“All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one.”

February 26, 2021 5:57 AM

Storytelling -- Harmon vs. McKee : "I realized the line accurately describes all stories I like, and also everything I attempt in my own fiction experiments, whether or not I succeed. Hitchhiker’s Guide, for example, dissolved the genre of space opera. Iain M. Banks’ Culture series resurrected and reinvented it. Storytellers who do one of the two things tend to do at least a little bit of the other as well, but tend to have a preference. It’s like being left or right-handed."
posted by snerson (20 comments total)

I read this and found parts of it interesting, but I don't understand the core premise. What does it mean to dissolve a genre?
posted by jacquilynne at 7:16 AM on February 26, 2021 [2 favorites]

To dissolve a genre you invalidate enough tropes (often using humor or by pointing out their wrongness or general inapplicability) so that using them looks cheesy, lazy or somehow uncreative. Essentially turning a genre into cliches.
posted by grokus at 7:37 AM on February 26, 2021 [4 favorites]

I thought it was an interesting article but I don't agree with the central premise in any way. Rick and Morty is smart about the kind of stories it tells but it's not 'dissolving' the cartoon sitcom in any way. Hitchhiker's pokes fun at a lot of sci-fi conventions and tropes but that doesn't mean it 'dissolves' a genre.

I think Harmon is fine but his ideas are by no means revolutionary.
posted by graventy at 7:45 AM on February 26, 2021 [2 favorites]

If anything, Hitchhiker's Guide is "space operetta".
posted by notoriety public at 7:47 AM on February 26, 2021 [8 favorites]

The premise that makes up the headline of the post is reductive and grandiose at the same time, and just feels wrong on the face of it. I would agree that Dan Harmon is better at distilling the essence of a certain kind of storytelling than Robert McKee is. The whole how-to-write-a-screenplay genre is kind of bereft of creative spirit even though it advertises itself as fostering it. Dan Harmon would dismiss them all as hacks and he'd be right. I also think that in Harmon's storytelling formulation, genre is irrelevant. His storytelling is fundamentally character-based, no matter what the story's surrounding tropes might be.
posted by wabbittwax at 7:56 AM on February 26, 2021 [2 favorites]

Wow, that sure is a lot of words. I disagree with a lot of it but I will pick on only aspect. The essay talks a lot about comedy - Hitchhikers, Community, etc. I think this is a bad approach that doesn't support the argument - comedy by its nature is a little transgressive - even the tamest comedy is genre busting to a small degree because some much of comedy is producing disconnect between the expected and the final result.

I find it amusing that the author mentions Friends as an example of genre comedy. When Friends first started it was hailed as a example of genre-defying show - a sitcom not centered around a family unit or a work-place, filled with somewhat edgy sex jokes instead of homilies. The fact that Friends is now considered tired and genre-moribund is due to its huge success and legion of imitators. If anything, Community is harking back to even older pre-Friends genres.

I feel that the quality of a piece in inversely proportional to the number of times it uses the word genre. This includes this very comment so I will stop here.

Just one more: genre.
posted by AndrewStephens at 8:23 AM on February 26, 2021 [7 favorites]

I think one can argue that deconstructionist works like Evangelion and Watchmen support this idea. OTOH, what "genre" was Les Miserables constructing/deconstructing? Sure, maybe sometimes "literature" can result from this creation/destruction cycle, but it's hardly a prerequisite.
posted by SPrintF at 8:30 AM on February 26, 2021 [1 favorite]

When Friends first started it was hailed as a example of genre-defying show - a sitcom not centered around a family unit or a work-place, filled with somewhat edgy sex jokes instead of homilies.

Maybe? Seinfeld also fits that bill, and started years before Friends did.
posted by nushustu at 8:51 AM on February 26, 2021 [3 favorites]

Also when I think about genre-busting movies, the first two that always come to mind are McCabe and Mrs. Miller and Unforgiven, both of which destroyed the Western genre, in very different ways.*

I'm not sure that the first fits Harmon's diagram, but Unforgiven fits it so well Harmon could have been watching it when he came up with his system.

*And decades apart, as well. There's probably a whole FPP to be written about how both of those films were transgressive of the same genre in such different ways.
posted by nushustu at 8:54 AM on February 26, 2021

I think that it's possible for a work to either dissolve or invent/reinvent a genre for a particular reader/viewer, i.e. you, but the article tends to be a bit grandiose in not stating that.
posted by Halloween Jack at 9:00 AM on February 26, 2021 [1 favorite]

I certainly could be wrong but the author seems to see genre in a fairly finite unmovable way or perhaps more proscriptive then I think it is actually. I can't speak to literature but in movies I think there is a life cycle to a genre where it at one point it is new, becomes the standard and then is parodied, forgotten and then rediscovered & reinvented (again at least when it seems to work this way when it comes to movies). As an example, the Italian (spaghetti) western - it started out aping the Hollywood westerns of the 50s and earlier and then reinvented that genre to appeal to European and changing tastes in North America. Then as that genre take grew into the standard take on the western influencing the Westerns made in Hollywood. But eventually you start to see parodies emerge or (sometimes) alienating divergences in the genre. Then as audience tastes moved on that version of the genre disappears or goes underground only to emerge a generation or more later in a more mature form bent to the tastes of contemporary audiences. Film Noir, the fantasy film, monster movies, and horror films all somewhat follow that trajectory.
posted by Ashwagandha at 9:53 AM on February 26, 2021 [2 favorites]

I like Scott McCloud's theory better. He posits that the masters of an artform tend to end up being EITHER great experimenters who invent or reinvent forms and genres OR master storytellers who operate within the boundaries of an existing form or genre.
posted by kyrademon at 1:46 PM on February 26, 2021 [3 favorites]

“Great” is doing a lot of work in the original Benjamin*. I’d count some works as great that merely (ha!) perfect a form or genre.

* anyone know where Benjamin wrote it?
posted by clew at 3:51 PM on February 26, 2021

About the McCloud theory - I can think of artists that go both ways over a lifetime, either inventing a form in wild youth and making exquisite and subtler statements in age, or doing decades of decreasingly-hacky hack work and finally sliding out of the conventions entirely.

The lunge to taxonomy in Ribbonfarm makes me think of The Key to All Mythologies.
posted by clew at 3:57 PM on February 26, 2021

* anyone know where Benjamin wrote it?

It's in "The Image of Proust"; in the standard translation, the sentence goes on to say "that they are, in other words, special cases." I think there's a disconnect between what Benjamin means in context and how he's being interpreted here, since part of Benjamin's argument is that À La Recherche du Temps Perdu is unique to the point of being unclassifiable (even though he can see aspects of other genres percolating throughout the novel). By contrast, what the blog's author describes is much more akin to Ashwaganda's point. Genres tend to be pretty capacious things in practice, so you really have to make an extra effort to "dissolve" one.
posted by thomas j wise at 6:51 PM on February 26, 2021 [1 favorite]

Simply speaking as a neophyte to the craft of story telling: I like the sentiment of "choosing your story".

I generally find myself initiating story from statement/verbiage, geological placement, or character dynamic. This kind of criticism frees me to utilize my impulses towards a more rounded end.
posted by coolxcool=rad at 9:41 PM on February 26, 2021

Yeah i felt like this article took a lot of words to be mostly wrong. Its fair to say that both community and rick and morty bend genres (although the former does it more than the latter, partly because rick and mortys world is more flexible) but i think thats because thats what Harmon likes to do rather than it being some sign of a masterwork. I dont think hitchhiker's is interested in overturning a genre at all, its far too much its own thing to particularly care what other books do.

I also think that while Harmons model is elegant, its clearly not the be all and end all, because, well, look at his shows. I love community but there is a lot of difference between the best and worst episodes of that show. I also think that community also highlights the flaws in his writing; his self hatred i think is evident in how he treats his characters sometimes, and i think harmon can be very nihilistic, something that actually works against what i think community is.

I guess my frustrations with the piece is that he spends a lot of words but doesnt really engage with harmon or any of the creators he mentions beyond a surface level
posted by Cannon Fodder at 1:41 AM on February 27, 2021 [1 favorite]

In music, it's often said that, among musicians whose work becomes very influential, there are two essential kinds: consolidators (of prevalent practice/style) and innovators (disruption or deconstruction of practice). Mozart? Consolidator. Stravinsky? Innovator. The Beatles? Consolidators, then innovators. There is no inherent superiority in one or another, it mostly has to do with the timing and/or location of their lives & work, and artists can be both through their careers.

The essay in the post is on to something, but it's not the 'eureka' insight that the author seems to think. While I'm happy they've discovered an idea new to them, this is actually already (very) well-mapped territory.
posted by LooseFilter at 7:11 AM on February 27, 2021 [1 favorite]

I would agree that Dan Harmon is better at distilling the essence of a certain kind of storytelling than Robert McKee is.

To be fair, this is not a high bar. Every other writer I've talked to who has tried to read McKee has had the same reaction I had, which is something along the lines of "wow, this is an extremely poorly written book about how to write well, I wonder if anyone else notices." I don't know the origins of McKee's weird dominance of the writing seminar field, but I suspect it has something to do with his pseudo-intellectualism / academic approach making people feel as though they've found an authority who will make the inherently terrifying task of writing fiction feel safer.

But he's bad. Like really, really useless. Just sucks the life out of everything.

And Harmon has found a system that works for him, but as noted, it's not like there aren't issues with Harmon's work. Julie Klausner, for example, takes down an obvious Harmon analog in Difficult People to pretty devastating effect.
posted by schadenfrau at 7:28 AM on February 27, 2021 [1 favorite]

"All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one.”

I realized the line accurately describes all stories I like, and also everything I attempt in my own fiction experiments, whether or not I succeed.

Because the humble author is, of course, naturally attracted to all that is truly great, and yearns to give the world the gift of his true greatness.

*snort*
posted by Saxon Kane at 3:17 PM on March 8, 2021