Walking into Hodges Figgis, a modern lexicon of the Irish narrative, you are faced with shelves of classification that have grouped identity into categories. These categories are considered genres, they exist to help the capitalist consumer in sifting through writers until they discover a mirrored desire, a world that vibrates to their emotional and intellectual tuning. American Science Fiction author Bruce Sterling views the relationship between the consumer and genres as a utilitarian dynamic built on a desire for gratification, “Genres gratify people, they gratify a particular mindset. They gratify a cultural sensibility…”.
There are sections dedicated to the various genres fictions that we have come to define as Science Fiction, Horror, Crime even Erotic Romance, yet these divisions sit incongruously to the unlabelled Literary Fiction section of the bookshop. Like spokes on a wheel the genre sections of the shop curve out from the Literary Fiction category. Irish Literature in all this division operates under neither a clear definition of Literary Fiction nor genre fiction but instead categorises itself into a nationalistic divide. Writers under this banner categorisation are merely organised alphabetically, not by a genre.
The affect this has on both the consumer and writer are negative for artistic endeavours as operating purely by nationalistic categorisation creates a genre categorised as Irish Literature. Fashioning the nation into a genre of its own the consumer will have expectation for any book under this national categorisation. The Irish writer meanwhile will become stagnant due to their inability to escape the Irish Literature identity.
By categorising Irish writers by their nationalist identity, while helpful for the consumer, actually reinforces tropes within the genre. Crime Fiction relies on a crime to be committed to fit its genre, Horror Fiction relies on preying on human fear, and Irish Fiction relies on establishing its national identification markers in order to fits its constructed genre. In committing to this categorisation structure of markers the capitalist society in its efforts to aid the consumer help to create cohesive genre identities. These markers stagnate the author and the reader as they encourage preconceived identities, homogenising creation into shelves in a bookshop.
Jennifer M. Jeffers in her introduction to The Irish Novel at The End of The Twentieth Century captures this dichotomy of nation to markers, how they can produce clichéd stagnate imagery. Connecting the evolution of the nationalistic genre markers from the rural tradition into a new national urban image she quips that,
“Predictably, even the image of the ‘new Ireland’ has quickly gelled into a ‘standard’. Where once there was clichéd rural Ireland, now there is the clichéd urban Ireland”.
Sterling, writing in his ground-breaking article on the state of the Science Fiction genre “Slipstream” in the late nineteen eighties, illustrates the exasperation that such binding by expectation can have on the writer as well as the reader, for when there are expectations to be met “Why innovate? Innovate in what direction? Nothing is moving, the compass is dead. Everything is becalmed; toss a chip overboard to test the current, and it sits there till it sinks without a trace”.
While contemporary Irish author Julian Gough’s rhetoric may appear rather strong, he hits the proverbial nail on the head with regard to the damaging nature of identifying writers under nationalistic categories: “Indeed, I hardly read Irish writers any more, I’ve been disappointed so often. I mean, what the FECK are writers in their 20s and 30s doing, copying the great John McGahern, his style, his subject matter, in the 21st century?”. An answer to Gough’s question may be that in the hyper consumer market that is the 21st century, where Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno’s logic on the homogenisation of art has occurred, “the inferior work has always relied on its similarity with others- on a surrogate identity”. In the case made by Gough, McGahern acts as this surrogate patriarchal figure for the Irish genre, a figure whose style is mimicked by others due to its commercial success.
Derek Hand offers a counterpoint to Gough’s accusations by believing that the latter has misread the nature of the Irish Novel. He sees that the problem lies not with a stagnation of the Irish novel which has always “made it up” but instead with the onset of globalisation. The creation of the contemporary “vulgar fiscal” international reading market, where the writer must increasingly focus on competing for attention and the reader must become increasingly selective due to the increase in choice, has damaged literature according to Hand: “The rise of genre fiction in Irish writing, it could be argued, is one manifestation of this drive towards bland conformity, the rough edges of literary expression being pared down so that reader, and writer, know what to expect and get what they want”. Hand works to differentiate himself from the comments made by Gough stems from his belief in their historical inaccuracies. Yet he does not deny that the Irish novel in the current global capitalist market has undergone a creative stagnation due to catering for an international audience.
A misunderstanding lies within his reading on the nature of genre however as he identifies genre fiction as a parasite that has infested the Irish novel. This completely ignores the genre fiction elements that have already pervaded the Irish novel prior to the creation of the global capital market. While Hand views genre fiction as the conforming principle instead it is the creation of national genres that has resulted in stagnation. For this reason Gough’s statement has validity as it address the concept of the Irish novel as a genre in stagnation. Eve Patten’s analysis of the Celtic Tiger era literature adds validity to Gough’s statement as she outlines the conservative nature of Irish literature which “beyond a prevalent social realism, its chief stylistic hallmark was a neo-Gothic idiom”.
Creative stagnation amongst writers can be said to predicate on commercial success of certain styles, not upon genre fiction, as reader expectations are placed upon the Irish novel. By accepting genre fiction as an aspect of Irish writing that is treated equally with social realism and neo-Gothic the potentials for the Irish writer to expand and reframe narratives become all the more apparent. There is already however a new burgeoning field of genre fiction that has come to fruition away from the capitalist system in the form of fan fiction websites.
Aintzane Legarretta Mentxaka’s account of the nature of fan fiction and its symbiotic dynamic to genre fiction has brought symmetry to the reader writer paradigm: she illustrates how the reader responds to the genre fiction by subjecting the text to their subjectivity and producing a response found on fan fiction forums. She depicts the reader response’s as both a creative and revealing process in which author freedom can encourage discussions she defines as taboo: “In an Irish context of institutional silencing through censorship, these writers express suppressed violence and trauma, give status to ‘disposable’ characters, and celebrate female and queer sexualities outside of patriarchal and heteronormative representations”.
The re-configuring of the writer reader paradigm through fanfic is a counter step to Horkheimer and Adorno’s understanding of the technological and capitalist evolution of communication and art. They foresaw that democratic art would give way to autocratic art seeing the telephone’s technological advancement to radio as an example of controlled output by an authoritarian body, i.e. Radio Stations. The creation of fan fiction alters this hypothetical view of capitalist culture tending towards a singularity of homogeneous culture and illustrates how technology in fact offers freedom and diversity in a culture capitalist paradigms. Genre fiction defined by literary abstract concepts such as Science Fiction and Fantasy Fiction rather than nationalist tropes are more flexible to interpretation due to less reliance on social or political boundaries. Through Fan Fiction, abstract genre categorisation can be a very creative process precisely because it places national identity second to literacy identity:
…in the context of national literature, the most telling feature in fanfic produced in Ireland is the fact that these authors’ interests, their commitments, and their pleasures do not lie in Ireland, but elsewhere.
Through Mentxaka’s critique it becomes apparent that in the case of Ireland where, the twenty-first century literary milieu of stagnation has been caused by national genre categorisation, a process of re-categorisation of literature away from national identification is needed. A recognition of past writers who were placed within the national genre yet exhibit other genre markers must be examined and redefined. For there are genre cracks that go deep into the canon.
Man In The Attic 
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