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Conversational Parameters
Jul. 19th, 2030 09:10 pmI had a conversation with a friend of a friend a couple of days ago that made me very disappointed in myself. To understand why, we have to rewind to the fall of 2001, aka, among a few other minor things, the first semester of my senior year of college.
Fall of senior year, I enrolled in a course on Victorian Lit. I didn't want to. It was not an area of interest for me. It filled a credit I needed for my major, though, and my friend at the time (who later became an author, sometimes of romance novels), convinced me it would be fun. Said friend, it should be noted, WAS very much into Victorian Lit. I was, to put it lightly, doubtful.
The course was being taught by a fresh-out-of-PhD adjunct. Kate Thomas had incredible taste in heels, a British accent that made everything sound better, and was easily, far and away, one of the smartest people I'd ever met. In that class, she introduced me Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's 'Epistemology of the Closet', and I am not being hyperbolic when I say that reading the introduction to the book was one of two foundational paradigmatic shifts in my intellectual approach to the world.
The analogy I'm about to give of one of the principles she discusses in that piece is a vast oversimplification and I hope that wherever she is in the afterlife, she can't hear me butchering her truly elegant work.
Sedgwick asserts that conversations cannot be had without agreeing on certain underlying concepts, usually, the definitions of words being used. So, let's say you and a friend are playing a game of checkers. Both of you have stated that you know how to play. Only, it turns out that you were each taught a slightly different set of rules, maybe because you're from different regions, or because one of you grew up in a family with its own slapdash set of rules. The game is probably not going to go well.
Sedgwick argues that we, as humans, consider many things givens that are not, and that, in reality, those "givens" need to be stripped back several dozen layers to get to shared facts upon which a dialogue can be built. That is, we all assume we know what words mean, that what we mean when we say something is the same thing our conversant hears and comprehends. This is rarely true unless the terms have been discussed and unpacked ahead of time.
I realize I have deeply buried the lede here, but all of this is to say: I made the assumption that the term "romance genre" would have a set meaning in this blog because it--for the most part--does within "romancelandia," aka, the space wherein persons who seriously read and discuss Romance, capital R, exist. I forget that, no more than eight months ago, I read an article about a bookstore owner who just last year had to be taught that no, Nicholas Sparks is not a Romance writer.
So, for the purposes of this blog capital R Romance, the romance genre, or romance books are defined as:
1. having two or more sentient beings who are of appropriate age to be with each other and who have the capability of having romantic love for each other
2. having a plot primarily focused on how these beings come together romantically
3. having a happy ending
Now, those are pretty broad requirements, but they are hard and fast. For example, the difference between being a mystery novel with romance elements in it, and being a romance novel in the mystery subgenre is number two: does the plot focus on the mystery, or is its raison d'etre the pairing at the forefront, and the mystery is a vehicle for them to get to know each other?
The difference between being a romance novel and so-called literary fiction with a romance element is the same. What drives the plot?
The difference between a romance novel and a love story--and this is the one that trips up most people--is that a love story can have an unhappy ending. A romance novel cannot. Which is to say, all romances are love stories, but not all love stories are romances. To be clear: happy ending does not mean a marriage contract, babies, communal property, etc. It simply means that when we leave our protagonists, they are happy together and in a secure position in life. But those basics are a must.
If you do not have any one of those three, your book is not a romance. If you have all of those three, no matter WHAT else you have--a metric tonne of dungeon sex, a weresnake from a different planet and a nice Christian girl who just wants to save his soul and is ride or die about abstaining until marriage, serious historical drama and political intrigue, literally anything--your book is first and foremost a romance. It might have a subgenre, but your top-level genre, as it were, is Romance.
Lookit that, we have our discursive axiom.
Fall of senior year, I enrolled in a course on Victorian Lit. I didn't want to. It was not an area of interest for me. It filled a credit I needed for my major, though, and my friend at the time (who later became an author, sometimes of romance novels), convinced me it would be fun. Said friend, it should be noted, WAS very much into Victorian Lit. I was, to put it lightly, doubtful.
The course was being taught by a fresh-out-of-PhD adjunct. Kate Thomas had incredible taste in heels, a British accent that made everything sound better, and was easily, far and away, one of the smartest people I'd ever met. In that class, she introduced me Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's 'Epistemology of the Closet', and I am not being hyperbolic when I say that reading the introduction to the book was one of two foundational paradigmatic shifts in my intellectual approach to the world.
The analogy I'm about to give of one of the principles she discusses in that piece is a vast oversimplification and I hope that wherever she is in the afterlife, she can't hear me butchering her truly elegant work.
Sedgwick asserts that conversations cannot be had without agreeing on certain underlying concepts, usually, the definitions of words being used. So, let's say you and a friend are playing a game of checkers. Both of you have stated that you know how to play. Only, it turns out that you were each taught a slightly different set of rules, maybe because you're from different regions, or because one of you grew up in a family with its own slapdash set of rules. The game is probably not going to go well.
Sedgwick argues that we, as humans, consider many things givens that are not, and that, in reality, those "givens" need to be stripped back several dozen layers to get to shared facts upon which a dialogue can be built. That is, we all assume we know what words mean, that what we mean when we say something is the same thing our conversant hears and comprehends. This is rarely true unless the terms have been discussed and unpacked ahead of time.
I realize I have deeply buried the lede here, but all of this is to say: I made the assumption that the term "romance genre" would have a set meaning in this blog because it--for the most part--does within "romancelandia," aka, the space wherein persons who seriously read and discuss Romance, capital R, exist. I forget that, no more than eight months ago, I read an article about a bookstore owner who just last year had to be taught that no, Nicholas Sparks is not a Romance writer.
So, for the purposes of this blog capital R Romance, the romance genre, or romance books are defined as:
1. having two or more sentient beings who are of appropriate age to be with each other and who have the capability of having romantic love for each other
2. having a plot primarily focused on how these beings come together romantically
3. having a happy ending
Now, those are pretty broad requirements, but they are hard and fast. For example, the difference between being a mystery novel with romance elements in it, and being a romance novel in the mystery subgenre is number two: does the plot focus on the mystery, or is its raison d'etre the pairing at the forefront, and the mystery is a vehicle for them to get to know each other?
The difference between being a romance novel and so-called literary fiction with a romance element is the same. What drives the plot?
The difference between a romance novel and a love story--and this is the one that trips up most people--is that a love story can have an unhappy ending. A romance novel cannot. Which is to say, all romances are love stories, but not all love stories are romances. To be clear: happy ending does not mean a marriage contract, babies, communal property, etc. It simply means that when we leave our protagonists, they are happy together and in a secure position in life. But those basics are a must.
If you do not have any one of those three, your book is not a romance. If you have all of those three, no matter WHAT else you have--a metric tonne of dungeon sex, a weresnake from a different planet and a nice Christian girl who just wants to save his soul and is ride or die about abstaining until marriage, serious historical drama and political intrigue, literally anything--your book is first and foremost a romance. It might have a subgenre, but your top-level genre, as it were, is Romance.
Lookit that, we have our discursive axiom.
