schapiro on Heidegger on Van Gogh," Philosophy Research Archives 13 (1982): 383-92.

7. Michael Reynolds suggests that the waning popularity of the Western may (also) reflect the transformation of the West itself from a powerful cultural myth to a "mere" historical epoch. The "cowboy" motif continues to play an important role, however, in both romance and science fiction, where the contrast is often between the individualistic hero and his social embeddedness (Han Solo does need both Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia after all). This indicates that it may have been the starker individualism of the Western, more than its mythic qualities, that fell from popular favor.