Here Be Dragons: The Buried Giant in the Hierarchy of Genres

Using Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant (Ishiguro: 2016) as a case study – considered in the context of his other novel genre experiments – this article argues that the presence of Querig the Dragon doesn’t, by herself, mean the author’s work is received, perceived or conceived as fantasy. Categories are not determined by intrinsic, essential, textual qualities but are the product of unspoken – though influenceable – agreement among authors and publishers, booksellers and buyers; genre is ‘partly formed in ... public discourse’ (Wilkins 2008: 275). Building on conventional genre theory’s understanding of the role of reader reception, this paper uses the discussion surrounding The Buried Giant’s release – described by Gérard Genette’s as the book’s ‘epitext’ (Genette 1997: 1) – to weigh whether Ishiguro’s fears were realised; whether his framing of The Buried Giant made it more or less fantastic. Ultimately, this essay considers whether the speculative elements of Ishiguro’s latest foray challenge its – or his – literary designation, and asks whether The Buried Giant succeeds, as literary fiction or fantasy? My research is informed by Bruce Sterling’s notion of ‘slipstream’ literature (Sterling 1989); a term he coined in 1988 to describe works that are clearly literary but exhibit speculative aspects. He did this in order to argue that ‘the work’ of science fiction – what Ursula K Le Guin has described as the genre’s ‘characteristic gesture’ of estrangement (Le Guin 2016), which provides readers and writers with a place from which to (re)view their world – was being done by literary fictions, such as Ishiguro’s. I argue that ‘unreal’ award-winning books by established literary authors challenge any easy identification of contemporary literary fiction as primarily realist, as China Miéville has controversially claimed (Crown 2011). Realism might rather be seen as a defining characteristic of the newly minted ‘middlebrow’ (Driscoll 2014) – an old term taking on a new f