Genre Matters: Response

Each of the papers I selected reminds us that the matter of genre is never an issue of definition or taxonomy, but of dynamic formation. With the novel, this issue of formation, through gestures of inclusion and exclusion, is particularly acute. If the "law of genre" seems to insist that genres are not to be mixed, that law is clearly made to be broken. And the novel is not only a mixed genre but a modernizing mixture. Through inclusion, ironization, and sublation, the novel subjects other genres and world-views to itself, taking them in, examining them, relegating them to the status of the old and outworn or the partial and fragmentary, within its voracious, comprehensive new order. The novel—certainly by the Victorian period—is not so much a loose, baggy monster as a dialectical engine for making these distinctions.

Analysis of generic formation always brings with it the ghost of an intentional effect, the suggestion of purposiveness that confirms our critical alertness to aesthetic form and to historical formation. In the papers I've selected, generic forces come together and pull apart, sometimes delicately, sometimes violently. Thus these papers help us to see questions of genre inflecting other matters. But they also help us to see some of the ways genre matters, especially to the novel.

David Kurnick distinguishes between domesticity and theater to argue against the received historical narrative of the novel's triumph and the theater's defeat. Using Thackeray's failed 1854 play, The Wolves and the Lamb, as his example, Kurnick proposes another model, of mutually internalized interrelation. Performed only once, at the "W. M. T. House Theatricals," the play's failure provides Kurnick with the "M. T. House" of his title. In what sense is the domestic interior "empty"? This is part of the conundrum that Kurnick poses. Providing a wonderful close reading of the stage set, with its "two drawing rooms opening into one another," he discovers the visual representation of an excessive, redundant domesticity folding into itself (260). This setting becomes the brilliantly turned pretext for Kurnick's parable of generic conversion.

The story of The Wolves and the Lamb becomes much more vivid when rewritten as Lovel the Widower (1860), gaining a quirky narrator, Mr. Batchelor, who takes an oblique—and, Kurnick claims, melancholic— relation to the central plot of domestication. Kurnick associates domesticity with the novel, and the theatrical past of the narrator with what's lost, as well as gained, in novelistically narrating the interior. Thus, Kurnick argues, interior monologue and even stream of consciousness are achievements in the history of novelistic narration that make do with what is left over when the exterior of that interiority has been excluded. In this argument, the original theatrical nature of Thackeray's project hones the novelist's ability to represent consciousness in all its vivid mobility, darting and hovering, enveloping the stale, conventional domestic plot within the penumbra of its queer angle of vision. In other words, Batchelor's narration—its mobile interiority, its restless ubiquity—does not signify his accommodation to the domesticity that triumphs at the end of the story, but his alienation from it. The domestic interior is empty, the opposite of a theatrically "full house."

Not the novel, but its theatrical past, seems most modern— seems most to promise stream of consciousness in the novel's future. Perhaps Kurnick over-stresses the story's association of the narrator's liveliness with his theatrical past, and perhaps, too, he over-stresses the association of the novel with domesticity, especially since the theater is also busy representing domesticity at this time. But still, these associations are not only warranted but powerful, for they afford Kurnick his meta-generic thesis, whereby novelistic narration gains in power by virtue of its alienation from theater. In his argument, "theater" means not "theatricality" but an ethical space that allows for certain social relations not expressible within the domestic interior. His account of the "ubiquity that seems to have no place to rest" (264), which he identifies as characteristic of Batchelor's narrative desire, is, in my view, the paper's strongest claim—indeed...