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University of Oregon

Review: [untitled]Author(s): Harry LevinSource: Comparative Literature, Vol. 36, No. 3 (Summer, 1984), pp. 258-260Published by: Duke University Press on behalf of the University of OregonStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1770263 .

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BOOK REVIEWS

KINDS OF LITERATURE: AN INTRODUCTION TO THE THEORY OF GENRES AND MODES.

By Alastair Fowler. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982. viii, 373 p.

Literary criticism would have been unthinkable without the concept of genres.

Since this supplied the basis for sets of rules, it has gone up and down with thefortunes of classicism. At its height, a dogmatic prescriptiveness led to reverberat-

ing quarrels over the generic identity of the Orlando Furioso and the Cid. In a

nominalistic reaction, Croce found easy adherents for the even more problematic

assumption that individual works of art "just growed," like the proverbial Topsy,without benefit-or handicap-of guiding principles. Recent theoretical develop-ments have revived the issue from broader and more flexible points of view. Its

strategic place in Renaissance thought has been clarified by the compendious

history of Bernard Weinberg and the perceptive lectures of the late Rosalie Colie.

Students of the eighteenth century have been showing a fresh sympathy for the

arrangement and multiplication of formal categories. More speculatively, Paul

Hernadi has carried the subject through and Beyond Genre, as indeed Northrop

Frye had done in his own distinctive terms. And Claudio Guillen has sketched

the historical background for a redefinition of genre as "a problem-solving model

on the level of form." The time would seem to be ripe, then, for a more synchronic

treatment, still tentative and prolegomenal, yet taking full advantage of current

inquiry.Alastair Fowler also stands in the tradition of Blair and Kames when, as

Regius Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature at the University of Edin-

burgh, he responds to this need with common sense and lively sensibility. Kinds ofLiterature is an engaging, well-ordered, and most welcome book, richly illustrated

with apt quotations and timely examples. Though it allows a fair amount ofweight to "diachronic considerations," its range of reference inclines toward con-

temporary allusion, sometimes so up-to-date that it risks the danger of soon be-

coming dated. Though it is mainly focused on English literature, it has conscien-

tiously drawn upon secondary studies to fill out the perspectives of comparativeliterature. French literature would have presented more clear-cut distinctions,but that is precisely why it would have been less germane to the author's central

demonstration. For he is less concerned with delimitation than with enlargement:"to recover a sense of the variety of literary forms." Whereas the neo-classicists

usually ended with a negative emphasis on exclusion, on les genres tranches, his

more positive outlook would stress inclusion, la mrlange des genres. Intermixture

is for him the matrix of experiment, and hence the breeding-ground of novelty, in-asmuch as the invention of new forms is necessarily based on the recombination of

old ones.

Not surprisingly, he shies away from the merest hint of classification-perhaps

a little too far; for, as soon as we admit that there can be different kinds of any-

thing, we recognize the possibility of a taxonomic approach. That, however, would

break down a totality from the outside, instead of building up the units from within.

Kind can be distinguished from mode by the difference between a noun and its

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BOOK REVIEWS

adjective: e.g., "comedy" versus "the comic," the first a primary dramatic struc-ture, related to the second thematically (a comic novel or article). Professor

Fowler pays rewarding attention to the relationship between subject-matter and

apposite technique. The meaning of his awkward term subgenre is clear enough,and comes out most handily when a classical genus has been subdivided into tradi-

tional species, as in the branches of lyric poetry. More striking is the transpositionfrom one genre to another, which he calls recategorization, and which the Russian

Formalists exemplified through the process of "canonization," whereby the models

from popular culture are raised to the levels of artistic refinement (from the

detective story to The Brothers Karamazov). The genres themselves, moreover,can undergo modulation, as in the remarkable case of the epigram, which began as

an epitaph or inscription and has reached its high point in the sonnet or inrepartee.

A writer, when addressing himself to a given genre, finds himself confrontingwhat is here termed its "repertoire": the prevailing codes and conventions that

must be observed, the available styles and devices with which he must work. Cer-

tain ages have apparently been more propitious to certain genres than to others,which have had other heydays, and it calls for diachronic as well as synchronicreflection to sort these out. Critics have attempted to set up hierarchies, but have

disagreed as to their ranking order: whether tragedy outranks the epic or viceversa. Literature as a whole has often been summed up and laid out as a tripartite

system-lyric, dramatic, narrative-and writers have turned such triads to their

own purposes. Mr. Fowler mentions Hugo's historical sequence; he might have

mentioned Joyce's subjective esthetic. He seems to be properly skeptical about

maps and diagrams, fully aware that the ground itself is too complex to be gliblyschematized. Thus he takes exception to "anatomy" as the fourth and last of Frye's

types of fiction. Supplementing the more meaningful rubrics (romance, confession,

novel), this is evidently a catch-all, shrewdly conceived to accommodate the

amorphous and the miscellaneous. At the same time it fits in with Frye's devotion

to the mystical number four and to the season-myth that frames his pattern of re-

curring ideas.

The static notion of kinds as universals seems to have passed, with the last

stand of neo-Aristotelianism atChicago.

To arrive at themby

means ofempiricalgeneralization is simply to put together the structural norms for readers' expecta-

tions and critics' interpretations-and hence, as Mr. Fowler concludes, "to break

the hermeneutic circle." His discussion of functional origins might have been rein-

forced by cross-reference to the Homeric epic, as it has been reconsidered in the

light of oral composition. His omission of l'dvolution des genres accords with his

distrust of Darwinian analogy; and Brunetiere's pseudo-science might well be

overlooked, though Tynjanov gets dismissed too summarily. Yet the paradigm of

evolution is not less relevant to the arts than to the sciences, and has amply provedits helpfulness in dealing with the history of European drama. Notice is inci-

dentally taken of a neglected German school, the Gattungsgeschichte of Karl

Viitor, a well-meaning if quixotic project whose formulations sought to reconcilethe normative conceptions with the innate. It is somewhat puzzling to understand

why Mr. Fowler should look upon historical relativism as a dangerous trap, since

this is pretty much the implication of his own position, and a rather hard one to

avoid without recoiling into either dogmatism or subjectivity.

Himself an accomplished poet, he is at his best in illuminating the poetic forms,

which lend themselves especially to such illumination because they can be most

concretely defined. When he speaks of "lyric as the dominant mode of nineteenth-

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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

century literature," we might not altogether concur; but we will realize whyMeredith seems to be a favorite novelist, and why the novel in general is inde-

cisively treated. This may reflect its somewhat ambiguous standing among the

genres; there is a suggestion that "the novel, being postclassical, has not much

tradition of genre criticism." Actually, the question of its role as a nondescriptlatecomer had instilled in it a unique self-consciousness, which in turn has critically

analyzed its generic contours in depth as well as breadth. (After all, the index lists

eighteen entries under "James, Henry.") Nor should the label of ronmancebe

construed as a latterday revival (p. 141) ; the single French word roman, when it

is applied to both subgenres, reaffirms a significant continuity. As a fellow-

townsman of Scott, Professor Fowler may be excused for having momentarily for-

gotten that Waverley was published anonymously in 1814 (p. 228). And Haw-thorne's Chaunticleer in The House of the Seven Gables need not provoke specu-

lation over Chaucer's Nun's Priest's Tale (p. 91); that cock's name had been in

the public domain ever since the Roman de Renart.

Such trivialities can do no more than underline the largeness of this under-

taking's scope, together with the boldness that the author has brought to its

execution. Short of omniscience, what it required was courage and insight, and

what it has acquired along with them is open-mindedness and ingenuity. The

history of criticism has all too frequently bogged down in repetition and stagna-

tion, in name-dropping and term-dropping, in unbridgeable disparities between

theory and practice. Weinberg's synoptic chapters can be discouraging. By the

same token, it is encouraging when the conventional apparatus turns out to be

still usable and the moribund verbiage somehow comes back to life, as we redis-

cover the theoreticians of earlier periods. Modern Structuralists and their suc-

cessors, with all their neologisms and jeux de mots, have been pushing in the same

direction and not much farther ahead. The shared commitment is a common

interest in the dynamics of literature, whose fundamental problems have not

changed much over the centuries. Its products vary and accumulate, to be con-

stantly enjoyed and continually reinterpreted. But the truly fundamental challenge,

confirmed today on all sides, is to fathom and retrace its processes. Whenever we

recall that Croce did not believe in genres, we should cheer ourselves up by

recallinglikewise that he did not believe in

comparativeliterature.

HARRYLEVIN

Harvard University

THE ANTITHEATRICAL PREJUDICE. By Jonas Barish. Berkeley and Los Angeles:

University of California Press, 1981. x, 499 p.

Books that advance genuinely original ideas are often treated to a special sort

of backhanded flattery: their authors are told that, indeed, here is a wonderful

idea for a book, if only the topic had received the treatment it deserved! The

reader is so taken with the idea that he is sure he could have done it better, could

really have given it the only proper treatment, forgetting in his enthusiasm for

rewriting another's book that without this stimulating original idea he would

never have had the luxury of his fictional revision. As Poe pointed out in one of

his marginalia, in reading some books we occupy ourselves exclusively with the

thoughts of the author, in others mainly with our own. We tend to think that the

latter case arises out of some failure on the part of the author, but Poe reminds

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