Eric Selinger and
Sarah Frantz have been called “the Marx and Engels” of romance scholarship. If
this is the case, perhaps it is time to turn attention to the ways in which our
very own Marx and Engels theorize and write about romance. In this regard, I
offer a “playful” engagement with Eric Selinger’s essay in New Approaches to
Popular Romance Fiction (now available for $9.99 on Kindle).
Selinger’s wonderful
essay – an essay that is not anxious, not attempting to slay various
precursors, not defensive of the genre, and makes no apology for studying
romance – provides a challenge to scholars (and common readers) of
the romance novel. Throughout his chapter, Selinger speaks of the possibility
of “close reading” the romance novel, even if only to see “what would happen.”
Anecdotally, I must
reluctantly admit that I have recently heard “close reading” used as a
dismissive judgment on scholarship. To say that a critic hasn’t engaged in a “close
reading” is to suggest, at least so it seems, that the critic has been overly
theoretical. Theory becomes a symptom for a reading that isn’t close enough,
theory is an illness that the reader needs to be cured of because the critic is
missing the forest for the trees, the text for the words.
Indeed, I often find
myself asking questions about theory, criticism, and popular romance fiction:
What is the place of theory and criticism? Can we “close read” literary
criticism and theory? Can we “close read” theory the same way we “close read”
fiction? What would happen if we did “close read” theory and criticism?
To these ends, I
turn my attention to Selinger's essay in New Approaches to Popular Romance Fiction. In his essay, “How to Read a Romance Novel (and
Fall in Love with Popular Romance),” Selinger offers a close reading of Laura
Kinsale’s Flowers from the Storm (1992) and draws on ideas of
intertextuality, particularly with respect to Milton’s Paradise Lost.
The governing question of Selinger’s essay is: “What would “close-reading a
romance” (as opposed to “reading the romance”) look like in practice?” And this
is precisely what Selinger does throughout the essay.
Flowers
from the Storm invokes
[Milton] by name, stops by his house, and vividly associates Paradise Lost
with Maddy’s parents and with Jevaulx’s hidden intelligence. If we want to know
“precisely where we are” as we read the novel, we will need to think about
Milton – so, at least, I teach my students to read the scene.
I am struck by how
closely Selinger reads Flowers from the Storm. Indeed, I am taken aback—almost
surprised—by the closeness of the reading. Selinger provides a series of
intertextual relations between Flowers from the Storm and Paradise
Lost, which consistently (and without fail) demonstrate the relation
between these two texts. There is, of course, an academic (and political) game
taking place: if the popular romance novel is able to “play” with Paradise
Lost, then surely there must be some intelligence in these novels,
something that makes them worthy of scrutiny and scholarship. But, there is
something more catching, at least for me, about Selinger’s piece. Selinger
“plays,” and “plays” quite a bit.
- Speaking about Dixon’s discussion of
romance, Selinger writes, “this ‘way’ bears little resemblance to the subtle, playful
strategies that we may have acquired in order to understand poetry or literary
fiction, postmodern or otherwise.”
- Selinger later writes, “to read such a
romance closely would not be to resist or dismiss it, but rather to let the
mind of love we see at play in the text spark an interesting excitement,
an ‘erotic curiosity’ of our own.”
- About Kinsale’s novel: “You don’t have to
read very far into Flowers from the Storm to note Kinsale’s play
with romance conventions made famous by The Flame and the Flower.”
- Kinsale’s novel, but now in
discussion with Dixon: “But the minute we accept Kinsale’s exegetical
challenge, playing along with what we might either call (with Dixon) the
novel’s ‘postmodern game-playing’ or (with Roberts) its ‘interplay with the art
of the past,’ we realize the Miltonic echoes are everywhere in the text."
- Once more, Selinger invokes play: “To
praise Kinsale’s novel, I may well want to
play the ‘games’ I find in
it, to use Dixon’s term, just as I play the postmodern mind games of A.
S. Byatt’s bestselling Possession: A Romance, published just two years
before Flowers from the Storm.
- Incidentally, in his “Rereading the
Romance,” (2007) Selinger writes, “But the fundamental questions of pleasure at
play in romance novels strikes me as yet to be posed in a way that is both
robustly theorized and practically applicable, able to account for the novels
or the experience of reading them in their range, variety, and charm.”
I admit that what
struck me about this “playfulness” was a passing moment in Selinger’s paper, “a
good enough author can use ‘nostalgia’ precisely in order to
raise the sort of ‘large’ questions that Gornick wants novels to explore: “how
we got to be as we are, or how the time in which we live to be as it is.” “Good
enough author” recalls, alludes to, and perhaps is consciously aware of, D. W.
Winnicott’s formulation of the “good enough mother,” which is so carefully
considered in his book Playing and Reality (1971).
I want to suggest
that Selinger’s use of “play” is important, not because of the way he critiques
notions of “play," but because Selinger is
carefully and playfully playing with play. Selinger might very well be
attempting to recuperate the “playful” quality of literary analysis. I think
this “recuperative” practice is important for Selinger. At one point in a very
playful spirit, Selinger writes:
Kinsale’s
phrase “pirate mouth” may be inscrutable on its own (a mouth with an eye-patch?
a mouth that says “arrrr”?), but it makes sense as stock-response shorthand, a
way to trigger the sort of associations spelled out at greater length by
Woodiwiss and intensify them through brevity and juxtaposition.
What could be more
“playful” than the brief meditation on the “pirate mouth”? (As a reader, I am
imagining Captain Hook, and I think there are some invocations of Neverland –
“the opportunity to return, night after night, to some duty-free zone of the
imagination” – to be found in the essay as well.) Selinger challenges his
readers learning “How to Read a Romance Novel (and Fall in Love with Popular
Romance),” to think “playfully” and to think about what that might mean. But,
isn’t “play” childish?
Play may very well
be childish, but as Winnicott notes, “play is immensely exciting.” This is
precisely what readers of “How to Read a Romance Novel” will find: play and
excitement. For Selinger, the romance is “immensely exciting” because of the
ways the romance can “interplay” with other texts, other forms of nostalgia,
love, and longing. As Winnicott notes, “playing is an experience, always a
creative experience, and it is an experience in the space-time continuum, a
basic form of living.” Indeed, I wonder if it is not possible to misread
Winnicott; could not “play” also be a “basic form of reading and criticism”?
Literary critics are certainly engaged in a “creative experience” of reading
the text, and Selinger’s turn to “play” is important to the way in which he
believes we might “fall in love with popular romance” just like “[his]
adolescent self, first falling in love with poetry.”
“Play isn’t simply
fun, and neither are the intenser reaches of pleasure” as Michael Moon has
recently written. Indeed, I am tempted to suggest that Selinger not only
teaches his readers “How to Read a Romance Novel (and Fall in Love with Popular
Romance),” he also teaches them (and us) “how to play with a romance
novel.” Selinger carefully puts “play” back into literary criticism and theory
precisely because play, like studying the popular romance novel, “is immensely
exciting.”
