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New Literary History, Volume 34, Number 3, Summer 2003, pp. 597-615
(Article)

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DOI: 10.1353/nlh.2003.0039

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 Anomalies of Genre: The Utility of Theory and
History for the Study of Literary Genres
Hayden White

I
n this commentary I will consider a topical thread that runs
through most of the essays comprising this issue of New Literary
History and the one before it. The topic is the relation between
history and theory in literary studies. In his contribution to this
symposium, Michael Prince cites Ralph Cohen’s suggestion that both
the notion of (literary) genre and genres themselves appear to be
“resistant to theory.” Prince goes on to suggest that genre’s resistance to
theoretical consideration tells us more about theory than it does about
genre itself. For if, as everyone seems to agree, genre is an essential
element or aspect of literarity, then genre’s resistance to theory implies
that theory itself is inimical to literature and should not, therefore, be
brought to bear upon the literary artwork. Indeed, Prince holds that it
may be genre’s resistance to theory that generates the endless task of
literary interpretation, which has the role in criticism of mediating not
only between literature and life but also between literature and theory as
well. If we hold to interpretation and abandon theory we might be able,
Prince tells us, to produce a low-level “theory of genre” “without falling
into paradox or self-contradiction.” And in his essay on “mauvais genres,”
he provides a brilliant historical account of how eighteenth-century
English thinkers, in their attempt to construct a “theory of genre,” met
with a kind of resistance by genre that left them in a wasteland of theory
and a quagmire of logical contradiction, left them, that is, with little
more to do than turn over the question of genre to the newly emerged
field of aesthetics, where the paradoxes it generated could be assimi-
lated to the idea of the sublime.
Thus, Michael Prince’s alternative to a theoretical approach to the
question of genre is a history (in this case, of the failure of one attempt
to construct an adequate theory) of genre. This is consistent with Ralph
Cohen’s historical approach to the study of genre. Cohen’s idea that
genre is resistant to theory is not itself a theoretical finding; it is a
historical or more precisely a historicist one. It is based on the fact that
no one has ever produced a compelling theory of genre in spite of the

New Literary History, 2003, 34: 597–615

598 new literary history

millennial effort to do so. We are therefore justified in thinking that, in

all probability, there is something about genre that makes it inherently
“resistant to theory” but hospitable to historical treatment.
On the other hand, genre is not the only thing that has proven
resistant to theory. The philosopher W. B. Gallie once proposed the idea
of “essentially contestable concepts” such as “democracy,” “Christianity,”
“humanism,” and the like, to which we might add “art,” “literature,”
“aesthetics,” and so forth—concepts which are essentially contestable
precisely because they combine ontological with evaluative elements in
their constitution. When it comes to these kinds of concepts, you are not
only compelled to try to characterize or describe them but also confirm
that they are inherently good or valuable or desirable in themselves, at
one and the same time.
So it is with genres—or so it seems to me. I have never been presented
with a genre (of literature or anything else) that I didn’t feel expected to
love or hate or at least feel ambivalent about. And this, not because the
genre had been theorized one way or another, but because genre is one of
those things whose manifestation demands both recognition of what it is
(pure or hybrid) and also acceptance of its value—positive or negative,
as the case may be. Theory is bound to run into resistance when
confronted with concepts such as genre—or democracy, or humanism,
or art—because concepts such as these are essentially contestable. But
this is what generates a specifically theoretical interest in them in the
first place.
A number of our contributors remark on the difference between a
puzzle, a conundrum which can be presumed to have a solution, and a
problem, a theoretical or practical difficulty for which a solution may or
may not exist. And some suggest that genre may belong to the second
category, that the very existence of genre raises problems—about its
nature, function, necessity to literary art, and so forth—for which there
may be no convincing, theoretical or practical, solution. But this is to
assign genre to the category of insoluble mysteries, to which, as both
Jerome McGann and Gary Saul Morson suggest, the sacraments of the
Roman Catholic Church belong—the category of things which, like
infant baptism, we may have witnessed but of whose virtus we cannot
know.
It is because genre—like the sacraments—is “resistant to theory” that
we can conceive it as lacking a “nature” or “essence” but having a
“history.”1 Indeed, most of the essays in this symposium take for granted
that the most productive way of dealing with genre is not theoretically
but historically. A historical treatment is typically seen as an alternative
and antidote to the corrosive effects of theory in literary study. (It is not
for nothing that Ralph Cohen’s journal is entitled New Literary History.)2
anomalies of genre 599

But what, we may ask, if we happen to be theoretically and not only

historically inclined, are the virtues of a historical approach to literary
studies and, a fortiori, the problem of genre? The (or rather a) historical
approach to the study of anything is supposed to be atheoretical, not
only value-free and therefore in a certain sense ”objective,” but free also
of the totalizing impulses of scientific and philosophical systematicity.
The historical approach lets you simply show the ways genre works in
different times and places in the development of literature, without
having to raise the vexing theoretical question of the value typically
assigned to specific genres, various notions of genre, and the idea of a
hierarchy of genres in both culture and society at large.
Everyone recognizes that the notion of generic purity is a supreme
value among aristocratic, conservative, and reactionary social groups
and political parties. So one might be inclined to think that the notion
of genre purity in literary criticism serves much the same function as the
notion of species purity in racist notions of humanity and history.
History, as they say, “shows” that the social uses to which the notion of
genre can be put are many and varied. If genre is resistant to theory, it
is certainly not resistant to use by bias, prejudice, and preconception.
Indeed, any simple historical account of the evolution of genre and
genre theory would show that genre has been the compliant servant of
political power and social privilege wherever they have been cultivated.
Stephen Bann’s essay “Questions of Genre in Early Nineteenth-
Century French Painting” shows how “history” itself was domesticated
and turned to the service of monarchy and reaction by being “re-genre-
fied” after 1815 in France. Bann argues that the development of
modernism in France proceeds “not in spite of, but indeed because of,
the fact that the public display of French art was more assiduously
policed than that of any other European nation.” This policing opera-
tion and the resistance to it, in turn, had as its “defining feature . . . the
question of genre.” The hierarchy of genres of painting permitted to be
exhibited in the annual Salons in Paris was capped by the “history
painting,” the purpose of which was to contribute to the legitimation and
glorification of the monarchy by assimilating it to—what else?—history.
Painters themselves “transgressed” the rules informing this hierarchy
in ways seeming to conform to the political interests served by the art
police, by inventing new or hybrid genres, of which the “genre historique,”
constructed by Paul Delaroche, was an example. Here the “history
painting” was adapted to “apply to subjects chosen from postclassical
[that is, modern] history.” It was a move as radical as the move by realist
writers such as Balzac, Stendhal, and Flaubert to treat “the present” as
history.3 For this move accomplished a metamorphosis of the genre of
history writing itself, a change of its focus on the past alone to a focus on
the present (and future) of historical societies as well.
600 new literary history

Were these changes in the genres of the history painting and the
genres of historical writing a result of theory or of practice? Both,
obviously, since the changes that occurred in the development of
realism by the new focus on the present as history could hardly have
been imagined had not the received practice of history-writing itself
already been subjected to theoretical criticism by thinkers such as Hegel,
Schiller, Comte, Walter Scott, Ranke, Manzoni, Michelet, Chateaubriand,
and the rest.
Changes in the genres of history-writing which marked the nineteenth
century in Europe and America were certainly a product of a reflection
more theoretical than “practical” in kind. How could it not have been?
No one practices or even experiences “history” as such; because “his-
tory” is an abstraction from the experience of change in society and, as
Hegel established, presupposes the institution of the State as a condition
of its possibility. And while one can no doubt experience the effects of
social change and of the power of the State, this is quite another matter
from the putative “experience of history.”
No doubt, the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century
was a period of what Michael Prince calls “genre instability” par
excellence. It may have been precisely this “instability” that got codified
and transformed into a solution to the problem of which it first
appeared as only a symptom. The mixed genre, the fragment, the para-
genre, and the metageneric genre are all celebrated in Romanticist
theories of genre. If the mixed or hybrid genre is subsequently thought
of as the norm rather than the exception, it is because the notion of the
pure genre disappeared with the notion of essences which modern
science finally demolished in the course of the nineteenth century. What
Michael Prince calls the “mauvais genre,” which replaces the ideal of the
“bon genre” (pure and uncorrupted by mixture of any kind), is itself a
theoretical construction, inspired by the need to resolve the paradox of
how a thing could be both “pure” in its essential nature and “mixed” in
its appearance, which is simply another version of the problem of the
part-whole relationship or the same-different relationship that has
worried race, gender, and class discourses throughout the modern period.
This suggests that “genre” is a construction of thought more meta-
physical than scientific in its founding formulation, so that any attempt
to treat it scientifically will always be met by the kind of resistance that
metaphysics (and religion) has posed for science since the time of the
Pre-Socratics.
The metaphysical nature of the notion of genre always becomes
apparent when subjected to a serious historical treatment. According to
the various historical treatments of this problem included in the present
volume, the problem of genres arises from the theoretical idea that
anomalies of genre 601

genres have or can be shown to possess “essences” as the secret of their

natures. Michael Prince says, “As long as the imagined connection
between genre and essence is strong, poetics need not be critical.”
Jerome McGann says, “Theory will not take us very far, as the history of
scholarship for the past fifty and more years has proved.” And Joseph
Farrell agrees; he thinks that the ancients’ thought about genre was
fatally bollixed by theory. Why? Because “Classical genre theory was a
powerfully essentializing discourse,” he says (quite correctly, I am sure).
Ancient “theorists” tended to participate in this discourse and, conse-
quently, “Ancient theorists and critics do not recognize generic ambigu-
ity as an issue.”4 But the “problem” of genre arose as a result of the
essentialist presuppositions shared by theorists and some poets, when
they spoke theoretically, alike. In fact, for the ancients, the problem of
genre, insofar as there was one, derived from “theory” itself which, on
Farrell’s account, insisted on the authority of “the law of genre” (“operis
lex,” coined by Horace, Farrell tells us) which is the law of generic
essence. It was theory which, in defense of the doctrine of generic purity,
“forbade” the mixing of elements from different genres.
This essentialist position Farrell treats as a hindrance to the confident
performance of poetic practices. He points out that in most of the
recognized classics of the ancient period (from Homer through Pindar
on to Virgil, Horace, and Ovid), it is mixture or impurity (Prince’s
“mauvais genres”) that provides the rule, generic purity the exception.
The poets were put in the position of having to affirm a rule which in
practice they could not but break. Indeed, Farrell writes: “The Roman
poets were . . . demonstrably concerned, even obsessed with genre as a
discursive device, . . . But their interest in genre as a set of prescriptive
rules . . . is powerfully undermined, even to the point of parody, by an
attitude of practical inventiveness and what looks like nothing so much as
an interest in the untenability of any position founded on the idea of
generic essence.” Nonetheless, Farrell also recognizes the point made by
Stephen Bann regarding the relation between repression and creativity in
art (as in social life). Farrell says, “What seems clear, . . . is that (for whatever
reason), generation after generation found the idea of genre as essence
or recipe to be the perfect foil for a poetics that was more concerned
with teasing indeterminacy than with purity of kind.” In other words, the
theory of genre as essence, whether in the form of a philosophical
doctrine such as that of Aristotle’s or as a religious doctrine backed up
by the threat of political force, may have served as a goad, rather than a
hindrance to creative variation in poetic practice, in much the same way
that Bann suggests the art police did in Restoration French painting.
After all, where is the frisson produced by transgression, poetic or
otherwise, if there is no law to violate in the first place? On this view,
602 new literary history

Farrell himself suggests, the theory (or law) of genre forms a pair and
necessary basis for the writing of the kind of poetry that later genera-
tions recognized as both generically mixed and “classic.” The fact that
these classic poets both believed in the “law of genre” in theory and
violated it in their practice argues less for the dampening effects of
theory than for the dialectical nature of the relation between theory and
practice in any field of creative endeavor.
The simultaneous belief in the law and in the legitimacy of the felt
need to break it (under certain circumstances) is—as Derrida, whom
Farrell cites, has noted—a feature of the “genre of the law” to which
every specific statute belongs. It is one of the conventions of the genre of
the law that anyone governed by it not only could break it but “at the
right time and in the right circumstances”—I quote John Huston in
Chinatown—will be inclined to do so. Poets and writers of fiction
especially are inclined to break whatever passes for the laws of proper
language use and the conventions of genre simply because they take it
upon themselves to test the limits of the sayable. The difference between
ancient and modern notions of genre may be marked by the point at
which people began to disbelieve in “essences” of anything. So Jerome
McGann suggests. But liberation from the tyranny of essence does not
necessarily imply liberation from the ideal of purity or the temptation of
idealism in general.
Mixture, hybridity, epicenity, promiscuity—these may be the rule now
rather than whatever alternatives we may envisage for them. But as the
notions of the “authentic fake” and the “real simulacrum” in contempo-
rary (postmodernist) criticism indicate, we are still enthralled by an
ideal of purity that promises relief from the contradictions we must live
between theory and practice and the paradoxes that attend our efforts
to live as both individuals and members of communities. It is no
accident that the quest for this ideal often takes the form of a liberation
from speech, language, even thought and recourse to the refuge of . . .
silence. In any event, it is not theory that is the problem here; it is a
refusal to see that theoretical discourse is the best we can hope for in
those areas of human inquiry where science will not, because it cannot, go.
With the exception of Gary Saul Morson’s essay on the genre of the
aphorism, all of the essays in this collection suggest, when they do not
argue outright, the advantages of a historical approach over a theoreti-
cal approach to the problem of genre. This is not to say that theory is not
used by most of the contributors. Professors Margaret Cohen and Susan
Stewart offer theoretically nuanced but richly elaborated stories of interge-
neric relations during the period of transition between traditional craft
labor and modern industrial labor, and both invoke a structuralist-
functionalist method in their treatments of their subject-matter.
anomalies of genre 603

Margaret Cohen narrates how James Fenimore Cooper invented the

genre of the “maritime novel” out of a combination of traditional
materials associated with the travel story, the newly minted historical
romance (Scott), and a growing body of lore about life at sea in the
modern age. She cites Fredric Jameson’s famous hypothesis, elaborated
in The Political Unconscious, which considers literary genre as a symbolic
expression of the human experience of conflict among the modes of
production in play at different times in history. For Jameson, genre is a
sublimated form of a class fantasy in which class conflicts themselves
achieve an “imaginary” resolution by means of narrativization. Thus,
genre, genericization, and genre-fication are interpreted as crucial
elements of ideology, providing imaginary matrices (Bakhtin’s
chronotopes) on which real social conflicts can be given possible
resolution in ways conformable to class aspirations and ideals.
(It must be added that the assimilation of genre to ideology in
Jameson’s “theory” is not presented as a basis for the derogation of
genre. Like Lukacs, Jameson thinks that, when it comes to dealing with
social relationships in class-divided societies, ideology is the only game
in town, and that it is better to have a bad [which is to say, a reactionary]
ideology than no ideology at all. More on this later.)
In any event, Margaret Cohen draws upon Jameson’s theory of genre
in order to guide her reading of the history of the maritime novel as the
story of how different relations of production, work, and commerce
came into conflict and produced out of this agon a celebration of a new
kind of work: “know-how,” a kind of work peculiar to the industrial age
in which man’s relations with nature were mediated by new kinds of
tools, institutions, and the new milieux of an ocean sea tamed by
industrial technology.
But what does Margaret Cohen’s story of this genre tell us about genre
in general, and how does it illuminate what others in our symposium
hold to be the paradoxes of genre and the contradictions between
theory of genre and its practice? One thing it suggests to me is the
questionable value of the concept of contradiction or paradox for the
understanding of the kind of conflicts which theory and genre are
supposed to have with one another. Professor Margaret Cohen is dealing
with conflicts and their resolutions, conflicts between generic conven-
tions, experiments with new techniques of representation, experiences
of conflict between modes of production, of social relations, of conflict
itself. The conventions of the historical romance and of the travel
narrative did not exactly “fit,” which is to say, they “resisted,” the
materials from which Cooper and other maritime novelists (down
through Melville and Conrad to Patrick O’Brian) wanted to make
stories. These materials required the invention of a new genre or
604 new literary history

mixture of inherited generic conventions in the same way that what

Cohen calls “know how” required a new way of thinking about how to
solve problems on the great sailing ships of the late eighteenth century.
Margaret Cohen interprets “know how” as a kind of adaptation of a
traditional kind of improvisatory technology to the new systematized
technology employed on the great sailing (and steam) ships of the
imperialist age. This new kind of knowledge turns out to be not unlike
(analogous to) the very kind of “bricolative” narrative techniques
characterizing the post-romantic or “realist” novel. The detailed and
precise descriptions of ways in which sailors used their new technologies
to tame and exploit the sea can be taken as allegories of technical
changes that will result in the kind of novel that we will subsequently call
modernist. It appears as no accident, then, that the author who
paradigmatically incarnates the moment of transition between realism
and modernism was himself a sailor: Joseph Conrad. Indeed, Jameson’s
own analysis of Lord Jim and Nostromo in The Political Unconscious makes
this point precisely in terms of a story of a combination of genres: the
conflict between the genre of the adventure tale of life at sea and the
plotless, characterless, and eventless modernist novel.
But it is not enough only to say that Margaret Cohen uses a historical
approach to her study of a specific literary genre. A certain kind of theory of
history itself guides her choice of the materials to be used as the manifest
“content” of her “story.” Nor is it enough to say that her work belongs to
the genre of the historical “narrative,” because the historical narrative
admits of the use of many modes and many genres of narrativity.
Cohen’s narrative—as I understand it—belongs to the genre of
Neomarxian cultural theory (“Neo” because, while continuing to posit
the base-superstructure relationship as fundamental to social analysis, it
no longer treats the latter as a “reflection” of the former, but as being
historically productive in its own right). This means that it is based on a
theory of historical change, periodization, and causation which features
the notion of the dialectic as fundamental to a scientific representation
of the relation of a cultural artifact to the world in which it arises.
A dialectical theory of history concentrates less on things than on the
dynamic relationships between things. Moreover, such a theory foregoes
the conventional historicist search for origins and teleologically deter-
mined outcomes of complex historical processes. The dialectical method
seeks to grasp the social world in process and follow it, not as a
determined course of events, but as the product of human work and
labor, continually having to improvise to meet human needs and desires.
Contrary to the Leninist-Stalinist version of it, a dialectical approach
to social evolution does not presume that “history” itself moves or
determines anything; rather, “history” is what the human species orga-
anomalies of genre 605

nized into societies makes of itself. This ateleological drama of human

self-making is played out at different times and in different places in
different ways over the course of world history. In this drama, different
cultures’ notions about the nature of generic identity play their parts.
And Margaret Cohen’s story of the invention and evolution of the genre
of the maritime novel contributes to our understanding, not only of this
genre but of genre in general by showing how one genre expressed in its
structure a more general way of grasping a new relation between nature
and society.
It is sometimes maintained that a structuralist approach to the study
of literary genre is not only inherently ahistorical, but also manifests the
limitations of any theoretical approach to such study as well. But a
structuralism of some kind is absolutely necessary for the characteriza-
tion (or constitution) of a historical period. If there is any such thing as
“history,” it is always in motion, always changing, and always changing in
different ways in different places on the temporal continuum, such that
the very idea of a “period”—in which the whole of this continuum
suddenly takes on a uniform appearance, a homogenous coloration, or a
substantive unity—is virtually unthinkable. And yet, history could not be
investigated, much less written, unless one were willing to cut up the
continuum, to segment and sequence it, in some way. Thus, “periodicity”
is a fundamental category of historical comprehension, “periodization”
an activity productive of a specific kind of historical object of study, and
the period a (para)theoretically constructed object of study.
By periodization, the movie is stopped, a synchronous moment is
marked out for examination, and the periodizing eye starts classifying
the elements of the picture in order to identify the genre to which this
congeries of events can be said to belong (“Renaissance,” “Enlighten-
ment,” “Age of Louis XIV,” “The Industrial Age,” “The Age of Imperial-
ism,” and so forth). On this view, historical reality too has its genres—
within which literary practices are inevitably turned to the cultivation of
those genres best suited to represent what is unique of their epochs.
Thus, Susan Stewart uses a historical approach to genre to account for
the revival of themes first and most paradigmatically treated in folk tales,
in a period in which the folk communities were being systematically
destroyed or transformed into a different, specifically urban and indus-
trial ethos. Her thematic analysis—structuralist in spirit if not in the
letter—identifies the spirit and the letter of the fairy tale within the cool,
materialist, and philosophically sophisticated prose of George Eliot’s Silas
Marner, where, it should be added, it functions as what C. S. Peirce called
a “representamen” to link the manifest story of Silas Marner to the kind
of fate featured in fairy tales, providing it thereby with a deep-structural,
allegorical content—what glossematics calls “the substance of content.”
606 new literary history

Silas Marner, like Cohen’s maritime novels, is a fable of work but a

fable of work in a period and in a place when work itself was undergoing
a (generic) transformation so radical as to render its aspect “magical” to
those who were indentured to manual labor as their lot. But George
Eliot’s fable is different from that informing the maritime novel, for hers
is a story about a victim of the metamorphosis of labor in the early
nineteenth century, while Cohen’s fables are about protagonists who
have or believe they have some kind of control over the new instruments
of production fueling this metamorphosis. What both genres have in
common is that they belong to the class or genre of the work novel,
which in the nineteenth century, will finally displace and ultimately
replace the genres of the action novel that had dominated the literary
imagination from Homer to the eighteenth century. Henceforth the
protagonists of the novel will less “do” than “suffer” things, will less
wrestle with their “fate” than bend to it, will less “fulfill” a destiny than
come to the realization that they have none.
By the end of the nineteenth century, the convention of the maritime
novel becomes split into two varieties: a romantic-comic, “adventure”
version of the kind which “Lord” Jim had read as a boy, and a darker,
more pessimistic, and horrifying version of the kind that Conrad turned
into a fable of the demonic nature of the very technology that had
originally promised control over a nature hostile to man. Susan Stewart
shows how the realistic novel’s realism, at least in the case of Silas Marner,
at once accepts and renounces the newly forming industrial world by
affirming its inevitability, on the one hand, and displaying its alienating
effects, on the other. Here, too, the new literary genre composed of a
hybrid of fairy tale and social documentary explains by replicating the
new processes of production emerging at the end of agrarian culture
and society.
The genre of the historical period is also used as the framework for
Jerome McGann’s study of Herbert Horne’s elaboration of a new genre
associated with the “religion of beauty” at the end of the nineteenth
century. He speaks of a “transitional period” marked by “generic
upheavals” of the kind studied by Joseph Farrell, Michael Prince, Susan
Stewart, and Margaret Cohen in their essays for this volume. The genre
invented by Horne might be called “the materializing poem” in which
the very distinction between the semantic content of a poem and its
material form is erased by the technique of using the design of the book
or text as a meta-signifying device. Horne, on McGann’s account,
thereby realizes the aim of Rossetti to grasp the soulfulness of the body
and the bodiliness of the soul.
McGann argues that our problems with the question of genre do not
stem from any inherent weaknesses of a theoretical approach or of
anomalies of genre 607

genre’s putative “resistance to theory.” They arise rather from our failure
“to execute in regular ways our theoretical views about the material and
performative character of textual works of imagination.” In other words,
the problem lies in our commitment to “referential and vehicular,
rather than to incarnational and performative, models of meaning.”
The problem of genre, for McGann, requires attention to “the
cognitive functions of the material signifier,” which he finds manifested
in the “physical design” of the book. The material basis of the literary
work provides insight into the most primitive level of meaning produc-
tion, where—as with the elements of the sacrament—“the book’s
‘outward and visible signs’ incarnate its ‘inward and spiritual condi-
tion.’” It is a striking image McGann uses to speak of the relation
between content and form in the materialized text. For in his applica-
tion of it to a reading of Horne’s Diversi Colores, he reverses the structure
of the image, interpreting the poems that comprise the work as rendering
service to the material elements of the book which contains them.
McGann purports to find in Horne’s book many if not most of the
conceits that characterize the celebration of the “materiality of the
signifier” in the modernist poetry of Joyce, Eliot, Pound, and Stein. But
in addition he suggests that if we wish to contribute to the understand-
ing of certain critical impasses, such as that indicated by the idea of the
enigma of genre, we would do well to study the physical aspects of
individual books rather than attend only to their verbal or linguistic
aspects alone. This is not a “theoretical” recommendation, he insists, “it
is practical in a very specific sense.”
Thus, McGann views only a certain kind of literary theory as ineffec-
tual in dealing with the problem of genre, namely, that which looks
through the incarnation of the text to its “incarnated” linguistic aspects.
Theory, he says, always arises on the foundation of a “metadistinction”
between “content and form” which obscures the extent to which the
book signifies both by what it says as it does in fashioning the matter out
of which it is made. A proper interpretive method would not only avoid
this spiritualizing tendency, but would, on the contrary, direct critical
attention towards study of the ways in which thought is performed in the
very process of its incarnation in the gross matter of the book: ink,
paper, binding, and so forth, that is: “in the foul rag and bone shops
where type meets ink and kisses paper and where paper gets gathered
and bound for glory.” And this is what he does (or rather performs) in
his study of a single book, Herbert Horne’s Diversi Colores. He shows how
the material elements of Horne’s book individualize it, making of it a
product of a unique performance, a genre with one member only.
I am convinced that we should always attend to the physical form and
properties of the book we are reading, the ways in which the paratext
608 new literary history

prepares us for the text itself, the ways in which the text is cut up and
segmented, and the ways in which a gap between two segments of
whatever length in a text signify quite as much as any title or epigraph or
intertextual citation. But if the best art is “performative and incarnational,”
should not the best criticism aspire to the same ideal? If we hypotheti-
cally entertained McGann’s notion about the nature of the creative work
of literature, would we not be compelled to try to make our critical
writing modally articulated in a similar way?
This is not a criticism based on the requirement that a critic ought to
imitate the style of the work she is studying. It has to do rather with the
relationship between the genres of literary writing and the genres of
critical writing. In spite of his assertion that “theory will not take us very
far,” Jerome McGann’s analysis of Horne’s book is theory-driven; it is not
a typically hermeneutic exercise.
Moreover, it offers or at least promises insights into the complex
relationships between the theory and the practice of genre invention in
a post-religious—by which I mean a not fully secularized—culture. What
McGann’s analysis of Horne’s book shows me is the ways in which older
religious notions and concepts can continue to exist in cultures that are
not only post-religious but also anti-religious. He shows me how religious
or mythical ideas like those about the nature of the sacraments can
continue to exist in materialist culture and, when put to aesthetic uses
can succeed in endowing even the most brutal matter with the aspect of
“spirituality.”
I take this to confirm Michael Prince’s thesis about the ways in which
the category of the aesthetic was adapted in the late eighteenth century
to transform such anomalies as “the paradox of genre” into a value and
an explanation of why works of art might appeal to us even though we
might be at first repelled by both their manifest “content” and their
apparent “form.” Our first experience of a book or indeed any work of
art or craft may be visual or auditory, but we do not relate to it
existentially until we have touched, handled or otherwise “felt” it. The
tactile sensation is commonly thought of as the basis of the appeal of
sculpture, which engages the body quite as much as the eye, ear, and
mind. We no doubt forget that our first experiences of reading are
physical experiences and that it is our bodily relationships to books that
may be formative of our attitudes towards them and their uses ever
afterward. Consequently, genre theory might very well profit from a
move toward something like the performative mode of addressing its
object—a move which has enjoyed massive payoffs in the fields of dance,
music criticism, and media studies. McGann, in his all too brief essay,
provides a theoretical argument for (as he might put it) “licensing” such
a move in literary studies.
anomalies of genre 609

I am fast running out of space without having come to the two essays
of this collection which interest me most. These are the two essays by
well-known practitioners of ideology critique: Morson’s essay on the
genre of the aphorism and Jameson’s essay on the genre of the Utopia.
Both critics are well known for their suspicion of “theory” when not
corrected by proper attention to “history.” Both of them also take genre
seriously as a kind of defining “substance” of the literary work of art.
Both are openly engaged with Marxian theory, Jameson as an advocate
of a revised version of it, and Morson as an implacably hostile critic of it
as the very type of the kind of totalitarian thinking that it purports to be
fighting. It is instructive, then, to see how what can only be called their
respective theories of literary analysis deal with the “paradoxes of genre.”
In these two essays the ideological implications of the very idea of genre
are confronted and assessed.
Morson approaches the problem by way of a reflection on the genre
of the aphorism. He proposes, he tells us straight away, to view genre—
even the shortest and seemingly least discursive form, namely, the
aphorism—as manifesting or expressing a worldview. “There exists an
aphoristic consciousness,” he writes, “that differs from that of a maxim,
a dictum, a witticism, a hypothesis, a thought, and many other forms.”
And he proposes to show how the aphorism manifests, expresses, or
incarnates a “basic worldview” graspable in terms of its opposition to
another short form, the genre of the dictum.
The worldview inherent in a genre does not possess a fixed form,
however; indeed, it can be apprehended as similar to that famous
anomalous figure that appears as a rabbit or a duck according to the
identity projected onto it by the viewer. Just as there are “some cases
where an expression can be read in . . . contradictory ways,” so too
genres can be read in contradictory ways. Thus, a given short expres-
sion—such as, say, Morson’s own sentence: “Tolstoy’s War and Peace is the
longest aphorism in the world”—can arguably be read as either an
aphorism or a dictum, or for that matter, as a witticism or maxim,
depending on the way it is construed or “taken” by the reader. Thus, we
might conclude, the generic identity of a text in no way determines how
a literary work or indeed any discourse has to be read. “There is no
single correct classification system,” Morson writes—dictalogically. “We
do best when we cease trying to account for the multiple and incompat-
ible uses of a term and focus on specific classes of works,” he says. And
concludes (meta-maximistically): “Identify classes, rather than account
for terms: this is a maxim of genre study.”
But in his discussion of the differences between the aphorism and the
dictum, Morson also indicates how these two genres make a conceptual
pair and how each draws its authority for what it says by its relationship
610 new literary history

of opposition to the other. This suggests that we might profitably consider

the problem of genre by identifying each genre’s conceptual “other”
rather than by simply classifying genres according to a principle of
similarity and difference. This “other” might be different in different
works, such that a tragic drama might be inflected in a particular way by
its opposition to a particular counter-genre, comedy or romance or even
farce, as the case might be. Applied to ancient Greek tragedy, for
instance, this might provide us with a way of distinguishing between
different kinds of the genre: Aeschylus could be distinguished from
Euripides by identifying the counter-genres embedded within the trag-
edies of each. Every work could then be interpreted as an interplay
between two or more genres-types or as an amalgam of a number of
genres.
The problem with Morson’s model, as I see it, is that in his own
paradigm, the oppositional relationship between aphorism and dictum
is not value-neutral but rather ethical in nature: the aphorism is not only
positive and good, the dictum is decidedly negative and bad. On his
terms, any fall out of aphoristic into dictal utterance is a fall into
ideology, whereas the opposite would not be the case. Thus, when
Morson says of the dictum: “The dictum is implicitly and often utopian,
and utopian tracts and fiction incline to dicta” and “the dictum is
insulated from history,” it is clear that he is demonizing the dictum as
bad ideology. The dictum, for Morson, is the paradigm of more
extended authoritarian discourses, such as philosophy of history, idealist
philosophy, Marxism, priestly cant, and religious dogma.
Morson’s examples of dictalogical discourse include quotations from
Marx, Marx and Engels, Bentham, Descartes, Lenin, Leibniz, and the
Catechism of the Catholic Church. The last of these examples is
included, I presume, because it is a paradigm of dogmatic assertion. But
one can easily see what all of these “dictalogists” are supposed to have in
common: they all represent dogmatic or at least nomothetic-deductive
systems of thought; they are all expressions of totalizing systems of
thought and belief; and they are all, by Morson’s lights at least,
oppressive in the effects they have on both thought and action. In this
model, the dictum is posited as the most evil of the short genres; indeed,
it is difficult on Morson’s analysis to discern any redeeming feature in it.
And yet, the dictum is the paradigm of legal discourse, where it cannot
be dispensed with. A legal system cast in aphorisms could not be a system
at all and would have very little of the law-like in it.
I take “ideology” to be—among other things—the product of a
strategy by which ethical categories can be smuggled into putatively
scientific or generally objective descriptions of things and endowed with
the inevitability of a “natural” necessity. Morson’s theory of the agonistic
anomalies of genre 611

relationship obtaining among the generic conventions informing a work

of art or science (he takes Darwin’s Origin of Species as a model of a
morally responsible scientific discourse) alerts us to the polemical
nature of intergeneric conflict. Nonetheless, his own inclination to use
the dictalogical mode in his discussion of the relationship between the
genres of aphorism and dictum suggests that, as in all ideological
discourse, the speaker tends to be contaminated by whatever it is he
wishes to neutralize or destroy, which suggests that an ideological
treatment of ideological discourse will end up becoming more ideologi-
cal than it wishes to be. And so too, we might surmise, with theories of
genre considered as the discursive instrument by which to effect the
substitution of ethical for scientific descriptions of reality. The social
function of generic conventions seems to be to hide or elide that
difference between fact and value which, from Hume to Weber and Lévi-
Strauss, has been seen as the fundamental problem of any possible
science of society.
One way of dealing with this problem is to view the literary work as the
product (in part, of course) of a kind of dialectic of genres, in which
what the formalists called the “dominant” of the work is viewed as an
attempted synthesis of all the generic conventions used to justify the
work’s claim to some kind of realism. This approach to the question of
genre gets us beyond any necessity to regard certain “paradoxical”
aspects of a discourse of genre as indices of a “problem” and allows us to
treat them as the solution to the question of why generic conventions
seem necessary to the presentation of a worldview in the first place.
Such seems to be the strategy of Fredric Jameson in his essay “Morus:
The Generic Window.” He begins by crediting various opposed interpreta-
tions of More’s Utopia as either a naïve fantasy of an impossible, ideal
society bearing no relation to the real world or as some kind of satirical
inversion of the “real” political, economic, and social conditions obtain-
ing in More’s own time and place in history.
Jameson begins with the observation that More’s book features two
distinct genres, the first being that of the travel narrative of part 1 and
the second that of the Utopia proper, too fanciful to be taken seriously
and therefore best understood as a wish-fulfillment daydream or pseudo-
political satire. Thus, the work seems “paradoxical” and even “contradic-
tory” in the way it seeks (and fails) to meld two genres never meant to be
combined in a single discourse. But, Jameson remarks: “The best
method is always to turn such a problem into a solution in its own right,
and make of this objective and incompatible alternation an interpretive
phenomenon at some higher (meta) level. Here reading and interpreta-
tion confront the fundamental ethical question par excellence which is
also the fundamental political one, namely whether Utopias are positive
612 new literary history

or negative, good or evil.” But this question can be raised, Jameson tells
us, only after the manifest “interpretive signals” have been attended, and
these are “the generic ones.” Why? Because, Jameson writes: “Genre
presumably governs the interpretation of the narrative or representa-
tional details within its frame”—a generalization which, by the way,
provides us with a way of comprehending the enigmatic phrasing of the
title of Jameson’s essay.5
I think that, of all the contributors to this symposium, Jameson has
been the one who has most consistently taken genre as a (if not the
principal) problem for a historically responsible approach to literary
studies. His allegiance to a historical approach to literary study accounts
for what has to many appeared as a distinct hostility to “theory.” In
Ideologies of Theory,6 he more than once identified “theory” with
“postmodernism” and consigned them both to perdition because of
what he took to be their avoidance of “history.” But as the title Ideologies
of Theory suggests, Jameson distinguishes between a specifically ideologi-
cal use of theory and the kind of theory that is useful in the deconstruction
of ideologies. This second kind of theory is deployed in the service of an
idea of history which takes the modes and means of production as
foundational to the understanding of how historical societies and their
various cultural endowments change over time. Therefore, Jameson has
a theory of literature and a fortiori a theory of genre, but these are
historical or, more precisely, historicist, theories. And he no more
envisions an inevitable conflict between a theoretical and a practical
approach to literary genre studies than he sees a conflict between theory
and history.
A historical treatment of anything whatsoever is not something to
which you add a dash of theory; what you mean by history will be
theoretically determined at some more basic level of existential awareness
of your “situation.” When it comes to discourse and literature or any
other aspect of human culture, theory is simply a mode of thought by
which to grasp the (synchronic) structure of the diachronic process of
which “history” is a manifestation. Narrative is another mode of thought,
by which the diachronic aspect of reality is grasped in discourse.
Jameson’s contribution to this issue of NLH on genre is a reprise of a
1977 essay on Thomas More’s Utopia, entitled “Of Islands and Trenches:
Neutralization and the Production of Utopian Discourse.”7 It is typical of
Jameson’s procedure that, in revising his treatment of More for a
volume on genre, he should now focus his attention—much more than
he did in the original treatment—on the ways in which the generic aspect
of Utopia yields insight into the conflicts, not only of different worldviews
but also of their “imaginaries,” which is to say, the different wish-
fulfillment fantasies that give them their different ideological valences.
anomalies of genre 613

The 1977 essay ends with reflections on Louis Marin’s discussion of

the Utopia as a genre. And there the text of More’s Utopia was presented
as the quintessential self-consuming literary artifact. Jameson:

The ultimate subject matter of Utopian discourse would turn out to be its own
conditions of possibility as discourse. Yet such desperate formalism, and the
spectacle of a genre lifting itself up by its own bootstraps, is perhaps only the
obverse and the corollary of its own most genuine chance of authenticity; for it
would follow, in that case, that Utopia’s deepest subject, and the source of all that is
most vibrantly political about it, is precisely our inability to conceive it, our incapacity
to produce it as a vision, our failure to project the Other of what is, a failure that,
as with fireworks dissolving back into the night sky, must once again leave us
alone with this history. (ITS 101; my italics)

The self-consuming nature of More’s Utopia specifies the nature of its

function: it is “the converse” of “ideology,”8 which means that its
function is to “designate the still empty space of a scientific theory of
society” (ITS 101).9 Thus, More’s Utopia is an example and paradigm of
a genre of political discourse and social commentary which, far from
providing a blueprint for the ideal society, expresses a desire for a
“science” of the social that would rise above the sectarian and confes-
sional conflicts that blocked access to such a science in the “situation” in
which More found himself in early-sixteenth-century England.
In this respect, the genre of Utopia gives us some insight into the
intellectual function of all generic fictionalities. They are to provide a
“window” not only on the world whose “narrative and representational
details” they “govern” but also onto genres themselves, the “windowing”
(or framing) function of which is every bit as important as the world to
which they give access. Here we can recall Nietzsche’s idea of interpreta-
tion as a perspective provided by a kind of lens which permits us to focus
on a specific access of reality, and to focus on the lens itself and its
function in providing perspective, at one and the same time.
The function of genre in literary writing would thus be exactly the
“converse” of its equivalent category in utilitarian or merely communica-
tive discourse. It might turn out that, in literary writing, the function of
genre is like the genre of Utopia in ethico-political discourse in the
modern age: to designate the “still empty space” of a perfectly commu-
nicative practice of writing itself. It is in this sense that the genre of
Utopia can always be identified by the extent to which the Utopian text
presides over the effort to escape the divisive and agonistic effects of
genre itself.
So, not surprisingly, the genre of Utopia turns out to be comprehend-
ible as a kind of Utopia of genre itself, in which all the divisions and
614 new literary history

hierarchies separating individuals from one another and the whole of

humanity from the world it occupies are sublated in an image of imperfect
unity. In this respect, the failures—logical, conceptual, and rhetorical—
of Utopia are, if anything, more important to its real project than its
successes. For if the tacit aim of every Utopian scheme considered as a
contribution to political and social theory is to show the impossibility of its
own realization, then the “failures” of Utopia espied by all of those
champions of “realism” who want to consign the whole genre to the
domain of fantasy and delusion, confirm Utopia’s own project.
It is not a matter, then, of choosing between the “historical” or
narrativized book 1 of Utopia and its theoretical or idealized vision of a
possible better world somewhere else or at a later time, and book 2, as
containing the “real” subject-matter of the work. For, on Jameson’s
reading, the theoretical part is merely the flip side or mirror image of
the historical part, in the way that the factual superstructure of the
“realistic” text depends for its authority on the verisimilitude of its
generic infrastructure.
And so it may be for genre in the life of both realistic and imaginative
discourses about “the real world.” More’s Utopia envisions a world in
which the conflict of discursive genres is resolved in a way consistent
with the conflicting imperatives of all the different sects and confessions
vying for dominance during the period of Reformations and Religious
Wars. In order to do this, More must identify the Utopian element in
each of the discourses clamoring for the right to speak authoritatively in
the void created by the declining authority of the Church. By incorporat-
ing all of these images of Utopia into his own vision of how Utopia is to
be sought and what it might look like when found, More at once affirms
and denies the validity of all of them. If the ideal of Utopian discourse is
to demonstrate its own impossibility, then More anticipates all of those
critics of later years who signal their own realism by the enthusiasm with
which they go about demonstrating that Utopia is indeed impossible. In
this work, they confirm only what More was at such pains to demonstrate
himself by his creation of this generic “hapax legomenon” which was
“Thomas Morus’ De optimo rei publicae statu sive de nova insula Utopia.”
In the last issue of NLH, also on genre, Peter Hitchcock suggested that
the genre of postcolonial writing differed from its metropolitan counter-
part by virtue of its project to dismantle genre in general, because genre
in literature is only another version of the idea of racial species which
served to justify imperialist oppression of native peoples. It appears to me
that, although this characterization of genre may be quite persuasive, a
direct assault on it will no more succeed than the centuries-long assault
on the idea of genre purity. Another strategy might be that of More or
rather Morus, who struck the beast of prejudice and tyranny from within
anomalies of genre 615

its own strongest element, the feigned idealism which made it attractive
not least to its victims. Perhaps it is the same with modern notions of
genre. Here, perhaps, as Tynianov argued, the best approach is parody.

Stanford University

NOTES

1 José Ortega y Gasset on history: “Man, in a word, has no nature; what he has is . . . history”
(“History as a System,” in Philosophy & History: Essays Presented to Ernst Cassirer, ed. Raymond
Klibansky and H. J. Paton [New York, 1963], p. 313).
2 It might be noted that the journal of History and Theory was founded, not in order to
put theory into history, but to examine the metatheoretical conflict between traditional,
humanistic, and belletristic historiography and such theoretically informed approaches to
historical studies as those represented by Marxism and the so-called “new social history.”
3 See Erich Auerbach’s characterization a the essential feature of literary realism in
France during the early nineteenth century: “In the Hotel de la Mole,” chapter 18 of
Auerbach’s Mimesis, tr. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, 1991), pp. 454–92.
4 It is questionable whether “theorist” is the right word here. The modern notion of
theory, as in the “critical theory” associated with the Frankfurt School, has a connotation
quite different from that indicated by ancient Greek theoria. Indeed, as Wlad Godzich
pointed out in his foreword to Paul De Man’s Resistance to Theory, ancient Greeks thought
theoria meant something like “contemplation” or “consideration.” Moreover, theoria was
not set in opposition to praxis (meaning something like “action”) but rather to aesthesis
(meaning something like the feeling of pleasantness). So the opposition between theory
and practice, which informs so many of the contributions to our symposium, would appear
to be more germane to the modern discussion of genres than to the ancient one. See Paul
De Man, Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis, 1986).
5 Morus [the Latin form of More’s name] : [the punctuation mark introducing a
quotation, explanation, or example of the word or phrase preceding it] The Generic
Window, which suggests that it is an example of the name “Morus.” Which suggests that the
phrase “The Generic Window” quotes, explains, or exemplifies the Latin form of More’s
name. How so? “Morus” not only designates the author of the text, it also sends out signals
of “Latinity” which endow the text with a whole body of signifieds (connotations) not
found in the New English language taking shape in More’s time. In this way Latin itself
serves as a “generic window” onto the combination of realistic description of England’s
then current condition (given in part 1 of Utopia) and the imagined community alternative
to England (given in part 2 of the text).
6 Fredric Jameson, The Ideologies of Theory: Essays 1971–1986 (Minneapolis, 1988). Note:
the subtitle of volume 1 is Situations of Theory, while that of vol. 2 is Syntax of History
(hereafter cited in text as ITS).
7 Jameson’s essay “Of Islands and Trenches” was first published in Diacritics, 7 (1977), 2–21.
8 Referring to Karl Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of
Knowledge (London, 1936).
9 Quoting Louis Marin’s Utopiques: Jeux des espaces, of which Jameson’s essay is a review
article.