Beyond genre.

I ran into a flash of perspicuity while reading Oswyn Murray's "Symposium and Genre in the Poetry of Horace," (1985, JRS 75: 39-50) a prefatory note to his thoughts on Roman reception of Greek sympotic verse--after all, it's a radical translation; imagine a hipster learning the tea ceremony. Murray writes,

Thus the genre is born of historical circumstances as they transform human needs; literature can be seen from this point of view as a form of ritual, a response to the human desire for regularities and for the communication of shared experience. As an expression of the mentality of a particular society the genre is therefore of fundamental importance to the cultural historian. But literature as ritual is a conservative force; whether by feat of oral memory or through the permanence of the written word, it becomes difficult to forget what has been created; most societies live in a universe of discarded mental forms. So alongside the living genre we must expect to find the dead genre, surviving as artistic form without context, as memory pattern. (40)

When classicists talk about genre they tend to have in mind a system of classification so stupendously exacting that I'm surprised the Germans didn't invent it first, and forty years after Cairns genre criticism has taken a fairly firm hold in the profession--although, bless G-d, not entirely without dissent. In my MA program this sort of thing was particularly admired, and trying to play to those expectations led me into some real absurdities--I think I once caused myself to discuss a couplet in the Heroides per the generic reference of its hexameter and pentameter, respectively. (I know, I know. They weren't impressed either.)

"A universe of discarded mental forms," though, really? It made me thrill. I like the concept of culture as accreted language, networks of concepts united by allusion and buried collocation--invisible hyperlinks.

What's the difference between a living genre and a dead one? Think of the pastoral--as far as we can tell, Theocritus practically invented it; three centuries later, Vergil write his Eclogues. Was it a living genre for him? What about for Milton? Is imitation, I mean self-conscious revival, the same thing as inhabitation? I'm thinking of Borges' story about the man rewriting Don Quixote word by word--my intuition says no, but my intuition also can't brush aside genre or the enormous, insurmountable, pestering ontological problems that hang onto it if we keep it around.

What's really remarkable is that the great genres of ancient literature seem to have been flashes in the pan--epic definitely died with Homer as an unselfconscious thing, Greek lyric seems to have been largely sui generis and seems even more so when you look at its lurchingly uncomfortable Roman revival--quodsi me lyricis vatibus inseres, indeed. Tragedy had a pretty sorry time between Aeschylus and Shakespeare and it's absurd to even talk about unselfconsciousness in pastoral. All of Roman literature is mediated by the gleeful preciosity of Alexandria, and it took Don Quixote to give Europe a literary form independent from antiquity.

It's remarkable too that Western culture has produced exactly three viable epics, the last two being explosions of angelic genius that blew an exhausted genre up to new elevations and burnt all further possibility of development to a crisp--8th century to 19 BC is quite a wait, but it took us til 1667 to end epic forever with an apple and a snake. (We'll see about Kazantzakis. Indications are not good--Ἐχθαίρω τὸ ποίημα τὸ κυκλικόν). At the same time, we've managed about a hundred really deathless novels in the last two hundred years; that's definitely a genre. Poetry, though--I wouldn't want to be the guy writing that dissertation.

Dr. Behrenboim:

My name is Meriwell Topher, and I would like to express interest in your adjunct position. I am 49 years old and ABD. Please refer to the contents of the enclosed semitruck, where you will find my unfinished dissertation Anglophone Verse Genre in the 20th Century, its Origins, Typology and Limits.

Please consider my unique talents and experience. I have not eaten in four days.

Sincerely,
M. Topher, M. A. (1982)

Do you feel elucidated? I don't. On my reading list--

E. Auerbach, Mimesis
G. Williams, Tradition and Originality in Roman Poetry;
G. Williams again, Change and Decline

Postscriptum 4 April. In my enthusiasm--and on reflection--I callously passed over the Divine Comedy in my sneer about viable epics. Although I'm not sure we can call it an epic--it's certainly epic length, and certainly masterful, but I think the subject material and handling are all wrong--how about this: if you want to count it as an epic, let's agree that I said "four." If not, not.