I’ve been thinking a lot about Emma’s comment on DA about what makes a classic–is it the emotional response it engenders in readers, especially those books that pull readers into a genre, ones that get stuck in their memories?
Or is it something more formal–a recognition of the skill in the writing, the way the puzzle of a plot fits together, an acknowledgement of the experimentalism in the work? (Or to put it more succiently–“I recognise that this book should be a classic for X, Y, and Z, even if I personally don’t like it.”)
Emma expounded on her comment in a great blog post and her point about what we take as canon in music got me to thining about the links between my own musical history and how it relates to the question of what defines a classic in my own romance reading history.
I’m calling it the “Pixies-Nirvana Theory.”
The Pixies are a great band, a band I really, really love. Our first dance at our wedding was to a Pixies song. I had Doolittle on repeat during a particularly horrible stretch in grad school. Most people agree: The Pixies deserve a pretty prominent place in rock history.
And then there’s Nirvana. I think the Pixies are a better band than Nirvana. (Even Nirvana thought the Pixies were a better band.) I still listen to the Pixies pretty often these days–I hardly ever put on a Nirvana album.
And yet…I listened to In Utero every single day in high school. And Nevermind every other day. When “Smells Like Teen Spirit” came out, it seemed like every kid over the age of thirteen sat up and came to attention.
That never really happened with The Pixies. And I personally didn’t appreciate The Pixies until after I’d graduated college.
But Nirvana…even now, I can’t describe how much that band meant to me. It’s all too tied up with everything from that time–my emotions, my frustrations, all of that yearning in high school to figure out who I was, the need to escape to college so I could reinvent myself, and so, so much more.
A Nirvana song came on the radio the other day and as I listened, with the kids chattering in the back, I reflected on how different my life is compared to how I imagined it in high school.
With a Pixies song, I don’t have those deep thoughts. I just sing along.
What does any of this have to do with romance?
At the same time I was listening to Nirvana every day, I was reading a lot of romance. And it started with a particular book. I still remember very clearly, in freshman Spanish, another girl passing me a hardback and saying “Read this. You’ll love it.”
I did. The book was Jude Deveraux’s A Knight in Shining Armor. And based on this classic review at DA, that book served the same funtion for many readers as it did for me. As that first entry into the genre that will forever remain enshrined in your memory for the pure awesomeness of that first reading experience. Like the first time you heard “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, you sat up and took notice when you read that book.
Does that qualify A Knight in Shining Armor for classic status? I don’t know. And I have to admit, I haven’t read it in years. It isn’t even my favorite Deveraux title. But the place it holds in my reading history–in so many others’ reading histories–can’t be denied. It remains to be seen if the weight of those collective histories can place that book in the “canon” some day. (And I’m guessing that 50 Shades of Grey will be that book for many in the next generation of romance readers.)
A series I do read over and over and over again? Cecilia Grant’s Blackshear trilogy. I don’t think the future classics status of those books can be debated. The language, the handling of social issues, the characterization–it’s the genre at some of its finest. It’s literature at some of its finest.
Cecilia Grant is The Pixies. (I realize that sounds weird, but I mean it as the highest compliment.) I imagine that some years in the future, at some romance readers convention, a group will be discussing issues in the genre and someone will say, with that very particular tone, “You know, the Blackshear trilogy already did all that.”
(It could even be me.)
Finally, I want to touch on Emma’s closing line, about how the canon is formed by the books we pass down to our daughters and an incident involving my own daughter just last night.
She came up to me, book in hand, and asked “Mom, could you read this to me?” It was Kaki Warner’s Heartbreak Creek. She’d picked it up because it had horses on the cover. I told her no, that she was still too little. We read On the Banks of Plum Creek instead.
But in a few years here, she’ll have full access to our library and to our Kindle account. (I didn’t have my reading censored when I was young and I won’t censor hers–once she’s older, though.) And I wonder, what will be that book, the one that makes her sit up and take notice? The one that will be forever permanently etched in her personal reading history?
I don’t think it will be the Blackshear trilogy. And I don’t think it will be A Knight in Shining Armor. Right now, I have no idea what it will be. But she will build her own personal canon, that list of books that she will want to endure.
She’ll have her canon and I’ll have mine. Is the “true canon”, the books that will become “classics”, the point where our two canons overlap, the books that can be agreed upon across the generations? I don’t know.
In the end, the official romance canon–if one is ever made–will be decided by the very same things that decide our own personal canons–time and chance.
In Italo Calvino’s long list of things that make a book classic, and one of them is, “‘Your’ classic is a book to which you cannot remain indifferent, and which helps you define yourself in relation or even in opposition to it.” I see this post as leaping off from that idea; you’re drawing a really important line between A Classic and Your Classic.
Lists of The Classics seem good to me insofar as they help people find their classics. If it’s like, “Here’s a list of books many people have found moving. It’s good to have familiarity with at least some of these,” that seems like a helpful concept, but I think the focus has to be on finding Your Classic, not on learning someone else’s list or in acting like any one list could define or capture a field, tell us everything we need to know about human-ness, etc., which is too often what Classic (c) has been used to do.
What’s interesting about romance, to me, is how it does have this passed down, secret quality, which I think has often been used to denigrate the genre, but which might be one of its strengths. I need to think about this, but romance might be counter-canonical or anti-canonical in an almost rhizomatic way.
“What’s interesting about romance, to me, is how it does have this passed down, secret quality, which I think has often been used to denigrate the genre, but which might be one of its strengths. I need to think about this, but romance might be counter-canonical or anti-canonical in an almost rhizomatic way.”
I think calling romance “anti-canonical” is exactly right, for all the reasons you touch on here. Romance is a genre pretty much exclusively written and read by women–this makes it difficult to gain acceptance in the academy, which for all the gains of the last fews years, still strikes me as very white male-centric. (But you would know probably better than me, being from the other side of campus. 😉 )
And the secret aspect you touched on is vital. Romance is very often read in secret and the discovery of the genre happens in secret. The stories of discovery don’t usually start with “My mom told me to read this” or “My teacher loaned it to me.” They almost always start with, “I found it in my mother’s drawers–she never knew I had it” or “It got passed to me in Spanish class under the teacher’s nose.”
It’s hard to build a canon of works if you feel you can’t even speak openly of what you’re reading.
Oh! And another thought just occurred to me–similar problems should also be inherent in putting together an erotica canon. My thoughts are only half formed on it just now–I’ll have to think about this more.