The Ideology of Genre

Introduction: Why Genre?

In his Gespräch über die Poesie ("Dialogue on Poetry"), the German Romantic critic and philosopher Friedrich Schlegel allows Markus to defend the concept of literary genre and the legitimacy of its study against Amalia, who feels that categorization in whatever form kills the spirit and the imagination: "I shudder whenever I open a book where the imagination and its works are classified under rubrics" [1].. But this is after all a dialogue, a fragment. No one has the last word. And like the ghosts of Paolo and Francesca, whirled around by the noxious gases of critical discourse, the spirits of Markus and Amalia have haunted every debate on genre theory down to the present day; they haunt it as the two poles of necessity and freedom which seem to struggle for mastery in every work and in every act of reading.

Their dialog is situated on the divide between ancient and modern approaches to genre. Like Markus, the ancients saw generic boundaries as a necessity for poetic production. A good example is Horace, who wrote his so-called Ars poetica as a letter of advice to a literary family. Genre in Horace is a sub-topic of to prepon or decorum, of the ability to find what is fitting:

If in producing my work I cannot observe (and don't know) the required genres and styles, why am I hailed as "Poet?" Why prefer wanton ignorance to learning?
Comic material resists presentation in tragic verse. Likewise the "Feast of Thyestes" resents poetry that is conversation and worthy almost of the comic sock.[2]

This production-oriented view of genre continued through the Renaissance, where "literary invention . . . was largely generic, and [the] transfer of ancient values was largely in generic terms, accomplished by generic instruments and helps."[3]

Amalia, on the other hand, is very modern in seeing all attempts at defining genre as coming from outside, as it were. In their philological bent, itself based on the root metaphor of biology, later thinkers such as Ferdinand Bruneti&eGRAVE; constructed a kind of greenhouse of genres, hoping to trace and classify the growth and hybridization of texts.[4] In reaction, Formalism in the early twentieth century became intent on isolating literature's textual features, some or all of which may be present in a text and thus determine its genre. In post-World War Two theoretical discourse, on the other hand, structuralism and reader-response criticism give readers and their conventions the responsibility of assigning genres to texts, thus making it impossible to speak of genre as any kind of permanent or transcendental construct. These four stages of generic criticism (genre as rules, genre as species, genre as patterns of textual features, and genre as reader convention) correspond to the four positions in the great debate about where textual meaning resides: in authorial intention, in the work's historical or literary context, in the text itself, or in the reader.[5] But how does the law of genre operate today? Let us look at some examples.

The ideology of genre is all around us. On one of my research trips to the local supermarket (most scholars prefer to consult the local tavern, but I am known as an innovator), I paused for a long time in front of the "Reading Center." There stood all the garishly multicolored books, hundreds of titles to choose from, and yet these many titles fell into relatively few categories. There were of course the romances, with names like Cajun Kiss, Tame the Fury, Sweet Savage Love, Sweet Texas Promise, etc. Like "sweet," the word or concept of fire appears quite often, as in Forbidden Fires, Fires of Surrender, The Flame and the Flower, and Embers of the Heart. Need I describe the covers? Inevitably, a half-naked man and a half-naked woman in some sort of embrace, with a castle or cypress tree or clipper ship or mountain range in the background, perhaps a sword covering the pudenda, everything in pastels and earth tones. The genre of modern romance can actually be subdivided, because the Harlequins are a bit different. Whereas the romances just described are basically for married or older women trying to escape humdrum reality, Harlequin romances are for younger women trying to learn where they can locate their desires within that reality. Younger and less undressed people inhabit these covers, not all of them embracing as in the firebrands. And they are depicted in undeniably middle-class, unexotic surroundings Ñ golf courses, shopping malls Ñ and under titles which do not evoke passion as much as they attempt to channel it into rules of conduct: A Matter of Principal, Jester's Girl, Scout's Honor, Capture the Rainbow, each a proverb and guide to behavior.[6]

While many students of the modern popular romance insist that the genre reinforces patriarchy by showing women as living in order to be desired by men, Janice Radway decided to take a different tack by actually asking readers why in fact they chose to read romances, and by asking those readers to identify features they liked and didn't like. Beyond the enormous variations one could expect, the actual defining feature of the genre emerged as a value, or a small piece of subversive social action. The romance is "compensatory literature. It supplies [its female readers] with an important emotional release that is proscribed in daily life because the social role with which they identify themselves leaves little room for guiltless, self-interested pursuit of individual pleasure. Indeed, the search for emotional gratification was the one theme common to all of the women's observations about the function of romance reading."[7] In other words, the contemporary genre of romance may have been created by the fact that American women are not provided with nurturers the way men and children are. Men and children, emotionally pampered beings that they are, develop different desires, and hence they enjoy different genres.

Radway's genre analysis proceeds from this point. After noting the particular use-value which romance has for its readers, she proceeds to identify those romances which best provide that use-value, and then from those representatives to construct an ideal plotline:

Instead of attempting to assemble an 'objective,' 'representative' sample of the romance, I have relied on [my interviewees'] tendencies to separate their books into the categories of the 'good' and the 'bad.' I have therefore departed from the usual procedure of focusing attention on a particular publisher's line or on a narrative subgenre, because virtually all of the . . . women read more than one kind of romance. . . . [A]n analysis of these twenty quintessentially romantic books would reveal the crucial generative matrix of the genre as the readers understand it. [8]

On its surface, Radway's final list of 13 essential plot elements, moving from the destruction of the heroine's social identity through the development of the emotional ties between heroine and hero to the restoration of the heroine's identity, looks analogous to the results of generic analyses carried out by Vladimir Propp on the fairy tale.[9] The crucial difference, however, is that Propp neither united the texts of his genre by identifying their shared cultural use-value, nor proposed a central need or wish-fulfillment which the fairy tale served. Radway's structural analysis of romance, on the other hand, makes sense only when framed by the use-value which defines the genre.
However, to find and (in particular) to express the exact use-value of genres is not always such an easy matter. Which (presumably) male needs are fulfilled in combat books, for example, with those predictable titles that seem designed to cause physical unease? To Hell and Back, Helmet for My Pillow, The Old Corps (get the pun?). If the titles of the romances are evocative, and if those of the Harlequins are proverbial, titles such as these are experiential. They show that this genre will deliver the sublime message of Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky: "Suffering is the sole cause of consciousness."[10] No nudity on the cover, and no women. Just soldiers and planes and guns. The colors surprisingly subdued, lots of green, dark brown, black. Interestingly, a combat book's cover and title rarely reflect on the work's fictionality or non-fictionality. Romance had to be fictional, because women's needs have not been fulfilled by history. But since culture is patriarchal, war can provide its confirmation both in history and fantasy. War exists always; we must imagine love. On the other hand, one can clearly differentiate between the World War II genre and the World War III genre. Bright red and yellow covers for the future, to show they mean business, and upward-mobility titles which are no longer painful, and which emphasize abstract actions rather than personal experience: Night Launch, Red Star, Hostile Fire, Black Sky.
Unlike any genre seen so far, Western titles tend to be names of places and/or persons: The Burning Hills, Milo Talon, Cimarron, The Texians, The Californios, Hanging Woman Creek. Furthermore, whereas the World War III genre tends to depict a single, enormous, high-tech implement on the cover and no people, Westerns nearly always depict humans (whose number can vary greatly), and the mode of depiction is always realistic rather than stylized. Like combat books, the Western is a male-oriented genre, and one whose compensatory message is generally clear enough: it poses individualism as a primary and necessary attribute. A man can act alone to solve a collective problem, a sententia which noted scholar Henry A. Kissinger took from the Western into his office as Secretary of State. When asked by Oriana Fallaci about the image he cultivated as a shuttle diplomat, Kissinger responded with a generic definition of the Western: "Americans like the cowboy who leads the wagon train by riding ahead alone on his horse, the cowboy who rides all alone into the town, the village, with his horse and nothing else. Maybe even without a pistol, since he doesn't shoot. He acts, that's all, by being in the right place at the right time. In short, a Western."[11] It is fascinating to watch Dr. Kissinger betray his German origins with the solecism of "village," which does not exist in the American West, and his misnomer hints that perhaps his relative newness to American culture allowed him to grasp both the ideological core and the use-value of the Western more quickly than most of us.

To use a place name (of "villages," etc.), while depicting the kind of people who inhabit that place conjures up an image of (visible, imaginable, and hence achievable) utopia, of a new race, of a sphere in which individual action can have a meaning Ñ in other words, of American market capitalism. So at least concludes Will Wright in his study of Six-Guns and Society.[12] Wright argues that Westerns essentially reflect, through their narrative sequence, the structure of American free-market capitalism. Like Radway, he supplies a Proppian sequence of sixteen "events" whose ordering is invariable, even if not all elements are present in every Western. In the first complex of events, according to Wright, the hero enters a social group to which he is unknown, but in which he reveals that he has an exceptional ability. In the final complex, the hero saves society, which then finally accepts him. Wright goes on to link changes in the genre (for example, its disappearance from television) to the transition from free-market entrepreneurship to a "corporate," post-industrial capitalism which de-emphasizes the role of the individual. Thus, if romances supply women with the understanding, imaginary partner they lack in real life, Westerns remove the unwanted partners which bring about the uneasiness of the male double-bind: "be a hero," but "don't rock the boat."[13]

The covers of thrillers differ radically from any described so far in their use of a visual "alienation effect." They depict a few objects (a doll, a knife, and a drop of blood, for example), often photographed rather than painted as the other covers always are, which don't immediately seem related to each other. Here photographic realism combines with compositional stylization to produce a fetishistic image appropriate for the worship of violence. The covers of thrillers are visual zeugmas Ñ a nail through a hand, a hammer beside a statue of Buddha, drops of blood on a map. These are also the only covers which dare to place their objects on the diagonal, thus further disorienting the viewer's vision. Their titles are similarly opaque, always metaphorical and suggestive (Size, Dark Room, Hard Candy) rather than deictic as in the westerns or evocative as in the romances. All these features reflect the nature of this genre's plots, which will ask the reader to put the pieces together. Disorientation is at the heart of this genre which provides a kind of "alienation effect" and an alternative to the familiar patterns of behavior. Apparently, disorientation is a use-value. Thrillers are the roller coasters and funhouses of reading.

So far, I have described a particular generic system within the American culture industry. I have hinted at some of the ways these genres function as a system, carefully differentiating themselves from their neighbors in terms of their titles, their covers, and the ways they are to be used by their readers. I have defined and subdivided the genres according to what I will call their "use-values." I will advance the theory in these next pages that generic differences are grounded in the pragmatic "use-value" of discourse rather than in its content or formal features. Rather than sort writing and language according to shared formal features, according to their following or not following certain rules of production, or according to their similarities to other texts, genre can explore the "use-values" to which cultural artifacts can be put. I have chosen to begin my sorting with popular literature for several reasons. One is that I will more probably be forgiven for playing fast and loose with my interpretations of these works than I would be for similar statements about Shakespeare's plays, for example. The reason for that forgiveness, however, is even more significant, and brings us back to Schlegel and the conflict between Markus and Amalia. It is, if I am correct, that most readers of this book will concur that popular culture is indeed "genre-driven," that the sorts of formal similarities and differences which I have been describing here are not simply created by my critical fantasy Ñ though the details of my analysis may be debated Ñ but have indeed been deliberately created by an industry (and not by "individuals," to concede Amalia's point) according to pre-conceived formulae which create well-defined markets for exploitation; hence my concentration on the cover art, so crucial in selling a book in the context I have described.[14]

On the other hand, my subjective treatment of the way these texts seek to seduce their readers may seem to have precious little to do with "Literature," i.e., with books that get taught. Indeed, the academic reaction against the marketability of genre is typified by formulations like that of Fredric Jameson:

With the elimination of an institutionalized social status for the cultural producer and the opening of the work of art itself to commodification, the older generic specifications are transformed into a brand-name system against which any authentic artistic expression must necessarily struggle. The older generic categories do not, for all that, die out, but persist in the half-life of the subliterary genres of mass culture, transformed into the drugstore and airport paperback lines of gothics, mysteries, romances, bestsellers, and popular biographies, where they await the resurrection of their immemorial, archetypal resonance at the hands of a [Northrop] Frye or a[n Ernst] Bloch.[15]

Though one wonders about the logic of a series where "bestseller" is seen as a generic category along with "romance," Jameson has created, with his usual magisterial compression, a little fable of a Golden Age, when artistic genius and the adherence to generic rules of production harmoniously coincided, and of the subsequent Fall, when true creativity, exiled from a genre system that both creates and limits its readers' appetites (Amalia's shudder) rather than writers' invention (Markus's defense), takes up its lodging outside of or between genres. In other words, a literary work's adherence to generic rules becomes inversely proportional to its aesthetic quality. The problem, as with Marxist criticism's great shibboleth, the ubiquitous "rise of the bourgeoisie," is one of specifying just when and where this Fall took place. But one need not be a Marxist or believe in the difference between "true" and "popular" cultures to explain genre away. In their own ways, Benedetto Croce, Jacques Derrida, Tzvetan Todorov, and Adena Rosmarin all do denigrate genre as an aporia, a critical phantasm, or an imposition upon literature. One could make a little anthology of declarations of "resistance to genre," such as the following by R. K. Hack: "The doctrine of literary forms has always turned our eyes from . . . reality, has caused us to rest content with a futile label." "Literature with a Capital L" is now consistently characterized by what I will call "generic instability," i.e., by its ability to confound our generic expectations Ñ including those for "Literature with a Capital L."[16]

The effect which many identify with the Postmodern is produced by defeating readers' generic expectations. One can see an example and a parable of this process in Jorge Luis Borges's short story "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," which can be read as an antidote against any belief in generic stability. Borges's short story masquerades as a report on the narrator's gradual discovery of a centuries-old conspiracy to create an artificial world through the production of, among other items, a fictional encyclopedia. Clearly, the use-value of an encyclopedia, the way its prose is supposed to be applied to the reader's world-at-hand, should be annihilated by its assignment to the realm of fictionality. But there is a twist; at the end of the story, the narrator reports that Tlönian discourse is remaking the world, that is, turning the traditional "true discourses" into fictional ones, encyclopedias into novels:

The contact and the habit of Tlön have disintegrated this world. . . . Already the schools have been invaded by the conjectural "primitive language" of Tlön; already the teaching of its harmonious history (filled with moving episodes) has wiped out the one which governed in my childhood; already a fictitious past occupies in our memories the place of another, a past of which we know nothing with certainty Ñ not even that it is false. Numismatology, pharmacology and archæology have been reformed. I understand that biology and mathematics also await their avatars.[17]

Like the Tlönists with their encyclopedia, Borges the narrator also sets up a dialectic between fact and fiction. His text opens not with the third-person preterite verb so common to fictional narration, but rather with the first-person present and a long, dry, bibliographic rambling which one expects to find not in a short story, but in that other brief genre at which Borges excelled, the "nota" (a cross between an essay and a critical article):

I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia. The mirror troubled the depths of a corridor in a country house on Gaona Street in Ramos Mej’a; the encyclopedia is fallaciously called The Anglo-American Cyclopædia (New York, 1917) and is a literal but delinquent reprint of the Encyclopædia Britannica of 1902" (3).

Again, two sentences later Borges provides another false lead that this is a Nota by mentioning the real person Alfredo Bioy Casares, while at the same time revealing Ñ in a veiled fashion Ñ the very genesis of his "novel": "Bioy Casares had had dinner with me that evening and we became lengthily engaged in a vast polemic concerning the composition of a novel in the first person, whose narrator would omit or disfigure the facts and indulge in various contradictions which would permit a few readers Ñ very few readers Ñ to perceive an atrocious or banal reality" (3). The first-person narrative here Ñ markers of another genre entirely Ñ along with the overlap in subject matter, allows us to suspect that this seeming nota is really the planned novel. Indeed, the contradictions start here, for in what sense can a novelist write down hechos ("facts") Ñ much less omit them! Ñ and how can contradiction lead to a deeper view of (alternately atrocious or banal) reality? Borges, then, is the master Tlönista; like the encyclopedia of Tlön, the text "Tlön, Uqbar, and Orbis Tertius" is a work of "reference" which reveals itself to be a fiction which in turn creates its own truths: among them, the truth of generic instability.

In moving from the supermarket to Borges we seem to have reversed course entirely, and are now moving away from the seduction of generic certainty, into the chaos of generic fluidity. But it is really our perspective that has changed, from being "outside" the system (as potential buyers) to being "inside" Borges's text (as actual readers). Though the system appears to us to function differently in the two cases, its effects are equally powerful in both. And while many critics might respond to the proliferation of such unclassifiable works by proclaiming the attenuation or futility of generic classification, I perversely insist on seeing Borges's calling attention to his text's generic instability as merely the negative image of my supermarket display. Both phenomena confront us with choice: the supermarket with that of which text will best fill our needs; the "literary" text with that of what exactly to do with it or how to read it. Genre is just as much present in the latter case as in the former. The force of Postmodernism is profoundly dependent upon there being readers familiar with the system of genre, without whom the texts' deliberate confounding of such genres would seem anodyne. Thus, my undergraduate students consistently find "Tlön" unreadable and uninteresting because they are unfamiliar with the various features and use-values of the different genres which it ricochets off of each other. The story has no point for them Ñ and no power. No genre, no power. But it is now time to ask, as Adena Rosmarin has, from whence derives the "power of genre"?

Why genre? If philosophers can ask the question "why is there something, instead of nothing?" then this book can ask the question "why are there (always) genres and not just language (or music, or pictures)?" One popular response to this question has been to ground generic distinctions in logical necessity: Northrop Frye, for example, distinguishes genres on the basis of their "radical of presentation," of the link established between narrator and spectator or reader.[18] Käthe Hamburger and Emil Staiger, on the other hand, distinguish genres by means of their orientation towards past, present or future, that is, by means of the different ideas of time they embody.[19] Thus, already a basic disagreement over where to locate the universal markers of generic difference makes the claim that genre is an essential feature of literature rather dubious. An alternative approach would be pragmatic: we simply would not know what to do with texts without the "user's guide" which genre provides. For example, artificial intelligence expert Douglas Hofstadter has remarked that all messages are really composed of three "layers." These are, in reverse order of decipherment: 1) the message itself; 2) a message about how to decode the message; 3) a message that tells us "this is a message."[20] Now, the statement "this is a message" can be taken both as an act of generic classification and as a statement about what purpose a particular object should be used for. Thus, one may read Hofstadter's analysis as an extension, beyond purely linguistic sign systems, of E. D. Hirsch's dictum: "All understanding of verbal meaning is necessarily genre-bound."[21] In looking at genre from the point of view of information theory, Jan Tryznadlowski has similarly described genres as "various types of programmes . . . . The programme is goal-directed. Whereas individual and synthesized instructions within a literary work are a literal code for the information contained in the work, the programme, outlined by the directives and criteria of the given literary genre, is the central directional information with considerable interpretive values." Furthermore, those values adhere not to the abstract and the private, but to the "artistic and ideological sphere of operation of a given litierary work."[22] Faced with the question of just how an authentic legal text, when reproduced verbatim in Pushkin's novel Dubrovsky, can lose its legal character and now be considered a literary text, Juri Lotman is forced to conclude: "'A change in the function of a text gives it a new semantics and new syntax.' Thus, in the example [of Pushkin's novel], the construction of a document according to the formal laws of a legal text is perceived as construction according to the laws of artistic composition. . . . The social function of a text determines its typological classification.'"[23] If the text's mode d'emploi were not somehow marked, reading Ñ in the sense of that word which goes beyond merely translating black marks on white paper into sounds Ñ would be impossible.

So far I have talked about such markers as garish cover art, titles, and even the ambience of presentation Ñ certain genres, however, cannot be sold in the supermarket. But as a counterpart to my supermarket experience, I could cite my participation in an informal reading group where I saw learned philosophers vexed at the impossibility of getting a handle on Ernst Bloch's three-volume utopian essay, Das Prinzip Hoffnung (The Principle of Hope). Why couldn't they? Because Bloch's style, subject matter, and tone change so drastically, one chapter being an intensely private memoire and the next blatant political invective with some philosophy in between, that his book does not fit into any particular textual category. To count as philosophy, at least for other philosophers, a text must be (literally, Socratically) questionable, and Bloch's book is too personal and slippery to be submitted to such interrogation. Philosophical analysis of a text can only begin once the text has been generically classified as philosophy. On the other hand, Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, and a number of other philosophers infringe on the law of genre by interrogating literary texts as though they belonged to the genre of philosophy. Predictably, what happens at that point is that the ideology of genre is applied recursively to the texts of Heidegger and Derrida, which may not belong to philosophy since they interrogate texts which do not belong to the genre of philosophy, etc. Thus, our group's evaluation of Bloch's ideas had to be postponed until it was determined "how to handle" his writing, a determination which seemed to depend on what I will call Bloch's "style." (This particular hermeneutic circle became a vicious one, ending in our decision to postpone the reading of Bloch indefinitely.) In a lecture entitled "Exkurs zur Einebnung des Gattungsunterschiedes zwischen Philosophie und Literatur," ("Digression on the Leveling of the Generic Difference between Philosophy and Literature"), Jürgen Habermas argues against the confounding of the genres of philosophy and literature on the basis of their different use-values, namely "Problemlösung" ("problem-solving") and "Welterschließung" ("revelation of reality").[24] Habermas's response to the attempts of Derrida and others to treat all forms of discourse as subject to the same methods of interpretation is in the end recursively tautological. In maintaining that there is a distinction between philosophy and literature beyond their shared rhetorical and figural strategies, his response does not explain what it is that will allow us to distinguish one type of text from the other. He treats "problem solving" and "revelation of the world" as transcendental essences of texts which remain invisible Ñ and yet understandable Ñ to their readers. Nevertheless, like Habermas, I began to see genre as a set of "handles" on texts, and to realize that a text's genre is its use-value.[25] Genre gives us not understanding in the abstract and passive sense, but use in the pragmatic and active sense. Use-value was what Radway and Wright and Habermas felt perfectly free to talk about in their cultural studies, but which had been virtually absent from genre theory per se. And since the use-values which Radway and Kissinger and Wright and Habermas found lying at the heart of the romance, the western, and philsosophy, were social rather than private (reading as a hidden, imaginary form of social action), genre in their works inevitably became a form of ideology.

The ideological nature of genre explains not only its necessity, but also its instability. Ross Chambers has demonstrated that in order to function, an ideology must be non-identical with itself, a phenomenon he calls "ideological split": "an ideology is not a doctrine to be accepted or not accepted but a discursive proposition that positions subjects in relations of power (power being itself a differential phenomenon, existing only through being unevenly distributed). Ideology necessarily produces these subjects relationally, and it is in the difference between them that the potential for ideological split resides, these subjects being differently positioned regarding the system that produces them. They 'perceive' it, 'understand' it, from different angles, so to speak, and in differing perspectives."[26] Chambers's view of ideology as a positioning of subjects is derived from the work of the French Marxist Louis Althusser, who in turn was influenced by the structuralist views of society in the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jacques Lacan. While maintaining the received Marxist notion which opposed "ideology" to "knowledge," Althusser located the workings of ideology in the realm of the unconscious and made it a pragmatic matter, the possibility of carrying on lived relations between people:

Ideology is a matter of the lived relation between men and their world. . . . In ideology men do indeed express, not the relation between them and their conditions of existence, but the way they live the relation between them and their conditions of existence: this presupposes both a real relation and an 'imaginary,' lived relation. Ideology . . . is the expression of the relation between men and their "world," that is, the (overdetermined) unity of the real relation and the imaginary relation between them and their real conditions of existence. In ideology the real relation is inevitably invested in the imaginary relation, a relation that expresses will (conservative, conformist, reformist or revolutionary), a hope or a nostalgia, rather than describing a reality.[27]

Though Althusser rejects the notion of ideology as a belief-system open to choice (his rejection is echoed in the first sentence of the quote from Chambers), he nevertheless still identifies ideology as false, as can be seen from his use of the term "imaginary" as contrasted to "describing a reality." Rather than contrasting imagination to reality, contemporary cultural critics tend to contrast the imaginary order to the symbolic order, and to identify ideology with the excentric subject created by their correlation Ñ reality being that which is unavailable to either realm. The imaginary operates on a metaphysics of wholeness, on the illusory identification of the subject with a unified body, while the symbolic implies culture's creation of subjects as products of its discursive systems.[28] Thus, for John Frow, who draws heavily on Michel Foucault's concept of "discursive practices," Althusser's "lived relation" of ideology has become a discursive relation, "the production and the conditions of production of categories and entities within the field of discourse," including the category of the subject upon which ideology is supposed to act.[29]

To this conception of ideology Chambers adds two additional nuances. One, derived from the Foucauldian view of power, is that ideology, which creates power by the positioning of subjects, must then necessarily appear differently to those different subjects. At this point, a term which Marx had made the instrument of falsity shatters into a controlled perspectivism Ñ ideology, like interpretation, varies infinitely but not randomly according to the perspective of those who participate in it. Chambers's second twist involves naming this perpectivist element of a totalizing system "noise." The concept of "noise," adapted from communication theory by various social and cultural theorists, tells us that categories and entities can only be developed against a background of non-entities and non-categories; systems, in other words, can function only by means of the non-systemic which they necessarily produce.[30] Thus, the non-systemic is simultaneously inside and outside of the system. Chambers then applies this concept of "noise" directly to sites of literary conflict such as canonicity: "As the mediation that produces power, then, the system of ideology necessarily produces 'noise,' a degree of play without which it would not be a system and consequently could not function to produce power. Canonicity is the site of such noise, a place of play within the system."[31] Now, besides the fact that they are both acts of sorting, canonicity and genre are also related in the sense that the recognition of an artifact as belonging to a certain genre can automatically exclude it from even potential canonizing Ñ as is the case with rock music videos, for example, at least for the present. To put it another way, the act of canonizing is one of the potential use-values associated with certain genres. I will argue in this book that, aside from canonicity, whose institutional power is quite obvious, genre is also a site of such noise, the cusp between different use-values of texts and between discursive entity and non-entity. Hence, not only are genre systems ideological, but their cusps provide a most advantageous place from which to observe the workings of ideology in literature.

The conception of ideology found in Chambers and Frow solves old problems and creates new ones. For literary studies, this revised conception resolves the question of literature's relation to ideology . It was clear to even the most hard-line socio-political critic that literature was almost never simply an embodiment of ideology (the "system" in Chambers's description), but also equally its negation (the "noise" in that system). Literary texts took up a differential position to ideology, taking given "ideologemes" and shaking them up, so to speak.[32] We are now saying that there are no "-emes" but only differences, and that literature can be considered fully ideological, because ideology is never fully identical with itself anyway.

The greatest problem associated with this way of talking about ideology is that it forces us to soon stop talking about it, since it is very difficult to describe something which is not "a set of beliefs to be accepted or denied." To "know" ideology is no longer to know the summary of a number of ideas. Ideology is no longer something which can be represented or paraphrased. Instead, it becomes something like the magnetic field which arranges the chaotic mass of iron filings into intriguing, ordered curves on a piece of paper. Ideology itself is usually invisible, noticeable and perhaps existent only in its interactions with the material world (which includes thought). Ideology is the magnetic force which simultaneously holds a society together, by allowing it to communicate with itself in shorthand, and pushes it apart by conflicting with people's realities. It is only in the deformations and contradictions of writing and thinking that we can recognize ideology; genre is one of those observable deformations, the pattern in the iron filings of cultural products which reveals the force of ideology.

In particular, what makes genre ideological is our practice of speaking of it as a "thing" rather than as the expression of a relationship between user and a text, a practice similar to that identified by Marx as "commodity fetishism." As Lacanian Marxist Slavoj Zizek explains, "when we are victims of commodity fetishism it appears as if the concrete content of a commodity (its use-value) is an expression of its abstract universality (its exchange-value) Ñ the abstract Universal, the Value, appears as a real Substance which successively incarnates itself in a series of concrete objects."[33] Schemes identifying different genres with different universal values have been erected in most historical periods; perhaps the most elaborate and explicit are those of the French neoclassical period for painting (e.g., genre painting ranked above portraiture which ranked above still-life) and literature (e.g., tragedy ranked above satire, as Boileau points out). My treatment of genre as use-value in the following pages is thus an attempt at penetrating one veil of an aesthetic ideology which continues to posit genre as universal.

As a form of ideology, genre is also never fully identical with itself, nor are texts fully identical with their genres. Furthermore, if genre is a form of ideology, then the struggle against or the deviations from that dimension, created necessarily out of the system itself, are ideological struggles. Unlike Jameson's location of Literature outside the constraints of genre, I will search out those places where the battle is most intense, where our decision on a text's genre determines meaning and reveals ideology.

Without denying Jameson's historicist account of the appearance of generic differentiation within today's commodified mass-cultural production, I will argue that this particular visibility is a material difference which disguises an essential and ideal struggle between genres Ñ and within individual works Ñ that has been at the heart of our reading and writing process for a long, long time. I will argue that, since a "single" genre is only recognizable as difference, as a foregrounding against the background of its neighboring genres, every work involves more than one genre, even if only implicitly. The position I will argue, then, is double-edged, both asserting the inescapability of genre as a kind of Kantian faculty of reading, and at the same time detailing genre's volatility and flux as a system of cultural values and as the only partly realizable possibility of "using" any particular text. Stephen Greenblatt has formulated the issue succinctly, though he limits it to the ideological differentiations between the literary and the non-literary: "It is important to expose the theoretical untenability of the conventional boundaries between facts and artifacts, but the particular terms of this boundary at a specific time and place cannot simply be discarded. . . . These impure terms that mark the difference between the literary and the nonliterary are the currency in crucial institutional negotiations and exchange."[34] The concept of generic instability mediates between previous attempts at theorizing genre, which have either looked at genre as something that is, which must then be classified, systematized, and renamed (Brunetière, Fowler, Frye, Hamburger), or else have attempted to prove that genre really doesn't exist, that each work is its own genre, that we must get "beyond genre" in a accepting multiple criteria for generic categorization (Hernadi), or that genres are critical tools for interpretation rather than static categories (Rosmarin). The "flashings" I have pointed out in Moby-Dick do not only occur in "great" literature. They have also been produced by a nineteenth-century Parisian hack polygraph who sneaks literature into his textbooks. Some are carried out by pop singers very much aware of and ill at ease with audience expectations. Some are carried out by anthropologists, others by theorists testing the limits of their dialogic language.
The theory of ideology and of its relation to genre adumbrated above can be described, metaphorically, as "refractive" or "anaclastic." The critical readings appropriate to such a theory would approach their objects from the side, as it were, using the comparative method to bring together texts from different periods (such as Lévi-Strauss and Aphra Behn in the next chapter, or Roland Barthes and Julián del Casal in chapter four) and from different cultures (Dylan and Degenhardt, Richardson and Barthes). The refracted meanings which result from such comparisons are similar to what is "said" through metaphor Ñ and of course metaphor is precisely the "unsaid." A further aspect of such refraction is that the texts are necessarily treated as decentered, torn apart by the various genres for which the most accessible record is the critical readings and listenings they have received. Therefore, in those chapters where I do not treat texts as reading each other (as I do in my study of the ars dictaminis, or in the chapter on Degenhardt's reading of Dylan), criticism takes on the same importance and uses the same strategies as the primary texts. The resulting "thick descriptions," in which texts fade not so much into their historical background as into their transhistorical critical contexts is my way of bringing to light the unsayable of generic systems.

Thomas O. Beebee