What Decides Literary Genre?

This week, I heard someone reading a poem that sounded to me exactly like prose.  Now, I’ve always been bad at understanding or passing any meaningful comment on poetry (it’s my blind spot) but the more I listened the more I realised I was responding to the poem exactly as if it were a short story.  What surprised me then was that other people began commenting on the piece afterwards, saying things that they would never ever have said about a short story.  Not surprisingly, their reaction to the piece was completely different to mine.

That got me thinking.  First I thought: what distinguishes a poem from a short story, or – more generally – what distinguishes poetry from prose?  Now, I reckon that if you took a hundred poems and a hundred prose stories, you’d be able to find big differences on the average.  On the poetry side: more rhymes, more alliterative use of sounds,  more rhythm, more imagery per line, more use of the rule-of-three, less definitive meaning, more artistic use of layout, less words per square inch of paper.  On the prose side: more prescriptive characterisation, less introspection, more dialogue, more discernible plots etc.  However, I don’t think I’d find one universal criterion or combination of criteria by which I could identify poetry from prose.   Among those slippery bits of writing, I’d always be able to find multiple exceptions to any rules I tried to lay down.

In fact, all those parameters I listed above are just loosely correlated to the poetry/prose divide.  As scientists say, ‘They just ain’t causal.’  For example, the average man is taller than the average woman, so there’s a correlation between gender and tallness, but I can’t tell what sex you are from your height.  Equally, I can’t tell that a piece of writing is a poem because it has a lot of rhymes, images or use of the rule-of-three.

So why do we bother to have the distinctions in the first place?

That brought me to my second thought for the week  (it’s a big week when I have more than one). OK, it’s this:  the label that someone puts on their writing is part of the package of cues that tells the reader what part of their cultural library of preconceptions to bring to the work.

What do I mean?  Everyone pre-loads a set of learned assumptions and conventions when they begin to read a new work.  If I tell you that you’re reading a ‘who dunnit’, you approach it looking for clues to the killer on page one, even before the murder has been revealed.  If I tell you it’s a poem, then you start looking for the rhymes, rhythms and imagery.  The scary conclusion is that I can change how you read my work by changing the genre description and, thus, changing the preconceptions you load up in your head before reading.

Now, maybe I’m just slow on the uptake, but this obvious truth has escaped me up to now, and I’m relooking at some arguments I’ve heard about the great novels of the Twentieth Century.  Many of them load you up with one set of preconceptions and then give you something else.  It’s a trick of estrangement.  Of course, they don’t do it by claiming to be poetry and then giving you ‘War and Peace’.  Their mislabelling isn’t that crude.  But they do systematically try to convince you that you’re reading one kind of genre and slip their real themes in under the radar.  In so doing, you’re forced to deal with their arguments with fresh eyes (and without your usual preconceptions).  This, I see now, is particularly true of books which were socially challenging at the time of their publication.

For example, although ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’ suffered some problems with censorship in the Deep South, I’ve heard it convincingly argued that the book would have been banned outright if it hadn’t been told in the voice of a young child and with such  majestic language that readers saw it as a ‘work of high literature’.

Think about the trick that Nabokov is playing on the reader throughout ‘Lolita’.  He even included a fictional forward to the book under the name ‘John Ray Jr PhD’ to manipulate the reader’s preconceptions further.   Is it ‘manipulation’ or is it part of the artistic vision?

Anyway, in conclusion, I’ve realised I was wrong about the poem that sounded to me like prose.  I was wrong because the writer wrote it to be judged as poetry (even went to the trouble of labelling it as such) and I refused to bring my poetry prejudices to its interpretation.  This is a crime as bad as putting a CD in an old-fashioned record player and saying you don’t like the music that comes out as the needle slides across the surface; or – perhaps more pertinently – of reading a book in French and complaining it doesn’t make much sense if you use an English dictionary to look up the meaning of the words.

Genre labelling matters because it’s part of the context against which work must be judged.  I shall be more respectful in future.