NEW CHAPTER

Is the twentieth-century novel a genre unto itself?

- LOUIS MENAND

Genres are the Sirens of literary criticism. They seem friendly and alluring, but they are dangerously elusive shape-shifters. You really have to lash yourself to the mast.

Genres tend to be pictured as the bones of literary texts, the formal properties onto which the imagery and details of character, plot, and setting are grafted. These skeletons are transmissible across time. So “Oedipus Rex” (circa 430 B.C.E.), “Hamlet” (circa 1600), and “Death of a Salesman” (1949) are all called tragedies. But, apart from unhappy endings, those plays are more different than they are alike. It is hard to extract a robust definition of “tragedy” that works for all three. Similarly, we call the Odyssey an epic. But why isn’t it a novel? Because it’s written in verse? Then how about a prose translation: would that be a novel? It’s not obvious why it wouldn’t. The Odyssey is a story about a family separated by war. So is “War and Peace,” and we don’t categorize that as an epic.

There is also the problem of basing our generalizations about literary types on a highly selective group of texts. Of the hundreds of tragedies estimated to have been written in ancient Greece, we know of only thirty-two complete ones, attributed to just three playwrights. We don’t know all the forms that tragedy, as the Greeks understood it, might have taken.

In the case of a genre like the novel, too, we are operating with a ridiculously small sample size. As Franco Moretti pointed out, in an article published in 2000, when literature professors talk about “the nineteenth-century British novel” they are talking about roughly two hundred books. He estimated that this is 0.5 per cent of all the novels published in Great Britain in the nineteenth century.