The dynamics and meaning of genre; Viktor Shklovsky, Kiyoshi Kasai, Genre X, and Hollywood
There is a classic Sartrean point that existence precedes essence — that something takes on a state of being prior to any meaning that can be assigned to it. Take a knife; it is firstly a literal object, an ontological existence free of inherent meaning: literally speaking, it is a slab of sharpened metal. Subsequently, this bare existence takes on its essence, the ability for meaning and purpose to be assigned to it, thereby allowing us to call it something like a knife. In many situations, it is easy enough to understand this viewpoint as being that the mundane and literal exist prior to the abstract and profound.
To some, this line of thought might read too much like a pretentious 13 year old’s thought experiments. Many a wannabe postmodernist has reiterated Sartre for the purpose of claiming that all meaning is, like, an illusion, man. Yet, regardless of such stereotypes, the intangibility of meaning is an important concern to tackle when forming even the most simple ideas. Especially when it comes to the issues that are constructed and maintained within predominantly social spaces.
For those objects that exist directly within the comprehension of humans, and not in any physical sense, the implications of such existentialist theories can be dire. In such cases, it could be said that their existence and their essence are fundamentally equivalent. It is not merely that humans cannot comprehend their true state of being due to the subjectivity of our perspectives, but that there is no true state of being for such objects in the first place. When such radical objects collide with conventional definitions of being, their fundamental existence becomes doubtful. To take an example that is highly pertinent to the description of this blog, do mystery novels exist? Or, to drill right down to the core of the issue, what is the purpose of genre if we grant that it does not “exist” in any direct sense?
Leaving aside any philosophical jargon, it is self-evident that genre predominantly “exists” as a pragmatic construct, not out of any inherent purpose. Every time I have encountered confusion between competing viewpoints of what constitutes a “mystery novel”, the pragmatic consequences of taxonomy have been at the heart of the discussion. The chief subject has usually been the function of genre as a kind of metadata, one that separates media based on pseudo-arbitrary and agreed upon criteria in order to minimise the impact of choice overload. Some might say that you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but if you can’t find something similar to judge them by, there would be no rational means of selecting unread books beyond random chance.
When faced with the overwhelming incomprehensibility of an object such as genre, one that is entirely constructed within human imaginations, people chiefly rely on the practical rather than the esoteric in order to provide structure and meaning where none exists. Although there is no source for any truly meaningful definition of where mystery begins and ends, we are able to trace an answer from the end result: Much like pornography, we may not know what makes a mystery novel a mystery novel, but we also at least know it when we see it — usually.
However, this slightly circular and twisted logic only takes us partway to our destination. We may intuitively understand that genre is a socially constructed non-existence that forms to fulfill the innate desire for categorisation and abstraction that all human beings have. But this desire cannot explain the particular shape and form of genre beyond the vague notion that genres are a necessary idea. Mystery novels exist to fulfill the need to separate mystery novels from non-mystery novels, but such tautologies are insufficient to explain why mystery novels separate themselves with the traits that they do.
It might be posited that the separations are actually arbitrary. After all, we can only perceive the world through the arbitrary social constructs that we all inherit. Similar social separations, such as colours, are decided upon with relative disregard for any meaning, and yet we implicitly accept these boundaries. Could genres be the same, a capriciously decided set of delineations that split and combine stories into boxes regardless of any meaningful comparisons? Fortunately, we can tackle this problem with the exact same toolbox that allowed us to comprehend it in the first place. Even if genres exist for arbitrary reasons, they may still be meaningful. What truly matters is whether the society is able to successfully construct non-arbitrary meaning in place of their dubious existence.
The means by which we can calculate and understand these collective constructs is by way of deliberate and careful inquiry into a kind of cultural liquid dynamics; by observing the peculiar features of how society has filled these buckets we call “genre”, we can ascertain estimates of the forces that led to their creation. Why, for example, do mysteries often contain murders? Is it simply a natural avenue for drama, due to a human fascination with violence? Maybe, as the formalists argued, is it a means of bringing chaos to the world for the sake of creating defamilisarisation from the mundanity of the ordinary world? Or, should we turn to the theories of Marxian mystery theorists like Kiyoshi Kasai, who argues that murder exists in mysteries as a dialectically synthetical creation of a culture’s relationship with mass death and war? Regardless of which answer is most true, the essential conclusion one must understand is that all of these theories are partially true, at least insomuch as they all inform the shape of what constitutes a “mystery novel”. Therefore, the question of “what a mystery novel is” becomes tied up in the complex task of understanding the shape and dynamics of this soup of hypothetical pseudo-meanings that have become retroactively important by way of the genre itself.
Imagine, if you will, that you have entered a dark room. Within this room is a television set, a gaming console, and its associated controller. On the television is the visual feedback from a video game being run on this gaming console. It shows a man standing adjacent to a 2 dimensional world, not dissimilar to the presentation of a classic RPG like Final Fantasy. You are handed the controller and told to move the man to the right side of the screen. I would wager that the vast majority of people, especially those with any experience playing video games, would effortlessly and instantly push the analog stick to the right and succeed in their goal. However, what I would like to emphasise is not the ultimate action that people would take, but the effortless way that a bizarre and abstract task can be synthesised and completed autonomously through social osmosis.
In his 1917 essay Art, as Device, Viktor Shklovsky put forward his theory of the autonomatisation of prosaic language. He writes:
It is the automatization process which explains the laws of our prosaic speech, its understructured phrases and its half-pronounced words. This process is ideally expressed in algebra, which replaces things with symbols. In quick practical speech, words are not spoken fully; only their initial sounds are registered by the mind.
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Algebraizing, automatizing a thing, we save the greatest amount of perceptual effort: things are either given as a single feature, for instance, a number, or else they follow a formula of sorts without ever reaching consciousness.
In other words, much like the automatic reaction by which you can turn your unconscious understanding into the action of controlling a video game, Shklovsky argues that the prosaic, everyday language used outside of art is an automatic process, mathematical and pragmatic in design. In contrast, the poetic and artistic behaves in the precise opposite manner. In Shklovsky’s words:
This is how life becomes nothing and disappears. Automatization eats things, clothes, furniture, your wife, and the fear of war.
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And so this thing we call art exists in order to restore the sensation of life, in order to make us feel things, in order to make a stone stony. The goal of art is to create the sensation of seeing, and not merely recognizing, things; the device of art is the ‘defamiliarization’ of things and the complication of the form, which increases the duration and complexity of perception, as the process of perception is, in art, an end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is the means to live through the making of a thing; what has been made does not matter in art.
Shklovsky taps into an important and ever present distinction within human communication. When we hear the phrase “good morning” every day, it becomes optimised by recognition, an unconscious and algebraic process of quickly identifying the likely meaning by way of our memory: However, for art to succeed, it must escape this automatised process of recognition; it must move from the familiar to the defamiliar in order to force the audience to negotiate with the meaning that they do not merely remember unconsciously but understand through conscious thought.
However, even Shklovsky saw that this process had its limits. Although he rejected the conventional theory of “the law of the economy of creative effort” as a confusion of the function of regular and artistic language, he ultimately understood that artistic language was bounded by its own restrictions of pragmatic artistic economy.
Therefore, we need to discuss the laws of spending and economy in poetic language based on its own workings, not on prosaic language.
It is for this reason that art cannot be composed purely by defamiliarised language in every case. Sometimes, brevity demands the automatised processes of the brain are used in order to quickly comprehend that which does not need to be given Shklovsky’s “sensation of seeing”, which is unique to artistic language. However, Shklovsky ultimately saw the measure of a skilful artist in their ability to purge unnecessary familiarised language from their work. A well worn metaphor that has become a trope in its own right would, according to Shklovsky, need to be replaced precisely because that which can be recognised might become autonomous, allowing the art to be consumed unconsciously rather than consciously.
This would, seemingly, position “genre fiction” as the ultimate enemy of Shklovsky’s formalist perspective. While an unoriginal metaphor or lazy description can familiarise language, genre risks familiarising a whole work of fiction itself. Genre allows the audience to unconsciously and autonomously comprehend the shape of a story merely by recognition. Just as cultural memory allows you to autonomously move the stick on a video game to control a character on the screen, it also allows you to perceive an “elf” in a sword and sorcery type fantasy story purely by way of your unconscious processes. According to Shklovsky, this neuters art of its impact, you would perceive the elf only by cultural recognition, regardless of any defamiliarising language, and therefore not consciously experience any of its “elfiness” as a fresh “sensation of seeing”.
This, however, begs the question: If the thoroughly familiarised contours of genre fiction are the enemy of the purpose of art, why have humans maintained genre so forcefully for so long? There is, of course, the argument that genre is actually falling by the wayside. Experimental and postmodern forms of fiction have long sought to purge media of all familiarity and patterns in an effort of pure individuality. The advocates of the styles of nouveau roman fiction and autofiction most strongly embraced this rejection of narrativity, and thereby attempted to deny genre all meaning. However, even these forms of experimental fiction came to be defined by their most common patterns, thereby becoming a practice in autonomous understanding in and of themselves. And while there is some evidence of audiences diversifying their taste in genre, this does not represent any attempt to fully abandon the concept.
Instead, the trend has been towards increasing genre familiarisation in media. Nothing quite exemplifies this like the trend of Hollywood’s “extended universe” franchises in the stead of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. In these kinds of stories, the excessively familiarised elements are the whole point. Rather than encountering a fresh “sensation of seeing” in each individual film, the audience builds an unconscious recognition of a huge cast of characters, allowing the creators to abbreviate considerable amounts of the economy of creative effort.
There is a slightly snobbish argument put forward that this trend is purely a pragmatic exercise for the benefit of “simple” audiences: that audiences prefer these thoroughly familiarised stories for the sake of simple entertainment, without requiring conscious thought. However, I am far more convinced by theories that consider the sophistication of audiences, such as those put forward by Japanese theorist Kiyoshi Kasai. Kasai has long argued for the existence of a “Genre X” in Japan, one that embraces the excesses of recognised and autonomous genre tropes for the purposes of not only entertainment but also more sophisticated literary purposes.
According to Kasai, “Genre X”, a neologism of his coining that refers to the youth media that make up “otaku culture”, is particularly prone to these excesses. In his essay The End of Modernist Literature and Light Novels, Kasai entirely rejects the modernist, and especially formalist, perspective that the automatisation effects of genre reduces art to mere entertainment. Rather, Genre X:
…is incapable of inheriting the ethical and logical duty supported by modernist literature up to now. However, Genre X carries too many excesses to be reduced to ‘mere entertainment.’ It cannot be resolved in the status of ‘mere entertainment’ that Hollywood Industrialisation has achieved, and moreover, it is bizarrely excessive enough to be theoretically unevaluable by modernist literature standards.
Modernist literature refers to the broader framework of “scientific” literature analysis shared by formalists and their structuralist brethren. Kasai argues that Genre X flies in the face of their understanding of “genre fiction”. Rather than reducing the value of a work to mere recognition for the sake of entertainment, he argues that the compounding metafiction and discourses within the genre allow for the recognition of complex artistic value — beyond what is possible under the normal economy of creative effort. Take, for example, his analysis of the issue of sekaikei within Genre X:
One must possess a bare minimum of background knowledge related to concepts like sekaikei in order to value Maijou’s oeuvre fairly. The same can be said about many works from Genre X. Most anime and games are accumulations of influences and interpretations from preceding works. They are made from the start in a way that hampers the consumers from enjoying and praising them without a fair bit of background knowledge.
Kasai even goes so far as rejecting the formalist argument that artistic language can stand apart from the process of automatisation:
Naturally, this ideal is naught but a deception. Looking at it from a text perspective, modernist novels are accumulations of imitations and influences from previous works. Phrasing it another way, they are naught but fragments of autonomously proliferating tales. The minute differences brought about by the impossibility of perfect mimicry barely manage to establish a work’s individuality and authorship. The modernist essence in works and authors comes from focusing on those relative differences and putting them on a pedestal.
Rather than the modernist hope for the disappearance of genre as literature escapes from the automatisation imposed by recognisable tropes, Kasai argues that:
The disappearance of independence and self-conclusive essence in works will surely make the reliance on surrounding knowledge compulsory. If that tendency continues to accelerate, genres will be divided into infinitely finer categories.
In other words, while modernists were concerned that genre could only erode the artistic value of literature, Kasai makes the opposite case. He suggests that while literary language must occasionally defamiliarise concepts for the sake of the individuality of the work, intentional automatisation is equally important. It is through this process of automatic recognition that complex metafictional works can achieve deeper engagement than is possible with a work that attempts to perpetuate the illusion that it exists in a bubble separated from the rest of literature.
In this manner, Kasai puts forward a positive purpose for genre that manages to fill the hole left by the pragmatic necessity for categorisation as already discussed. While formalists accurately assessed the behaviour of automatisation as a means of non-conscious engagement, they failed to correctly ascertain why genres remained important beyond a snobbish consideration for the mere “entertainment of the masses”. In reality, genre exists in all literature, even so-called “pure literature”. Take, for example, works such as Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov. It is constructed entirely out of the defamiliarised poetic language that the formalists sought; but between the lines of its defamiliarised imagery are the thoroughly automatised processes of allusion and metatextual purpose. It is not conscious engagement with the bizarreness of the text that gives it its meaning, but through the automatic recognition of its deliberate similarities and differences compared to what came before. In other words, “literary history” itself provides a genre that cloaks all of the so-called “pure” literature that attempt to escape the automatising effects of genre.
Let us return to the beginning of this discussion. What “meaning” does genre have? Obviously, as a socially constructed concept, there is no inherent meaning in a genre. That which we call a “mystery novel” can be whatever we decide it is. However, there is purpose behind genre once it becomes unconsciously perceived by the author and their audience. Once perceived, a genre takes on the automatising process as described by the formalists, and is able to create a sense of recognition beyond the mere contents of the text.
Some may choose to reject this process, and attempt to escape to a world of purely defamiliarised art. In reality, this is an illusion. As the world becomes more interconnected, so too will our literature. No matter the desires of some literary theorists, literature that exists in the modern world must have some degree of narrativity in order to appeal to the complex demands of current audiences. Some postmodernists have attempted to escape this narrativity in order to escape genre altogether. But examples such as the MCU and Genre X demonstrate how this approach is foolish. In reality, genre provides a means of automatising the structure that facilitates depth itself. This allows for the heightening of a work’s individuality, which is what creates the defamiliarised “sensation of seeing” that Shklovsky argued for back in 1917. For the clearest example of how this dynamic has come to dominate the modern age of literature, and has thoroughly expunged the assumptions of the modernists, one only needs to look at the largest growth genre of the age of the internet: fanfiction.
To outsiders, fanfiction might seem like any other genre of literature. At most, it is understood as a means of constructing stories to satisfy the particular interests of a fandom without the pretence of originality. Instead, fanfiction has its own particular conventions that fly in the face of the independence of literature advocated by modernists. The purpose of fanfiction is not merely to flaunt copyright by way of directly imitating an existing property, but instead to automatise that which is taken for granted in order to maximise the economy of creative effort.
Take, for example, an alternate universe reimagining of the SitCom Friends as a post-apocalyptic survival scenario. In such a work, the ordinarily defamiliar characters and their dynamics would instead become familiarised to readers. This would allow the defamiliar, the particulars of the post-apocalyptic scenario, to rise to the front of the conscious mind without needing to establish that which is not essential. The continued synthesis of the familiar and defamiliar would allow the work to take on a dialectically synthesised style that is completely impossible for a traditionally independent work of literature.
This is, fundamentally, the future of literature. And in this future, we find a meaning for genre where none originally existed. While formalists worried that genre might familiarise and automatise the whole world of a fiction, that is precisely the effect that genre fiction is able to exploit in order to reach toward brand new styles of storytelling. Despite the best intentions of the formalists, we are not heading towards a post-genre world, but instead a world of neo-genre, where the previously pragmatic boundaries drawn for the sake of convenience are reimagined and synthesised into whole new frontiers of meaning.
