Some thoughts on genre / subgenre

What I called just in my last post the everlasting quest for definition has, obviously, started way before.

But, for the sake of argument, let´s assume it started (at least in this current version) in Jonathan McCalmont´s article How to define a genre ... and why not to bother.

McCalmont´s arguments are solid - to a point. In the beginning he already states in a very straightforward way the following:

This is a column that will attempt to put an end to such venomous wastes of time by suggesting not only that we do not need a definition in order to discuss things in SF, but also that discussion might be more fruitful if we all felt free to create our own terminology.

This is very tempting, but is also a bit surreal - it reminded my of Monty Python´s Life of Brian, particularly in that all too famous scene where they are at an amphitheatre, and some zealots show Brian the current group of dissidents of the Roman domination of Judaea - and you find that these groups consists only of a few scattered members each, and some of them consists of only one member! That´s the major problem of this line of argument.

On the other hand, he is right when he considers our "wired" need for labeling things:

The desire to define things is a product of one of the more interesting quirks of human neural architecture; the desire for abstraction. This desire expresses itself as a tendency to see the world not in terms of individuals but rather clumps of objects that share characteristics, and which can therefore be expected to behave in similar ways. This is a cunning evolutionary strategy that allows us to deal with the world without having to haul around wetware capable of formulating and storing completely separate understandings of every individual thing we encounter.

In her excellent blog, Jana Lubina goes further, maintaining that:

(...) the problem starts, when the lines become blurred, and when the work fits into more than one or two neat categories. That's when the disagreements start. And they can get heated. But the negative here is that it really can have a limiting effect on a book to define it so narrowly.

So-called "literary fiction" doesn't really carry any subgenres within it despite the fact that books falling within that particular bent obviously work on different trends much in the same way that genre or commercial fiction does.

I also tend to agree to a point. As I commented in Jana´s blog and will try to extend matters a little bit further here, many people would promptly say that all this classification stuff is mainly fault of the publishing houses, media vehicles and all that, but I think that´s the easy answer - and not very accurate at that.

Humankind is semiotic by essence, which means (in a very small nutshell, of course, since Charles Sanders Peirce´s science is much too complex to be summarized in so short a piece): we need to label things. Starting by our need to name things and to name ourselves. So it comes as no surprise at all that, when book publishing began, someone had the brilliant idea of classifying them by genres.

Tzvetan Todorov (and Umberto Eco, I think - I´m writing by memory) offered the classification by modes instead of genres, which, I think, would ease things greatly. After all, if we have genres (or subgenres) like New Weird, New Space Opera, Science Fantasy, and Steampunk, to name the foremost, it´s because of their hybridness, so the concept of genre as we know it may be treading water by some time now.

Maybe it´s time to rethink the whole shebang - but I don´t think we´ll ever get rid of the concepts of genre / subgenre. Not because the media wants it, but because, when the day is done, we like to know what we are about to read (even though we may disagree with the labeling after reading the story). But, hey, what fun would us SF buffs would have, after all?