theoryofliteratu00inwell

Literary Genres 245
one more complex than the Greek temple, it found in it nothing
but formlessness. So with genres. Every "culture" has its genres
the Chinese, the Arabian, the Irish; there are primitive oral
"kinds." Medieval literature abounded in kinds. 28 We have no
need to defend the "ultimate" character of the Graeco-Roman
kinds. Nor need we defend, in its Graeco-Roman form, the
doctrine of generic purity, which appeals to one kind of aesthetic
criterion.
Modern genre theory is, clearly, descriptive. It doesn't limit
the number of possible kinds and doesn't prescribe rules to
authors. It supposes that traditional kinds may be "mixed" and
produce a new kind (like tragicomedy). It sees that genres can
be built up on the basis of inclusiveness or "richness" as well as
that of "purity" (genre by accretion as well as by reduction). In-
stead of emphasizing the distinction between kind and kind, it is
interested—after the Romantic emphasis on the uniqueness of
each "original genius" and each work of art—in finding the common
denominator of a kind, its shared literary devices and lit-
erary purpose.
Men's pleasure in a literary work is compounded of the sense
of novelty and the sense of recognition. In music, the sonata
form and the fugue are obvious instances of patterns to be recog-
nized j in the murder mystery, there is the gradual closing in or
tightening of the plot—the gradual convergence (as in Oedifus)
of the lines of evidence. The totally familiar and repetitive pat-
tern is boring j the totally novel form will be unintelligible—is
indeed unthinkable. The genre represents, so to speak, a sum of
aesthetic devices at hand, available to the writer and already in-
telligible to the reader. The good writer partly conforms to the
genre as it exists, partly stretches it. By and large, great writers
are not the inventors of genres : Shakespeare and Racine, Moliere
and Jonson, Dickens and Dostoevsky, enter into other men's
labors.
One of the obvious values of genre study is precisely the fact
that it calls attention to the internal development of literature,
to what Henry Wells (in New Poets from Old, 1940) has called
"literary genetics." Whatever the relations of literature to other
realms of value, books are influenced by books j
books imitate,
parody, transform other books—not merely those which follow
: