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.”
