Notes on an Aesthetics of Junk Fiction (Part 2 of 3)

Reading notes on Thomas J. Roberts’ An Aesthetics of Junk Fiction (Athens, GA; University of Georgia Press), 1990.

Part 1 here.

This post covers chapters 4-8

Chapter 4: A Variety of Readers

Roberts starts by noting that we make certain assumptions about genre readers: that smart readers jettison their critical standards when they read genre fiction, that all readers of a genre read it the same way, etc. But these are too simplistic.

In this chapter, Roberts offers what he calls “the minimal set of distinctions” one needs in order to understand genre readers’ relationships with their books.

His main point in this chapter is:

The people who read paperbacks are not the simple souls their critics make them out to be. They read across genre boundaries. They manifest intricate patterns of reading addiction, reading preferences, reading avoidances, and reading allergies. They are not easy to understand even when they are speaking about a single, favored genre.

A. Exclusivists: A myth about junk fiction reader which skews analysis of them. It is almost always false  that genre readers read only in their favored genre. Roberts notes this assumption is made especially about romance readers, and I think he is right, yet even Radway’s research suggested it is false for a large portion of romance readers.

B. Users: Read regularly in the genre, but also read outside it. In this section, Roberts makes reference to addictive behaviors of the user, and he is spot on. For example:

If our romance reader is like many of the rest of us, she may find herself standing outside the store a few minutes later with a sales slip in one hand and books in the other. She may feel that she is afflicted with an innocent form of kleptomania, as though she unconsciously steals books but then unconsciously pays for them. It is if course one of her reading addictions that is governing her.

C. Fans: Colloquially, “fan” is used to refer to ANY reader of a genre, but Roberts says the term should be restricted to apply only to those readers of a genre who correspond with one another. Roberts opines that very few genre readers are fans, and he cites Radway as evidence (because Radway’s subjects had no interest in talking with others about romance novels).

This is one example where the 1990 publication date shows — I think the internet has both revealed a strong network of fandoms in genre, and has created and enhanced them.

I chuckled to read that the first SFF fanzine, FSFNET: BITNET Fantasy-Science Fiction Magazine, was published at my uni — UMaine — in 1984 (p. 78)

D. Occasional Readers: This group of readers generates “the one book expert”, which romance readers have reason to be particularly wary of, because the one book expert on a genre is rarely complimentary of it. Roberts’ critique of the journalist who “tries one detective novel”, or the academic who “solemnly reads and annotates some six or twenty” novels and make sweeping (usually negative, usually false) pronouncements about the genre is spot on.

E. Allergics: In this section, Roberts relies ot some extent on Radway, who found a group of people in Smithton who were allergic to romances. He cites Walker Gibson’s theory that we are allergic to books that “make us into someone we do not want to be”, approvingly, but says there is more to it.

Roberts denies there is a “typical reader” even of one genre. when someone asks “What can readers be finding in the romance?” (and I was asked this question by a well known “lain fiction” blogger recently), the answer is “Which readers? which romance?”

Chapter 5: Of Fun, Escape and Daydreaming

In this chapter, as in Chapter 4, Roberts rejects of modifies certain assumptions made about genre readers, in this case, that they read for one of the three reasons in the title.

A. Having Fun

The idea that people read genre fiction because it is “fun” is problematic for 2 reasons: (1) because it falsely implies we don’t read other novels for “fun”, and (2) it is false even abotu genre fiction, which is often not “fun” in any usual sense of that term. (i.e. euphoric, funny, etc.)

Roberts wonders whether the happy endings of a lot of genre fiction (the detective story and the romance especially) account for this myth, but he cites Radways readers as ranking a happy ending third out of the reason they read romance.

Plus, this idea ignores the large numbers of unhappy and ambivalent endings in genre fiction.

And it fails to make a key distinction: between a “happy” ending, and a “satisfactory” ending. Many “happy” endings are not satisfactory to the reader, for any number of reasons. In romance, I can think of the chaos that ensued when JR Ward killed a heroine and turned her into a ghost. Technically, it was an HEA for the protagonists, but most readers were very unsatisfied.

Roberts rejects the idea that the ending of a junk novel has much to do with the narrative itself. Rather, he says argues that the ending of a junk novel is ” a conventionalized indication that the writer is abandoning the story”. I found this to be very interesting, personally.

In short, says Roberts, all we mean when we agree with outsiders that we read for “fun” is this”: “we have read them, we are reading them, and we will continue to read them.” (p. 95)

B. Reading As an Escape

This is often a criticism of genre readers, but Roberts replies that, in one sense, all reading is an escape. As C.S. Lewis wrote, Reading “involves a temporary transference of the mind from our actual surroundings to the things merely imagined or conceived.” Second, genre readers are better described not as running away from something but as running toward something.

Roberts notes we often misjudge one another:

If an academic woman reads Chaucer by day and the romance novel by night, the rest of us — the men, especially — may suppose that it is at night that her ultimate, character-defining taste is revealed, that if she turns in her free time to the Harlequin romance, her interest in Chaucer is mercenary or pretentious. (p. 99)

He says readers have a “preference hierarchy” and we need to know a lot about a reader — much more than we know about that woman academic — to understand it.

C. Daydreaming

The idea that we wrap our identities in a heroic central character. Roberts identifies Genreflecting by Betty Rosenberg as a proponent of this idea.

This is the Walter Mitty argument with which romance readers are so familiar is makes our brains bleed. Just this week over at AAR, Lynn is talking about our version of this, the placeholder heroine.

Roberts rejects this because much junk fiction is not all that happy, because it asks us to believe something about junk fiction readers that is patently false: that they are “deeply uncertain of their own identities”, and third because it begs the question.

Now, so far this is a great chapter, right? Then why does Roberts close it with this?

We probably will not go too far wrong if we think of paperbacks as the  … intellectuals’ Las Vegas. …  paperbacks are a haven from consciousness…” (p. 106).

The Las Vegas metaphor is supposed to tell us what is true in the daydreaming/fun/escape descriptions.  That, like in Vegas, we “rub shoulders” with different kinds of people (often unsavory people) than we ordinarily do in real life, that we can relax in our observation of “secular pieties”, a “place where the learned feel they can go to be bad.”

Chapter 6 Textures, Designs

In this chapter Roberts investigates the formal pleasures of junk fiction, something he thinks has been overlooked in favor of content-based pleasures.

A. Verbal textures –  this is the “form-in-the-small”, the sensuous values of art, such as texture, color, tone (here Roberts is quoting John Hospers’ Aesthetics entry in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Macmillan 1972)

Here Roberts seems to take back what he has said earlier about genre readers reading for genre rather than text. He demonstrates, in a host of examples from every genre except romance, broad stylistic variations from genre to genre, and form book to book within each genre. The values of tone and texture are vitally important to genre readers.

B. Design — this is the “form-in-the-large”, the “over-all organization that results from the interrelations of the basic elements of which a work is composed”

“The best writers are those who can honor a traditional design and always, somehow, surprise us.”

But it is a mistake to think a genre has only a small number of designs. In fact, there are hundreds in each genre, and they are often cross bred to create new ones in very good books. Sometimes writers take designs form other genres. He uses the example of Stephen King’s The Shining where King draws on real life designs of public outrage against mistreatment of young children and imports it into a gothic horror novel.

Sometimes genre writers sell themselves short on this score. His example here is Robert Heinlein who said famously that writers of pulp fiction are competing for beer money.  But readers of Heinlein love his stories and his story telling skills. Even when they disagree vehemently with what he says, they like the way he says it. (p. 24)

Roberts bemoans the lack of structural analysis of genre, but he points to Janice Radway as a good, if rare, example of it. He attributes this largely to the mistaken idea that readers of genre fiction are written by people who have no respect for their readers, and read by people who are too naive, ignorant or dim to know or care. (p. 125). Once we realize how sophisticated readers of genre fiction are, we see the need for formal analysis.

In fact, he says, paperback fiction is “form-intensive. It is as form-intensive as the sonnet, the villanelle, the English ode.” It follows that much of the pleasure readers derive form it are formal.

Chapter 7 Thinking with Tired Brains

Roberts lists three ways that genre fiction feed our minds. He takes back the compliment, though when he describes those minds as weary and tired. Ah well.

Here are the three:

1. Advice and information

We don’t read paperbacks for the information but we read them because of it. Some of the information helps us read other books in the genre (like learning about the ton in reading a Regency romance). Some of it is of practical use (a recipe in a Jennie Cruise book). Some of it is neither. Fiction can make us see things that no manual ever could.

2. Models of Deportment

Here there is a long discussion of the types of hero. The basic idea seems to be that there is a kind of hero we want to be, and a kind of hero we can never be but might like to be.

This is the kind of thinking found in such venues as the advice column at Smart Bitches Trashy Books.

3. Problems

Paperbacks directly engage their readers’ intellect in two ways:

a. Internal tensions within the narrative

b. By means of a problematic story  — the book’s interest lies not in solving the problem but in defining it. It is this that is most central to the concerns of my academic gang, the ethical critics, not #1 or #2, although #1 or #2 are always the first things people think of when they hear the phrase “ethical criticism” (the next is “censorship”). I actually think we have to be extremely careful about embracing #2 in particular. I will discuss my views on that in April when I give my talk “Ethical Criticism of Genre Fiction: The Case of Romance” at the Popular Culture Association Annual meeting in April of this year.

As Roberts puts it:

Each story leaves us a little dissatisfied with what we had been before reading it. We are a little less smug in our opinions, a little more aware and so a little more thoughtful. The good stories do that to us: the poor stories do that to us.

Pulp fiction looks simple to people who don’t read it, but regular readers know is makes up “disturbed and thoughtful.” Roberts gets this exactly right. Note how far this view is for the idea that paperbacks are “dupe for dopes”.

Ok, so this was a great chapter, but then why does he end it this way:

Paperbacks as a class are written for minds wearied … The paperback genres are a device the human race has invented to permit it to think even when it is tired, so tired it does not suppose that thinking is any longer possible.

There is some distinction, according to Roberts, in the mental tools we use when we are thinking about a paperback versus a classic.  While I readily admit I read romance novels faster and with seeming greater ease than some literary fiction (Padgett Powell, Thomas Pynchon, Henry James), other literary fiction is a relative breeze (Julian Barnes, J. M. Coetzee, Dickens, Tolstoy, Sartre).

Chapter 8: Reading in a system

Roberts says that what we see in junk fiction depends on whether we are reading with story focus or genre focus. Genre reading is system reading. This chapter looks at some elements of the system (which is always changing).

Here are the three words people inexperienced in a genre use to describe genre books:

A. Simplemindedness — Roberts is so right here, noting that anyone can grab a selection of paperbacks and support this idea. In Romanceland we have so many examples of this. Too many to list. Some writer at Salon or HuffPo or Blogher is looking for a story idea and decides to “check out a couple of romance novels” and then finds what she was seeking and reports on it as it if it were news.

Roberts admits that they are simple. But the simplicity of stories in genre fiction is strategic: “every paperback genre works with complexities by means of simplicities” (p. 153).

He gives extended examples from SFF and Westerns. In sci fi, for example, the story of machine versus man seems very simple. But when you look closely at particular texts, when you understand the texts because you KNOW the genre, you see how subtle and complex are the questions being asked. Romance readers are familiar with the accusation that romances are simplistic. We even joke about it: “”Boy meets girl. Shit happens. They live happily ever after.” But that’s only a small part of the truth, and a very misleading one if it is taken as the whole truth.

I love this passage from Roberts:

The experienced readers of the traditions the books emerge from recognize that the books are hasty harvests from the riches of their genres, that they merely make evident to an unknowing public a small part of the unending and ever-changing debates that are the true lives of those genres” (p. 161)

Picking up the thread on “questioning” from the last chapter, Roberts argues that genre proceeds by means of simplicities which are opposed to counter-simplicities,with an increasing sophistication and redefinition of the question (p. 161). Pondering this would take me way off track, but it is a kind of whig view of genre progression, that is common enough in romance (we mock the bodice rippers of the 1980s) but also has its detractors (those who say we will never again have the meaty detailed accurate historicals of the 1980s, for example).

B. Predictability

Roberts makes the sound point that if each book in a genre were merely a retread, then people clever enough to learn how to read would simply keep reading the same book over and over rather than spending money on new ones. And, he adds, in a nod to our favored genre, “If romance is so simple, why do some writers fail to get their books published? Why do only a few writers sell so hugely?”

Roberts does allow that there are patterns in genre fiction., but quickly adds they are everywhere in all literature:

no one asks why Spenser, Byron, and Keats do not become bored with that underlying pattern repeated again and again. The patterns in vernacular fiction have the same character and purpose as those Spenserian rhythms … and the hundreds of other patterns in canonical literature that make monumental texts predictable too.

Roberts points out that genre readers are puzzled by the predictability charge because their favorite writers are not usually predictable at all. even when we recognize a pattern (the reformed rake, say), it is “rarely pure”. He writes, “We do not listen for that melody. We listen for the variations” (p. 166)

C. Absurdities

Genre readers know there are absurdities. In romance we talk about them ALL the time. The fast recoveries from all kinds of physical and emotional trauma, the HEA itself in many cases, the skills and abilities of the protagonists, not least the sexual ones of those virgins who have presumably never so much as held a man’s hand who are suddenly experts in fellatio, or the 45 year old hero who can make love 3 times in a row.

Roberts says these are genre conventions of a particular kind, “enablers”. he says they seem absurd the first time they appear in a genre, even to genre readers, but over time we get used to them. It’s not that we don’t KNOW they are absurd, it’s that we have traded outrage or embarrassment for another kind of important pleasure: the pleasure we take in

watching a genre’s stock of conventions change over time, a pleasure denied people who do not read with a genre focus. A genre’s enthusiasts watch it devise new character types, new settings, new techniques, new problems. watching this happen, we are watching the genre invent itself. We discover the new, watch it become standard, watch it become a cliché, and then one day notice that it has disappeared. Viewed as a system, a genre is like a ship always heading into strange waters.

That’s it for chapter 4-8. I enjoyed these much more than the first 3. The last 3 chapters coming up soon.