In the final entry of this surprisingly long series, I sum up what I’ve said before, then talk about Star Trek a bit more, of course.
Genre fiction is a reflex of narrative itself, a product of mass literacy not because it’s easy, but because a wider and more diverse literate audience led to increasingly high demands on narrative itself, to deeper questions about what narrative is and what plots are. The old patterns of plot and character arc remain as they always have done, but with a greater attention to form than before. Literary fiction went through its own response to mass literacy, arriving at the deconstructions of postmodernism, while genre fiction made a similar journey for the same reasons, with narrative inevitability reconstituted as a function of the genre.
As this happened alongside cheaper production methods and the spread of free public libraries, as well as a greatly increased pool of potential writers (because more people were able to write, both because of mass literacy and more free time for ordinary working people), the amount of literature available increased dramatically. The more you read, the more likely you are to become jaded by repetitive action and to start asking questions about narrative. Dickens’ reliance on coincidence becomes less easy to swallow, so you need more of an explanation. Writers provided a variety of answers to these demands, manifesting as the various genres.
(There’s potentially more to explore here, in terms of looking at how form influenced genre – what’s the difference between reading a story all in one book and reading it chapter by chapter, as it’s published? – but I think that’s another essay, not least because the most interesting question in contemporary fiction is, Why hasn’t the internet produced a widely read work of fiction?, and I could easily write a book on this topic (stop saying QAnon, it doesn’t count)).
So lumping together all the genres on the one hand, and literary fiction on the other, is somewhat misleading. They all represent the same reflex but in different ways. All art is essentially a game of pattern recognition: we get used to seeing certain shapes and we have an infinite variety of ways of perceiving them, producing infinite variations on themes. The variations then themselves become a new theme, with infinite new permutations. Both literary and genre fiction trade on this. When the weight is more on recognising patterns of events, we call it genre fiction, and when its more on patterns of behaviour, we call it literary fiction, but with, again, infinite possible blends of the two modes of understanding. You can never have a pure blend of one or the other, because there’s always the argument that how someone reacts to an event is a function of character, or that a given event only transpired because of character. So, to give a final example, the motivation of The Search for Spock is Spock’s death at the end of The Wrath of Khan and McCoy and Kirk’s reaction to it. Spock’s death itself is a function of his character – he dies a hero of utilitarianism, the key line being ‘The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few – or the one’. But the death itself happens because of a MacGuffin – the warp drive is failing. Warp drives aren’t real (yet – I’m keeping my fingers crossed), so their failure is arbitrary, as is the idea that a warp drive failure can be averted, but only by someone who is at least half-Vulcan.
All other works of fiction can be viewed through this lens, as a manifestation of these two reflex responses to mass literacy. If nothing else, it provides a convenient intellectual rationale for claiming Buffy the Vampire Slayer as a postmodern masterpiece.
Frank Podmore 