r-e-s-p-e-c-t

as cool as i am, you should know this already

After I sent out Rooney Dispatch Number One (remember that? that was ten years ago), one of you wrote back to me with some thoughts and I asked him if I could quote him (anonymously) because I thought the exchange was a bit interesting. To protect his identity, we will call him “A Concerned Patriot.” Anyway, A Concerned Patriot writes:

I’m sure there are other examples—I can’t think of them now though—but it strikes me that the thing in footnote 5 about Austen appreciation coming with “I’m not a Janeite” is something I only ever see women do.

This is probably true—though, as I told A Concerned Patriot, I didn’t qualify it that way because I don’t really know how men terrorize each other when I’m not around. Maybe they’re shoving each other’s faces in the toilet screaming “INSULT THE JANEITES” when they’re off in the bathroom. I wouldn’t know.¹

But I made a note of it here in the drafts and I think enough notes have accumulated that they amount to a post.

In general, I think trying to get people to take you seriously through disavowal of something you fear they might mistake you for is a doomed game.² (People don’t respect anybody for what they aren’t, do they?) And you don’t have to go the other way and write things about The Radical Resistance Of Being A Fangirl. It’s fine to dislike Janeites and to criticize them and to think they read Austen badly; it’s not fine to criticize them for points, to slip in that little and they make it harder for me, serious person (woman model), because.…³

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To go back to Rooney for a moment, conversations about Intermezzo were dominated by the specter of “the romance novel,” such that (sorry to pick on this review again but) Andrea Long Chu decided to prove Rooney does not resemble a romance novelist in Vulture by quoting a line from Normal People:

Now, it is simply untrue that Rooney’s prose resembles that of a commercial romance; her sentences are spare, exact, and disarming. Normal People, about a pair of lovers who cannot quit each other, frequently exhibits Rooney’s ability to draw marrow from bare bones: “He looked up at her, directly, with total attention. She knew he was going to kiss her, and he did.”

Not the most convincing choice. But I also think quoting lines from books to prove they can’t be mistaken for romance novels is a doomed mission. So is the converse. It is pretty easy to pull out sentences from books that sound “like romance novels.” Here’s a line from Sons and Lovers, for instance: “She had scornful grey eyes, a skin like white honey, and a full mouth, with a slightly lifted upper lip that did not know whether it was raised in scorn of all men or out of eagerness to be kissed, but which believed the former.”⁴ (I began to want to see how far I could push this—start looking into Houellebecq novels or whatever—but then I recalled my mortality.)⁵

Now, if you go into forums for romance novel readers and poke around, my experience is that they passionately dislike it when people call Rooney a romance novelist because they view it as fake advertising and an attempt to tap into a market everybody knows really does buy and read books. Partly this is because romance functions slightly differently from most other genres. In the contemporary market a “romance novel” has to⁶ adhere to certain conventions that Rooney does not, namely:

A Central Love Story: The main plot centers around individuals falling in love and struggling to make the relationship work. A writer can include as many subplots as they want as long as the love story is the main focus of the novel.

An Emotionally Satisfying and Optimistic Ending: In a romance, the lovers who risk and struggle for each other and their relationship are rewarded with emotional justice and unconditional love.

If a book doesn’t give you a Happily Ever After it is, to most of its readers, not a romance novel, full stop, that’s the end. It is some other type of book. But the other reason I assume romance novel readers resent being dragged into this conversation (when they do resent it, presumably some don’t) is also because they know what “romance novel” actually means in these pieces is beneath consideration. What is at stake in arguing over whether or not a book is a “romance novel” is whether or not the book should be allowed into the sphere of things we deem worthy of critical conversation instead of just being of a certain kind of sociological interest.⁷

So if you are an intelligent reader of romance novels you can respond to this sort of thing by (1) trying to make the argument that this or that romance novel is as good as this or that mainstream literary publication (2) claiming that literary criticism has no tools to evaluate the romance novel or (3) saying fuck em.

And my general feeling is you should always pick (3).⁸

As far as number one goes, long experience as a Taylor Swift fan leads me to believe that you cannot present a proof that something is “actually good” that everybody else is forced to acknowledge as such (and to the extent you can prove a book is as good as All The Wives We Cannot See Were Briefly Gorgeous Everywhere it’s probably because that book isn’t very good). You can just proceed as if it is and people will decide what they think. And as far as number two goes, that also involves conceding ground you don’t need to concede I think.

So, just say fuck em. There are individuals whose respect it is worth having in life, but not that many. Certainly tying yourself into knots trying to argue a defense of your own tastes for an op-ed page is a waste of time and self-respect.

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Now if you have a certain kind of cranky oppositional instinct, you can perhaps take this too far. Certainly, a resistance to being taken seriously by people I wouldn’t take seriously myself is probably why I have written 235678997652345 Taylor Swift posts, talk about perfume, post selfies, etc. I’m not really such a girly girl in every day life, I don’t, for instance, wear makeup beyond the occasional lipstick, but if I heard some guy praise me for not wearing it I’d probably show up the next day with a clown face painted on. Like—fuck you! There is some sense in which if I sense I’m being given a test to pass I have the overwhelming need to fail it and this instinct does not always lead me in a good direction.

But the bigger point (I guess) is that whatever shadowy figure I fear being taken for is probably less dangerous to me than letting that fear dictate my actions or my thinking. It’s not that the respect comes with conditions—surely all respect does?—but that the conditions themselves are bad and poisonous.

If this is something women in particular are prone to (jury is out) it’s just because it’s terrible to know you’ve been slotted into an undifferentiated woman category, and it can be hard to know how to distinguish yourself and gain an identity without casting aspersions on the category from which you seek to escape. In Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche says something like, all women hate “woman,” which struck me as an annoying but true observation back when I read it. But it’s an observation, not a law of nature. One can choose otherwise.

1. To this he said, “I don’t think the intellectual hazing changes that much in the company of women—not to reveal the mystical secrets of Dudes Rock to a non-initiate like you.” Too late… I’m in…

2. There are times in life when earning the approval of strangers who are probably not worth it as individuals is necessary (i.e., grant applications), but otherwise. Grant application committees do not read this footnote.

3. After all, they don’t make it harder for you. If anything, Janeites make it much easier to be interested in and write about Jane Austen. Fanny Burney meanwhile probably gets to sneak into the mainstream from time to time only vis-a-vis Jane Austen (“Read The Novelist Jane Austen Admired”; “Ten Books By Women Who Aren’t Jane Austen”).

4. I do think if you click on the preview sample for, say, a book by Emily Henry, that Henry’s books are completely different from Rooney’s becomes apparent very quickly, well before you have to think about anything like “genre conventions.” An Emily Henry paragraph is snappy and it keeps things moving. These are two attributes I’m pretty sure nobody would give a Rooney paragraph.

5. “Marie-Françoise greeted me with a big smile. She wasn’t just glad to see me, she was thriving. To see her bustling around the kitchen in an apron bearing the humorous phrase ‘Don’t Holler at the Cook—That’s the Boss’s Job!’ (or words to that effect), it was hard to believe that just days ago she’d been leading a doctoral seminar on the altogether unusual circumstances surrounding Balzac’s corrections to the proofs of Béatrix” (from Submission)—not really a good candidate but the best I can do at this time.

6. And I do mean has to.

7. Still I guess part of what I find interesting about this dynamic from the fandom side is that romance novel fans really don’t seem to want the kind of mainstream attention that (for instance) science fiction writers have often wanted. They are very dedicated to defending the boundaries of their genre from the inside. It’s possible they don’t really want any stranger’s respect because they have something more useful to them—books they like to read.

8. There’s a hidden option (4) which is “have a world of interlocutors you respect and argue with and whose criticisms you are willing to consider,” and if you have such a thing do not say fuck em to those people. Obviously.