Making Sense of Genre
Deborah Knight
For those who consider genre to be too simplistic or formulaic for
academic consideration, there is the question whether anything like
serious comprehensional activities are involved in reading or viewing
generic texts. Are we just passive consumers of stories that, in an
important sense, we already know? Or are we in some respect active
participants, constructing meaning from the narrational cues of a genre,
so that familiarity with a generic form turns out to be an advantage to
us, helping us to sort expediently between salient and non-salient
information as it is presented to us by the generic narrative?<1> Is it
just irrational for spectators and readers to return, again and again,
to consume new installments of familiar generic fictions? This question
seems to apply equally to those who prefer the successive consumption of
sequences of autonomous but generically similar texts (devotees of
action or horror films, for example), to those who prefer to consume
serialized texts where each has a more-or-less autonomous structure
(P.D. James Adam Dalgleish mysteries, television series which are
presented as more-or-less independent story units), to those who prefer
unclosed generic texts, like soap opera, where particular storylines
develop over long periods, interwoven with many others, and thus seldom
coming to anything like closure, and to those (doubtless the majority)
who mix and match.
In this paper, I first examine a view defended by, among others,
Paul Ricoeur, Northrop Frye, Roland Barthes and Peter Brooks, which
suggests that active interpretation is a hallmark feature for
understanding any narrative, including generic ones. This view is,
broadly, Aristotelian; it is concerned with narrative form and
structure, and with the sorts of comprehensional activities required to
understand and thus to retell and interpret a story. Next, I turn
to N”el Carroll s recent argument<2> which purports to make sense of
the repeated consumption of successive generic fictions by showing that
consumers of generic fictions are active followers of the particular
stories they watch or read. With this argument, Carroll confronts and
resolves what he calls the paradox of junk fiction. <3> In the final
sections of the paper, I raise questions about Carroll s strategy for
making sense of genre. I distinguish between what is involved in making
sense of some behaviour and the question whether that behaviour is or is
not rational. Further, if it is to be philosophically persuasive,
Carroll s account must work for the full range of generic subcategories.
I suggest that it does not. Finally, I argue that Carroll s view of the
active reader as primarily concerned with making guesses about future
occurrences in any particular generic story fails to acknowledge the
important role of retrospection that is at the heart of the hermeneu-
tical account of narrative comprehension. I suggest that some genres do
not depend to any significant extent on retrospection, on synthesizing
the elements of an ongoing story, or on discovering the point or purpose
of the events that make up the story. If this is correct for some
genres, then there is a real question whether some generic stories might
be consumed without being understood. If this is plausible, then we
unexpectedly wind up face-to-face again with the paradox Carroll had
hoped to dissolve.
(1) GENRE: FORM AND FORMULA
Generic fictions are, first and foremost, identified in terms of
familiar, codified, conventionalized and formulaic story structures.<4>
Plot action is a main focus of generic fictions; the answer to the
question, What fictional genre is this? is standardly given by a key
term which figures the line of plot action to be found in the particular
story, as in mystery or thriller or horror or family melodrama.
Generic fictions are also associated with highly conventionalized
characters: detectives or gangsters, Westerners or lovers-on-the-run.
Genre characters are identified functionally, in terms of their role in
a particular story structure, rather than psychologically. Indeed,
story is the main focus of genre. As Frank Kermode remarks, generic
fictions encourage underreading.<5> They are fictions of easy access,
not usually the sort to make many demands on the reader s or viewer s
breadth of cultural knowledge. However, generic fictions do make
demands on the reader s or viewer s knowledge of other generic fictions,
and the sorts of story patterns that are to be associated with the
particular generic category of the text in question.
One might argue that, because they encourage a certain kind of
underreading one which focuses on developing plot action rather than,
say, the beauty of the prose or the cinematography that generic
fictions are ideal places for the rehearsal of a certain kind of
interpretation. Generic fictions, we might suppose, allow us to
practice our skills of narrative comprehension. Let us consider a
generally held view that emphasizes the activity of the reader or viewer
in her engagement with narratives. I associate this view with, among
others, Paul Ricoeur, Northrop Frye, Roland Barthes and Peter Brooks.
In his work on the hermeneutical interpretation of narrative
texts, Ricoeur has emphasized the deep interconnection between following
and understanding a story.<6> And that surely this seems plausible. If
someone insisted that she had followed all the actions of a novel or
film but had not understood it, one might want to suggest that perhaps
she had not quite followed the text after all. Similarly, if someone
said she understood the story but then, in answer to further questions,
revealed that she hadn t followed the events of the story, we would be
doubtful that she had actually understood it. We might guess that she
had had the point of the story explained to her, but that she had not
herself managed what Ricoeur talks about when he talks about extracting
a configuration from the mere succession of events; one occasionally
reads exam answers like this. In both cases, we would be inclined to
say that the reader or viewer hadn t quite got the point, and we might
be able to show her where she went off-track in following the story, or
how her understanding of the story missed its mark if, under
consideration, she had not seen how the course of action had unfolded.
Many others have emphasized the conjunction between following and
understanding. Northrop Frye speaks of the double articulation of
literature, the reciprocal interconnections of plot and theme, between
what is happening and what it means for the text as a whole.<7> Peter
Brooks<8> makes a similar point with reference to two of the five
codes popularized by Roland Barthes in S/Z,<9> drawing attention to
the connection between the proairetic the code of actions and events,
the one we refer to when we want answers to questions like, What is
going on (now)? and the hermeneutical the code of mystery and
enigma, the one we refer to when we want answers to questions like, Why
is this happening? (particularly if the answer to this question is
withheld by the text, where the answer is not immediately apparent).
Generic fictions are, admittedly, highly conventional in terms of the
story-forms they adopt. If we follow Ricoeur, Frye, Barthes and
Brooks<10> in stressing the centrality of plot to this process of
following and understanding narratives and in particular, if we accept
the idea that, as readers or viewers, we are constantly engaged in an
activity of sorting, synthesizing and ordering particular plot elements
to extract from them a sense of the story as a whole then we can see
that reading for the plot, or looking for it, in the case of cinema, is
a skill which we can develop and practice with generic texts as well as
with non-generic texts.
So here is one means of countering the idea that consuming generic
texts is in some sense irrational. On the formalist line exemplified by
Ricoeur, Frye, Barthes and Brooks, readers and viewers engage in the
development and refinement of a significant cognitive skill. But
perhaps the claim of the irrationality of genre can still be advanced.
Take a Wittgensteinian analogy: How much practice do we need with the
arithmetical rule for adding two before we know how to go on with adding
two?<11> Comparably: how many Westerns or gangster films do we have to
watch before we know (can reasonably expect, can predict, can infer)
that there will be a confrontation between individual interests and the
socio-moral requirements of the community; how many episodes of Inside
the Line or Law and Order do we have to watch before we know that within
the institutions that ostensibly define and defend justice, there is
only so much that can be done about the malefactors who get away with
it ; how many weeks or months must we invest in daytime soaps before we
know that a central woman character, deciding to act on her own (to
protect her family, say, or to investigate a mystery) will be at serious
personal risk and need rescue by her lover/husband/father. (Indeed,
this conventionalized association of serious risk and the independent
actions of seemingly resourceful, competent women characters is hardly
restricted to the soaps. In the action film Speed, when Keanu Reeves
leaves Sandra Bullock alone in an ambulance after they have finally
survived the bomb-rigged bus, any viewer ought to know she is at risk
without him.) One might still ask, isn t this repeated consumption of
stories which, in an important sense, we already know, just about as
irrational as continuing to practice the rule for plus two just in
case we haven t gotten it right yet?<12>
To take the formalist line exemplified by Ricoeur, Frye, Barthes
and Brooks, we could reply that the apparent repetitiveness of generic
fictions testifies to the pleasures viewers derive from rehearsing and
refining their interpretational skills through engagement with
particular texts that are, as individual examples of generic works, new
to them. For all virtual Aristotelians which is to say, for nearly
all of us whose basic idea of a story is that it should have a
beginning, a middle, and an end there may be a kind of pleasure
derived from the repeated engagement with generic plots.<13> The
formalist line emphasizes Aristotelian form: the wholeness of the
narrative text, the beginning-middle-end structure, the priority of
action over character, and the requirement that, to understand any
story, we must be able, as Ricoeur reminds us, to derive a configuration
from a succession of storied events. The formalist line will, then,
stand as a background assumption for the discussion of genre. It is not
yet obvious that the successive consumption of generic fictions is any
less rational than the successive consumption of any other text-type.
I turn now to discuss a particular strategy for making sense of
genre recently proposed by N”el Carroll, one which I take to be an
example of what I call the formal-cognitivist gambit. Here, the term
formal stands for the formalist line and its Aristotelian background.
The term cognitivist marks the preference for making sense of the
ongoing consumption of generic fictions in terms of the opportunities
these fictions provide for cognitive activity and in terms of the
pleasure derived by spectators from those activities: chiefly, the
pleasures afforded by the opportunity to guess or infer, often
correctly, what is going to happen next in an ongoing course of
narrative events, as well as the opportunity to make judgements,
including moral judgements, about those actions. While it should be
evident that I am sympathetic to Carroll s general project, I will raise
some concerns about whether Carroll s strategy for making sense of genre
works.
(2) CARROLL AND THE FORMAL-COGNITIVIST GAMBIT
No‰l Carroll opts for the formal-cognitivist gambit in his recent
consideration of why it might be rational, or at least not irrational,
to read or view junk fictions. By junk he means the sorts of
best-sellers that line the stalls at airport gift shops as well as
things like Harlequin romances; sci-fi, horror, and mystery magazines;
comic books; and broadcast narratives on either the radio or TV, as well
as commercial movies (225). The general hallmarks of genre, especially
the formal and the formulaic, are central to Carroll s account. What
Carroll calls junk are, as he puts it, narratives [whose] story
dimension is the most important thing about them, narratives which
aspire to be page-turners (225). They also generally belong to
well-entrenched genres and manifest only a limited repertoire of
story-types (226). Carroll s leading question concerns the paradox of
junk fiction, to which I have already alluded in my introduction: How
could it be rational for us to be interested in consuming stories that
we already know (227), given that most consumers of junk fictions are
already well acquainted with the formulae of these genres and thus will
have a good sense, even before beginning to read, view or hear any
particular example of the genre, pretty much how it will go
(226-27)?<14>
Carroll s solution to or more correctly, his dissolution of
the paradox of junk fiction is to make sense of this behaviour. To make
sense of the successive consumption of generic fictions, he introduces
the notion of the transactional value that accrues to the reader or
viewer. Junk fictions allow for, and even encourage, the practice of
interpretation within the constraints of genres: the reader or viewer
gets to practice making and testing hypotheses about how a course of
events will play out. The solution to the paradox seems at first glance
to be of a piece with the account of narrative understanding which we
have already considered as the formalist line exemplified by Ricoeur,
Frye, Barthes and Brooks. As Carroll remarks, the ultimate union of
hero and heroine in a Harlequin Romance or in Sleepless in Seattle may
never be in serious doubt; but the question remains how will that union
finally be realized, and the junk reader or viewer can remain engaged
in, and derive a certain satisfaction from, observing and anticipating
the particular developments of each plot (234-5).
Carroll contends that, as consumers, we experience a sense of
satisfaction when our inferences and interpretations are correct (235).
(He might add that we may experience surprise when our inferences are
incorrect, and that this surprise might also be satisfying if it
encourages us to attend more closely to the unfolding action.) So the
transactional value for the consumer of genre is one that leads to, and
ideally supports, the opportunity for self-rewarding cognitive
activity (235). Now it is important to note here that Carroll does not
restrict the range of self-rewarding activities to cognitive judgements,
but also acknowledges the satisfactions derived from moral and emotional
judgements (236).<15> The sort of satisfaction in question then is
basically a text-directed variety of the day-to-day sorts of practical
reasoning which (many believe) form the basis for our decision making,
for our predictions about what decisions others will make, and thus for
our explanations about what we and others are up to. From Carroll s
perspective, the promotion of self-rewarding, readerly activities
explains the apparent paradox of junk fiction (238); in fact, insofar as
junk fictions are structured to encourage this sort of transactional
activity between consumers and generic texts, these self-rewarding
activities explain the paradox away.
If we accept his argument, Carroll s dissolution of the paradox of
junk fictions explains the successive consumption of generic texts by
any given reader or viewer. Even with formulaic fictions, the reader or
viewer is active in following the story. The reader or viewer moreover
derives satisfaction from being able to make guesses, often correctly,
about just what is going to happen next in the ongoing course of action
of the particular fiction. I call this a formal-cognitivist gambit,
since it accepts the general formalist line about the centrality of the
ongoing interpretational activities emphasized by Ricoeur, Frye,
Barthes, and Brooks, but adds the twist that foregrounds cognition and
the application of practical reasoning skills, principally prediction,
to the understanding of character motivation and plot action. Indeed,
as we see from several of Carroll s examples, the hypotheses about what
will happen next in the plot are often hypotheses about what a character
is going to do next, and these hypotheses in turn depend upon being able
to explain the character s actions in terms of her goals and reasons for
acting, as well as in terms of her circumstances.
(3) PROBLEMS WITH SENSE-MAKING AND QUESTIONS OF RATIONALITY
Carroll s strategy is intended to show that the consumption of
generic fictions is rational because he can demonstrate that it makes
sense. Showing that something is rational by showing it to be
intelligible is not to be differentiated from showing that something is
not irrational by showing that, appearances to the contrary, it can be
made sense of. I am very fond of this strategy; I think it is central
to the whole practice of intentional psychology, of which the dissolu-
tion of the paradox of junk fiction is a part. But of course there is
an equivocation here with the terms rational and irrational. It is
one thing to make sense of suboptimal behaviour, including pathological
behaviour, by showing how the agent s beliefs and desires, hopes and
fears, memories and goals combine to lead her to do something that, all
things considered, is not obviously in her own best interests. We can,
in one sense of the terms rational and irrational, show that the
behaviour can be explained by reasons and is not, on this construal,
irrational. But on a rather stricter construal of rational and
irrational, just showing the agent s reasons for acting as she did can
still be of a piece with a conclusion that her actions are, after all,
irrational.
We can make sense of the most peculiar sorts of action and
behaviour by means of attributing a very strange desire to the agent,
coupled with otherwise quite mundane beliefs. We can also make sense of
behaviour by attributing to the agent a belief that we find very
peculiar, but which seems on all the evidence nevertheless to be a
belief held true by the agent, coupled with fairly straightforward
desires that are consistent with that belief. For instance, we can make
sense of the anorexic s behaviour in terms of her desire to be thin and
her belief that by eating fewer than 1,000 calories a day she will
become so. We can also make sense of her behaviour in terms of her
belief that she is overweight, and her desire to be thinner. We can, in
short, understand her behaviour we can make sense of it, it is
intelligible to us. But sense-making explanations do not make this
behaviour rational: the anorexic s unshakeable belief that, at five
foot five and 87 pounds she is far too fat, as well as her desire to be
thinner, given her weight and height, are not easy to rationalize,
though they certainly combine to make (a certain kind of) sense of the
pattern of behaviour which has her starving herself to death. So there
is the question whether, because he can make sense of the successive
consumption of generic fictions, Carroll can show that such behaviour is
rational.
One might in fact raise the question whether we need to show that
this behaviour is rational in any strict sense. There are lots of
repetitive activities one can engage in, where one knows pretty
certainly how things will go before one begins them, which have positive
transactional values for the individual engaged in them, and which have
not yet, to my knowledge, been challenged as to their rationality:
gardening, cooking, knitting, taking photographs, phoning or visiting
friends and family, having medical check-ups, engaging in sex or
exercise, and so forth. The question about rationality and generic
fictions is largely tied, I think, to two prejudices, both of which
Carroll speaks to: the high art/mass art prejudice, which holds,
roughly, that serious attention should properly be paid to serious
art and literature, that the very idea of mass art is an oxymoron, and
that the only explanation which could make sense of the ongoing
consumption of junk is an explanation in terms of suboptimal or
irrational behaviour. But this is no explanation, since it presupposes
the irrationality of the masses and the behaviours which they pursue.
The second prejudice is that the consumption of junk does not demand any
sort of reasoning, and the formal-cognitivist reply to this is to show
that the consumption of generic fictions demands at least the practice
of practical reasoning. Yet hidden in these two prejudices is a fear or
anxiety not addressed by the formal-cognitivist gambit: roughly, that
the successive consumption of generic fictions is motivated, not by the
pleasures of reason and reasoning, but by the pleasures of the emotional
responses that one can anticipate and which will genre being genre
be gratified. Carroll s formal-cognitivist approach to genre, despite
its recognition of the idea of self-rewarding activities, has not, I
think, gone far enough to deal with the pleasures of genre that are not
the pleasures of reasoning.
Much as I d like to be persuaded by the argument about
transactional value, I m not convinced that what makes the successive
consumption of generic fictions intelligible is that any generic text
provides a forum for the self-rewarding cognitive activities associated
with making inferences and testing hypotheses about what actions are
likely to happen next in that particular story. I m unpersuaded that
the account is properly transgeneric because I m doubtful about the
adequacy of the emphasis Carroll places on formulating hypotheses
concerning expectations, concerning what is going to happen next. A
refinement from the formalist line exemplified by Ricoeur, Frye, Barthes
and Brooks could solve the adequacy problem, but once introduced it
might confirm that the repeated consumption of fictions from some
generic subcategories just isn t quite rational. This would follow if
it turned out that not all consumers of genre follow or understand the
particular story in the way required by the formalist line.
(4) IS CARROLL S FORMAL-COGNITIVIST GAMBIT PROPERLY TRANSGENERIC?
Certainly Carroll s dissolution of the paradox of junk fiction
works for some generic fictions, and for some story structures. As
Carroll remarks, the paradox disappears when we are thinking of what is
called classical detective fiction ; I am inclined to think that it
disappears not just for classical detective fiction but also for
hard-boiled and other detective fictions, whether those that feature
professional investigative-detectives (Sam Spade, V. I. Warshawski ),
amateur detectives (remunerated or otherwise, for example Holmes, C.
August Dupin, Miss Marple, Kate Fansler ), or simply characters who
stumble upon something they take to be a mystery and set about to solve
it. Indeed, I think the paradox disappears for mystery stories in
general, and might even disappear for stories centered around any
mystery or enigma, whether a traditional mystery story or not: some
romances and a fair amount of soap opera work on the principal of an
enigma or mystery, for instance a secret from the past.
The crossroads between mystery and detection is so clearly tied to
the interconnection of what Barthes calls the proairetic and the
hermeneutic, the codes of action and enigma, that it is hard to see how
any reader or viewer could simply, passively run her eyes over the words
or images of such a fiction and not form hypotheses about how things
will go, hard to imagine how she could fail to participate in a
continual process of constructing a sense of where the story is headed
by envisioning or anticipating the range of things that are apt to
happen next (235). Indeed, for those who enjoy fictions which centre
on resolving a mystery or explaining an enigma, the idea of ongoing
cognitive activity seems essential to following the story at all. Frank
Kermode notes that detective stories often exhibit what he calls a
specialized hermeneutic organization <16> which focuses attention on
clues and the possibility of ordering them so as to produce a solution;
but this is indeed a specialized organization, one not necessarily
employed by other generic subcategories.
A major limitation of Carroll s version of the formal-cognitivist
gambit emerges right here in what even he concedes to be a paradigm case
of a genre demanding ongoing cognitive activity. It is this: the sort
of cognitive activity demanded of those who want to follow and
understand a mystery or detective fiction is one that is not merely
anticipatory, not merely organized prospectively, and certainly not
focussed exclusively on the question What will happen next? There is
a fundamentally retrospective, synthetic and synoptic aspect to
understanding mystery or detective fictions. Mystery and detective
fictions exhibit the close interconnection emphasized by Ricoeur, Frye,
Barthes and Brooks between the proairetic and the hermeneutic, between
the question What is happening? (and the related question, What has
happened? ) and the question Why? . This is because we cannot be
certain what the mystery is until we are able to explain just what has
happened, and such an explanation depends upon discovering the answer to
the question Why? and well as the question Who? . In fictions
centred around the mysterious or the enigmatic, our understanding is
always subject to revision.
For something to be a mystery or an enigma at all requires that it
be incompletely or even incorrectly understood in the beginning often
by the detective, and almost always by the audience as well. The
mystery can only be solved when we discover what actually happened.
Standardly, this will involve the reinterpretation, or at the very
least, the redescription of a prior situation or set of events. It will
involve seeing that what we had formerly accepted or simply taken for
granted ought not to have been taken for granted, that information we
thought we had understood we had not understood correctly after all.
Understanding a mystery is not simply a prospective or projective
undertaking, one that requires us to make inferences about what will
happen next. Rather, it involves retrospection, rethinking not only
what we think has happened, but also rethinking what counts as salient
or relevant to our understanding of what has happened. So in order to
follow the plot of a mystery or a detective fiction, the consumer does
not merely hypothesize about the range of possible future actions, she
has to hypothesize about various possibilities to explain what seems to
have happened in the past. Those different possibilities about what the
past events and actions were will produce different views about what the
course of events actually was, and will have different implications for
what we anticipate happening in the future.
It is much harder to see that anything quite so involved is needed
to understand fictions from other generic subcategories. Carroll s
example of Sleepless in Seattle is a case in point. We can agree that
when the heroine finds the boy s knapsack, the viewer tracks the action
in terms of the question of whether our heroine and our heroes will meet
or pass each other on the elevators (235); but this question is hardly
of the same order as the question that focuses the early action of, for
example, Manhattan Murder Mystery, the question did Larry and Carol s
neighbour murder his wife? There is no Why? tied to the issue of the
backpack; whereas Why? has to be answered in the latter case. Larry
and Carol learn of the unexpected death of their neighbour s wife. Yet
Carol is suspicious. The wife was, after all, in good health. Though
there was a joint burial plot, it appears that the wife has been
cremated rather than buried. Carol begins to wonder whether it is death
by natural causes or murder. If murder, then an explanation has to
connect the murderer to the action. The very idea of motive underlines
this. For something to be a murder, we have to produce a murderer and a
motive: to identify the murderer, we have to be able to tell a story or
produce an explanation that shows the reasons why the action was
committed. To have any idea what is going on in a mystery or detective
fiction, one must always couple the question What? with the question
Why? There is no need at all to ask Why? about the main line of
action in Sleepless in Seattle. If the heroine does not meet the heroes
now, we guess that she will meet them later; it is just a matter of what
causal nexus of actions and events will produce the inevitable meeting.
The dependence of narrative understanding on both anticipation and
retrospection is evident in the mystery and detective subgenres, as is
the connection between the question What is happening (what has
happened, what is going to happen)? and Why? On the other hand,
action films provide an example of a genre where the question Why? is
hardly relevant to whatever inferences and interpretations spectators
might make about what will happen next. They also exemplify the
comparative insignificance of retrospection on our successful
understanding of an unfolding course of events. Whether we are talking
about True Lies or any of the Die Hard films or Speed, it would be
singularly pointless for a viewer to be concerned with hypothesizing
the range of things that are apt to happen on the basis of the
particular actions of the particular films. Partly this is because a
central concern of action films is suspense, and suspense involves the
regulated introduction of the unexpected.<17> So little wonder that in
Speed, just when it looks like things are going to be okay, when the bus
has made the near-impossible right-hand turn onto the freeway and the
characters, along with the audience, experience the euphoric release of
tension typical of such moments when success has been torn from the
teeth of what ought reasonably to have been disaster we discover what
we could not have expected or even guessed: that the freeway hasn t been
completed, that there is (yes!) an unfinished overpass which the bus
must jump, since it has been rigged to blow up if it slows below 50 mph.
Yet even at that moment of pleasurable release of tension, anyone who is
at all familiar with the genre ought to be able to say that at any
second now something is bound to go wrong.
So if by cognitive activity Carroll means that, once the bus
reaches the apparent security of a long stretch of highway, we
hypothesize that something bad is going to happen, then there would be
general agreement. I take it, however, that Carroll means something
much more strictly keyed to the particular film, something much less
generic than the guess that something bad is going to happen. He has
to mean something more keyed to the particular film, since otherwise we
are back at the point of paradox, watching a film where, because of our
familiarity with the genre, we know what is going to happen next. So if
what is at stake here is some prediction about what is going to happen
next in this particular plotline, there is the question just how many of
us would have guessed that there would be a great gaping hole in the
highway? And even if someone did guess that, aside from a momentary
sense of superiority and self-congratulation, does it really matter?
The point here is that in action films, you aren t expected to
guess just what is going to happen next. Surely it would detract from
the pleasure of action films if, in a regular fashion, you could guess
what is going to happen next; it would deprive you of the pleasure of
anticipating further calamities, a pleasure keyed to the certainty that
there will be more of them, and to the surprise that you can t always
foresee what they will be. All you need to know is that something is
going to happen; and given the escalatory plot structure of action
films, you can also guess (correctly) that you won t have to wait long
for whatever it is to happen. So I m not persuaded that correct guesses
about just what is going to happen next are what characterize the
self-rewarding cognitive activities of genre viewers in general. The
generic guess that something bad is about to happen will serve quite
well to fuel our anticipation, and is bound to be confirmed. A generic
guess will be splendidly self-rewarding, without being keyed to the
actual development of the particular generic plot at least in cases
like the action film.
Nor do action films depend upon an ongoing process of revising our
sense of what has already occurred in order for us to go on to make new
guesses about future events and actions in the plot. In Manhattan
Murder Mystery, when Carol thinks she has caught a glimpse of her
neighbour s presumably dead wife going past on a city bus, it causes her
(and us) to rethink whether or not the neighbour s wife is dead leave
alone whether or not she has been murdered! Action films like Speed
just don t demand any comparable ongoing reconsideration of what we take
to have happened.
In the context of the action film, I d venture that the sorts of
guesses that deal with the range of things that could plausibly happen
are themselves as generic and formulaic as the film in question. The
range of things that are apt to happen are things that are only apt to
happen because this is an action film and not a mystery or a screwball
comedy. As soon as Carroll gives the nod to the idea that spectators
are busy making inferences about the range of possible occurrences, then
I think he winds up espousing a view of the interpretation of particular
generic texts that squares with the reading within a system approach
from which he wishes to distinguish his own view. What counts as the
range of possibilities of action is one that is largely determined by
the genre rather than within the constraints of the particular text.
A sketch might be helpful. Watching Speed, my guesses went more
or less like this: there will be progressively more dangerous and
improbable situations; an innocent or two will die along the way, but
probably because they have endangered the group; there will be
progressively more focus on the romantic-sexual attraction between our
hero, Jack (Keanu Reeves) and our heroine, Annie (Sandra Bullock);
either the hero s partner or a close friend of his will die at the
hands of the villain, played by Dennis Hopper confirming for those who
need to be reminded the threat posed by the villain and justifying the
eventual confrontation between hero and villain; when the great rescue
occurs, everyone will, however improbably, get off the bus with nothing
worse than scrapes and bruises; once the bus blows up the police will
have to catch the villain; the villain will abduct the heroine (it would
be such a waste of Dennis Hopper not to have him abduct the heroine);
the hero will confront the villain; the villain will die; but the death
of the villain will leave the heroine in a life-threatening situation;
things will seem hopeless; having gone through so much to try to rescue
Annie, Jack will not abandon her but rather stay with her in the face of
what looks like certain death; there will be one final action sequence
that will destroy any number of small-scale models of subway cars; Jack
and Annie will miraculously live through it all; they will kiss; a crowd
will applaud; the closing credits will roll. These seem to me to be
guesses keyed to expectations about the genre, rather than expectations
about the particular story.
The range of possibilities of action in the Western or in action
films, in horror or in family melodrama, are plausible only given the
constraints of the genre, and certainly have little to do with what it
would be plausible to expect if the represented course of action were
unfolding in our real world. Thomas Sobchack makes this point when he
remarks that genre characters can do what we would like to be able to
do. They can pinpoint the evil in their lives as resident in a monster
or a villain, and they can go out and triumph over it. We, on the other
hand, are in a muddle. We know things aren t quite right, but we are
not sure if it is a conspiracy among corporations, the world situation,
politicians ; but whatever it is, we can t call it out of the saloon
for a shoot-out or round up the villagers and hunt it down. <18> The
beauty of genre is its comparative simplicity: what is plausible or
possible is so only within the stripped down, economical, yet
well-ordered lines of the formula in question.
Do we watch action films like Speed just to guess what is likely
to happen next, or to feel some sort of self-rewarding cognitive
gratification when we do? I doubt that, in the main, viewers watch
Speed to make cognitive, moral or emotional judgements at all. We don t
need to make them, the genre film makes them for us. These are, after
all, not fictions of narrative complexity or ambiguity, any more than
they are fictions of moral complexity or ambiguity. With generic
fictions, by and large we are not in doubt about moral questions. We
watch Speed because it delivers progressively escalating action,
suspense and romance. We watch for the pleasure of the overt action ;
some will, in addition, watch for the pleasure of anticipating the union
of the romantic couple. We may also watch for the pleasure of built-in
moral judgements: for example, for the opportunity to see the villain
perform a sequence of progressively more heinous acts. These are the
sorts of expectations that action films reward.
Given the page-turning character of junk fictions and the
equivalent in cinematic terms, which Thomas Sobchack describes as the
genre film s tendency to feel shorter than it is the actual range of
relevant inferential options is pretty clearly limited, and arguably so
are the sorts and range of cognitive activities required of the reader
or viewer. If, as Carroll claims, the transactional value for readers
and viewers of junk fictions derives from the self-rewarding character
of their interpretive activity that so often the interpreter can guess
correctly about how things will unfold it seems at least worth
emphasizing that what counts as a reasonable guess in the context of
particular generic fictions is a guess keyed to our expectations about
the genre, and the likelihood of those guesses being seriously mistaken
is only evidence of the degree to which we are unfamiliar with the
conventions of the generic subcategory in question. However, as soon as
we admit guesses that are keyed to expectations formed thanks to our
familiarity with each subgenre s preordained forms, known plots,
recognizable characters, and obvious iconographies ,<19> then we
realize that most of our general, generic guesses will be pretty much on
the money most of the time. In the context of the action film, our
guess that something will happen next is bound to be rewarded. And even
only marginally more sophisticated or context-specific guesses about
future action will often turn out be right in the long term even if they
are wrong in the short term. Jack might not actually kiss Annie until
the final scenes of Speed, so I might have to wait a while for my guess
that they will kiss to be rewarded. He didn t, for instance, kiss her
after she successfully pulled the bus around the near-catastrophic
right-hand turn onto the highway. Nor did he kiss her after they
escaped from the bus (an exploding 747 interrupted the otherwise
romantic moment). In one sense, if I had guessed at each point that
they would kiss, I would have been disappointed, or at least not
rewarded . But satisfaction is guaranteed with genre; the deferral of
the inevitable provides the additional pleasure of prolonged
anticipation.
So it seems that the formal-cognitivist gambit, at least as we see
it exemplified in Carroll s dissolution of the paradox of junk fiction,
might not succeed in showing that the successive consumption of generic
fictions is rational in the way Carroll had hoped. It is not even
obvious that it is largely supported by the practice of practical
reasoning skills. Indeed, Carroll s account, based on the notion of
transactional value and self-rewarding cognitive activities seems to
bring the discussion of genre back to the point of the original paradox.
For once we assume that the sorts of guesses and hypotheses about how
generic fictions will proceed are, after all, largely keyed to our
expectations about the genre or subgenre, then we find we are, again,
dealing with the pleasures derived from what we already know about the
narrative form and conventions of generic fiction.
OBSERVATIONS IN CONCLUSION
I have three concluding observations about the formal-cognitivist
gambit. The first goes back to the notion of wholeness or formal unity
which underlies the formalist account of narrative comprehension which I
have sketched with reference to Ricoeur, Frye, Barthes and Brooks. Let
us grant that Ricoeur is correct when he suggests that following and
understanding a story are absolutely interconnected activities, that you
don t get one without the other. This still makes it an open (and
indeed an empirical) question whether there might not be many otherwise
perfectly content consumers of generic fictions who do not follow the
story, who do not extract a configuration from a succession of events,
and who thus may well not understand generic fictions. This would be
heresy from the formalist point of view, but I have experienced it
myself and have heard it reported in classrooms and in other
discussions. I think this situation is exacerbated by cinematic and
televisual generic narratives, where the speed of delivery is such that
some viewers might at no time hold the whole narrative together in any
formal configuration at all. Such viewers might have little ongoing
sense of how the successive segments of the narrative are part of the
narrative as a whole. And this might not seem to be a problem for such
viewers, for two reasons: because, in a sense, they already know how
things will go, and because the pleasure or transactional value they
seek and derive from these fictions is somatic rather than cognitive.
They are fine if they can keep each sequence of action together, and if
they can follow shifts between sequences, but have no particular need,
even comprehensionally, to hold the story-as-a-whole together as they
watch it. And because generic fictions, as Carroll rightly remarks,
aspire to be page-turners (or their cinematic equivalents), the
attention span needed to believe that one is following the story (even
if one isn t) is quite limited. The narrative provides what cues are
necessary to keep the viewer oriented now; the actual configuring of a
whole story is unnecessary, and the absence of such a configuration does
not strike the viewer as a loss.
Obviously we can be trained to attend to the whole structure of a
narrative this is the sort of training that goes on in classrooms all
the time. And it takes a lot of training to get viewers to the point
where they can make a serious attempt to hold even a generic film
together on one viewing. But it may turn out to be debatable that any
actual attentive concern with the story as a whole, and thus with
integrating the various narrational components of the story into a
whole, is indeed at issue for all consumers of generic fictions. If
this is true, then the formal-cognitivist gambit is in real jeopardy,
both as a formalist account and as a cognitivist account, of the
consumption of generic fictions. It will then only pertain to those
consumers who do attend to the formal and narrational cues of the
fiction. And we might discover that, at the end of the day, there are
fewer virtual Aristotelians than might have been imagined.
A second observation, following from the first, concerns the need
to get clearer about what we might broadly call the somatic responses to
generic fictions, and the question just how these somatic responses
interact with cognitive and moral activities on the part of viewers and
readers. Here I am not suggesting that body-based and emotional
responses to generic texts (or to anything else, for that matter) are in
radical contradiction to intellectual, cognitive, or reason-based
responses. Philosophers such as Ronald de Sousa and neurologists such
as Antonio Damasio have made persuasive cases for the rationality of
emotion and for the somatic basis of practical reasoning.<20> Somatic
responses were acknowledged by Aristotle, who draws our attention to the
fundamental role played by the emotional responses proper to spectators.
There is a somatic aspect, and not merely a cognitive one, to at least
two ideas that are central to Carroll s own account of genre:
anticipation and gratification. Perhaps in order to make sense of the
behaviour of the consumer of generic fictions we must consider the
somatic as well as (or perhaps even instead of) the cognitive.
Turning our attention from the cognitive to the somatic, or
turning our attention so as to include the somatic, does not entail that
the consumption of generic fictions slides from the realm of the
rational to the realm of the irrational. Responses to works of high
art have a somatic dimension; this does not make our appreciation of
these arts irrational, so there is little reason to conclude that a
significant somatic dimension to one s response to genre entails
irrationality. What wants investigation is whether the self-rewarding
transactional value of generic fictions might turn out to be profoundly
somatic. If so, the repeated consumption of generic fictions might
require at the very least discussion of changes in metabolic and
biochemical levels to augment the current focus on the cognitive
pleasures of interpretation.
My third concluding observation returns me to the question of the
other sorts of cognitive activity that are cited as reasons that could
make sense of the consumption of generic fictions. Carroll, as I have
mentioned, suggests that moral judgements as well as cognitive
judgements are ways of achieving the transactional value that he
suggests marks the relationship between consumer and text. Here I must
confess real scepticism. I think it is far from obvious that moral
judgements are made i.e., deliberated over, reflected upon,
contemplated by viewers or readers of generic fictions. Rather, they
are made for us by the generic text. As Thomas Sobchack has shown
persuasively, for anything to be generic, it has to have at least two
moral dimensions that are part of the form and formula of genre. The
formal component has to do with the moral structure of the plot of any
generic work. For something to be genre, it must achieve a particular
sort of aesthetic and moral order. The formulaic component concerns the
deployment of characters with immediately identifiable moral qualities,
where this is supported by the iconographic aspects concerning character
and setting. In genre, moral issues are easy to schematize. Carroll
might well argue that in genre the viewer can test hypotheses about the
moral worth of an action or a character. But genre just wouldn t be
genre if this were the general case. Rather, characters and situations
are their moral significance, their moral value: if we recognize this,
then the fiction will ceaselessly confirm it for us.
In conclusion, the formal-cognitivist gambit might provide an
explanation of the ongoing consumption of generic fictions by those
already familiar with the various generic subcategories, but only under
the assumption that the reader or viewer in question already thinks like
a virtual Aristotelian, and does indeed (attempt to) understand any
particular fiction as a whole. The formal-cognitivist gambit does not
seem to explain the consumption of generic fictions by those who do not
work toward the sort of holistic understanding that is the basis of the
formalist part of the gambit. As for the cognitivist part of the
gambit, I have raised three issues that suggest Carroll hasn t succeeded
in dissolving the paradox of junk fiction after all. First, it isn t
clear that making sense of this behaviour goes any particular distance
toward making it rational. Second, it isn t clear that the cognitivist
account is persuasively transgeneric: it works very well with some
genres, yet seems unnecessary for the explanation of others. Third, it
isn t clear that the attention Carroll gives to the prospective,
forward-looking engagement with particular developments in an ongoing
course of events is adequate as an account of what is involved in
following and understanding a story. In extreme cases, it may well not
be necessary for readers whose attention is keyed primarily to what is
happening now. And if I am right in my suspicion that the best guesses
about what sorts of actions one should expect are properly guesses keyed
to the genre rather than to the particular text, then we find ourselves
right back at the original paradox. What I think is needed to dissolve
the paradox of junk fiction is an account that explicates the relation-
ship between making sense of fictions, including generic ones, and
making sense of agents behaviour. Carroll s account needs to say more
about the sorts of practical reasoning skills involved in these two
sense-making activities, and in particular, more about the extent to
which practical reasoning makes a difference to the understanding of
genre.<21>
Notes
<1> In the case of cinema, the argument in favour of the connection between
narrational cues and comprehension an argument that certainly extends
to generic films can be found in David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction
Film. Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985; see also
Edward Branigan s Narrative Comprehension and Film. London: Routledge,
1992.
<2> No‰l Carroll, The Paradox of Junk Fiction, Philosophy and Literature
Volume 18: 225-241.
<3> The concern to show that the consumption of literature has a rational
basis is apparent also in, for example, Paisley Livingston, Literature and
Rationality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
<4> In Genre Film: A Classical Experience, Film Genre Reader, ed. Barry
Keith Grant (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), pp. 102-113, Thomas
Sobchack has argued that we think about the fictional genre film as a single
category that includes all that is commonly held to be genre film (102).
Sobchack s line is formal and, broadly speaking, Aristotelian. He suggests
that despite the obvious differences between the various generic subcategories
(between thrillers and screwball comedies, for example), the fundamentals
of story structure, characterization, theme and iconography, as well as
the fundamental mimetic idiosyncracy of such fictions, are common to generic
films as such. Attention to these formal or classical aspects of genre
will give us a better understanding of how genres work, and how spectators
relate to them.
<5> Frank Kermode, Secrets and Narrative Sequence, in On Narrative,
ed. W. J. T. Mitchell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981, pp.
79-97.
<6> See the three volumes of Time and Narrative, trans. David Pellauer
and Kathleen Blamey. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984, 1985,
1988; Life in Quest of Narrative, On Paul Ricoeur, ed. David Wood. London:
Routledge, 1991, pp. 20-33; The Narrative Function, Hermeneutics and the
Human Sciences: Essays on Language, Action and Interpretation, ed. John
B. Thompson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981, pp. 274-297;
Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1992.
<7> Northrop Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1957.
<8> Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot, in Reading for the Plot: Design
and Intention in Narrative. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992,
p. 18. Others have drawn attention to this doubled feature of narrative;
Brooks cites, for example, Jonathan Culler s notion of the double logic
of narrative, p. 28. Both writers are mentioned in relation to this notion
in Gerald Prince s A Dictionary of Narratology. Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1987.
<9> Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Martin. New York: Hill and Wang,
1974. The other three codes concern the semes, the symbolic, and the cul-
tural.
<10> It may strike some as just mistaken to see Roland Barthes as a team
player in the ongoing game of textual hermeneutics. I certainly see where
this objection comes from. But however unorthodox, however seemingly
anti-holistic Barthes interpretive work might be, it is nevertheless strongly
thematic in motivation, and is drawn upon by many more holistically motivated
theorists and philosophers. His work is a rule-proving exception, an
exception that tests the rule.
<11> This example comes from 185 of Ludwig Wittgenstein s Philosophical
Investigations. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958.
<12> Carroll discusses the idea of practice in The Paradox of Junk
Fiction, and notes that many skills are profitably and enjoyably practiced
without repetitive practice being seen to be irrational.
<13> The phrase is Brooks .
<14> This question is to be distinguished, Carroll insists, from other
questions about genre. Carroll is not pursuing the question of how to make
sense of why some consumers of genre take such delight from particular
subcategories of genre. While he acknowledges the idea of genre as a system
of systems, but the paradox that is of interest to him here is not one that
is appropriately answered in terms of anything like reading in a system
(231). Carroll also distinguishes his question from the question why it
is rational to return to any particular text (generic or otherwise) which
he calls the paradox of recidivism (227). I believe Carroll would ultimately
deny that recidivism is a paradox, and would thus deny that it is irrational
to read or watch fictions again. Still, recidivism is not unconnected to
the issue of genre (as Carroll notes); it would certainly be worth
investigating for the light it might shed on the selection and function
of classical or canonical texts, and the role they play in any sys-
tem-of-systems account of generic fictions.
<15> I will return to the question of moral judgements, but I confess
that I am uncertain just what is involved in emotional judgements. Perhaps
Carroll is speaking of emotional responses such as fear, hope, excitement
though I doubt he uses the term judgement so loosely. Perhaps he is
speaking of judgements that are in part motivated by emotional response:
if so, I think this needs more spelling out.
<16> Kermode, Secrets and Narrative Sequence, p. 83.
<17> This is a point Carroll has already developed in his article Toward
a Theory of Film Suspense, Persistence of Vision no. 1 (Summer 1984):
65-89, where he proposes that suspense develops in relation to two possible,
logically opposed outcomes to a set of events, such that one outcome is
morally correct but unlikely, while the other is evil and likely.
<18> Sobchack, Genre Film: A Classical Experience, p. 108
<19> Sobchack, Genre Film: A Classical Experience, p. 105.
<20> Ronald de Sousa, The Rationality of Emotions. Cambridge, MA: The
MIT Press, 1991; Anthonio Damasio, Descartes Error: Emotion, Reason, and
the Human Brain. New York: G. P. Putnam s Sons, 1994.
<21> I am grateful to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of
Canada for their ongoing support of my research, and to Queen s University for
an ARC grant that supported a research project on genre, gender and narrative.
Profound thanks to George McKnight (Film Studies, Carleton University), with
whom I have collaborated on the topic of the narrative conventions of
mystery-detective fiction, for his comments and suggestions on this paper.
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