Aspirational taste

Romance novels aren’t quite the bottom layer of the hierarchy of culture – that place is surely reserved for detective novels in which the cat solves the mystery.

Clearly Henry needs to acquaint himself with the fine product that rolls off the assembly lines of the Bastei-Lübbe and Pabel-Moewig publishing houses.

It’s because ‘romance’ isn’t really a genre the way Sci-Fi and detective fiction are. Traditional novels in general tend to be romances of one kind or another so the designation ‘romantic fiction’ really just means ‘traditional fiction which isn’t very good’.

Romance is feel good literature for single women with service jobs, sf/fantasy is feel good literature for single men with engineering jobs. The latter tend to have more efficient means to assert their own value than the former, in particular with respect to cultural norms.

Is that a reasonnable explanation?

…book ownership can, and indeed should, serve as a medium for displaying something important about yourself.
The late George Melly once said something to the effect that looking through someone else’s record collection is the human equivalent of dogs sniffing each other’s bottoms….

Worth noting given the post, that I was listening to a US (woman) book critic on the radio the other day here in Ireland going to enormous lengths to refute the mild suggestion that Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” could be described as science fiction. I was struck by how stupid she made herself sound as she exposed clear and personal predjudices on her part …

As Le Guinn notes, Cormac McCarthy is a serious writer and so by definition incapable of lowering himself to commit genre.

I was going to point out the Selman/Seligman mistake as well – especially since I went to undergrad and grad school (for at least some amount of time) with a Matt Seligman.

On the other hand, were romance novels to be considered high-status, it would be so much more difficult to really annoy the literature snobs.

Different romance novels foreground different parts of the fantasy, of course, and a significant number of them are about babies, either overtly or more subtextually. But as many or more of their readers are women who have kids and husbands with whom their relationships are maybe a little too real-world everyday, so that’s a reality the books are providing escape from as well.

The overarching basic fantasy of the romance genre, I would argue (and have, using for that purpose the more standardized category books), is that the heroine is regarded as ordinary, or perhaps a little weird. She’s pretty enough but not beautiful, she’s not rich, if it’s a contemporary setting she’s probably got an interesting job that doesn’t make her a whole lot of money. And the hero is gorgeous and rich and everyone is in awe of him and he goes for her, for the ordinary woman, and she through the force of the personality that other people see as weird is able not just to win over but to tame this incredibly dominant figure.

Babies come in the epilogue most of the time.

segueway

—1,000,000 credibility points for this error.

Comic books are better value if you want your bookshelves to give off that slight whiff of transgressivity. But romance novels, for some reason, are still de trop.

Combining the genres, I believe that a prominently displayed complete set of Terry Moore’s “Strangers in Paradise” could leave a positive impression.

What Lizardbreath, and Miss Laura, and Henry in his comment, said. Romance novels are devalued because they are a specifically female frivolity. Oprah, “chick flicks,” aromatherapy, cat ownership, and Sephora are just some of the other things that suffer the deadly double whammy of being associated with the feminine and considered “frivolous.” Women who shop for clothes, jewelry and makeup are shallow consumers who are ruining the planet – whereas men who buy “big boy toys” are given a free pass (never mind that consumerism is consumerism, and an Iphone isn’t any less destructive of the planet than a new dress, if saving the planet is your main point).

And yanno, it cheeses me off to absolutely no end to see people who ought to know better rush to distance themselves from the feminine + frivolous as if there was something wrong with it. As far as I am concerned, there is NOTHING wrong with femininity or frivolity, and those who try to distance themselves from it are merely reinforcing sexism.

Meanwhile, why yes I do read romance novels, and I especially love the fairly new occult/romance crossovers. Aaaand I have a whole shelf of “The Cat Who” cozy mysteries.

Gaaah. Can you tell this whole thing Pisses. Me. Off.?

On another note, are “the cat who” books the ones about the guy with siamese cats who inherits money to move to some village? Are those really seen as the lowest of the low? I liked them, although they did get a bit repetitive after a while.

Romance novels aren’t quite at the bottom layer of the hierarchy of culture – that place is surely reserved for detective novels in which the cat solves the mystery.

Perhaps, if you want to answer the question of why romance novels are afforded such low status, you should instead examine the genres that are at the bottom of the totem pole: I’m slightly embarrassed to admit that I’m not familiar with the cat-detective genre (Is this a genre of children’s literature? Because I feel like might shed some interesting light on your question), but I might suggest another entrant outranked by romance novels: the genre of film novelizations.

Here, it seems to me, the novel(ization)’s low status stems at least in part from its association with a media franchise: it is explicitly non-original; it is associated with an overtly commercial enterprise; it is written at the behest of figures who do not operate primarily in the world of literature and publishing. Indeed, some of this taint rubs off even on novels that have been turned into films: if I read a copy of The English Patient on the subway in 1998, its status is diminished; doubly so if it has a photo of Ralph Fiennes and the text “Now a Major Motion Picture” on the cover.

Romance novels are also sometimes part of a media franchise, for example in the case of series with individual volumes written by various authors under a common pen name. The genre shares this trait with what I would propose, contra your assertion about f/sf’s cool factor, are its rough equals in status: the sci-fi, fantasy, techno-thriller, and “street life” genres. I don’t think the causality here is straightforward — are romance novels treated fungible units because they are low-status, or does their low status derive in part from their history of publication as fungible units? — but I think it’s fair to say that the practice of marketing novels in a genre as commodity products rather than unique works meant to be evaluated idependently is a marker of low status.

The film novelization is perhaps the most extreme example of a work that is not meant to be evaluated independently; it is positioned in the market as a product whose value depends entirely on the value of its precedent. But this fails to explain its low status; after all, the same could be said of a work of literary criticism, but somehow Leiter on Nietzsche looks more impressive on the shelf than Transformers: The Movie: The Novelization. So what is it? Something about the lack of creativity involved, the faithfulness of the novel to the film’s narrative? Is the film novelizer closer to a translator than an author? If so, why do people treasure their translations of Neruda but turn their noses up at novelizations of even movies they enjoyed on the screen? And why do film adaptations of novels not suffer from the same devaluation?

I submit that this is not something inherent in the medium itself, but a consequence of where this genre fits into the actual facts of the publishing industry. I don’t see why, apart from licensing restrictions, it should be impossible to write a decent, interesting novelization of a film. The economics of book publishing versus film production are the are only reason this hasn’t happened. But even if it did happen, do you think that the film novelization genre would rise out of its literary ghetto? Of course not.

Similarly, I suspect that the historical realities of the romance novel industry, not anything inherent in the genre itself, is what saddles the genre with its low status. As with its peer genres (f/sf, Tom Clancy, black gangster novels), it is ghettoized, and borderline works have to actively distinguish themselves from the genre if they want to be considered serious. Hence the previously-cited anecdotes about McCarthy writing sci-fi-but-not-sci-fi and westerns-but-not-westerns, etc. The distinction being made here is between the literary markers of the genre (its content) and its market markers (its positioning as a product). Romance novels (and Tom Clancy novels) are sold as commodity products in grocery stores; not so with other genres. I suspect, to answer my question above, that the genre’s low status is actually caused primarily by this type of marketing, and that this creates a ghetto effect that perpetuates its low status.

I am very surprised by the sentiments that books get low status when they are associated with female readers. It might be true for all I know, but I thought that almost every genre of fiction has 70 or 80 percent female readers. The exceptions are genres like techno-thrillers and science fiction, hardly the most prestigious genres around.

More prestigious than romance novels.

To who?

“that place is surely reserved for detective novels in which the cat solves the mystery.”

Oh the Felidae books weren’t tbat bad.

“…believe that a prominently displayed complete set of Terry Moore’s “Strangers in Paradise” could leave a positive impression.”

Certainly more positive in some circles than a prominently displayed complete set of Sven Hassell’s works.

More prestigious to critics and reviewers in general, and in general social interactions among avid readers, and among book buyers and sellers.

I guess my anecdotes involve more eye-rolling at a Tekwar novel than a Harlequin.

In my period of reading genre fiction I found that I would start a new one and when I got more than halfway through I would suddenly realize that I had read that particular one before but had totally forgotten it because it was so unmemorable and lacking in characterization or incident. I would then suddenly remember how it ended, spoiling it totally for me. The books are interchangeable.

A “good” book, on the other hand, lends itself to being read over and over, always yielding new satisfactions. The so-called classic canons in books and music got to be that way in many cases because teachers didn’t mind having to teach them over and over to their students.

I realize, however, that some very ambitious authors have lent a hand to genre fiction — for obvious economic reasons. It’s very possible that they can create something of value out of them. Look at, for example, The Name of the Rose.

At last! Someone familiar with the works of Jane Austin, that under-appreciated American authoress.

Those of you who don’t know her works may be interested in the bibliography at home.tiac.net/~cri/2001/austinbib.html.

tracy w:

Yes, of course they’re poor. I’m surprised that you’ve read novelizations by authors you admire; I didn’t realize anyone would be willing to put his or her real name on a film novelization.

One of the problems, of course, is what you point out: expanding a 2-hour film into a novel leaves it threadbare, and literal transcription of scenes designed for the screen onto the page leaves them flat. The reason there’s no corresponding problsm for film adaptations of novels is, I think, a consequence of the asymmetry I pointed out in my post: many books can be written for the price on one film, so books tend to be longer, and filmmakers can pick and choose among the best (or most popular) bits of literature for their inspiration. Good film adaptations of novels often take extensive liberties with the text; something like “No Country For Old Men” is exceptional in that it is a fairly faithful adaptation while still being quite a good film (significantly better than the book, IMO, although I do like McCarthy in general).

So why don’t novelizers (is that the right word?) take more liberties in their adaptations? Why not expand on the material in the film, riff on it, make it more complex and engaging in the specific ways that literature can be and that film cannot? Because, as I said in my first post, that’s not what they’re being paid to do. It’s not a function of the art form itself, but of where it is positioned in the industry. Nobody picks up a film novelization looking for a complex novel that uses the film as a jumping-off point; anyone who picks one of these books up wants a faithful retelling of the film, one that recaptures the feeling they had while watching it, or, in the case of readers who missed the film in the theater (and before the VCR), they want to imagine what it must have been like to watch the film. I remember that, as a boy, my brothers and I used to spend hours telling each other about movies we’d seen, scene-by-scene. Film novelizations are close to an oral art form in that way, I think: they are an attempt at pure narrative, a faithful retelling of a story the author had heard once.

Romance novels are simply not escapist for me. I rejected that sort of male figure when I married my husband.

I’d like to propose a genre of fiction that could compete quite credibly (at least among readers of this blog) for lowest status of them all:

hyper-Evangelical post-apocalyptic/rapture dreck…

I’d (and I’d wager many CR readers would) gladly display a shelf of dog-eared and well-loved Harlequin paperbacks before allowing a single hardcover volume of LaHaye & Jenkins to touch my bookshelves.

Consider Phlebas, floopmeister.

floopmeister — like Ryman’s _Air_? I bought it in a SF bookshop, but it looks to me as though it was also marketed as lit’ry. (And did well, as it should have.)

Have I missed a reference to Jennifer Crusie, who IIRC wrote a thesis on the structure of the ‘women’s romance novel’ and was so *right* in her deductions that she has since published a string of bestsellers? (misslaura may have been summarizing Crusie’s argument differently than I would). Crusie is currently co-writing books with a male writer of thrillers; they are intentionally trying to have both action and romance. I didn’t think the first one totally jelled, but their joint blog is a charming performance of contrary styles.