Against Genre

In january I read Susanna Clarke's "Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell," which was an enjoyable and well-researched tome about two magicians trying to bring magic back to 19th century Britain. While the plot was engaging enough to get me through the roughly thousand pages, the characters weren't terribly original or deep, and when I was done reading it I nodded my head and shelved it in the fantasy section of my library. However, in recent jaunts to the local used bookstores, I've seen copies of this book not in the fant/sci-fi sections, but shelved with the rest of the "literature," which started me really wondering what made that difference. Certainly the ten years worth of research that went into the depiction of the state of English magic in the 19th century pushed this novel a step above your less well thought out hack and slash universe into the realm of historical fiction, but is it possible to write about a theme such as magic in a way that is not immediately branded as "fantasy?" Personally, I considered the Harry Potter series to be more in the Young Adult genre; though magic plays a not inconsiderable role in the plot, the books seemed to be more about the growth and struggles of their teenaged hero. Conversely, I having been working on a short story for my fiction class about a golem hunting down an angel in a modern city, which certainly had fantasy (or at least fantastic) elements for many of my classmates, while I considered it more in the light of urban gothic or modern folktale, and then my teacher asked who exactly would be the intended audience. Presumably people who like reading things that they haven't read before, stories that don't fit into the expected molds and tropes of genre.

This evening I considered my fiction bookshelf, and decided that I was done with genre, shuffling together what had previously been distinct categories of literature, fantasy, horror, sci-fi, children's, etc. These categorical distinctions have been a thorn for some time, as there are just too many books that don't fit into one genre or another, too many sub-sub-genres (magical realism, steam punk), and too many authors who are not content to stay in one mode of writing (George Orwell being the largest frustration of this type for years now, "1984" leans towards sci-fi, but "Down and Out in Paris and London?" Or what to do with Hesse's volume of fairy tales?) I have a similar difficulty with my shelves of poetry, mythology, and philosophy, which I like to keep arranged in a rough chronology. Except that the further back historically you get, these genres all converge towards the same thing: works like the "Bhagavad-Gita" are essentially all three. I feel like the idea of marking off set boundaries on what certain types of literature can or should be ultimately limits the possibilities of the worlds that can be created with language. When it comes down to it, Joyce's "Dubliners" is just as fictional as Tolkien's "The Hobbit." Though one takes place in a world that is at first glance more familiar to us, it was as equally filtered and recreated through the mind of its author. And who's to say that Middle-earth wasn't the more fully thought out, containing the history, customs, and peoples of not just one city but an entire world? Perhaps instead of setting arbitrary boundaries on types of semi-believable realities, a more holistic attitude would be to consider that these are all stories, spanning a spectrum of invented realities from the seemingly mundane to the convincingly fantastic. Which of course leads me to the question of when someone will attempt to write across all of them.