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Notes on An Aesthetics of Junk Fiction (part 3 of 3)

Mar 12

Posted by Jessica in Academia, Genre musings | 8 Comments

A book discussion of John Roberts’ An Aesthetics of Junk Fiction (Athens, GA; University of Georgia Press), 1990. Click here for part 1 and here for part 2.

This post covers the last chapters, 9-11. With my commentary in [brackets].

Chapter 9 Literary and Paperback Bookscapes

The distinctions within  “learned” and the “unlearned” bookscape differ:
1. they recognize formally different texts (junk fiction is a “literature without texts”)
2. they have differing conceptions of the author
3. their genres differ in visibility (a “literature without genres”)

In short, while both have texts and genres, the fascination with the literary landscape is primarily about texts, and fascination with paperbacks is primarily about genre (system).

The Literary Bookscape: the Variorum Text

The variorum text is the text with commentary
The commentary developed because learned readers want to know what other learned readers see in a text
“Literature” is a collective term for individual works

The unlearned bookscape shows no interest in commentary “more sophisticated than reviewers’ brief recommendations and warnings” (hey, at least he didn’t say “grunts and howls!)

Literary commentary is “anything that learned readers find interesting” (p. 193) [are you dizzy yet from the circular argument here? Junk fiction is what doesn't have commentary -- the grunts and howls, oops, I mean "recommendations and warnings" of junk fiction readers do not count. So what is commentary? it is "anything that learned readers, i.e. readers of literature, find worthy of saying.]

The gateway to the paperback bookscape is the supermarket, the gateway to the literary bookscape is the classroom.

When a body of literature begins to form around a junk fiction text, it is now being accepted as “canonical” (i.e. has left the realm of junk fiction)

The varorium text , which does not exist in the paperback world, is why literature readers often find junk fiction “thin”. Paperback readers think it is a kind of “reading decadence” to turn away form a text to read other texts about that text.

The Paperback Bookscape: Writers Versus Authors

An author is “uniquely creative” not merely “creative”. An author has a unique style of his or her own.

A writer “makes stories for people — good stories, of course, even excellent stories, stories with truth in them sometimes, and beauty, but not the kinds of texts being made my those who would be authors.”

[Ok, so what is this textual difference? Exactly?]

Readers are in awe of authors, but not of writers.

Paperback writers, whose name is a “label” and not an authorial identity, get to play 4 games:
1. The disguised writer — they use several open names (literary writers at most use one). They can write in very different voices for each pen name, and readers may only enjoy the author under one “label” (for example, Nora Roberts versus JD Robb)
2. The writing team — literary writers just do not do the Cruise/Meyer thing
3. The ghost writer — a paperback writer can die and ghost writers can continue with a series, without upsetting readers. [hmm. Can you think of any case of a romance writer doing this? The closest I can think of is when you have a husband/wife writing team, and the spouse dies and the other spouse carries on the writing under the same pen name.]
4. The jam session – literary writers do not partake of these, but junk fiction writers will do all kind of riffs, for example, all contributing tot a story on one theme,

“[genre fiction] readers do savor the work of individual writers … but none would mistake the critical discourse of the paperback bookscape with that of any of the learned bookscapes (p. 199).”

The Genres in the Two Bookscapes

Here Roberts criticizes the way literary folks use the (mis)use the word “genre”. For Roberts, it is not a class, but a tradition, “a system of changing rules” (p. 200)

Time is everything to the distinction between literature and genre fiction. Literature is always a varorium text because it takes at least 50 years until a text is canonical. Literature readers cannot experience a text the way genre readers do, dynamically, in the present.

A few random points Roberts makes here:
–paperback reading is effortless because it is of our times (as described in an earlier chapter)
–genre sticks out to junk readers because readers read more of them, and can see the system more clearly (connect to the relative ease of reading genre fiction)
–the significance of the “human sources” of the stories is much weaker in genre fiction – whose writers think of themselves as “artist-craftsman” as “professionals”, rather than as “artists-prophets” [I found this last point very interesting. I've posted before on the question of whether writing counts as a profession.

[Clearly genre fiction writers want to be considered professional. Do literary writers feel the same way, or does the word "professional" connote a set of standards that cramp the style of the "uniquely creative" author?]

Just as literary fiction cannot be read dynamically, so it it cannot be read in terms of genre, because the genres have often floated away by the time a text is canonical.

“the paperback bookscape rarely offers its readers the monumental text, and when it does they may be annoyed that the text is asking them to give it careful consideration.” (p. 203)

[Again, no definition of "monumental" is forthcoming from Roberts, who asks this word to do too much work to leave it undefined. He does give examples of texts that were "monumental to begin with", such as The Iliad, Goethe's Faust, and George Eliot's Middlemacrh).

Chapter 10: Reading Thickly

Literary readers "study", while junk fiction readers "read thickly".

Roberts begins by quoting Janice Radway (about whose book Laura Vivanco at Teach Me Tonight has recently given us a thoughtful refresher), and this is very interesting in light of my recent thinking about fantasy in romance reading, and what a large role it plays for many women readers. Radway argued that romance readers don;t care about anything but story, and that they speak as though story were "a transparent window opening out onto an already existing world" (Radway, p. 189, as quoted by Roberts, p. 205)

But Roberts says readers like those Radway interviewed are downplaying the complexity of their reading.

Roberts surmises that it is the private nature of genre reading that has hindered the consciousness on the part of such readers of how much attention they actually do pay to things besides "story", such as language and implications. He suggests that more public reading and more commentary on paperbacks would generate heightened awareness.

Stories

Here Roberts takes the gloves off and says what he has been hinting at the whole book:

"The novel recognized as canonical literature also tells a story, of course, and almost always the story it offers is superior. Some apologists for the paperbacks become angry when critics say this, but it is true." (p. 207)

[I don't quite get it. If all he means is that these are the best books written at a certain time, as determined by reader reaction and the springing up of learned commentary, then it's tautological. If he means they are objectively superior, then he needs an argument.]

Information

A bit repetitive, as he has already told us genre readers get information when they read. Here he emphasizes that it is not the information itself but the pleasure they take in it — even when it is useless– that matters.

Forms

Also repetitive. Roberts reminds us that genre readers enjoy formal elements of genre, although these features may be “less purely formal” (p. 211).

Writers

Here Roberts seems to take back his earlier assertion that genre writers do not have distinctive voices. The best of them do, and he names Heinlein, Agatha Christie and Chester Himes. Still, readers do not “reverence” paperback writers, they “merely care” for them (p. 213) [I could have a feminist ethics field day with Roberts' privileging of "reverence" over "care" but I will spare you.]

What does it mean to “follow” a genre?

1. Genre Mapping

The main thing is recognizing what is new in a genre and what is not. New genre readers get excited over the wrong things: what distinguishes the genre from other genres. But seasoned genre readers get excited about what distinguishes this genre texts from the others.

Literary readers do not do this, because “the reading of primary texts by genre is denied to any but the most specialized readers”. (p. 215)

The literary bookscape is not arranged by genre.

2. Canon Disturbances

This is another source of pleasure to genre readers. We enjoy the drama of the lists and the rankings and the changes which are their own meta stories [I think Roberts would view interest in the AAR list of best 100 romances, or the RITA awards, in this light.]

3. Genre Mutations

Self-explanatory — we enjoy these too.

4. Sociability

Roberts notes that nonreaders think readers are “withdrawing into themselves” when they read (p. 218)

Roberts argues that readers are getting a “private sociability”, a “virtual fellowship” of character, readers, and writers

Two kinds of fellowship:
a. Fandom — the folks who meet up and have ‘zines, etc. these don’t interest Roberts
b. “virtual fellowships of readers who sense one another’s existence but do not know one another individually” (p. 219)

“Most readers of pulp fiction do not know anyone who reads in the same genres they read; and, everything considered, they woudl prefer not to know or be known.” (p. 219)

[the first part of this describes my real life, and the second did describe my attitude to romance reading for the first year or two]

Some think of readers as dupes of the publishing industry. But these readers are powerful, not servile: they should get the credit and/or blame for pulp fiction.

Roberts distinguishes between “arbiters/critics” (literature), and “guides/reviewers” (pulp fiction).

“Simply put, critics try to make the world better. Reviewers try to make the world happier.”

[John Stuart Mill is rolling in his grave right now over what this implies about the relationship of happiness to the good.]

[Although ... when's the last time a genre fiction blogger called herself a "critic"?]

[Roberts gets wrong a lot of what he says about reviewers. For example, that they don't talk about books they do not enjoy. OTOH, it used to be rare for romance readers to do that, didn't it? I think taking his own experience a the only possible experience of junk fiction did not serve him well at all.]]

There is “no instruction in taste” in pulp fiction, because there is no commentary or criticism, and readers like it that way. They want to gush about their favorite authors, not criticize.

Roberts notes that part of the “virtual fellowship” [we read that phrase so differently today with Twitter and blogging, huh?] is with the author, and as pulp fiction readers read an author’s works, they come to be invested in the narrative of the author, her career successes and failures (not commercial so much as her struggle with her material. As when a writer tweets “finished 100 words”, or “stuck as a scene”). [I see this very strongly in Romanceland, and I think it explains in part what I originally found baffling: romance readers' interest in publishing.]

Roberts admits that these are not just stories for tired brains, as he said in an earlier chapter, but offer other mental pleasure,s including emotional ones

Both “study reading” and “thick reading” offer:
–expanded alertness
–awareness of story
–awareness of texture and design
–awareness of the human source of the story,a dn of other readers
–awareness of a personal canon of valued texts

So how is “study reading” different? It is more a matter of emphasis. For example, the “text yields more” to study reading, and in study reading there is more attention paid to the author. [this is not all that clear -- he admits in the next chapter (p. 250) that he really doesn't tell us what "study reading is". This seems to me to be a rather large gap.]

A genre is neither a formula nor a set of formulas although it contains formulas. Genre reading is only 100 years old or less.

Roberts ends this chapter by rejecting the analogy that literary readers are gourmands and junk fiction readers are gobblers. This sounds good until he writes that the better analogy to junk reading is “half-aware reading of political slogans, one-line jokes, advertising tags, greeting card sentiments, and those other messages that make up so large a part of a landscape saturated with visual language.” (p. 228)

Chapter 11: Reading Learned Essays and Watching Television

Roberts says that a literary bookscape is a learned bookscape that is “prepared by experts for the profit and pleasure of amateurs” (p. 233). What he means by expert is “anyone who has command of a special knowledge” and by “amateur” “anyone who is driven by a special kind of love”. It is not a competence based distinction.

Fro the expert, the bookscape is “a linkage and overlapping of intellectual neighborhoods” (and Roberts uses the MLA’s distinctions as an example), while for the amateur “it is a heroic landscape of mountains and monuments, of rich valleys and awesome waterfalls, [etc.]” amateurs wander where ever interest and love take them, while experts stay put. Experts have a residence in the literary landscape, amateurs travel it.

When experts follow contemporary literary commentary, they are at that moment most like genre readers. They are reading by genre, and everything they do has its parallel in the thick reading of the junk fiction reader. Fro example, just as you have genre readers who are “exclusivists”, and will only read one genre, you have experts who will only read criticism of one author. And just as genre readers “follow” a genre, so experts “follow” the commentary on their chosen author or subfield, and they get as much of a charge as genre readers do when it changes.

Television

I skimmed this a bit, but on p. 247 Roberts quotes Kathe Robin (“Tete a Tete”. Rave Reviews 13 June/July 1988, p. 73), who wrote about readers’ complaints about romance novel covers: [Is "Rave Reviews" the older incarnation of Romantic Times?] Robert’s point here is that “a book is an object with physical properties that tell us what it is, cue our reading, and — sometimes — please and amuse us in their own right” (p. 248).

In case you are curious his point about TV is the same as his point about literary scholarship: that it, too, is a literature without texts, just liek genre fiction, an “art without masterpieces”.

He concludes the book by saying that if the institutions of art faded away, we would still find and study the masterpieces because they repay that kind of study. [So Roberts is clearly working, as we've suspected all along, with some kind of objective account of aesthetics.]

Just because genre fiction doesn’t repay study doesn’t mean we shouldn’t read it. Junk books “reward us very richly indeed when we are content to read them.”

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Interview With A Croatian Feminist, Anarchist, Speculative Fiction Writer, and Avid Genre Fiction Reader

Mar 7

Posted by Jessica in Academia, Blogs and blogging, Feminist contentions, Genre musings | 6 Comments

Milena Benini, a regular reader of this blog, won my last contest. When I realized I had to send her prize to Croatia, I let out a blood curdling scream and hid my wallet,  took the opportunity to ask her a few questions. It turns out Milena is, in her words, an

anarchist, blogger, cat-feeder, cook, dog-minder, editor, feminist, fire-horse, human being, illustrator, journalist, mum, mum, reader, Sagittarius, theoretician, translator, web-mistress, wife, woman.

I couldn’t fit all that on the address label, so Milena kindly agreed to answer a few questions for RRR. She’s also a writer of speculative fiction and has written a paper on the online romance community for her workplace, the Centre For Women’s Studies (more on both below).

1. Say a little about your blog and what you do there.

Well, my tag-line includes women, genre and politics. I have a whole group of posts about women I like and/or admire, particularly early sufragettes, but also some contemporary stars — anyone whose life and work I happen to appreciate. I usually try to post about them on their birthdays, with the idea that, some day, I’ll have a whole “feminist calendar”.

I also write about genres; my primary focus is SF (interpreted as Speculative Fiction, not just sci-fi), but I also talk about mysteries and romances. Oh, and I published a novel at the blog, because I wanted to see how that would be accepted in Croatia. It’s a fantasy novel with a strong romantic element, although I wouldn’t call it exactly a romance. :)

I sometimes also talk about politics, although that’s mostly related to open-source issues and stuff like that, as well as women’s issues, and sometimes anarchism.

1b. Can you say more about your position on open source?

Writing this on a computer running Ubuntu and having given away a novel under a CC license, I think I can safely say that I am very much in favour of open source. FOSS has a pretty strong community in Croatia, although, as is the case everywhere, I think, a lot of people tend to keep away from it out of habit, or fear of the unknown. There is also the fact that people are often suspicious about things they get for free, because we’re very much conditioned to think that worth can only be measured in money. But there is also a growing number of people who can see the value of things like open source or creative commons. Mostly thanks to Cory Doctorow, probably. :)

2. Is there any way for those who do not read Croatian to read it? I tried Google translator but … unless you are in fact a drunk monkey at the keyboard, I cannot believe it does your words justice.

Oh, yes, Google translator is an endless source of humour, but very little correct translation. Unfortunately, I don’t think that there’s a simple way to resolve this.

3. How long have you been reading romance novels? What are your favorites?

Just about all my life. There is a very famous Croatian author, Marija Juric Zagorka, who wrote about a dozen historical romances — and they’re real monster-novels, one of six and one of twelve tomes! — and that’s where I started. Then I went on to the classics such as Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters. When I started reading in English, I also passed through a — I suppose I should blush now — Kathleen E. Woodiwiss period. In my defense, I was very young at the time. :) . Then there was Georgette Heyer, of course!

I love Loretta Chase, Patricia Gaffney, Jennifer Crusie for the humour, and I also enjoy Jacqueline Carey’s Kushiel series, especially the first trilogy; Robin McKinley is also among my favourites… oh, there are too many to mention them all. I’ll also read anything with vampires in it — I even read Twilight! Research purposes and all that (I’m writing a book about parallels between vampire and spy fiction) — but, unfortunately, there aren’t that many really good vampire romances.

4. Do you read in English? Translations?

I read mostly in English, especially since translations of romances are few and far between in Croatia, not to mention usually more expensive (smaller print runs make for expensive books!). Furthermore, nowadays, I read a lot on my mobile phone, and there are almost no e-books in Croatian.

As for Croatian romances, I’m afraid the answer is — not any more. Apart from Zagorka, whom I have already mentioned (she was–and still is — probably the best-loved Croatian female author of all times, a very interesting woman who managed to also be a proto-feminist and one of the first female journalists in this part of Europe, and when she got poor in her old age her fans got together to feed and clothe her — a fascinating story, really), there was one woman who was pretty famous as a romance author some thirty years ago, but she stopped writing about a decade ago.

Oh, and there is one woman who writes under an English pseudonym and, allegedly, has a dayjob as a waitress. But we’re a small country (only 4.5 million people) and books are not a good way to make a living. In addition, romances are still mostly despised — even when there are actual romances translated, they’re never marketed as such. SEP is marketed as general fiction in Croatia, and Nora Roberts is invariably shelved in the mystery section.

5. What are some attitudes towards romance novels you’ve encountered?

Well, I have to stress that mine is not a typical situation: I am very much a part of the SF community — which is a lot stronger in Croatia than the romance community — and I don’t have any problems there, because we’re all outsiders together, in a way. And people in the SF community — at least here in Croatia — are not afraid of romance novels; in fact, there are several people who also read them, and when I post about romance novels, people generally react favourably.

Also, at the Centre for Women’s Studies, my interest in any genre was always welcomed, but they are all great women anyway.

6. Can you say a little more about the speculative fiction community in Croatia?

I think it’s more or less the same everywhere: SF-fans are viewed as those strange people who walk around with false pointy ears and recite poetry in Klingon. Even if you don’t speak a word of Klingon, you get marked as such once you publicly proclaim your interest in SF…

In Croatia, the SF community is something of an exception in its attitude towards women: for example, our national SF-award, SFera, has the largest percentage of female award-winners of all Croatian literary awards. I understand that this is something of an anomaly, caused probably by the fact that our fandom was started by grownups and not teenagers, so the more mature outlook rubbed off on the following generations.

7. What is the difference between “SFF” and “speculative fiction”?

Well, “speculative fiction” is the broader term. People first began using it when the borderlines between genres started getting blurred — particularly in the seventies, with New Wave — and it’s getting more and more used today because it’s often impossible to tell if something is science fiction or fantasy. When you look at people like China Mieville, for example, it’s impossible to define him as “science fiction” or “fantasy” or “horror”: there are elements of all three in his work. And “speculative fiction” is a nice umbrella-term for all the genres that, at heart, start from the question “what if”. A lot of people who are interested in one thing are also interested in another, whether as readers, writers, or both. So it makes a lot more sense to use one name for the whole thing.

8. Can you name a couple of your favorites in mystery and speculative fiction?

In mystery, I am a great admirer of the grandes dames — Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Ngaio Marsh — and from the newer authors, I have to single out Martha Grimes, who is doing weird and fantastic and wonderful things while staying strictly within her genre. And SF is my first love, so the list is very long… Terry Pratchett, Roger Zelazny, Ursula K. Le Guin and Michael Moorcock for the classics; Charlie Stross, Ken MacLeod and Cory Doctorow for the new voices; Steven Brust as an all together great guy; ditto for Neil Gaiman. And Robin Mckinley and Melissa Michaels, who also do strange and wonderful things. I think I better stop now…

9. Is there a Croatian romance community?

Not really, I’m afraid. There are two or three blogs that cover romance as one of their interests, but only one blog that I know of that focuses exclusively on romance. And in the “real life” sense, there’s nothing.

10. What did you say in the article you wrote?

Well, it’s basically an overview of the development of the romance community on the Internet, and it includes a (very) short history of the genre itself. The article will be published a special edition of the Centre’s magazine “Treca” (The Third, in female form — Croatian is much more gender-specific than English). There was a whole semester devoted to popular culture intersecting with feminist issues, and my article is part of that.

I tried to show that the Internet has given an opportunity to smart, educated women who like romance to get together and discuss their genre in a way which was difficult before the Internet. And I also tried to outline the way in which the genre has started looking at itself, after long being the object of fascination and disgust for outsiders. I find this somewhat similar to what happened in SF — at one point, SF fans got fed up with outsiders telling them what their genre was like, and started developing their own theory, combining it with the “official” academic approaches and reaching new and exciting things. And now we see a similar process at work in the romance community, which has to deal with the added problem of romance being, to a very large extent, a “female” genre, which is often the reason why it gets so much criticism, regardless of whether the bias is shown openly or not.

The thing is, although genre lit in general has not been overlooked in Croatian academic circles, romance is usually almost completely left out in such analyses, or is dealt with in a very offhandish manner. That’s why I was trying to give people a place to start, especially young women. I mentioned your analysis of ethics in Patricia Gaffney as an example of how romance can be approached not as a phenomenon, but rather as literature.

11. What is the Centre for Women’s Studies?

Well, it’s so far the only such place in Croatia, because our academic community is not really too keen on feminism, at least not in the upper echelons, where decisions are made. The Centre organises all kinds of educational programmes, publishes books, holds workshops, etc. One of the things I do is maintain their web-site, and there are at least some pages in English, so you can take a look if you want.

12. How about a blurb for your book?

Yes, I published a novel at the blog, because I wanted to see how that would be accepted in Croatia. It’s a fantasy novel with a strong romantic element, although I wouldn’t call it exactly  romance. :)

Kalaide, priestess of the Moon, is trying to hold her home together in the midst of war when a strange prisoner is brought: Enaor, an Elder, who lost his family, his city, and almost his sanity in the war for which he blames Kalaide’s gods — and his own brother. With the unnatural winter gripping the land, the two must form an unexpected alliance in order to survive… and maybe, just maybe, save the world as well.

Hvala, Milena! Thank you!

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

Mar 4

Posted by Jessica in Genre musings | 12 Comments

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.

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Notes on An Aesthetics of Junk Fiction (part 1 of 3)

Mar 2

Posted by Jessica in Genre musings | 15 Comments

Thomas J. Roberts’ An Aesthetics of Junk Fiction was published in 1990 by the University of Georgia Press. It was cited in Noel Carroll’s “Is there a Paradox of Junk Fiction?, which I blogged a bit about here.

In this post, I’m going to summarize the first 3 chapters of the book. (see this post for chs 4-8)

In the Introduction, Roberts explains what he means by the phrase “junk fiction” :

1. Canonical fiction — that part of the fiction of the past that still interests us) Ex. Dickens. Fielding, Eliot
2. Serious fiction — one segment of contemporary fiction written for a small highly educated readership. Ex. Woolf, Joyce
3. Plain fiction (best seller fiction) –most widely read kind of contemp fiction, the middle class of fiction. (Contains one genre: “social melodrama” — see John G. Cawelti’s Adventure, Mystery and Romance for that — but otherwise cross-genre). Meant to be read once, and not meant to be studied. Ex. Gone With the Wind, The Godfather, Uncle Tom’s Cabin
4. Junk fiction (also called genre fiction, vernacular fiction, category fiction, paperback fiction, etc.). Junk fiction is like plain fiction in that its readers don’t study it, but it is like serious fiction in that it requires its own learnedness

Roberts’ purpose in the book is to explain what readers get out of junk fiction, not just when it’s good, but when it’s poor. The “readers” Roberts has in mind are those who “have good taste”, i.e. enjoy and appreciate serious fiction as well as junk fiction. It is those readers who present the “paradox”.

In Roberts’ view, it is a mistake to attempt to import the methods of the study of literary fiction to the study of junk fiction. Classic criticism, includes the study of an author’s body of work, of themes, and a focus on big names and big titles. While we can study genre fiction with these methods, Roberts’ contends that other methods suit the medium better. In this book, he proposes different methods more appropriate to the material.

Chapter 1: The Stories of Our Times

In this chapter, Roberts makes the case that junk fiction mirrors our contemporary lives back to us. He uses the term “newspaper reality” for the continuously changing image of reality we put together from all the sources reporting on events we do not actually see for ourselves (p. 13). While this isn’t unique to junk fiction, Roberts thinks junk fiction is more closely tied to newspaper reality than other literary forms.

When we romance readers pick up an old category at a UBS and notice that the heroine smokes cigarettes at work or wears pantyhose, or says “golly”, we are reminded of the point Roberts is making.

A second piece of the puzzle is “literary reality”, the genre itself as refracted through junk fiction. As Roberts puts it (p. 17),

to the experienced reader, there is not a page in a new paperback that does not echo, answer, vary (or, sometimes, fatally ignore) pages written earlier. Everything that occurs within an intense, self-conscious, self-referential, and aggressively literary subculture has its exact parallel in paperback fiction.

Roberts’ emphasis is on the ways that stories in a genre talk to one another. He quotes James Gunn’s notion that to understand science fiction, you have to read about 100 books. While anyone can enjoy their first taste of a genre work, the real pleasure comes in learning the language the books speak to each other — part of that “unique learnedness” referenced above.

We also see literary fiction 00 because that is part of our reality, too — reflected in junk fiction. I’ve posted on this quality of romance fiction in Are You Smarter Than a Romance Reader?, a post on literary allusions in Patricia Gaffney’s To Have and To Hold.

Roberts writes that all good novels help us see ourselves and our times more clearly, and junk fiction is no exception. It’s one of the chief sources of the pleasure we derive in reading them, something traditional literary critics miss when they try to analyze junk fiction.

Obviously, this process is complicated. To use romance examples, it’s not just about verisimilitude in the contemporary romance (as when we wonder whether a poor heroine be wearing those expensive shoes, etc.), but the ways we reaffirm our own understanding, for example, of femininity today when we read and react to sex outside of marriage in a historical romance or the way we think about what free will means to us when we read a paranormal or a cyborg romance romance.

Possibly one of the most interesting points in the whole book for me is Roberts’ discussion of the way junk fiction creates characters. While nongenre readers think junk fiction is “unrealistic”, Roberts denies this, pointing to the way junk fiction embraces role identities as shorthand. He argues that the way we relate to one another today is largely through our roles (think about Twitter profiles: “wife, mother, friend, teacher, lawyer, reader, writer”, etc.) and genre writers build on these roles to create characters. It’s yet another way junk fiction reflects our reality.

Chapter 2 Of Low Taste

In this chapter, Roberts introduced the Table, which I have posted on, as The Dumbest Table I Have ever Seen. Roberts doesn’t argue for his table. He just tells us that divisions between kinds of readers are “generally accepted”. In my opinion, the divisions represented by the table are not just counterintuitive, but so contrary to my reading experience, that I have to wonder whom Roberts has been talking to. I also have no idea what work this table is doing for Roberts.

I’m honestly not sure what Roberts is up to in this chapter. It seems to be a mashup of observations about readers of junk fiction. On the plus side, throughout the book, Roberts makes points that no one but a real fan of genre fiction could make, and this chapter is no exception. For example, he refers to the guardians of disapproval every genre has:

The distress that some enthusiasts for paperback fiction feel when academics begin to move into their territory: pulp fiction has its gate guardians, too. This disapproval is worth special notice, for the serious readers who also read paperbacks must in some genres read against a sort of outward pressure that tells them they are not welcome. (p. 39)

He considers the theory that there is no paradox at all presented by serious readers reading junk fiction, because all fiction has the same preoccupations with basic themes of human existence: death (detective story), nature (the western), religion (fantasy), love (the romance), time (sci fi).

While this may be true, Roberts admits, it doesn’t help explain why serious readers read junk fiction, instead of sticking with serious fiction.

A second explanation — the dominant one, I would say, in Romanceland, and among academics working in popular romance fiction — is that junk fiction is actually very good fiction, and that the best of the genre fiction is as good as the best literary fiction. Roberts rejects it, though, because is assumes something false about genre readers, namely that they read for the same things serious readers read for. He’ll explain what those things are in a later chapter.

Again, he makes a point that only an academic who is a real fan of junk fiction would know:

most paperback fiction mistrusts [academics] and anyone else who reads serious fiction. For serious readers, to read in these traditions is rather like maintaining a cordial relationship with people who are always making it plain that they dislike you.

I see a bit of that online, and a bit of it in romance fiction (for example, the nerdy asexual useless male professor) but my experience has not been that this is the uniform attitude at all.

Another explanation Roberts rejects is that readers of junk fiction are ignorant, neurotic, or young. But ex hypothesi, some readers of junk fiction are just like Roberts himself: highly educated, normal and able to appreciate better books.

In the final paragraph, Roberts seems to put forward one last theory, to which he seems to assent: that human social contact today requires acquaintance with junk fiction, even if it is outside of books (TV, etc.). “If only in self defense”, he writes, “our psyches find ways of turning what seems dross into gold.”

Chapter 3 Book Types and Antitypes

Roberts introduces another table. 5 classes of serious books, 5 thresholds, 5 antitypes.

The antitypes are what junk fiction looks like to those with familiarity with literary fiction: the chthonic, the pretentious/manipulative, the inexcusably unintelligible, the illiterate, and the clownish.

Here are the types:

A. The excellent:
1. The Sacred — We worship this book. Beyond fault, beyond human rejection. If someone doesn’t like it, that person is in error. Ex. Shakespeare

2. The Classic — Demands rereading. Can be studied, Ex. James Joyce’s Ulysees, T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land

Of note: Roberts contends that readers who come to genre fiction from the classics mistakenly think it is not good fiction because it doesn’t repay study.

3. The Readable — Again, showing his understanding of genre reading, Roberts notes that in the past, critics contended that paperbacks were easy, transient pleasures (think of the infamous “they are not books but more like Hustler or chocolate” comments by Hilzoy of Obsidian Wings a few years ago) but today it is acknowledged that junk fiction is often reread by its fans, and that fanship often involves “a simulated form of study.”

But he insists it is different from classics reading:

We do not take notes, we do not review earlier evidence, we do not talk the problem over with friends. We read alertly, we even reread alertly, but we do not study. I suppose that when we do begin to study a paperback, we have already unconsciously accepted it as a classic.

Again Roberts insist that there is a skill and competency involved in genre reading, including “familiarity with genre specific vocabularies”, and recognition of the ways genre books refer to each other, such that “Most of what seems inexcusably unintelligible in popular fiction is crystal clear to those who have learned how to read it.” (p. 60)

4. The Unreadable — Roberts notes that when we can’t finish a serious book, we say is is “unsuccessful”, but when we can’t finish a paperback book, we say it is “illiterate”.

As often happens in this book, I can’t figure out what his main point is in this section. He notes both that some books stink, and that that we all have our own private aversions — things we won;t read or can’t finish. All I will say about it is that I see bloggers in Romanceland talking about these “aversion thresholds” all the time. We are very interested, as a group, in DNFs, in what doesn’t work, in what we cannot tolerate (Incest? Historical inaccuracy The Too Stupid To Live heroine?) and we lump in personal, subjective aversions with objective judgments about the quality of the book just as Roberts is doing in this section.

Again extrapolating from his own experience and common sense, Roberts makes another point:

The reading of paperbacks is bulk reading. We read them buy the half dozen, by the dozen, by the score. We read them almost without noticing who wrote them or caring what else the writer might have published. Sometimes we continue reading, after discovering, a few pages into the first chapter, that we have already read the story … (p. 63)

For me. this is both true and false, both from romance reader to romance reader, and even in my own case, depending on my mood, the day, etc.

And just a bit later Roberts explains why this is:

The [genre] reader is reading not the text but the genre by means of the text. The reader is following the interplay among the texts, the changes is what is newly permitted, what is worth exploring, what can be abandoned. We can follow this byplay only if we are able to read a very large number of stories, which means that we must have a very high tolerance for inept writing. A high tolerance is possible only when we have low standards, that is, a low aversion threshold. (p. 63)

Roberts mentions science fiction’s Sturgeon’s Law: “Ninety percent of science fiction is crap!” … But then, ninety percent of everything is crap!”

His interpretation of this law, which he thinks applies to junk fiction per se, is really interesting, but also not totally clear to me. What the law is really saying, opines Roberts, is not that 90% of a genre is crap, but that 90% of a genre will not be recommendable to people outside the genre — it’s not bad, but it will be unintelligible to them. Non-genre readers “won’t get it”.

But how to square that point with his companion point, that genre readers have “low aversion thresholds”? I took a low aversion threshold to refer to both a high tolerance for trying new things in the genre and a high tolerance for weak stories in the genre. So I am not sure how to interpret this point, and will have to think some more.

5. The Clownish — books that are so bad they are good. Roberts’ notes that it can be hard to distinguish between a clowning (a parody of clownishness) and clownishness itself. He uses Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle as an example of a clowning parody of modern romance, and Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy as an example of a parody of sci fi.

Roberts goes so far as to say that “a genre cannot exist until someone has parodied the patterns to which other writers are beginning to adhere.” (p. 67) And the best parodies are by the folks who love the genre the best, as we of course already know from our Purple Prose Parody contests and other clowning.

Roberts says a lot of interesting things about clownishness and why we ought to appreciate it. He says clownish writers appeal because they are always trying and failing to be writers, just as all of us, in some ways, at some points in our lives, are trying and failing to be human. His examples of subwriting, especially “subpoetry” had me on the floor laughing.

More here.

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Moral Repair and Ritual Death in the Romance Novel

Feb 20

Posted by Jessica in Genre musings | 15 Comments

(this post title sounds more formal than this post actually is. I’m just thinking out loud.)

In The Natural History of the Romance Novel) (pp. 30-39).Pamela Regis identifies 8 essential elements of the romance novel. One of them is the “point of ritual death”, the moment when love seems doomed, when the barrier seems insurmountable, and when all hope is nearly lost for an HEA (the other 7 elements are:  society defined, the meeting, the barrier, the attraction, the declaration, the point of ritual death, the recognition, the betrothal.)

Regis tells us that Northrop Frye, (see Eric Selinger’s  2006 reflections on how helpful Frye was to him in teaching romance) coined the term “point of ritual death” in his Anatomy of Criticism (1957).  In The Secular Scripture: A study of the structure of romance (1976), Frye writes:

One of the most fundamental human realizations is that the passing from death to rebirth is impossible for the same individual; hence the theme of substitution for death runs all through literature, religion, and ritual. Redemption is one form of substitution, though one more satisfying to theology than to romance (p. 89)

Regis doesn’t pursue the spiritual parallels at all, which is interesting, since they seem so central to Frye’s use of the phrase. There’s more work to be done there, and someone should do it.

In this post, though, I wanted to talk a little bit about one things that attracts me to romance, namely the way it deals with moral repair, and how it’s connected in many cases to ritual death and recognition.

Moral repair is a bit of a newfangled term in ethical theory, associated with late twentieth century feminist approaches to ethics, and especially the work of Margaret Urban Walker, whose book on the topic was recently published. In modern moral philosophy (by which I mean anything after Descartes), there has tended to be a lot of focus on moral judgment and action. A lot of emphasis on how we know what the right thing is to do, and should motivate us to do it.

Feminist moral philosophy tends to be a moral naturalized moral philosophy, but which I mean many things, but paramount for this discussion is a recognition of the lived experience, or phenomenology of moral life.  In contrast, traditional moral philosophy tends to be ideal moral philosophy, in the sense that it thinks of morality as more of an abstract system, and attempts to decipher what the ideal moral agent would do in various hypothetical cases. Unsurprisingly, given feminist philosophy’s insistence that the lived experience of women has been neglected and misrepresented in traditional philosophy, feminists tend to think about how real moral agents actually work, and the kinds of real moral problems they actually face.

One result of this difference in emphasis is the recognition that we often make the wrong choices, and that there is moral fallout: pain, anger, broken relationships, injustice, injury or death. “Moral repair” is the name for the kind of work we do after the moral wrong has been done. We have to go on, although you would never know that reading most traditional moral philosophy, which always takes the point of view of the moral agent at the moment of choice among a predetermined slate of possible actions and ends the discussion at the moment of decision.

Moral repair includes a cluster of concepts, concerns, attitudes, and actions that have been neglected in philosophical discourse about morality. Acceptance, forgetting, censure, public disavowal, remorse, repentance, apology, penance, pardoning, excuse, forgiveness, reparation, hostility. Moral repair is not just a response to a wrong: it is  a response to a wrong as a wrong. If you accidentally step on my foot on the dance floor, I may yell “ouch”, but if you say “sorry” and I see it is a mistake, I move on. I have responded to your action, but not as a moral wrong. On the other hand, if you stamp on my toe at a political rally to stop me from speaking out, that’s a moral wrong, and I will respond to it as a moral wrong. I’ll say “ouch”, for sure, but I will follow up in other ways, too.

Some of our attitudes and responses to wrongdoing make the situation worse. Those kinds of responses are often not reparative. Figuring out how to repair relations, or whether they can or should be repaired  — whether it is Tiger Woods’ marriage or race relations in South Africa after the fall of apartheid  — has to be a collaborative process, to some extent, and cannot be decided in advance. Different situations call for different responses.

There are many kind of ritual death in the romance novel.  It may be the result of an external problem (the hero has been kidnapped, or the heroine is near death), or it may be an internal conflict that doesn’t have a moral focus (the hero has an alcohol problem, the heroine’s past romantic failures lead her to doubt the hero’s love).

But sometimes, the estrangement between hero and heroine happens because of moral wrong doing, one or both has hurt the other in a way that is blameworthy in a moral sense. Sherry Thomas is someone who excels at writing this kind of book, and it is one of the reasons I am so attracted to her writing. In Private Arrangements, a major moral wrong committed by the heroine is responded to by the hero in s way that deepens the moral rift, and the rippling rifts reverberate throughout the book (hey, I can haz alliteration!). In Not Quote a Husband, it’s the hero’s infidelity that features as the moral wrong the couple has to repair, although it turns out to be more complicated than that, because the heroine’s response to the infidelity was not the kind that could facilitate any moral repair, whether that meant moving on or reconciling. So she compounded the problem,.

Another writer whose books attract me is Susan Elizabeth Phillips. When I think of Jane Darlington tricking Cal Bonner into getting her pregnant in Nobody’s Baby But Mine, or Molly sexually assaulting Kevin in This Heart of Mine, or Sugar Beth Carey’s reconciliation with Colin in Ain’t She Sweet, I can see SEP excelling at telling this kind of story.

Paranormal romance has its share of ritual deaths that involve moral rupture: Colin and Savi in Meljean Brook’s Demon Moon, Irena and Alejandro in Brook’s Demon Forged, Clay and Elena in Kelley Armstrong’s Bitten, etc.

I need to do some more thinking, and ask you what you think, about connecting ritual death to moral rifts. It seems that the catalyzing moral wrong and thus the moment of ritual death in novels like  Private Arrangements and Bitten took place before the action of the novel proper. Is that even possible? does the point of ritual death have to occur late in the novel? Here’s where my lack of training in literature serves me ill.

We talk a lot about “the grovel”, and sure enough, these books have some of that. But “the grovel” doesn’t begin to get at the complexity of what is going on, morally, in books like those I have named. “The grovel” brings to my mind something superficial, chocolates and roses, profuse apologies, one sided actions designed to achieve the end of reconciliation. I think the grovel has its role, but it’s either the last step or the first –  not the journey.What happens in good romances in which the conflict is around moral wrongs, is the achieving of new moral insight and sensitivity, deep character change, a complex process of reconciliation that is just an integral to these union as the good times. It makes perfect sense to me that this would be the case, because romance novels are about love, and one of the most loving things we can do for someone is to forgive them, or to do what it takes to be forgiven.

I think there is work to be done connecting this aspect of some romance  novels to the goals of feminist ethical theory, especially as related to the neglected but crucial topic of moral repair. And I’m trying to do a little bit of it right now.

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Contest: The Romance Writers’ Phrase Book

Feb 14

Posted by Jessica in Genre musings | 23 Comments

Last night my book club met. We’re a group of humanities and social science professors, and our book discussions tend to be long and intense, because we are all trying to prove our discipline’s superior ability to read a text. We follow that with getting drunk and talking about The Simpsons until the wee hours of the morning.

Anyway, I was recovering from a nasty virus, so my husband went without me. The topic was Padgett Powell’s Edisto, which I hope to finish one day and review. My husband got home after I fell asleep, but this morning I walked into the kitchen to find this:

I don’t think I need to tell you what this book is supposed to do. Check out Sarah Tanner’s most excellent post on this book from March 2009 for an explanation and hilarious example of how to “use” this book.

I checked out Amazon.com’s reviews. My favorite review is by M.A. Bechaz “bookaholic”:

Oh, but this book is awful! Its authors have taken all the very worst, most revolting, most overused phrases found in romance books (those same hackneyed phrases that make romance book editors swear they’ll scream if they have to read them one more time) and organised them into one tome, all in neat little chapters. This book is like a tombstone on the grave of creative writing … about as much of a turn on as getting a pap smear. In fact, I’ve read tractor magazines that were hotter and spicier than this.

But Goodwin’s Gal’s 2005 review offers a spirited defense of the book:

the overall message and purpose of the book seems to have been overlooked. The Romance Writers’ Phrase Book is a guide that’s meant to inspire an author and get a writer to understand the importance and the role of the “descriptive tag/phrase” when it comes to the overall art of writing as a whole.

Romance fiction in particular relies a great deal on emotion and internal conflict. Neglecting the little details, those descriptive phrases, can make or break a story. When I open this book, I’m not looking for a word-for-word phrasing I can simply cut and paste into my manuscript. Romance writing (heck, any writing) is never that simple or that formulaic. For me, the phrase book is a good starting point when I’m stumped on a gesture or where to start on how I want to describe an action or a particular emotion.

It’s easy to make fun of a book like this, and if you’re going to use it to mash up random phrases and pass that off as a novel, you deserve to be made fun of.  And, yeah, some of the phrases are outdated and ridiculous no matter what the context (see below for a sampling). But I read a lot of romance, and I have read … many, many, many of the phrases in this book, even in books with publication dates well into the twenty-first century. For example, “her temptingly curved mouth”, “his square jaw tensed visibly”, “the heat emanating from his body”, “with long purposeful strides”, “his eyebrows shot up in surprise, “his jaw clenched, his eyes slightly narrowed”, “the last traces of resistance vanished”, “she swallowed hard and bit back tears”, “her body ached for his touch”, “his gaze was soft as a caress”, “her soft curves molding to the contours of his lean body”, and on and on. Either there are a zillion copies tucked away in writers’ desk drawers, or writers have read enough romances that they unconsciously rely on the stock phrases of the genre with which they are familiar.

Ok, so where’s the contest? Well, inspired by the mystery appearance on my kitchen table of this book, and by Sarah’s post, you can choose any four of the used books below if you win. To enter, create and post here a paragraph with 4 or more of the following phrases from this book (I will count. I am professory like that), lovingly hand chosen by yours truly, by this Friday at midnight eastern time.  Open to anyone living anywhere (actually, Mars might be too far). Only one entry per person. I will choose winner at random on Saturday and announce it on this thread.

her complexion was white and illusive pink

her mouth was a smiling rosy flower

the living moistness of her full red mouth

her hair was a cobweb of silvery gold

she had a look of loving to pamper herself

he had a monopoly on virility

the warmth of personal contact in his hand

with an adventurous toss of her head

her head bowed and she remained in an attitude of frozen stillness

he touched his forehead slightly in a mock salute

a circle of ice ringing her mouth

a cold congested expression settled on his face

an inexplicable look of withdrawal came over his face

there was a pale blue lightening of amusement between his lashes

her large black eyes were filled with shifting stars

her eyes froze on his lips

his tone was irascibly patient

she was determined to straighten the havoc alone

the heavy lashes that shadowed her cheeks flew up

she was shocked when his eyes suddenly filled with a fierce sparkling

she was irritated at the thrilling current moving through her

her thoughts scampered vaguely around

she felt a curious swooping pull at her innards

her green eyes clawed him like talons

she allowed her subconscious thoughts to surface

could she handle his bundle of restless energy?

the moist satin of her breasts

his bulbous nose dominated his meaty features

reflected light glimmered over his handsome face like beams of icy radiance

manly wisps of dark hair curled against the V of his open shirt

his full black hair flowed from his face like a crest

preoccupied with his blonde hair and long slim legs

his cold urbanity was only slightly disturbed

he had the craggy look of an unfinished sculpture

his flesh met hers in a warm clasp

with a few swift strokes he closed the circle

Books to win (click on the cover to learn more about each book. They are USED):

Happy writing!

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Feminist Critique of Romance: Ur Doin It Wrong

Feb 10

Posted by Jessica in Academia, Genre musings | 32 Comments

*I couldn’t have written this post without the help of Laura Vivanco especially the background on Mills & boon, Emma Darcy and in tracking down citations. All the opinions expressed here are mine.

I haven’t been all that satisfied with feminist engagement with popular romance, on either side. Feminists often operate with ignorance as to the diversity of the genre, or they don’t clarify their theoretical grounding for feminism, while romance defenders can sometimes use the word “feminism” or “feminists” in a bit of a loosey goosey way. While in the popular imagination there may be some monolith called “Feminism”, there is no such thing in either history or theory. Just as romance scholars rightfully reject the idea that Romance is one book being written over and over in slightly different ways, I have been hopeful for a parallel recognition on the part of romance defenders of the diversity, tensions, and complex history of feminism and feminist theory. Understanding the vigorous debates among feminists over issues like pornography and cultural diversity, and the equally significant disagreements in feminist theory over how to define even basic terms like sexism, oppression, equality (of what? between whom?), and gender, the word “feminist” has very little meaning for me unless it is situated somewhere in that complex terrain, no matter who is using it.

Given that hope, I was excited to find: “THE BARRISTER’S BEDMATE: Harlequin Mills & Boon and the Bridget Jones Debate” by Rochelle Hurst, Australian Feminist Studies, Vol. 24, No. 62, December 2009. I saw she cited real feminist theorists, like Linda Alcoff, Iris Young, and Judith Butler, and looked forward to reading the article. As Hurst writes:

This article ultimately endeavours to demonstrate that, textually, even the most recent incarnations of the Harlequin Mills & Boon brand fail to withstand feminist scrutiny. … Something of an antidote to the Harlequin Mills & Boon romance, Bridget Jones’s Diary explicitly answers and counters many of the low-brow romance’s perceived ideological failings,

Hurst rejects the more positive reader response takes on romance that appeared after Radway, including, for example, the work of someone named Alison Light. But the author cites, not Light, but Helen Taylor’s essay, “Romantic Readers”, in From my guy to sci-fi: Genre and women’s writing in the postmodern world, edited by Helen Carr (London: Pandora Press).

To rely on other scholars too heavily is problematic for two reasons (1) it looks lazy — if you this is your field, you yourself should have read the cited work, and (2) you risk replicating scholarly mistakes, if your source has not, for example, properly cited the original source. This turns out to be a serious problem for Hurst, as you will see in a minute.

As I mentioned, Hurst says that there was a wave of reader response scholarship on romance following Radway that attempted to demonstrate that while the texts themselves are retrograde, readers put the texts to emancipatory uses. but Hurst is skeptical, noting that

This type of scholarship has ultimately facilitated some absurd analyses of
the Harlequin Mills & Boon brand, in that many of the claims that practitioners of this
approach make are hyperbolic in the extreme. In response to one such defence of the
genre*that ‘reading and writing a romance may be amongst the most subversive acts a
woman can engage in when it comes to challenging patriarchal culture’ (Modleski 1998,
66)*Tania Modleski retorts, tongue-in-cheek: ‘Right up there, I guess, with struggling for
effective sexual harassment policies, working at rape crisis centres, and protecting
abortion clinics’ (1998, 66).

I haven’t read Modelski (I know, for shame), but I knew someone who has read absolutely everything in romance scholarship … Laura Vivanco, and within .00001 seconds, I had this response:

That quote from Modleski was first published in Paradoxa in response to the other contributors to anearlier volume of Paradoxa to which Modleski had also contributed. She rips into Crusie, in particular, quoting her article repeatedly, though that’s not the article Modleski is quoting in this paragraph. Here Modleski is referring to Lynn Coddington’s article, in which Coddington paraphrases something in Deborah Chappel’s doctoral dissertation: “Deborah Chappel believes that reading and writing a romance may be among the most subversive acts a woman can engage in when it comes to challenging patriarchal culture” (59). So what we have is Hurst quoting Modleski quoting Coddington who’s paraphrasing Chappel!

I am not going to comment on Hurst’s points about Bridget Jones’ Diary, except to note that her argument for BJD’s feminist superiority to romance, depends largely on her faulty take on the romance genre. I want to focus instead on Hurst’s portrayal and dismissal of romance, and her “scholarship”.

At least thrice in the text of this article, Hurst has truncated or quoted out of context the words of an original source in order to support her points:

1. Hurst:

Jones also observes this absence, claiming, ‘woman-to-woman relationships are [invariably] tangential or fraught’ (1986, 214).

What Jones actually wrote (thanks to Laura Vivanco, who had access to the text) is this:

Another result of the centrality of the hero is that woman-to-woman relationships are tangential or fraught; although some novels represent strong families, including energetic and capable mothers, the heroine is more likely to be given a woman friend as a merely temporary confidente – or to confront heartless or amoral rivals for the hero’s love. (214)

2. Hurst again, quoting not the original, but a secondary source:

The Harlequin Mills & Boon novel posits women and men as essentially, drastically, at odds, presenting femininity as inborn. Female friendship is absent and the romance is all. Jay Dixon argues compellingly that Harlequin Mills & Boon and feminism ‘are antithetical to each
other’ (Makinen 2001, 37).

What? Jay Dixon, former Mills & Boon editor and lover of romances, wrote that? Actually, no, she didn’t. Hurst is quoting Makinen, who is quoting Dixon’s The Romance Fiction of Mills & Boon 1909-1990s. London: UCL Press, 1999.

Here’s what Dixon actually wrote:

…on the surface it might seem that romance ideology and feminist politics are diametrically opposed, except that both set out to claim for women the right to attain what they want. So, as Carolyn Smalley, a Mills & Boon copyeditor and feminist, put it: “In so far as the heroine always gets what she wants, on her terms, in a strange way, Mills & Boon’s are feminist.” Maybe it is that sense of empowerment that I, and other readers, get from both feminism in the public sphere and Mills & Boon novels in the private. (41)

In the final paragraphs of her book Dixon writes that:

a close examination of Mills & Boon texts shows how romance writers have adapted certain creeds of both the First and Second Waves of feminism to fit the dominant beliefs which their own writings exemplify. In particular, both feminist philosophy and romance ideology demand a change in the way sexual, emotional, economic and working relationships between men and women are conducted. They both have a Utopian vision of a society which puts women’s desires first, where men adapt themselves to women’s needs, and not vice versa, and where there is no perceived difference between the status and social position of men and women. Mills & Boon romances and feminism have differing political frameworks, but it may just be that under the skin they are sisters. Feminism has many faces. Perhaps romance fiction is one of them. (194-195)

Who made the error? Hurst or Makinen (Merja Makinen, Feminist Popular Fiction, Palgrave MacMillan, 2001)? I don;t have access ot all of the Makinen text (and no, I am not spending $100 on the Kindle version), but I know form Amazon’s Search Inside feature that she refers to Dixon as a “former Mills&Boon editor, feminist and avid reader of romances”, noting that Dixon claims romances “depict the difficulties specific to women in a patriarchal world” (p. 34). If I were a betting woman, I’d put my money on Hurst.

3. Hurst writes, “Merja Makinen describes the Harlequin Mills & Boon novel as ‘one of the last bastions against feminism’ (2001, 30), (Hurst, 3)

Thanks to Amazon’s search inside (again, pointer courtesy Laura Vivanco), here’s what Makinen actually wrote:

“while some romance writers saw the genre as one of the last bastions against feminism, others willingly identified themselves as feminists.”

By this point, I am not inclined to exercise any charity in interpreting Hurst’s article. Read on.

1. Hurst says she doesn’t want to take the cheap way out. She knows feminist critics of romance tend to pick the worst examples of the genre. So, she has two tactics:

In this discussion, comparisons will be limited to titles from Harlequin Mills & Boon’s
Sexy range, given their proliferation*eight are issued each month, as opposed to only six
Desire and four Temptation titles*and the fact that these are ostensibly sexually
progressive, ‘sophisticated’ takes on romance (eHarlequin n.d.).

Here Hurst is equating sexiness with progressiveness. Where did she get this crazy idea? A chaste romance is just as likely to be a feminist one as an erotic romance. Strike one for her method.

To avoid such charges, the oeuvre of Emma
Darcy* romance novelist extraordinaire, author of hundreds of Harlequin Mills & Boon
titles, founder of the Emma Darcy Award (which assists aspiring authors to complete their
manuscripts), and writer of the industry guide The Secrets of Successful Romance Writing*
has been specifically consulted, along with numerous other representative titles

Emma. Darcy? the Emma Darcy that wrote The Billionaire’s Housekeeper Mistress? and The Pleasure King’s Bride? and The Bedroom Surrender? This is the author (or authors — Emma Darcy was until 1995 a husband wife team) Hurst chose when she went looking for feminist romance novels?

Strike two for Hurst’s supposedly fair and unbiased method.

2.

Margolies notes another of feminism’s grievances against Harlequin Mills & Boon:
the heroine is unvaryingly solitary, ‘there is no sisterhood’ (1982, 9). Jones also observes
this absence, claiming, ‘woman-to-woman relationships are [invariably] tangential or
fraught’ (1986, 214). As Mairead Owen remarks, the heroine is ‘curiously socially isolated’
(1997, 541):

Here again, why is Hurst quoting other scholars’ assertions about romance novels? Hasn’t she herself ever read one? But ok, fine. Is heroine isolation categorically true? I can attest this is patently false in both the Harlequins and single title romances I read here in the States. Laura Vivanco opined it is not true with respect to the Mills & Boons she reads. What do you think?

Also, I think knowing something about category romance and the purpose of different lines may be helpful here. With a line that focuses very tightly on the relationship between hero and heroine, there just isn’t time for the kind of scope needed to introduce a cast of friends and family. I guess we can ask the question why that is, but you;d have to know something about category romance to even formulate it.

3.

Feminising processes such as depilation, cosmetic application and exercise are entirely absent from the mass-market romance. The heroine’s exaggeratedly feminine physique is an apparently natural manifestation of her gender.

Ok, first of all, one could well argue that it’s no improvement, from the perspective of a feminist critique of the beauty myth, to have chick lit heroines constantly getting waxed and tweezed. Does chick lit provide a critique of these often costly and painful processes? Do the women of chick lit toss out their flat irons, tweezer, and Jimmy Choo’s, walking barefoot, uni-browed, and frizzy into their smug married futures?

4. Hurst:

[These novels portray] … romance as a woman’s singular and supreme source of pleasure. In the Harlequin Mills & Boon novel, every single page *every paragraph* pertains to the pursuit of love.

Really? What do you think, dear reader? For my part, I love the smell of hyperbole in the morning!

5. Hurst writes:

Whereas, however, the ending
of Edge of Reason is suitably ambiguous, the final pages of Bridget Jones’s Diary reinstate
the primacy of romance:

So…ambiguity is good, but the fact that Bridget calls the year a good one, thanks to her relationship with Mr. Darcy is “arguably regressive” and “ideologically suspect”. first, we can ask, why is ambiguity better for feminist purposes? But second, this is exactly the kind of thing I meant in the first paragraph: why is romantic love “ideologically suspect” for a feminist point of view? I teach feminist theory and I don’t even know what she means. She needs to explain, is she using the framework of Simone de Beauvoir? Kate Millet? Kathryn Pauly Morgan? Sarah Hoagland? Who?

In sum, this was a real disappointment, not just in the author, but in the peer reviewers and journal editor. I’m referring here not to the faulty assumptions, bad logic, and suspect research “method”, which, alas, you can find in practically any academic journal, but in the misattributions. I think it would be terrible for Dixon and the others if these misquotes made their way into later articles. Laura and I exchanged a flurry of fast and furious emails (she was fast, I was furious) and one thing we discussed, without coming to a conclusion, was whether we (or I) had any responsibility to do more than feel angry and blog about it. What do you think?

DNF Smackdown: Grandma Racy v. Outlander

Dec 25

Posted by Jessica in DNF Reflection, Genre musings, Navel gazing | 19 Comments

You know those success stories where romance novel readers convince their skeptical friends and family to try a romance, and they love it? This is not one of those.

IMG_4569

Grandma's Fridge

To my delight, my mother, who is a voracious reader of nonfiction and literary fiction, picked up a copy of Outlander a couple of months ago. She lives down the street, and whenever I visited, I would surreptitiously glance at the placement of the bookmark to see what progress she was making. At first, she seemed genuinely enthused and the bookmark moved steadily forward. After a few weeks, as the bookmark stalled, I started to doubt her protestations to the effect that “I’m reading it, really”.

Finally, I confronted her with the evidence: the bookmark had been at p. 233 for a month. She looked at me, took a deep breath, glanced at my husband (my husband! the traitor!) for moral support, and said “It’s awful honey. I can’t finish it.”

After I removed the dagger from my heart, I asked her to at least explain herself on this blog.

J: What motivated you to pick up Outlander?

GR: My younger daughter was very interested in the genre. I saw the Gabaldon books, and they looked interesting.

Mr. Racy: Cuz she was feeling a bit randy.
GR: Aye lad.

*Ten minute digression into faux Gabaldon speak.*

J: What do you usually read?

GR: I read everything. My area of abiding interest is Russian and English literature, but I am equally interested in exploration and maritime history. And I like poetry.

J: What are a few of your favorites?

GR: My favorite novel of all time is Anna Karenina. I also loved The Grapes of Wrath, which I first read about 25 years ago. It had a profound impact on me and opened my eyes to poverty.

J: What did you expect Outlander to be like when you started reading it.

GR: I thought it would be a good, fun read. I’m very interested in the Scots heritage and was looking forward to that.

J: And after the first few pages, what did you think?

GR: I was bothered by the constant stream of dialogue between Claire and Jamie, and the dialect that I thought was overused. It is a good tale, but there were elements in the way the book was constructed that prevented me from giving over to the story and the fantasy.

Mr. Racy: “Git yer haggis, right here… chopped heart and lungs… boiled in a real sheep’s stomach… tastes as good as it sounds! Good fer what ails ye, eh?”
GR: [gales of laughter]

J: [fuming] What else?

GR: Because I know something about that period in time, the fact that nothing really horrible happened to Claire after she went back in time, was too unbelievable. I also thought Clare’s assimilation was also unbelievable. No one would have had anything to lose by taking advantage of her sexually or otherwise. So why didn’t they? Surprisingly, I had no problem with the time travel. I thought the author handled that really well.

J: But how about that Jamie? Isn’t he-?

Mr. Racy: “Ah, ya silk-wearin’ buttercup…”
GR: Fegs!!

J: You guys, cut it OUT!

GR: He was a very typical hero. I thought, “Oh, here he is. Here’s the guy. He’s going to sweep her off her feet, save the day. The Scottish superman.” I mean, any normal guy would have been dead many times over.

J: So is it the fantasy elements that you didn’t enjoy?

GR: The number one reason I did not enjoy the book was the dialogue. I just don’t think Claire would have been able to understand most of what was said, for one thing. All the Scottish-ese just got in the way.

Mr. Racy: Aye woman, get me my haggis!!!
GR: Aye, me laddie!
Mr. Racy: Yer a bonnie lass. (shouting towards the living room) Where are me wee bairns??!!

J: (Growling) But back to Jamie. So is there something problematic about the fact that you have a hero and heroine and you know they are getting together problematic?

GR: I was hoping for a heroine who was going to get through the book without a Jamie. I don’t read anything with fantasy usually. I’m reading the Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1859) right now, which was written for a popular audience, and it’s predictable, but I like it. It’s not the predictability I don’t like, which the Wilkie has. I’m against predictability that isn’t well done.

I loved Exodus, for example. Ben is a hero. He leaves America and goes to Israel, and does superhuman things and gets the girl. But to me, he was believable.

And I loved Chewbacca, and Incredible Hulk. So I don’t have a problem with fantasy.

J: (changing tacks) Did you know you bought me my first romance novel when I had mono in 7th grade?

GR: (horrified) I didn’t.

J: (triumphant) Yes, you did. It featured a woman doing it against a tree with the hero. I had a dread fear of splinters after reading it.

GR: [hangs head, rubs eyes.] What was wrong with me? [Silence. Looks up.] You must have asked me for it. I never read them.

J: Didn’t you have friends who read romances?

GR: Yes, but not me. When I think back on it now, the woman was the heroine in the books I loved as a teen. Nancy Drew, the nurse novels [can’t remember titles], Wonder Woman was one of my favorite characters.

J: Why do you think you have never read romance novels?

GR: Cause I never had to fantasize about having a man.

Mr. Racy: [loud guffawing, followed by silence and a puzzled look.]

J: (Splutters in outrage) What? I’m happily married!!!!!!

GR: Well (backtracking), I think I’m just rooted in concrete reality. The romance novels around back in the day didn’t have the female heroines I would have liked to read about. You have to remember that I went all though Catholic schools. The strong women in that literature were always punished severely for stepping outside the role prescribed for women. I didn’t want more of the same as an adult.

J: You haven’t mentioned anything written by women among your favorites so far.

GR: Oh! Edith Wharton, Eudora Welty, Mary McCarthy, Zelda Fitzgerald are some of my favorites.

J: Was there anything you liked about Outlander?

GR: Yes, I liked the part when Claire was figuring out medicinal techniques, and how to mix herbs. I liked Claire in general, and how she translated her talent from the 20th century to the past.

J: Will you ever finish Outlander?

GR: No.

J: Will you ever read another romance novel recommended by your youngest daughter?

GR: No.

J: Why not? You don’t like love stories?

GR: [The woman is not giving in. Sooooooo typical. Can you win an argument with your mother? I can’t.] I do enjoy love stories. I loved The Age of Innocence, Anna Karenina, the BBC Cranford series.

J: But things don’t end up well in those books for the lovers.

GR: They just seem to struggle more realistically.

J: Have you ever read a love story that you liked which ended happily?

GR: Geez, I read so much, Jess, I can’t remember. I guess if it ended happily it wouldn’t be worth writing.

J: Why not?

GR: I think human beings are naturally attracted to tragedy and are always sort of looking out at how people go through tragedy and how they solve it. It’s resolution that the reader wants, one way of the other. I think Anna Karenina would have been a successful novel if Anna had gone on with Vronsky and her husband looked the other way, which he was willing to do, but that’s not resolution.

J: Why do you read?

GR: Reading is my hobby. I love books. I love books all around me. I hate giving them away, although I do. It’s like parting with friends, but there are people who love to read and can’t afford their own books. It’s therapeutic, it’s educational, it leads me to new places.

J: What do you make of your youngest daughter’s reading habits.

GR: I find them amusing. That’s all I’m going to say.

[Just wait dear reader. This is a woman who always has something to say.]
[five seconds, 4, 3, 2, 1--]

Ok… I’m not judging it. I think it’s a very, very interesting activity, that whole genre. The romance novels served important functions for women who were at home 50 years ago when I began parenting. Most of my friends devoured them and exchanged them. You’d have a cigarette and sit down and read your story. You took it everywhere. But I never read them even then.

J: What did you read, then?

GR: I first got serious about reading in 1956-7 when I began to read Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Dreiser. I began my journey with the American novelists.

J; Who did you talk to about those books?

GR: Women I knew didn’t really talk to each other in those days. And they didn’t acknowledge reading them to each other. It was not considered appropriate. There was a bias against meeting other women during the workday, when you were supposed to be taking care of your kids. Our roles were very clear. Remember when JFK ran for President, and people started having coffee klatches to talk about politics. So we began to have coffee hours, and that was the beginning. Invariably, the discussion would turn to other things.

J: When did you read a feminist book? Was it Betty Friedan? Late 1960s?

GR: Yes, but I had had very strong role models. All she did for me was legitimize what I was already feeling. In my own family, my mother and my aunts were very strong. The prescribed role for me in the 50s and 60s felt like being in a strait jacket.

J: Was there any connection between your fiction and nonfiction reading?

GR: I don’t think I realized the impact of my reading on me, until the late 1960s. Then I was able to put everything I knew and read and experienced into a context. That’s what Friedan did for us.

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