theoryofliteratu00inwell

Literary Genres 243
tive-accessory and narrative, e.g., ruined castles, Roman Catholic
horrors, mysterious portraits, secret passageways reached through
sliding panels j abductions, immurements, pursuits through
lonely forests) j there is, still further, a Kunstwollen, an aesthetic
intent, an intent to give the reader a special sort of pleasurable
horror and thrill ("pity and terror" some of the Gothicists may
have murmured). 22
In general, our conception of genre should lean to the for-
malists side, that is, incline to generize Hudibrastic octosyllabics
or the sonnet rather than the political novel or the novel about
factory workers: we are thinking of "literary" kinds, not such
subject-matter classifications as might equally be made for nonfiction.
Aristotle's Poetics, which roughly nominates epic, drama,
and lyric ("melic") poetry as the basic kinds of poetry, attends
to differentiating media and the propriety of each to the aesthetic
purpose of the kind: drama is in iambic verse because that is
nearest to conversation, while epic requires the dactylic hexameter
which is not at all reminiscent of speech: "If anyone should compose
a narrative poem in any other meter or in several, it would
seem unfitting, for the heroic is the most stately and weighty of
the meters and therefore most easily receives borrowed words
and metaphors and ornaments of all kinds. . . ." 23 The next
level of "form" above "meter" and "stanza" should be "struc-
ture" (e.g., a special sort of plot organization) : this we have, to
some extent, at least, in traditional, i.e., Greek-imitative, epic
and tragedy (beginning in medias res, the "peripety" of tragedy,
the unities). Not all the "classical devices" seem structural, however;
the battle piece and the descent into the Lower World
appear to belong to subject matter or theme. In post-eighteenth-
century literature, this level is not so easy to locate, except in the
"well-made play" or the detective novel (the murder mystery),
where the close plot is such a structure. But even in the
Chekhovian tradition of the short story, there exists an or-
ganization, a structure, only of a different sort from the short
story of Poe or O. Henry (we can call it a "looser" organization
if we choose). 24
Anyone interested in genre theory must be careful not to confound
the distinctive differences between "classical" and modern
theory. Classical theory is regulative and prescriptive, though its