Let’s all agree to just ignore the gap in time between my last post and this one—working full time in an understaffed office takes a lot out of you.
Rather than its time, the subject of that aforementioned prior post will be of issue. I think, for the most part, that post succeeds in explaining the basics of why genre matters in the abstract. However, something so abstract might be a little challenging to properly grasp. Perhaps, in taking on the points of that post, one might become convinced that genre fiction is not essentially problematic; that a genre label is no impediment to “literary value” as conventionally understood.
While this point of view is moderately refreshing compared to the overwhelmingly mediocre arguments that position “literature” and “genre fiction” as entirely distinct from one another, recognising the “literary value” of genre fiction independent of its label only gets us halfway there. Literary snobbishness is an irrational prejudice, but freeing oneself of it is not the same as discerning any entirely alternate system.
This might all be overwhelmingly esoteric once again, but the essential point is that the arguments for genre in abstract mostly serve to relieve people of tired and unproven prejudices: it is the more specific role of genre in practice that best illustrates the entire place of genre in the wider system of literature. Subsequently, it is time to talk about the primary subject of this blog with a compromising degree of candour. What meaning is there in the Japanese mystery fiction so lauded on this blog? Specifically, what distinguishes the value of the shinhonkaku school of mystery fiction from a genre-free look at literature at large?
What is shinhonkaku, anyway?
No, seriously, what is it? I covered the encyclopaedic history of the style, among others, in one of my earlier posts on this blog. However, the definitions offered in that post mostly serve the interests of literary historians and archivists: it clarifies why “novel A” might be considered representative of “school X” in contrast to “novel B” from so and so period and so on and so on. Important to be sure, but of limited use in our inquiry into the meaning and purpose of the genre in a more philosophical sense.
Regardless, we should recount some of these basics so we can clearly envision our subject. Shinhonkaku mystery fiction—an epithet variously translated as neo-authentic or neo-orthodox mystery fiction—refers to the modern boom in puzzle oriented mysteries published in Japan, especially in the period between 1987 and the entrenchment of the light novel boom during the 2000s. So, basically, the 1990s. Although, given that books in the shinhonkaku style are still a relatively powerful force in Japanese publishing, it might not be entirely correct to offer any kind of end date.
The primary attribute that separates these shinhonkaku novels from other kinds of crime fiction is their deliberate attempt to recreate aspects of the golden age of detective fiction. Whether inspired by subversive voices in the West or by the general discursive frame of postmodernity, shinhonkaku authors are noted for the sense of “play” with which they approach the genre—and especially for their use of metatext. Take, for example, The Decagon House Murders, by Yukito Ayatsuji: A 1987 novel in which the main cast are each named after famous mystery authors and the characters are genre savvy enough to frequently cite the tropes they encounter. Or, have a read over the cast list with which Nisio, Isin opens his 2002 novel Strangulation: Kubishime Romanticist; it blatantly lists a character’s role as the satsujinki—murderer. A pretty bold hint as far as these things go.
In his essay The Grandest Game in the World, John Dickson Carr defined mystery fiction as:
A hoodwinking contest, a duel between author and reader. “I dare you,” says the reader, “to produce a solution which I can’t anticipate.” “Right!” says the author, chuckling over the consciousness of some new and legitimate dirty trick concealed up his sleeve. And then they are at it – pull-devil, pull-murderer – with the reader alert for every dropped clue, every betraying speech, every contradiction that may mean guilt.
While Carr imagined a spirit of gamesmanship between author and reader, shinhonkaku is slightly different. As a deliberate and nostalgic return to the past genre, shinhonkaku is sufficiently respectful of this classic game between author and reader; however, it is not exactly satisfied with merely recreating the past either. The shared understanding of this well trodden genre, as held by both the writers and readers of shinhonkaku fiction, means that the modern contest is no longer between author and audience, but between past and present. A modern mystery author must take the thoroughly digested remains of the genre and reanimate them into a new shape. As the shinhonkaku author Outarou Maijou put it:
The mystery genre is basically a project with predefined themes, motifs, and techniques to begin with. Alibi tricks, corpse switches, codes, locked rooms, do you think I invented any of that stuff? It’s all other people’s inventions. My job is to write an original story using those. Great detectives, suspects, culprits, Watsons; it feels like all the patterns have already been used up. Yet, I manage to write my own novels.
In other words, if we were to define classical mystery fiction as a game between author and audience in the art of narrative trickery, where mutual competition is utilised to create an original and compelling plot: we can now offer a more useful definition of shinhonkaku mystery fiction as a contemporary game of competition between the author and the database of genre, where the conventions of genre are challenged and reformulated in order to find newly compelling plots and narrative trickery.
An aside on the general purpose of art
In my prior post, we covered Viktor Shklovsky’s exploration of the purpose of art. According to Shklovsky, “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.” However, this decisively modernist perspective is difficult to intuitively apply to a genre such as shinhonkaku, which came into existence during the height of postmodernity. Yet, as we’ll shortly see, Shklovsky’s insights are still decisively important regardless of their era.
Art is, when speaking to objective notions of value, absolutely meaningless. Every utilitarian function fulfilled by art is sufficiently indirect that it becomes simple to imagine a dozen different means to obtain the same objective without the art at all. George Orwell famously claimed that all art is propaganda, but it was that same George Orwell who in Politics and the English Language demonstrated that language has the prosaic potential for propaganda without any need for art. Art chiefly exists to fulfill the unique aesthetic preferences of humanity, who would otherwise be bored and confused by always taking the most direct path on every occasion.
Any discussion of the meaning and purpose of some category of artwork must reckon with the positive, rather than normative, role of meaning in criticism. Art does not have inherent meaning on its own, it has various meanings that collaboratively explain humanity’s particular fascination with particular arts. The purpose of The Iliad in dramatizing a shared mythology and elucidating the Greek metaphysics of destiny is fundamentally different from the purpose of the introspective and evocative prose of Vladimir Nabokov’s Despair—although they both share Shklovsky’s meta-purpose of communicating a “sensation”. Each work of art has its own purpose, determined by its exigent context: regardless of this context, all art achieves its independent purposes by evoking new sensations in the audience, this communicates the necessary information for understanding these independent purposes by immersing the audience in a desired experience.
In not so many words, all art exists to create sensations as articulated by Shklovsky, but the purposes of these sensations are chiefly reliant on historical and sociological context unique to each creator and each work, and therefore cannot be generalised to one singular metaphysics of meaning.
The particular purpose of shinhonkaku
As previously discussed, shinhonkaku exists as a reflection and reaction to the genres that came before it. Authors who were intimately aware of the tropes and mechanics of the previous golden age works became intrigued by the task of playing with these ideas and reformulating them into stories that fit the sensibilities of modern audiences. However, this desire was also shaped by the particular context of Japanese literature at the time—just as any art is altered by its context.
This full history of Japanese literature of the period is beyond the scope of this post: rather it needs a whole book; probably several, beginning with Otaku by Hiroki Azuma as far as options available in English. Regardless, here’s a rough primer: The 1990s was a decade where Japanese media became increasingly concerned with intertextual links between media. Azuma explained this via a model of database consumption, Kiyoshi Kasai instead relied on a model of dissipating individuality leading to a construction of meaning through widely recognised symbols. No matter the model used, it was indisputable that the works of the 1990s trended away from the modernist ideal of independent literature. Instead, works from the 1990s carried with them an expectation of genre awareness on the part of the audience that was readily exploited to create intertextual links and references as core parts of the works.
So, then, to return to our core concern of the purpose of shinhonkaku: Shinhonkaku exists to take a genre that had become thoroughly familiarised with age, and by reconstructing its elements from the ground up, create a fresh and new sensation. As previously argued, a genre functions chiefly to organise literature around shared, familiarised principles so as to focus in on the defamiliarised elements of the work in an economical manner. In modernity, this occurred at the prosaic level, as works attempted to stand as “individual” pieces. However, this ideal could not survive postmodernity, especially the otaku-ified Japan of the 1990s.
While literature from modernity could defamiliarise purely through the use of literary devices such as metaphor and allusion, in postmodernity, literature itself has become familiarised. No matter how intimately an audience is brought into the world of Soldier Island from Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, the setting itself is, as Shklovsky would put it, merely “recognised” instead of experienced as a “sensation of seeing”. Our familiarity with the tropes of literature itself impedes the artform’s purpose.
Therefore, the literature of postmodernity and beyond has abandoned any reliance on its independence and individuality. Instead of trying to trick the audience into ignoring their own familiarised knowledge, the links between literature are explicitly recognised and dealt with by the author. Instead of a game between author and audience to communicate a fresh sensation, postmodern authors must fight in a game between author and literature itself, as they extract the defamiliar from that which has already been thoroughly familiarised.
Perhaps we shall at some point return to this subject to more broadly describe the advantages of mystery fiction over other genres, and its particular purpose as separate from those other genres. However, I hope this discussion has at least brought the purpose of genre out of the shadow of abstraction and into sharper relief, as one can see the concepts discussed in my prior post in action. If not, well, I suppose there is always more work to be done.
