The Rise of Genre and the Fall of Story

Why do so many readers today read one genre exclusively? Genre used to be an incidental property of literature. It has become its most essential property. The first thing people ask about any novel is, what genre is it?

Why? I suspect that it is because most readers today are not reading primarily for story. They are reading for something else, for a secondary ingredient. And each genre is defined by the secondary ingredient that it provides. Story has become the base for the delivery of that ingredient, the bread that holds up the jam.

Three genres on a plate.

Genre is on the ascendant in the publishing world. Story is on the decline. A novel does still need a story. We are wired for story. But genre makes story the delivery mechanism for something else, for some other desirable ingredient. And because the reader’s desire is for that other ingredient, they are not interested in stories in other genres unless they desire the secondary ingredient that those genres deliver.

Last year, I wrote about the rise of worldbuilding and the decline of stories in fantasy novels. Worldbuilding is the secondary ingredient that attracts readers to fantasy. Since then, I have come to have a greater appreciation for worldbuilding as an art form. Like ballet, it’s not something that appeals to me personally, but I can see that it is a genuine art form and one that engages many readers. But what I have also come to realize is that fantasy is not alone in being defined by its secondary ingredient. Every genre, including literary fiction, also has a second ingredient, and it is the second ingredient that both defines the genre and forms the basis of its appeal.

In historical fiction, the second ingredient is history, or, at least, history as a reader would like to imagine it to have been. If you doubt this, you have only to hang around historical fiction online groups, and you will find people asking for novels set in particular places or times or even novels about particular people or events. They may want a story in there somewhere, but it is a very specific history they look for first and foremost.

To show just how extreme this can be, here is a portion of a post from the Historical Novel Society Facebook group

Anyone have a Bradshaw's Guide for Great Britain from the years 1890 to 1896? I need to know if there was an early morning train from London (any station, any day of the week) to Great Torrington, Devonshire. If so, what was the arrival time.

But if that seems like an over-the-top level of attention to historical detail, consider one of the responses:

Be slightly wary of Bradshaws as they are quite hard to navigate. In particular, they often give impressions of through trains when in fact you are talking about connections. See if you can figure out where your first train is going as a starting point. Sometimes notes indicate through carriages. Sometimes you need to delve into the detailed local pages and see if the times make sense to you. For example, you may find a branch train leaves the junction some time after the main train has departed from it.

Good advice, perhaps, for someone actually trying to get from London to Great Torrington in, say, 1893, but do we really think that a novel would be ruined if Sir Reginald and Lady Penelope turned up at Great Torrington Town Hall fully 15 minutes earlier than the train timetable would allow?

To be clear, I am not saying that there is anything wrong with literature having a second ingredient, or a third, or a fourth. A novel would be a poor thing without them. Without a world, without a history, it is hard to imagine what would be left of a novel. It is not about the presence of these ingredients, all of which are essential. It is about their relative importance to the appeal of the novel. Do these other ingredients exist to enhance the story, or does the story exist simply as a delivery mechanism for one of these other ingredients, promoting it, in effect, to the primary ingredient?

But wait, you say, if all these secondary ingredients aren’t story, what is story itself? You can’t have a novel that is just story, with no other ingredients. If a horse lover reads a horse story for the horses, one can’t simply remove the horses from the story and call it fit for the pure story lovers. The story lovers need the horses too because they are part of the story.

Steinbeck’s The Red Pony is a wonderful story. It will appeal to horse lovers because it is about the love of horses. It will appeal to story lovers because it is a profound story about the specific character of love that a boy may have for something that matters deeply to him, that lies at the center of his identity and his place in the society of men. This type of story does not have to be told about a pony. It could be told about a gun, or a hockey sweater, or a bicycle. But it has to be something. There is no story about a boy’s love in abstract. There must be a specific thing for the boy to love.

And whatever object is chosen as the object of a boy’s love, its specific character determines the character of the entire narrative. You can’t simply drop a red pony into Roch Carrier’s The Hockey Sweater or a hockey sweater into The Red Pony. For one thing, they are very different boys in each story. There may be a common thread around the nature of boyhood, but it takes a different boy in a different setting and with a different history to love a red pony and to love a hockey sweater.

The Red Pony and The Hockey Sweater (note that they both take their titles from their respective objects of affection) are both good stories, beloved by lovers of stories, even if they care nothing for horses or hockey. Nevertheless, horse lovers will likely love The Red Pony more than The Hockey Sweater, and lovers of hockey will likely love The Hockey Sweater more than The Red Pony. So, if the pony and the sweather are secondary ingredients in these two tales of boyhood aspiration, what is the primary ingredient? What is story itself?

Story, I will suggest, is not any of it’s ingredients, but its movement, the symphony of its gears. It is the vigor of the narrative, the easy fluid energy of its movements. This does not mean pace alone. Indeed, pace in literature is about everything but speed. It means the proportion of movement to the moment and the grace of its execution. Even the most languorous movements of slow seduction should have a grace to them, and grace of movement can only come from an underlying strength and energy that keeps the limbs from trembling as they move. All great stories share a perfection of form and vigor of movement which is unmistakable, no matter whether their subject is ships or horses, lovers or wanderers, kings or captains, pirates or fairies.

A bad story, in other words, is like a Ray Harryhausen dinosaur: stiff and herky-jerky in its movements. A good story is like a Jurassic Park dinosaur: fluid and lifelike. In the fullest and most important sense, it is like life. It moves like life. It sounds and tastes like life.

That grace of form and movement (under certain motivations, which I will discuss in another essay) is what story is. But grace of form and movement can only be expressed in something that lives and moves. The question is, are you in love with the form and grace of dance, which can only be embodied by a dancer, or are you in love with the dancer, even if she dances like a buffalo on an ice rink?

If you were told that your granddaughter was in a dance recital, would you go because you love dance or because you love your granddaughter? That is the kind of distinction I am trying to make here. To drag my implications fully into the open, your granddaughter is genre, the thing you love and will go to watch even if she has two left feet and moves like a spastic hippopatamous. Story is the kid you have never seen and will never see again who astonishes you and makes you see dance as you have never seen it before, even if you hate dancing.

But the ability to tell stories with such grace of form and vigor of movement is not common. And editors and producers seem curiously unable to detect it reliably even when they do encounter it. Perhaps this is because they have become too jaded or numbed by the constant barrage of inferior work, or perhaps because they themselves are devotees not of story but of some second ingredient or other, and are thus looking not for the vigor and grace of the story, but for the particular flavor of their favorite second ingredient.

Or perhaps the ones that actually make enough money for their firms that they get to keep their jobs are the ones that realize that it is easier to sell inferior books about horses to horse lovers than it is to sell lovers of stories a great story about horses this week, a great story about dragons next week, and a great story about ships the week after that.

Even lovers of story have attachments to certain secondary ingredients. Suppose you love ships and you are stuck at a country inn for a week in a snowstorm. You find that the library has only three novels. One is a bad novel about ships. One is a good novel about ships. One is a good novel about horses. You have time to read two novels. Which two do you choose? If your primary love is stories, you will start with the good novel about ships, since that satisfies both your interests. Then you will read the good novel about horses, since stories are your primary interest. If you read the bad novel about ships instead, then your primary love is ships, and stories come second.

Even if you love stories first, it is easier to sell you a good novel about ships than a good novel about horses. And here’s the kicker: if you ask people if they love stories, they will all say yes. Love of story is not a clear market differentiator. Love of ships is a clear market differentiator. Love of horses is a clear market differentiator. You can place novels about ships in the marine outfitters and novels about horses in the saddle club. It’s easier to find and market to people who love stories about particular things than it is to find and market to people whose primary love is stories.

The problem for the publishing industry has always been to predict which books will sell and which won’t. It works on a system of a few hits paying for dozens or hundreds of duds. But while the uncertainty does not go away, it is much easier to discern which readers like ships, which readers like horses, and which readers like romances with a medium level of spice than it is to discern which reader will read a great story about any subject at all.

Thus does genre come to dominate the acquisition and sale of books, and thus does genre rise and story fall at the center of our literary culture.

Because I use the term “literary” here, you might suspect that I am a literary fiction snob looking down my nose at genre fiction readers. But actually, literary fiction is the last place you are likely to find good stories today. Literary fiction is a genre as much as any other, which means that its appeal rests more on secondary ingredients than on story. But it’s actually worse than that because its secondary ingredients are not robust real-world things like horses or ships or robots that are genuinely deserving of love. They are the dessicated entrails of story itself: indulgent prose and psychological inspection.

Indulgent prose has become rather systemized and defined through MFA programs, but it largely seems to consist in piercingly detailed descriptions of mundane objects. Good prose can be a fine thing, but good prose is not separable from the grace and vigor of the movement of the story. If it is not part of that, then it is slowing the story down, robbing it of its grace and vigor, no matter how crafty the word picture it is painting. It takes a writer of rare talent to make us notice something of real consequence that we might otherwise not have seen. When that happens, it adds to the vigor and grace of the story. Otherwise, indulgent prose is an affectation. That affectation may be a second ingredient valued by certain audiences. But it detracts from the story rather than adding to it.

Literary fiction practices psychoanalysis as a sport. The reader is invited to consider the psychological deficit of some poor character in a way that often seems designed to flatter the reader into imagining themselves possessed of insights into the minds and souls of lesser men. Psychological realism is one of the defining characteristics of the novel, but, as with fine prose, it should be inseparable from the grace and vigor of the story. Otherwise it is nothing but an appeal to the vanity of the reader, to their belief that they have the wisdom and perception to penetrate the psyches of lesser men and women.

I am claiming here that story should be the preeminent value, and everything else should exist to serve the needs of story. Any second ingredient is superfluous when it is not used in the service of story. But is this true? Couldn’t one argue that it is the so-called “second ingredient” that is actually supposed to be primary in each case? Why can’t story simply be the bread that holds up the jam? And if it is, isn’t the genre system simply refining and systematizing what has always been the point of fiction, to provide animation to the charming flesh that requires the motion of story merely to show off its charms to the fullest?

Indeed, it is clear that many readers, many critics, and, indeed, many authors do seem to prefer the flesh to the dance. So, for instance, is should not matter that the story of a political novel moves a little stiffly if it strongly affirms my political preferences; it should not matter if the story of an historical novel falls over its feet from time to time as long as it portrays history in the kind of light that suits me; it should not matter if the story of a sea novel cannot find its way to port if the author knows his capstan from his jib.

To address this, we must answer the question of what story actually does. It has become fashionable to say that art is useless and to make a virtue of its uselessness as if there were something unforgivably crass about asking what art is for. But I say that art is indeed useful. Indeed, I think it is one of the most useful things in the world because art helps to calibrate the mind to reality and fortify the character for action.

Instruction and experience are the two pillars of education. This much is clear. From a very early age, a child seeks to learn both from experience and from instruction: going out into the world to see and touch and do, while constantly turning back to ask what and how and why. There are some things that are learned mostly by experience and others that are learned mostly by instruction, but for most things, experience and instruction work together and reinforce each other. It is very hard to believe a proposition that has no ground in experience or to understand an experience with no recourse to propositions. This is why the child both explores and constantly turns back to ask what and how and why.

But there is so much of life that is inexpressible as propositions and is also expensive, dangerous, or downright impossible to encounter as direct experiences. Stories fill that gap, a gap so wide that the desire for stories is built into our brains. It is perhaps unfashionable to suggest that art has a use in this way. But this is a use so fundamental to the human experience and to living in this world that in some real sense it lies underneath every other kind of useful thing. After all, if we can’t see straight and lack the courage to act, we are not going to make much of a fist of life.

Of course, this does not mean that no one can grow up to be a successful adult without reading novels. The novel is simply the most complex form of storytelling, and while it may convey benefits that other forms of story do not, the basic uses of story are fulfilled by much more basic stories, such as people have been telling each other since the dawn of time. On the other hand, the world we live in now is much more complex than the world of our ancestors. This complexity creates much greater demands on our clarity of perception and our fortitude for acting. At the same time, the modern world isolates us more than ever from the kinds of experiences that lead to clarity of vision and fortitude of character. In this sense, we need stories more than ever. And in this sense also, the complexity of the novel can be seen as an artistic response to the growing complexity of life.

And yet those mechanisms of the modern world that shield us from the trials of life, trials that would naturally work to calibrate our vision and fortify our character, also conspire to produce the rise of genre and the fall of story. And insofar as the focus on delivering the genre-specific second ingredient results in a less life-like story, the capacity of that story to calibrate our vision to reality and fortify our character for action is compromised. A bit of fluff now and then is not going to throw off a well-calibrated mind or make feeble a well-fortified character. But a steady diet of a single genre is very likely to do just that.