evolved its own genres such as romance or science fiction, and these too
have mutated over time. For example the digital world has brought about
the sub-genre known as cyberpunk.
Many writers like to be stay-at-homes within a particular genre, because
it gives them limits within which to generate and control ideas. Writing
persistently within a particular genre, however, can be restrictive, because
it imposes limits and norms, and produces rather predictable results. His-
torically it has been the case that most innovative writers have pushed the
boundaries of the genre in which they were writing. Emily Bronte, for
instance, working within narrative realism, engineers characters and situ-
ations that constantly exceed that framework. Heathcliff, in Wuthering
Heights, often seems more like a projection of forces, than a ‘rounded’
character in the conventional sense.
Even genre-based writers often stretch the forms they work within.
British popular novelist Barbara Vine, for example, has made the crime
novel much more elastic by displacing the tension in the story, so that it
does not necessarily become reduced to the solving of a crime. Instead, her
novels often set up ambiguities in the way the story is resolved, and involve
considerable psychological development of the characters beyond their
function as part of the genre. In a completely different way, Margaret
Atwood often stretches the boundaries of narrative fiction with multiple
focalisations or complex time shifts. However, this is only taken to a
certain point in her work, and is never pushed to the extent where narra-
tive totally breaks down.
Postmodernist writing has played a double game with genre: both
paying homage to it and yet pulling the rug from beneath its feet. In the
following sections we will enter that game with the synoptic novel, dis-
continuous prose, mixed-genre writing and fictocriticism. Once you have
tried some of these approaches, you may want to play with genre in ways
which are not represented here, or have not been attempted by other
writers.
exercises
- Write a synoptic novel.
- Write some ‘notes on the life of a student’ using the form of dis-
continuous prose. - Create a mixed-genre piece which ‘cross-dresses’ a number of
literary and cultural genres. - Create a fictocritical text.
The invert, the cross-dresser, the fictocritic 193