Fish or Fowl (or, Is There a Genre in This Text?)

Abstract

By briefly regarding Andreas’s text with respect to the problem of its genre, this chapter begins to show the centrality of social issues in Andreas’s text. The first section, “Transgressing the Boundaries of Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric,” shows how Andreas’s text flouts grammatical, logical, and rhetorical convention and the notion of categories in general and thus provides clues as to how to read Andreas’s text. Because the text does not follow medieval rhetorical rules of any genre systematically enough to be categorized, naming Andreas’s text becomes more problematic than naming the rose.¹ This is not to suggest that rhetorical “rules,” being generally descriptive rather than prescriptive, were always followed, nor is it to suggest that genre is ever a wholly successful way to categorize literature. Nevertheless, the attempt to classify Andreas’s text is enlightening. The second section, “Genre Trouble, Reading Instructions, and Other Formalities,” explores the text’s multiple identity and shows how Andreas undermines his authority as author and Master, thereby undermining authority generally and showing a “split” in his textual identity. This section also explores the text’s charges to the careful reader and its self-referentiality, another set of clues for reading. The third part, “Deconstructing Gender and Culture: A Reading of the First Five Chapters,” provides a reading of the first five chapters of Andreas’s text, plus the beginning of the sixth, all of which introduce the most important issues in Andreas’s text—the questionable underpinnings of religion and conventional morality, language and interpretation, nature versus art, homo- and heterosexuality, money, gender, class, and authority, all of which are gradually unpacked over the course of the dialogues and Books II and III.

The actors are come hither, my lord … The best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, scene individable, or poem unlimited.

The Fishmonger, Ham. II.ii

Dès qu’on entend le mot “genre,” dès qu’il paraît, dès qu’on tente de le penser, une limite se dessine. Fit quand une limite vient à s’assigner, la nome et l’interdit ne se font pas attendre….

As soon as the word “genre” is sounded, as soon as it is heard, as soon as one attempts to conceive it, a limit is drawn. And when a limit is established, norms and interdictions are not far behind….

Derrida, 177, 203