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CHAPTER CONTENTS

10 Literary Genres

CHAPTER CONTENTS
Plot Conventions and Expectations 299
Reading: Happy Endings
Margaret Atwood 299

Comparing Genres 302

Reading: from The Way to Rainy Mountain
N. Scott Momaday 303

Stick Shack. Courtesy of Bonita Waesche, www.bonita-photography.com.

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CHAPTER 10 LITERARY GENRES
10 LITERARY GENRES
A typical family with typical tastes goes to the local
multiplex. The kids go to the animated feature
about singing rats. The teenage girl goes to see a
teen romance; the teenage boy goes to a horror
movie. The parents are tempted to go together to
see a foreign movie they read about in the paper
but decide it might be too depressing. So Dad goes
instead to the action adventure with Bruce Willis
and Mom goes to the romantic comedy with Hugh
Grant. What do you notice about these choices?
Each one represents a type of film, or genre, and
each genre raises a certain set of expectations. For
example, you expect a teen romance to be about
struggling young lovers who in the end live happily
ever after; you expect a horror movie to be full of
shocks and gore. To take it a step further, a true
teen romance aficionado would also maintain that
there is a world of difference between a Miley
Cyrus, a Hilary Duff, and a Vanessa Hudgens
movie. And, the true lover of action and adventure
films would understand the difference between
Bruce Willis, the Rock, and Vin Diesel. When you
know a genre inside out, you know the general
conventions and all the variations within those
conventions; you know the ones that play by all the
rules, the ones that twist them a bit, and the ones
that break the conventions completely.
These same rules hold true for just about every
aspect of American culture: movies, music, video
games, television shows, sports, comics, mysteries,
science fictionand, of course, literature. We expect
genres to follow certain conventions. Conventions
take many forms, depending on the genre and the
medium (print, music, TV, film). The most com-
mon conventions are related to plot, character, and
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iconography. Plot refers to what types of events hap-
pen, the order in which they happen, and how they
end up. When you go to a comedy, you expect
humorous situations and a happy ending. In this
same comedy, when a series of terrible events
begins to happen to the protagonist, you do not
worry, because somehow you know it will work out
all right in the end. Conversely, if you were watch-
ing a movie that you knew was a tragedyTitanic,
sayyou would expect that when things start to go
wrong they will just get worse.
Most comedies are built around comic types, or
characters that maintain similar qualities and
traits from movie to movie. Comic actorsthink
of Jim Carrey, Mike Myers, Chris Rock, Adam San-
dler, or Cameron Diazalways play basically the
same character. Such characters possess particular
costume pieces, ways of speaking, and physical ges-
tures that are part of their identity. We refer to this
feature of genres by the art-historical term iconog-
raphy, which originally described the way in which
visual features recur in particular genres of paint-
ing. You are probably familiar with the iconogra-
phy of the traditional western, for example, where
the good guys wear white, the bad guys wear black,
and both of them ride horses and carry six-
shooters in the middle of a one-street town.
We begin this chapter with a brief look at how
genres both create and confound our expectations
as readers. Then, we take a close look at the con-
ventions and expectations of the forms of literature
that include the four literary genres that you will
encounter in this book: poetry, fiction, plays, and
nonfiction. We conclude with a discussion of the
conventions of visual media.
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Plot conventions and expectations
One of the arguments of Happy Endings, the story
by Margaret Atwood that you are about to read, is
that genre conventions and expectations heavily
influence the ways we respond to the narratives we
read. Happy Endings teases us about our fondness
for unrealistic plots and our desire for happy end-
ings to structure the events of our life stories. The
story also suggests that writers find themselves con-
strained by the expectations of the genres in which
they are writing. No matter how much they want to
be original, if new writers simply reject existing gen-
res and conventions they will have little or no audi-
ence. Moreover, they will have a hard time telling a
story: it is still possible to find a new twist to the old
genres, but very difficult indeed after several millen-
nia of storytelling to come up with something so
different that it would constitute a wholly new
genre. Born in Ontario, Canada, in 1939, Atwood
Reading
Happy Endings
Margaret Atwood
John and Mary meet.
What happens next?
If you want a happy ending, try A.
A B
John and Mary fall in love and get married. They
both have worthwhile and remunerative jobs which
they find stimulating and challenging. They buy a
charming house. Real estate values go up.
Eventually, when they can afford live-in help, they
have two children, to whom they are devoted. The
children turn out well. John and Mary have a
stimulating and challenging sex life and worthwhile
friends. They go on fun vacations together. They
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PLOT CONVENTIONS AND EXPECTATIONS
With a genre like film noir, everyone has these
assumptions and expectations. And once all of
those things are in place, thats when you can really
start to twist it about and mess around with it.
WRITER AND DIRECTOR
LARRY WACHOWSKI ON MAKING
THE MOTION PICTURE, BOUND
has taught widely in Canada and the United States,
and has been a leading figure in Canadian literature,
as well as committed feminist and social activist, for
decades. Her poetry, novels, and short stories have
won numerous awards; among her best-known nov-
els are The Handmaids Tale (1985) and The Blind
Assassin (2000). Happy Endings was first pub-
lished in Canada in the short story collection, Mur-
der in the Dark.
retire. They both have hobbies which they find
stimulating and challenging. Eventually they die.
This is the end of the story.
Mary falls in love with John but John doesnt fall in
love with Mary. He merely uses her body for selfish
pleasure and ego gratification of a tepid kind. He
comes to her apartment twice a week and she cooks
him dinner, youll notice that he doesnt even
consider her worth the price of a dinner out, and
after hes eaten dinner he fucks her and after that he
falls asleep, while she does the dishes so he wont
think shes untidy, having all those dirty dishes lying
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CHAPTER 10 LITERARY GENRES
around, and puts on fresh lipstick so shell look
good when he wakes up, but when he wakes up he
doesnt even notice, he puts on his socks and his
shorts and his pants and his shirt and his tie and his
shoes, the reverse order from the one in which he
took them off. He doesnt take off Marys clothes,
she takes them off herself, she acts as if shes dying
for it every time, not because she likes sex exactly,
she doesnt, but she wants John to think she does
because if they do it often enough surely hell get
used to her, hell come to depend on her and they
will get married, but John goes out the door with
hardly so much as a good-night and three days later
he turns up at six oclock and they do the whole
thing over again.
Mary gets run-down. Crying is bad for your
face, everyone knows that and so does Mary but she
cant stop. People at work notice. Her friends tell
her John is a rat, a pig, a dog, he isnt good enough
for her, but she cant believe it. Inside John, she
thinks, is another John, who is much nicer. This
other John will emerge like a butterfly from a
cocoon, a Jack from a box, a pit from a prune, if the
first John is only squeezed enough.
One evening John complains about the food.
He has never complained about her food before.
Mary is hurt.
5 Her friends tell her theyve seen him in a
restaurant with another woman, whose name is
Madge. Its not even Madge that finally gets to
Mary: its the restaurant. John has never taken Mary
to a restaurant. Mary collects all the sleeping pills
and aspirins she can find, and takes them and a half
a bottle of sherry. You can see what kind of a
woman she is by the fact that its not even whiskey.
She leaves a note for John. She hopes hell discover
her and get her to the hospital in time and repent
and then they can get married, but this fails to
happen and she dies.
John marries Madge and everything continues
as in A.
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C
John, who is an older man, falls in love with Mary,
and Mary, who is only twenty-two, feels sorry for
him because hes worried about his hair falling out.
She sleeps with him even though shes not in love
with him. She met him at work. Shes in love with
someone called James, who is twenty-two also and
not yet ready to settle down.
John on the contrary settled down long ago: this
is what is bothering him. John has a steady,
respectable job and is getting ahead in his field, but
Mary isnt impressed by him, shes impressed by
James, who has a motorcycle and a fabulous record
collection. But James is often away on his motorcycle,
being free. Freedom isnt the same for girls, so in the
meantime Mary spends Thursday evenings with
John. Thursdays are the only days John can get away.
John is married to a woman called Madge and
they have two children, a charming house which they
bought just before the real estate values went up, and
hobbies which they find stimulating and challenging,
when they have the time. John tells Mary how
important she is to him, but of course he cant leave
his wife because a commitment is a commitment. He
goes on about this more than is necessary and Mary
finds it boring, but older men can keep it up longer
so on the whole she has a fairly good time.
10 One day James breezes in on his motorcycle
with some top-grade California hybrid and James
and Mary get higher than youd believe possible and
they climb into bed. Everything becomes very
underwater, but along comes John, who has a key to
Marys apartment. He finds them stoned and
entwined. Hes hardly in any position to be jealous,
considering Madge, but nevertheless hes overcome
with despair. Finally hes middle-aged, in two years
hell be as bald as an egg and he cant stand it. He
purchases a handgun, saying he needs it for target
practicethis is the thin part of the plot, but it can
be dealt with laterand shoots the two of them
and himself.
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Madge, after a suitable period of mourning,
marries an understanding man called Fred and
everything continues as in A, but under different
names.
D 15
Fred and Madge have no problems. They get along
exceptionally well and are good at working out any
little difficulties that may arise. But their charming
house is by the seashore and one day a giant tidal
wave approaches. Real estate values go down. The
rest of the story is about what caused the tidal wave
and how they escape from it. They do, though
thousands drown, but Fred and Madge are virtuous
and grateful, and continue as in A.
E So much for endings. Beginnings are always
Yes, but Fred has a bad heart. The rest of the story is
about how kind and understanding they both are
until Fred dies. Then Madge devotes herself to
charity work until the end of A. If you like, it can be
Madge, cancer, guilty and confused, and bird which anyway are just one thing after another, a
watching.
F [1983]
If you think this is all too bourgeois, make John a
revolutionary and Mary a counterespionage agent
QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION AND DISCUSSION
1. How would you summarize this story? 4.
2. Each of the six possible plots presented in the
story as letters AF adapts the conventions of a
different genre. Briefly outline the conventions 5.
of each plot, and ways in which Atwood thwarts
our expectation in each example.
3. Why is there no other possible authentic end-
ing than John and Mary die? Why is this a
happy ending only in version A?
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READING
and see how far that gets you. Remember, this is
Canada. Youll still end up with A, though in
between you may get a lustful brawling saga of
passionate involvement, a chronicle of our times,
sort of.
Youll have to face it, the endings are the same
however you slice it. Dont be deluded by any other
endings, theyre all fake, either deliberately fake,
with malicious intent to deceive, or just motivated
by excessive optimism if not by downright
sentimentality.
The only authentic ending is the one provided
here:
John and Mary die. John and Mary die. John and
Mary die.
more fun. True connoisseurs, however, are known
to favor the stretch in between, since its the hardest
to do anything with.
Thats about all that can be said for plots,
what and a what and a what.
Now try How and Why.
Atwoods conclusion suggests that the ending is
the most conventional aspect of a story. Do you
agree? Why or why not?
Does Atwoods story tell only a what and a
what and a what or does it also suggest a How
and Why about the subject she is discussing?
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CHAPTER 10 LITERARY GENRES
WRITING EXERCISE: A GENERIC DESCRIPTION
The adjective generic refers to something with all
the qualities of a particular object (drugs or food,
for example) but without a more specific brand
name. For the present exercise, describe a generic
version of one of your favorite genres (of movies,
music, books, etc.) to someone possessing no prior
familiarity with it.
1. What are the essential conventions of the genre,
the ones that allow you to recognize it as such?
Comparing genres
Margaret Atwoods story Happy Endings suggests father and a mother of English and Cherokee
that telling a story the conventional way makes it
impossible to get at the How and Why of experi-
ence. In The Way to Rainy Mountain, a book on the
oral tradition of the Kiowa Indians, N. Scott
Momaday suggests that conventional ways of nar-
rating history are unable to capture the unique cul-
ture of his fathers ancestors. Instead, he structured
his book in brief chapters, each composed of three
distinct parts. Each part employs different generic
conventions in order to approach a different aspect
of the story Momaday wants to tell. Son of a Kiowa
The Judas Strain: National Treasure meets Die
Hard meets James Bond meets 28 Days Later.
AN ANONYMOUS REVIEWER IN TVTROPES.ORG
DESCRIBING A RECENT THRILLER BY JAMES ROLLINS
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These features may include story elements,
themes, settings, characters, styles, vocabulary
or ways of talking, and particular stars.
2. What are the expectations that you bring with
you when you view a new example of your
favorite genre?
3. What are your favorite examples of the genre?
Do they meet all of the conventions and fulfill
all of the expectations, or do they diverge in
particular ways?
descent, Momaday was born in Lawton, Oklahoma,
in 1934, and raised in Arizona. He graduated from
the University of New Mexico, and received a PhD
in English literature from Stanford University in
1963. Momaday has taught American Indian stud-
ies at many universities, and published several
works of criticism, as well as several volumes of
poetry, a play, and a memoir, among other genres.
The Way to Rainy Mountain is a reworking of his
first novel, House Made of Dawn (1968), which was
awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
As you read the following excerpt from The Way
to Rainy Mountain, consider the different expecta-
tions raised by each of the three genres it uses: a
mythical narrative, an anthropological commentary,
and an autobiographical memoir. Consider also the
way in which they work together to produce a whole
that is greater than the sum of its parts.
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Reading
From The Way to Rainy Mountain
N. Scott Momaday
Chapter 4
They lived at first in the mountains. They did not yet
know of Tai-me, but this is what they knew: There
was a man and his wife. They had a beautiful child, a
little girl whom they would not allow to go out of
their sight. But one day a friend of the family came
and asked if she might take the child outside to play.
The mother guessed that would be all right, but she
told the friend to leave the child in its cradle and to
place the cradle in a tree. While the child was in the
tree, a redbird came among the branches. It was not
like any bird that you have seen; it was very beautiful,
and it did not fly away. It kept still upon a limb, close
to the child. After a while the child got out of its
cradle and began to climb after the redbird. And at
the same time the tree began to grow taller, and the
child was borne up into the sky. She was then a
woman, and she found herself in a strange place.
Instead of a redbird, there was a young man standing
before her. The man spoke to her and said: I have
been watching you for a long time, and I knew that I
would find a way to bring you here. I have brought
you here to be my wife. The woman looked all
around: she saw that he was the only living man
there. She saw that he was the sun.
There the land itself ascends into the sky. These
mountains lie at the top of the continent, and they
cast a long rain shadow on the sea of grasses to the
east. They arise out of the last North American
wilderness, and they have wilderness names: Wasatch,
Bitterroot, Bighorn, Wind River.
I have walked in a mountain meadow bright with Indian
paintbrush, lupine, and wild buckwheat, and I have seen
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READING
high in the branches of a lodgepole pine the male pine
grosbeak, round and rose-colored, its dark, striped wings
nearly invisible in the soft, mottled light. And the
uppermost branches of the tree seemed very slowly to
ride across the blue sky.
Chapter 5
After that the woman grew lonely. She thought
about her people, and she wondered how they were
getting on. One day she had a quarrel with the sun,
and the sun went away. In her anger she dug up the
root of a bush which the sun had warned her never
to go near. A piece of earth fell from the root, and
she could see her people far below. By that time she
had given birth; she had a childa boy by the sun.
She made a rope out of sinew and took her child
upon her back; she climbed down upon the rope,
but when she came to the end, her people were still
a long way off, and there she waited with her child
on her back. It was evening; the sun came home
and found his woman gone. At once he thought of
the bush and went to the place where it had grown.
There he saw the woman and the child, hanging by
the rope half way down to the earth. He was very
angry, and he took up a ring, a gaming wheel, in his
hand. He told the ring to follow the rope and strike
the woman dead. Then he threw the ring and it did
what he told it to do; it struck the woman and
killed her, and then the suns child was all alone.
The plant is said to have been the pomme blanche, or
pomme de prairie, of the voyageurs, whose chronicles
refer time and again to its use by the Indians. It grows
on the high plains and has a farinaceous root that is
turnip-like in taste and in shape. This root is a
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CHAPTER 10 LITERARY GENRES

healthful food, and attempts have been made to
cultivate the plant as a substitute for the potato.
The anthropologist Mooney wrote in 1896:
Unlike the neighboring Cheyenne and Arapaho, who
yet remember that they once lived east of the Missouri
and cultivated corn, the Kiowa have no tradition of
ever having been an agricultural people or anything
but a tribe of hunters.
Even now they are meateaters; I think it is not in them to
be farmers. My grandfather, Mammedaty, worked hard to
make wheat and cotton grow on his land, but it came to
very little in the end. Once when I was a small boy I
went across the creek to the house where the old
woman Keahdinekeah lived. Some men and boys came
in from the pasture, where a calf had just been killed
and butchered. One of the boys held the calfs liverstill
warm and wet with lifein his hand, eating of it with
great relish. I have heard that the old hunters of the
Plains prized the raw liver and tongue of the buffalo
above all other delicacies.
Time and again the grandmother tried to capture
the boy, but he always ran away. Then one day she
made a snare out of rope. The boy was caught up in
the snare, and he cried and cried, but the
grandmother sang to him and at last he fell asleep.
Go to sleep and do not cry.
Your mother is dead, and still you feed
upon her breasts.
Oo-oo-la-la-la-la, oo-oo.
In the autumn of 1874, the Kiowas were driven
southward towards the Staked Plains. Columns of
troops were converging upon them from all sides, and
they were bone-weary and afraid. They camped on
Elk Creek, and the next day it began to rain.
It rained hard all that day, and the Kiowas waited on
horseback for the weather to clear. Then, as evening
came on, the earth was suddenly crawling with
spiders, great black tarantulas, swarming on the flood.

Chapter 6
The suns child was big enough to walk around on
the earth, and he saw a camp nearby. He made his
way to it and saw that a great spiderthat which is
called a grandmotherlived there. The spider
spoke to the suns child, and the child was afraid.
The grandmother was full of resentment; she was
jealous, you see, for the child had not yet been
weaned from its mothers breasts. She wondered
whether the child were a boy or a girl, and therefore
she made two things, a pretty ball and a bow and
arrows. These things she left alone with the child all There are things in nature that engender an awful
the next day. When she returned, she saw that the quiet in the heart of man; Devils Tower is one of
ball was full of arrows, and she knew then that the them.N. Scott Momaday, The Way to Rainy
child was a boy and that he would be hard to raise. Mountain.

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I know of spiders. There are dirt roads in the Plains. You
see them, and you wonder where and how far they go.
They seem very old and untraveled, as if they all led
away to deserted houses. But creatures cross these
roads: dung beetles and grasshoppers, sidewinders and
tortoises. Now and then there comes a tarantula, at
evening, always larger than you imagine, dull and dark
brown, covered with long, dusty hairs. There is something
crochety about them; they stop and go and angle away.
Chapter 7
The years went by, and the boy still had the ring
which killed his mother. The grandmother spider
told him never to throw the ring into the sky, but
one day he threw it up, and it fell squarely on top of
his head and cut him in two. He looked around,
and there was another boy, just like himself, his
twin. The two of them laughed and laughed, and
then they went to the grandmother spider. She
nearly cried aloud when she saw them, for it had
been hard enough to raise the one. Even so, she
cared for them well and made them fine clothes to
wear.
Mammedaty owned horses. And he could remember
that it was essentially good to own horses, that it was
hard to be without horses. There was a day:
Mammedaty got down from a horse for the last time.
Of all the tribes of the Plains, the Kiowas owned the
greatest number of horses per person.
On summer afternoons I went swimming in the Washita
River. The current was slow, and the warm, brown water
seemed to be standing still. It was a secret place. There
in the deep shade, inclosed in the dense, overhanging
growth of the banks, my mind fixed on the wings of a
dragonfly or the flitting motion of a water strider, the
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READING
great open land beyond was all but impossible to
imagine. But it was there, a stones throw away. Once,
from the limb of a tree, I saw myself in the brown water;
then a frog leaped from the bank, breaking the Image
apart.
Chapter 8
Now each of the twins had a ring, and the
grandmother spider told them never to throw the
rings into the sky. But one day they threw them up
into the high wind. The rings rolled over a hill, and
the twins ran after them. They ran beyond the top
of the hill and fell down into the mouth of a cave.
There lived a giant and his wife. The giant had
killed a lot of people in the past by building fires
and filling the cave with smoke, so that the people
could not breathe. Then the twins remembered
something that the grandmother spider had told
them: If ever you get caught in the cave, say to
yourselves the word thain-mom, above my eyes.
When the giant began to set fires around, the twins
repeated the word thain-mom over and over to
themselves, and the smoke remained above their
eyes. When the giant had made three great clouds
of smoke, his wife saw that the twins sat without
coughing or crying, and she became frightened.
Let them go, she said, or something bad will
happen to us. The twins took up their rings and
returned to the grandmother spider. She was glad to
see them.
A word has power in and of itself. It comes from
nothing into sound and meaning; it gives origin to all
things. By means of words can a man deal with the
world on equal terms. And the word is sacred. A
mans name is his own; he can keep it or give it away
as he likes. Until recent times, the Kiowas would not
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CHAPTER 10 LITERARY GENRES
speak the name of a dead man. To do so would have
been disrespectful and dishonest. The dead take their
names with them out of the world.
When Aho saw or heard or thought of something bad,
she said the word zei-dl-bei, frightful. It was the one
word with which she confronted evil and the
incomprehensible. I liked her to say it, for she screwed up
her face in a wonderful look of displeasure and clicked
her tongue. It was not an exclamation so much, I think,
as it was a warding off, an exertion of language upon
ignorance and disorder.
Chapter 9
The next thing that happened to the twins was this:
They killed a great snake which they found in their
tipi. When they told the grandmother spider what
they had done, she cried and cried. They had killed
their grandfather, she said. And after that the
grandmother spider died. The twins wrapped her in
a hide and covered her with leaves by the water. The
twins lived on for a long time, and they were greatly
honored among the Kiowas.
In another and perhaps older version of the story, it is
a porcupine and not a redbird that is the
representation of the sun. In that version, too, one of
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the twins is said to have walked into the waters of a
lake and disappeared forever, while the other at last
transformed himself into ten portions of medicine,
thereby giving of his own body in eucharistic form to
the Kiowas. The ten bundles of the talyi-da-i, boy
medicine are, like the Tai-me, chief objects of
religious veneration.
When he was a boy, my father went with his
grandmother, Keahdinekeah, to the shrine of one of the
talyi-da-i. The old woman made an offering of bright
cloth, and she prayed. The shrine was a small, specially-
made tipi; inside, suspended from the lashing of the
poles, was the medicine itself. My father knew that it
was very powerful, and the very sight of it filled him with
wonder and regard. The holiness of such a thing can be
imparted to the human-spirit, I believe, for I remember
that it shone in the sightless eyes of Keahdinekeah. Once
I was taken to see her at the old house on the other side
of Rainy Mountain Creek. The room was dark, and her
old age filled it like a substance. She was white-haired
and blind, and, in that strange reversion that comes
upon the very old, her skin was as soft as the skin of a
baby. I remember the sound of her glad weeping and the
water-like touch of her hand.
[1969]
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QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION AND DISCUSSION
1. How do the three parts of each chapter differ?
What are some of the generic conventions you
can identify for each part? What are some of
the similarities and differences between the
conventions of the legend of the twins and
other myths with which you may be more
familiar?
2. Read through the excerpt again, but this time
read first the six parts of the legend of the
twins, then the six anthropological parts, and
finally the six autobiographical pieces. Now
reflect: what would the effect of the book be if
it were composed only of the legend, or only
WRITING EXERCISE: A LIFE IN THREE GENRES
1. Choose an event or series of events in your life
or the life of someone you know well, and
describe the event(s) according to the conven-
tions of three different genres. For example,
what would they look like remade as an action-
adventure movie or as a pop song, video game,
diary entry, soap opera, comedy, summary, or
essay?
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READING
of the anthropological part, or only of the
autobiography?
3. The legend of the twins is a good example of
Margaret Atwoods description of plot as a
what and a what and a what. Do the other
parts of the excerpt provide the How and
Why? If so, what is the how and why of this
myth? If not, what else do the other two parts
add to the original myth?
4. Animals and the natural world play an important
role in all three parts of The Way to Rainy Moun-
tain. How is nature depicted in each part? What
are the similarities and what are the differences?
2. Sit back and reflect on your three versions.
Were you able to include everything in each
version, or did conventions require you to omit
something in one version? Which version does
a better job at describing what happened, and
which version does a better job of explaining
the how and why? Which version would you
prefer to live through again?
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