Lecture
In twentieth-century literary scholarship, repeated attempts have been made to supplement the traditional «triad» (epic, lyric, drama) and to justify the concept of a fourth (or even a fifth, and so on) genus of literature. Alongside the three «former» genera, the novel, satire, and the screenplay have all been proposed. There is much that is debatable in judgments of this kind, but literature does indeed know groups of works that do not fully possess the properties of the epic, the lyric, and drama, or even lack them altogether. They may justly be called extra-generic forms. This applies to some extent to the sketch (ocherk). Here the authors' attention is concentrated on external reality, which gives literary scholars some grounds for placing them among the epic genres. In sketches, however, chains of events and narration proper play no organizing role: description predominates, often accompanied by reflection. Such are «Khor and Kalinych» from Turgenev's «A Sportsman's Sketches», and certain works of G. I. Uspensky and M. M. Prishvin.
The so-called literature of the «stream of consciousness» also does not fit neatly within the bounds of the traditional literary genera, since it is dominated not by the narrative presentation of events but by endless chains of impressions, memories, and inner movements of the speaking subject. Here consciousness, most often appearing disordered and chaotic, as it were appropriates and absorbs the world: reality turns out to be «screened» by the chaos of its contemplation, the world placed within consciousness. Works of Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and Andrei Bely possess properties of this kind.
And finally, the essay, which has now become a highly important and influential sphere of literary creation, decisively does not fit within the traditional triad. At the origins of the essay stand Montaigne's world-famous «Essays». The essayistic form is a free and unforced combination of summary statements about individual facts, descriptions of reality, and — what is especially important — reflections upon it. Thoughts expressed in essayistic form generally do not claim to offer an exhaustive treatment of their subject; they allow for the possibility of quite different judgments as well. The essay gravitates toward syncretism: properly artistic elements here readily combine with the publicistic and the philosophical.
According to M. N. Epstein, the essay rests on a special conception of the human being — as a bearer not of knowledge but of opinions. Its vocation is not to proclaim ready-made truths but to split apart ossified, false wholeness, to defend free thought that moves away from any centralization of meaning: what occurs here is «the co-being of the personality with the word as it comes into being». Let us note, however, that the essay has by no means eliminated the traditional generic forms, and moreover it is capable of embodying an attitude toward the world that stands opposed to relativism. A vivid example of this is the work of M. M. Prishvin.
Thus one can distinguish the properly generic forms — traditional and dominant, without division, in literary creation for many centuries — and the «extra-generic», non-traditional forms that took root in «post-Romantic» art. The former interact quite actively with the latter, each complementing the other. Today the Plato-Aristotle-Hegel triad (epic, lyric, drama) has, it would seem, been considerably shaken and stands in need of revision. At the same time there are no grounds for declaring the customarily distinguished three genera of literature outdated, as is sometimes done, following the lead of the Italian philosopher and theorist of art Benedetto Croce.
Generic affiliation (as well as a greater or lesser participation in «extra-generic» principles) largely determines the organization of a work, its formal and structural features. For this reason the concept of «literary genus» remains an integral and essential part of theoretical poetics.
Comments