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walkitoutI have a persistent desire to write a ludicrously detailed analysis of reuse of sequences / characters / attributes / settings in JAK novels, and I’ve tentatively decided to actually forge ahead with the project. This is a profoundly data intense project. When I was a teenager, it would have been an exercise involving lots of 3x5 cards and a corkboard wall. Obviously, that is not how I’m going to do it in 2021. I think it will be a set of files (one per novel) with a coded sequence for the entire book, and the codes refer back to spreadsheet(s) of repeated elements. The idea being that with the sheets and the files, you could find all instances of a jungle pool, or a grotto / cave, or a car chase involving attempts to force someone off the road or whatever, and each individual work file would be a list of these elements in order with uncoded portions getting long-form (but still short) descriptions.
Anyway. It seems wrong to do this without at least looking at the literature in a cursory fashion to understand what kind of academic work is being doing on prolific writers of romance novels (I could expand this more generally, and I’m finding so little that I may do that, but I don’t really care that much so probably not). Everything I am finding is focused more on consumption rather than production and/or involves the typical academic deep reading of text for subtext.
I’m currently reading _Making Meaning in Popular Romance Fiction: An Epistemology_ by Jayashree Kamblé from 2014. (Yes, I know this violates my Palgrave Is Always a Bad Choice rule, but you know, sometimes we sacrifice for a worthy cause.). It’s fine; it has some interesting perspectives and analytical sections. There is a comparison of the 2002 Roberts _Midnight Bayou_ book to the 2009 movie which I experienced largely as a reminder of why I don’t read Roberts any more (so much to love about Roberts — except the rapes). There is a comparison of Kleypas’ (who I do not ever read; I don’t remember why I have this rule, altho this particular description is overwhelming in terms of options why not to read Kleypas) _Only In Your Arms_ (1992) to _When Strangers Marry_ (2002). The second book is a re-working of the first one, and Kamble’s analysis really shows the limitations on reworking a book with as many problems as _Only In Your Arms_ clearly had.
It’s hard to summarize further the many page summary of the differences, but I’ll take a swing at it:
Widower Max terrifies everyone all the time in 1992, but in 2002 he’s mostly misunderstood and in a hot, sexy way, and is much nicer to his sons from first marriage. “While the 1992 Max sleeps with his mistress after Lysette requests delaying consummation, 2002 Max does not.” Max owns slaves (see above: limitations of what you can do with a starter book with this many problems), but in 2002, “Max is revealed to be increasingly ambivalent about owning slaves”. “This adaption of the “romance” strand in When Strangers Marry suggests that it has discarded the traits that show a hero as aloof, a sexual predator, and passive about social injustice, in favor of one who is affectionate and expresses a more direct stance against racism.”
OK. But still owns slaves. Also, that’s not _passive_ about social injustice. Come on!
Continuing: “For instance, while the 1992 edition represents the speech of Max’s black housekeeper (sic), Noeline, as a transliteration of black dialect, the 2002 edition carries no such orthographic indicators.” Side by side passages follow. And here we have a _perfect_ example of how erasure is at least as bad as what it is erasing. Not 100% certain why Kamble went along with the idea that this is somehow better — I mean, this work dates from 2014 — but she’s not unaware of what is going on here. “Kleypas’s choice to represent such a dialect in 1992 and then erase it in 2002 thus presents an intriguing glimpse into how the “romance” strand — the erotic, the desirable — of the “romance novel” changes… by 2002, the practice [referring to the dialect in the dialogue] seems to have the potential to de-eroticize the text; the trait … is therefore recoded by Kleypas for racial respectfulness.”
!!!
There is a lot going on here, but I have left the passages out, which means you can’t see what one of the biggest problems here with Noeline’s speech is — the speech exists purely to provide side commentary on how much the white slaveowner desires the white woman. Everything about this fails. Everything.
The erasure continues, replacing words like quadroon and octaroon, which Kamble summarizes as: “All the edits consistently speak to a more racially sensitive rhetoric … reveal the author-publisher’s instinct that ignoring Max’s role in slavery, representing black dialect, or using certain racial descriptors would … make its protagonists undesirable / unpleasant / unerotic [in 2002].”
Back when I used to read romance more broadly, I had a rule: if you found a book that you loved, you can go find earlier books by the author, while waiting for the author to make new ones, but if, in the course of reading backwards through the author’s work, you hit problems that were worrisome and made you unhappy, you had to stop _right away_. You cannot keep going, because whatever is going on back there is only going to get worse the further back you go. This is _not_ a rule I ever had with any other genre I read it (and I read backwards in other genres). The Kleypas’ analysis goes a long ways to explaining why that rule was so important.
Anyway. It seems wrong to do this without at least looking at the literature in a cursory fashion to understand what kind of academic work is being doing on prolific writers of romance novels (I could expand this more generally, and I’m finding so little that I may do that, but I don’t really care that much so probably not). Everything I am finding is focused more on consumption rather than production and/or involves the typical academic deep reading of text for subtext.
I’m currently reading _Making Meaning in Popular Romance Fiction: An Epistemology_ by Jayashree Kamblé from 2014. (Yes, I know this violates my Palgrave Is Always a Bad Choice rule, but you know, sometimes we sacrifice for a worthy cause.). It’s fine; it has some interesting perspectives and analytical sections. There is a comparison of the 2002 Roberts _Midnight Bayou_ book to the 2009 movie which I experienced largely as a reminder of why I don’t read Roberts any more (so much to love about Roberts — except the rapes). There is a comparison of Kleypas’ (who I do not ever read; I don’t remember why I have this rule, altho this particular description is overwhelming in terms of options why not to read Kleypas) _Only In Your Arms_ (1992) to _When Strangers Marry_ (2002). The second book is a re-working of the first one, and Kamble’s analysis really shows the limitations on reworking a book with as many problems as _Only In Your Arms_ clearly had.
It’s hard to summarize further the many page summary of the differences, but I’ll take a swing at it:
Widower Max terrifies everyone all the time in 1992, but in 2002 he’s mostly misunderstood and in a hot, sexy way, and is much nicer to his sons from first marriage. “While the 1992 Max sleeps with his mistress after Lysette requests delaying consummation, 2002 Max does not.” Max owns slaves (see above: limitations of what you can do with a starter book with this many problems), but in 2002, “Max is revealed to be increasingly ambivalent about owning slaves”. “This adaption of the “romance” strand in When Strangers Marry suggests that it has discarded the traits that show a hero as aloof, a sexual predator, and passive about social injustice, in favor of one who is affectionate and expresses a more direct stance against racism.”
OK. But still owns slaves. Also, that’s not _passive_ about social injustice. Come on!
Continuing: “For instance, while the 1992 edition represents the speech of Max’s black housekeeper (sic), Noeline, as a transliteration of black dialect, the 2002 edition carries no such orthographic indicators.” Side by side passages follow. And here we have a _perfect_ example of how erasure is at least as bad as what it is erasing. Not 100% certain why Kamble went along with the idea that this is somehow better — I mean, this work dates from 2014 — but she’s not unaware of what is going on here. “Kleypas’s choice to represent such a dialect in 1992 and then erase it in 2002 thus presents an intriguing glimpse into how the “romance” strand — the erotic, the desirable — of the “romance novel” changes… by 2002, the practice [referring to the dialect in the dialogue] seems to have the potential to de-eroticize the text; the trait … is therefore recoded by Kleypas for racial respectfulness.”
!!!
There is a lot going on here, but I have left the passages out, which means you can’t see what one of the biggest problems here with Noeline’s speech is — the speech exists purely to provide side commentary on how much the white slaveowner desires the white woman. Everything about this fails. Everything.
The erasure continues, replacing words like quadroon and octaroon, which Kamble summarizes as: “All the edits consistently speak to a more racially sensitive rhetoric … reveal the author-publisher’s instinct that ignoring Max’s role in slavery, representing black dialect, or using certain racial descriptors would … make its protagonists undesirable / unpleasant / unerotic [in 2002].”
Back when I used to read romance more broadly, I had a rule: if you found a book that you loved, you can go find earlier books by the author, while waiting for the author to make new ones, but if, in the course of reading backwards through the author’s work, you hit problems that were worrisome and made you unhappy, you had to stop _right away_. You cannot keep going, because whatever is going on back there is only going to get worse the further back you go. This is _not_ a rule I ever had with any other genre I read it (and I read backwards in other genres). The Kleypas’ analysis goes a long ways to explaining why that rule was so important.