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How Literary Genres Are like Village DogsNovember 02, 2008 I'm so glad that ADD (attention deficit disorder) hadn't been invented when I was a kid. When my attention started drifting in school, around sixth grade, my parents acted on the assumption that I was bored and found me another, more challenging school. More recently I've been told (mostly in jest -- I think) that if I need to get up from the computer for several minutes every hour, maybe I have ADD. My personal opinion is that anyone who can sit staring at a computer (or TV) screen for hours on end has worse problems than ADD, but YMMV, of course. Anyway, long before ADD came along, I diagnosed myself with "butterfly mind": when it drifts, it flits from flower to leaf to dungheap. For a writer this is actually an asset: you glimpse connections that other people miss, and come up with unexpected ways to describe what you see. Which is what just happened on my feminist science fiction e-list. In announcing the publication of The Mud of the Place, I said that it wasn't fantasy or science fiction, but that f and sf had given me some of the tools I needed to write it. This led to a discussion of unclassifiable fiction. My butterfly mind immediately skipped to a wonderful book I read last winter that has nothing whatsoever to do with fiction: Ray and Lorna Coppinger's book about dogs, Dogs: A Startling New Understanding of Canine Origin, Behavior, and Evolution. What follows is more or less what I posted to the e-list. The Coppingers believe that canids domesticated themselves (and evolved into dogs) after humans started settling into stationary villages, which featured on their outskirts stationary dumps -- good foraging for those canids who didn't mind being that close to people. These "village dogs," both in history and in the present, developed certain common characteristics, e.g., a medium size that was big enough to defend itself but small enough to thrive on the food available. Physical differentiation started to happen when some humans figured out that dogs could be useful at certain tasks, such as herding or guarding livestock and pulling sleds. "Breeds" as we know them, however, are relatively recent developments -- can't remember exactly, but IIRC within the last 100-150 years. Until then a retriever was a dog that retrieved well -- not necessarily a dog with retrievers on both sides of its pedigree. Whether a dog could retrieve well depended partly on its parents (did it have the right physical characteristics for the job?) and partly on how it was raised and trained. A Labrador retriever pedigree alone does not a good retriever make. The modern emphasis on "pure" breeds (meaning the stud books are closed, meaning genetic diversity takes a wallop), especially in the show ring, tends to divorce function from appearance and to focus heavily on the latter. So I'm thinking of literary genres as breeds -- of relatively recent development, especially the notion that there are clear lines between them and everything has to fit into one category. "Literature" is more like those village dogs of indeterminate breed: it adapts to the climate and food sources available, and maybe it looks a little like this, a little like that, but you can't say for sure that it's a beagle or a foxhound (or a mystery or a romance). When you're trying to tell a story, you scavenge and steal from whatever's in the vicinity and if it works you keep it. To this a writer I hugely admire responded: "Susanna, that is the most satisfying theory of Genre I have ever read. Like a good village dump dog, I am going to steal it, drag it away, chew on it, give it to the puppies to gnaw -- OK?" OK you bet. Butterfly minds rule!
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