Curriculars: The Relative Weird, Part Three—Genre and (as) Myth
Narrative as inevitability
OK, so this series has gotten away from me a bit, but in a good way. As this section hit four thousand words, I chose the discretion of brevity over the valour of expansiveness again. Instead of three instalments we now have four; this one is a bit of an interregnum, developing some thoughts that are germane to the broader topic but not, perhaps, vital; they’re more table-setting, and in the fourth and (gods willing) final post I’ll be diving into Lovecraft Country with more depth than I would have otherwise.
1. Genre as Inevitability
I ended my previous post by framing the conceit of genre as metaphor—specifically, as a metaphor for arbitrary systems of inclusion and exclusion, both the official sort enacted by law and the unofficial but no less powerful sort enforced by societal and cultural mores.
Genre is by definition exclusionary, as is any form of categorization: it delineates itself as much by what it isn’t as by what it includes. Such delineations are arbitrary, proceeding from tropes and narrative conventions that resonate enough to inspire imitation. To put it another way, genre at its inception isn’t generic—it becomes so over the course of countless iterative repetitions that become formulaic. Genre in this respect is all about expectations: when we pick up a mystery novel or go see a slasher movie, we do so with an implicit promise that the text will deliver on those expectations. When it fails to meet expectation, either through poor execution (the murderer was obvious from the start) or the absence of key elements (no blood, no scares), we feel cheated, let down. “Audiences know what to expect,” the player tells the ill-fated heroes in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, “and that is all they are prepared to believe in” (76). Tom Stoppard’s play about Hamlet’s hapless courtiers who die ignominiously offstage is all about genre as inevitability: as I like to tell my students, if you ever discover that your life is a Shakespearean tragedy, and you’re the titular character? Well, I’ve got some bad news for you …
The arbitrary nature of these delineations is a crucial aspect, because it’s easy to forget: narrative conventions that calcify into generic formulae come to appear inevitable, or naturally-occurring, a point made rather unforgettably by Terry Pratchett in Witches Abroad (Discworld #12). “Stories etch grooves deep enough for people to follow,” he writes, “in the same way that water follows certain paths down the mountainside” (8) Every time a given story is retold, “the groove runs deeper,” to the point where familiar stories come to possess their own inevitability or destiny:
So a thousand heroes have stolen fire from the gods. A thousand wolves have eaten grandmother, a thousand princesses have been kissed. A million unknowing actors have moved, unknowing, through the pathways of story … It is now impossible for the third and youngest son of any king, should he embark on a quest which has so far claimed his older brothers, not to succeed. (9)
What Sir Terry calls (with his tongue presumably only partly in his cheek) “the theory of narrative causality” essentially recapitulates the argument made by Roland Barthes in his book Mythologies (1957). Myth, Barthes asserts, is what happens when we confuse history with nature—or more plainly, when we start to understand human artifice as naturally-occurring. Early in the long essay “Myth Today” that comprises about half of Mythologies (the other half being a collection very short analyses of aspects of popular culture, from wrestling to cars to Greta Garbo1), Barthes nods toward the more common understanding of mythology. But while the tales of Zeus or Odin or Osiris have attained a sense of transcendent timelessness, Barthes emphasizes that even these foundational tales are contingent on our interaction with them in story:
[O]ne can conceive of very ancient myths, but there are no eternal ones; for it is human history which converts reality into speech, and it alone rules the life and the death of mythical language. Ancient or not, mythology can only have an historical foundation, for myth is a type of speech chosen by history: it cannot possibly evolve from the “nature” of things. (108)
“Very ancient myths” are the product of invention and artifice—as such they are invariably historical. If there’s a tendency to want to think of mythology as Mythology, much of that has to do with the “ancient” part of the equation. Structurally, however (and this is Barthes’ main argument) there is little difference between the overdetermined quality of ancient myth, local folklore, and the expectations and assumptions ingrained by genre films. As Sir Terry once quipped, folklore is just mythology with a big budget; one could say something similar about the ways in which Hollywood amplifies the stories it repeats.2
I spoke obliquely about this sort of thing in my post on the arbitrariness of place names: national borders and the names we give regions are, quite literally, imaginary insofar as they are fictions on which we (almost) all agree. Such designations, I wrote, “like constitutional law and other elements of the social contract, are manifestations of the collective imagination.” But with enough of a consensus, “such acts of imagination take on the substance of reality.” Perhaps more significantly, after a certain point we come to forget that such fictions are in fact fictions, and they come to seem a naturally occurring given. National borders and indeed national identity, however, are the products of story, and as Sir Terry notes, the more frequently stories are told, the more inevitable they seem.
Genre functions in this way. Genre, indeed, plays a not-insignificant role in establishing the broader cultural mythologies that are Barthes’ subject. Think, for example, of the Western: from the dime novels of the nineteenth century to John Ford movies to Sergio Leone’s to Unforgiven, the genre articulates and reinforces tropes integral to American self-fashioning as embodied in the figure of the gunslinger. Rugged individualism proven against the wilderness, competent masculinity, a familiarity with violence and its application, antipathy to society’s rules coupled with a personal code of ethics—the men (specifically men), in other words, who forge the conditions for civilization while not being civilized to the point of domestication. This character—largely an historical fiction—is so overdetermined as to make my enumeration of his qualities redundant. From the contemporaneous tales of Wild Bill Hickok to Yellowstone, we’re intimately familiar. There’s a reason, I tell my students, why we don’t need any exposition in Star Wars to immediately understand who Han Solo is. Though he lives a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, he is aesthetically the epitome of a gunslinger … and so we know he’s a ruggedly individualistic rogue who doesn’t abide society’s niceties but nevertheless possesses his own ethical code (and he will shoot you under the table if it comes to it).
Han Solo exemplifies both Barthes’ understanding of myth and Sir Terry’s framing of narrative inevitability, not least because he appears not in a Western, but in a space opera that is itself a generic nexus3 of SF, fantasy, Westerns, wuxia, samurai films, WWII dogfighting, all shoehorned into a hero’s journey written as though George Lucas was using The Hero With A Thousand Faces as a checklist.4
Star Wars is also useful here insofar as it offers the perfect segue into my next section.
2. Genre as (Contested) Terrain
Anybody who pays any attention to fan culture of almost any sort is probably familiar with culture wars that rage on social media over genre fiction and film, especially with such beloved franchises as Star Wars, or the Jekyll & Hyde of the Marvel and DC cinematic universes. There are any number of fronts in these wars, and innumerable issues people take whenever changes large or small occur in the canons of these various worlds, or when genre conventions writ large reflect changing social and cultural mores.
Not all the arguments playing out deal with question of race or gender or “wokeness,” but these issues do comprise a critical mass of the disputes and they certainly comprise the loudest and most vitriolic. Intra-fandom arguments are hardly a new phenomenon—I like to imagine heated back-and-forth graffiti fights on the walls of Rome over Ovid’s bastardization of Greek myth or whether Virgil’s a sellout—but they have been expanded and amplified exponentially in the digital age. The concomitant explosion of content over streaming services and the rise of online culture and social media has manifested in seemingly endless iterations of intellectual properties along with no shortage of fandoms voicing opinions. As I noted in the conclusion to my previous post, the mainstreaming of genre has had the salutary effect of opening it up and facilitating a greater diversity of voices. At the same time, these changes have inspired an often-reactionary policing of the traditional terrains of genre against the perceived incursions of outsiders. I’ve occasionally likened this process to a sort of reverse gentrification, in which homogenous neighbourhoods are diversified; one way or another, those perceiving themselves as having squatters’ rights tend to be disgruntled by the change.
Exemplary of these fights was the strange saga of the Sad Puppies. About ten years ago a reactionary group of SFF writers and fans upset with cultural transformations reflected in their favourite genres formed the group named after lachrymose canines. Their target was the Hugo Awards, which they charged had become overtaken by politically correct social justice warriors (this was before “woke” became the catch-all) who were skewing SFF away from its origins and elevating inferior work that foregrounded themes of race and gender and oppression, and privileged authors who were women or queer or nonwhite or all of the above. (I don’t want to recapitulate it all here, but if you’re interested I wrote a long and exasperated blog post about it at the time).
Another example, more germane to my discussion here, was the change made to the World Fantasy Award in 2016. Since the award’s inception in 1975, the trophy was a bust of H.P. Lovecraft. Though this had caused controversy at various points over the years, there was a groundswell in the early 2010s that finally resulted in Lovecraft’s visage being usurped by a really rather lovely orange sun clasped in the branches of a tree.
The impetus to change the award was in part precipitated by the Nigerian-American author Nnedi Okorafor, whose novel Who Fears Death5 won in 2011. A friend of hers who asked to see the award was horrified to discover that it was Lovecraft’s bust. Though Okorafor had been vaguely aware of Lovecraft’s racism and antisemitism, she hadn’t appreciated its depth and virulence until her friend introduced her to a certain notorious poem he had written (which I will not quote, but is included in Okorafor’s blog post):
What a nasty piece of poetry. My first reaction was fury on the level of my character Onyesonwu (think tornadoes, tsunamis … no, bigger like the red eye of Jupiter). I knew of Lovecraft’s racial issues, anti-Semitism, etc., but I never knew it was this serious. How strong the sentiment must have been within his soul for him to sit down and write that poem. This wasn’t racism metaphorically or abstractly rearing its ugly head within a piece of fiction, this was specific and focused. Who does that? Even in the early 1900s? That excuse of “that was just how most whites were back then” has never flown with me. The fact that a lot of people back then were racists does not change the fact that Lovecraft was a racist.
Okorafor is precisely the kind of author the Sad Puppies and their ilk find objectionable—not just for being a writer of colour, but one whose work and voice offers substantive challenge to the traditions and conventions of genre. Using Lovecraft’s image for the trophy was always problematic but becomes unavoidably so when it is increasingly bestowed on writers whom Lovecraft would have viewed as subhuman.6 To be clear, she didn’t call for changing the statuette. “If Lovecraft’s likeness and name are to be used in connection to the World Fantasy Award,” she writes, “I think there should be some discourse about what it means to honor a talented racist.”
And not, it should be added, just to honour a talented racist, but to use him as the embodiment of an entire genre of writing—which, were he the most blameless of artists, would still be problematic, given that Lovecraft represents fairly specific terrain with speculative fiction more broadly. There would have been an argument against his statuette even absent his reprehensible views on humanity. But then, this contention itself is reflective of a tendency to see genre as a closed economy. I could make a counterargument (again, absent his less palatable qualities) that Lovecraft is the ideal representative for the WFA: though his own writing largely hewed to a narrow segment of what he called supernatural horror, his influence is actually quite promiscuous across SF, fantasy, horror, and speculative fiction in general. This ubiquity of influence is ironic, especially when we consider—as I have been doing—the ways in which his mythos has been used to challenge his own myopic views of humanity.
The simple answer for why Lovecraft not only remains influential, but has in fact become even more so, is that his has become a negative influence. And I mean negative in the most negative sense of the word, in that a critical mass of contemporary works call themselves “Lovecraftian” effect a simple inversion of his mythos. Or more accurately, they reverse his perspective and assumptions, either by giving voice, as in The Ballad of Black Tom, to the undifferentiated Other in his fiction, or figuring the permeability of the self—which for Lovecraft comprises the ultimate horror—as liberatory or utopian.7
There is also the ways in which the narrowly defined understanding of subjectivity, which circumscribes Lovecraft’s understanding of humanity, is itself reflective of how genre circumscribes narrative possibility. In what I devoutly hope will be the final instalment of this series of posts, I will consider how both the novel and television adaptation of Lovecraft Country make use of genre as a metaphor in this respect.
REFERENCES
Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1972.
Pratchett, Terry. Witches Abroad. Corgi, 1991.
Stoppard, Tom. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. Faber & Faber, 1967.
NOTES
Popular culture, that is, in France in the mid-1950s. The most convincing part of Barthes’ book, to a large degree, is just how applicable his analyses of a seemingly random selection of curiosities are seventy-odd years later.
As Andre Bazin famously observed, Hollywood shows America the way America wants to see itself.
In this respect, Star Wars is not unlike The Lord of the Rings’ “invention” of fantasy, as I discussed in our first video: that is, it takes a morass of eminently familiar generic tropes and conventions and performs a sort of miraculous alchemy. There is nothing “new” in Star Wars, but it managed to recombine all its well-trodden narrative elements into something revelatory.
Which, for all intents and purposes, he did. He considered Joseph Cambell a friend and mentor and has been quite candid about taking inspiration from Campbell’s most famous book. By the same token, Campbell quite loved Star Wars and frequently cited the mythic moment when Luke turns off his targeting computer in The Power of Myth.
A genuinely brilliant and harrowing post-apocalyptic fantasy that I can’t recommend enough.
Okorafor speculates on what kind of reaction Lovecraft would have to someone who looks like her winning an award bearing his image, and opts for a generosity of spirit: “I am the first black person to win the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel since its inception in 1975. Lovecraft is probably rolling in his grave. Or maybe, having become spirit, his mind has cleared of the poisons and now understands the err of his ways. Maybe he is pleased that a book set in and about Africa in the future has won an award crafted in his honor. Yeah, I'll go with that image.”
I will have more to say on this point if I get around to covering the Utopian Weird.