Do literary genres accord to something universal or essential in the human experience of the world?

Do literary genres accord to something universal or essential in the human experience of the world? Or is the existence of genres is a contingent matter, established by the course of literary history and not by some predictable pattern of human life? Plato and Aristotle wrote as if the structures they were describing were simply the givens of literary activity. They outlined and practiced certain literary types and they described clear rules for them. Certainly the way these ‘givens’ have then been treated in literary history lent them the aura of normativity.

In his Republic, Plato has Socrates explaining that literary art forms must have a moral purpose. In fact, by providing a kind of shadow life, literary texts are potentially quite dangerous to the ideal republic. Socrates observes that storytellers narrate past, present or future and use the form of pure narration or an imitative action, such as a drama, or a combination. Three modes thus emerge: the mode of direct poetic speech; the mode of speech through characters; and the mode which combines the two. Tragedy and comedy are delivered by means of the imitative, representational action of characters. The poet’s direct speech is found in the ‘dithyramb’. And epic poetry is the form that the third mode most often takes.

For his part, Aristotle classified the different types of poetry as ‘modes of imitation’ which could be differentiated accord to their means, their objects, or their manner of imitation. The ‘means’ of a verbal work is it formal characteristics like its rhythm or its language. The ‘object’ of the imitation has to do with the human action it is concerned with, and whether this is performed by someone who is good or bad. Aristotle was also concerned about whether the agent of some depicted action was superior, inferior or equal to us (the implied audience). ‘Manner’ has to do with whether the text is presented in dramatic or simple narrative form. 

This somewhat rudimentary system of classification is based on the kind of voice that is present in each text. And yet, that is not the discussion that Plato and Aristotle in fact began. Subsequent to them, theorists have either attempted to provide lists of different genres simply based on observation of existing literary works; or, they have tried to develop a system of literary genres in a more cohesive way. Aristotle’s alleged division of literary genres into epic, dramatic and lyric has provided the basis for not simply list-making, but for the development of entire schemes of genre.[1] These schemata have the power of appealing to their ‘naturalness’. Goethe, for example, distinguishes between the multiple genres in which literature can be found and the three ‘natural forms’, which are not simply quirks of cultural history, but essential – in some way ‘natural’.[2]

While the influence on the Western literary tradition of Aristotle in particular, and the Greek dramatists and poets with him, could not be underestimated, it is still the case that this view of genre fails on account of the way in which genres grow and overspill the three large barrels that are supposed to contain them. Whenever the three base types are deployed as a comprehensive scheme, they become a Procrustean Bed, subsuming difference rather than expressing it.

There have however been some more recent attempts to establish the universal and archetypal basis of literary forms like genre. The work of the Canadian critic Northrop Frye (1912-1991), sometimes labelled a ‘neo-Aristotelian’, bears some comparison with those of the structuralists, with whom he was roughly contemporaneous. Like a number of literary theorists in the twentieth century,[3] Frye felt embarrassed by the lack of scientific rigour in his discipline. He wrote:

If criticism exits, it must be an examination of literature in terms of a conceptual framework derivable from an inductive survey of the literary field. The word ‘inductive’ suggest some sort of scientific procedure. What if criticism is a science as well as an art?[4]

It seemed to be chiefly a matter of developing taste, of rating authors as if they were bottles of wine in a cellar. What Frye hoped to do was to develop a grand and objective system of literature. He held that this was possible because literature was itself systematic – that is, it was a tradition of writings that worked by dint of its conformity to certain deep patterns or laws. For example, literature was founded on four ‘narrative categories’: the comic, the romantic, the tragic and the ironic - which correspond to four mythoi: spring, summer, autumn and winter.

There is more to Frye’s complex system than that; elucidating it is not our purpose here. What Frye held that he had achieved was the quarantining of literature from the mess of history. According to fellow critic Terry Eagleton, for Frye,

Literature is not a way of knowing reality but a kind of collective utopian dreaming which has gone on throughout history, an expression of those fundamental human desires which have given rise to civilization itself, but which are never fully satisfied there.[5]

Literature emerges less from the individual impulse of genius but from the collective consciousness of the whole of human culture. Swimming in the wake of Victorian critics like Matthew Arnold, Frye saw that what literature offered civilization, at least as he conceived it, was a kind of religion in a new key. It offered the kind of mythic storehouse necessary for the flourishing of human life that religion had once offered.[6]

By its very sophistication and aesthetic quality, Frye’s system seems at once to fail. Its comprehensiveness and scope means that it is always susceptible to the charge that it simply trims off the differences between literary texts in order to fit them neatly into the system. It is not likely that it will be sensitive to variations. It also simply not viable to imagine a system of literature quarantined from history. Literary history is surely a subset of human history; how can the two be held apart? Furthermore, there is the powerful charge that Frye is providing a way to isolate literature from the most powerful social and moral questions – the very questions which great literature in its greatness seeks to address. Nevertheless: Frye’s intuition that there is within genre a quasi-religious sensibility is one that I shall pursue.

There is however another argument for a framework of essential generic forms and that lies in the work of the structuralists and formalists of the 1950s and 60s. The movement known as ‘structuralism’ began in the field of linguistics with the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. Saussure’s great insight was that linguistic signs are part of a system of such signs. The relation of the signs to the objects that they described was essentially arbitrary. What was more interesting was the relation of the particular sign to other signs within the system. Saussure’s insight was subsequently  applied to anthropology, literature and cultural studies – in which could be found other language-like sign systems. The founding principle of structuralist thought is that human practices of making meaning are shaped by the conventional relations between various signs. In this, it differs from Frye’s theory of archetypes.

However, the study of the phenomena of literature across cultures led structuralists to conclude that there were some anthropological constants. The work of the French structural anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss was crucial here. Levi-Strauss thought that the individual human mind in any given human society will always find the experience of story-making compelling; and there are only so many forms of narrative available. The functions of literary texts, written and oral, will always resemble one another in human cultures, whatever the differences. Despite the vast differences between the myth-making of different cultures, close comparison and analysis reveals their basic similarity. The human experience of time, for example, while it is very differently conceived in different cultures, is always still an experience of the body’s existence over the course of time. The human body is time-bound: it is born, it ages, and it dies. There is always, whoever you might be, a then and a now, and moment when now will become then. There will always be the human practice of narrating as human beings seek to give verbal expression to the experience of existing in a time-bound world as a time-bound being. The practice of story making, like the practice of music-making, is an attempt in some sense to orient oneself to time. Human neural pathways are such that make the formation of literary genres endemic to human societies.

But how far can this observation take us? The Russian scholar Vladimir Propp had already compiled an analysis of a vast array of folk tales by means of a sophisticated classification system in 1928. A.J. Greimas was able to make an even more diagrammable system in which the pieces of narratives were described as one of six kinds of ‘actant’. There was something impressively rigorous about this study that resembled the discipline of the hard sciences. At the same time, by echoing the clean lines and empirical logic of physics and chemistry, literary studies hoped to capture something of their intangible aura. The success of the sciences in replacing religion at the heart of modernity as a cult of knowledge was something to be envied. Was structuralism the way to capture some of the ground that science had seized? The failure of the attempt was rooted in the difficulty that structuralists had in showing that their systems were not simply banal; and if not banal, then highly subjective. Furthermore, as with Frye, it seems utterly counter-intuitive to attempt an analysis of the phenomena of literature in a way that sequesters it from the forces of history and the ideological interests that flow through history – since literature itself is as much about these kinds of things as it is about the eternal human condition. As Eagleton observes:

Structuralism is among other things one more of literary theory’s series of doomed attempts to replace religion with something as effective: in this case, with the modern religion of science.[7]

If there is a lesson to be learnt here, is that the universally human is always particularly expressed. We have human experiences here and now, and not then and there; our job in seeking to know what is truly human is not to discern the deep structures of these experiences – discernible as ‘deep structures’ because it is in this that they resemble the experiences of others - and count them as somehow more ontologically concrete in this aspect. These structural elements may be part of the total picture; but they cannot be its totality or its most concrete point or its inner meaning. But this is not thereby the licence for the disappearance of the universal altogether, as is found in a post-structuralist like Michel Foucault – who would count human being itself as a radically contingent concept and one that is ripe for the slaughter.

We should coulnt the existence of genres as a factor both of universal human experience and of the contingent events of history. We need not adopt Frye’s complex, beautiful but inherently unlikely system, nor become inducted into the high orders of the structuralist cult in order to maintain their insistence that the forms that literature takes are indicative of something universally human, and ‘objective’. The human brain will always tend to the framing of human experience in terms of the narrative forms available to it, and these will tend to share in certain readily discernible patterns: the tragic, the comic, the epic, the romantic, and so on. Literary texts will seek to imitate[8] actions in time in this way – and there really only are so many possibilities for human action. The differences between the sub-genres of texts are likely to be differences of character or setting. The Western and the Sci-Fi epic, for example, do not differ in essentials.[9]

But it is also the case that genres are shaped by contingent historical circumstances. They do not have a single, once-for-all shape. Criticism of literary works according to generic patterns have long since ceased (if they ever actually did) measuring them by their conformity to generic principles. As Jonathan Culler puts it, ‘a genre, in other words, is not simply a taxonomic class’.[10]

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[1] It is worth noting, with John Frow, that Aristotle in fact makes almost no mention of lyric at all. It was always the odd one out in that it is not a narrative genre. The threefold classification – epic, dramatic, lyric - becomes conventional only as late as the sixteenth century. Frow, p. 59.

[2] Ibid., p. 60.

[3] I.A. Richards and William Empson, for example.

[4] Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism : Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), p. 7.

[5] Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory : An Introduction (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983), p. 93.

[6] ‘Literature’ was not the subject of formal study in schools and universities until the mid-nineteenth century. When it did arise, it was the hope of Matthew Arnold and others that it would, in the first place, provide an alternative to declining religion and second, that it would be a subject that could be studied by the mass of people without need for learning Latin and Greek.  See my ‘May our literature save us’, Kategoria

[7] Eagleton, p. 122.

[8] The idea that literary texts were ‘mimetic’, which is to say, attempts to imitate the actions of the real world, traces all the way back to Aristotle and Plato.

[9] It could well be argued at this point that this is precisely what makes consideration of genre a limited investigative tool in that it reduces all literature to certain similarities of structure and misses the very thing that makes each literary work worth reading in the first place. To say that Sci-fi and Western films share a structure may turn out to be a completely banal observation.

[10] Culler, p. 159.