One of the things I’m constantly saying when I teach workshops is that popular fiction – like romance – is a mirror of popular culture. Sub-genres become popular, then less so, as a reflection of our concerns in our day-to-day lives. This makes sense to me – when we’re working out some facet of gender roles or expectations from marriage or whatever, it seems reasonable that we would find resonance in books that explore those very same ideas. I’m also always teaching that romance is the most conservative genre in the bookstore, which means that ideas are explored in our genre last. When ground is broken in the romance section, it’s always been explored earlier in mainstream fiction or even other genres.
For example, currently interracial romances are experiencing real growth in market share. Traditionally, the vast majority of couples depicted in romantic fiction matched. They might have had different backgrounds, different perspectives but their skin colour matched. So, “multicultural” romance, as defined by publishers, meant a non-Caucasian couple who were of the same racial background. I always thought this was weird, because I grew up in Toronto in the era of Pierre Trudeau’s notion of multiculturalism – a true mosaic which promoting mixing over matching – but there you go.
Now, however, we have the new-ish niche of interracial romance, which means the hero and heroine don’t match. This isn’t because interracial partnerships are new – they’re older than time, in practice – but is because people in America are socially prepared to talk about this idea in 2012. It is possible. It is thinkable. And so we have a new sub-genre that is growing in popularity every day.
This is the kind of mirror I mean when I talk about popular culture and popular fiction. But recently, I realized there are many other facets to that mirroring. Right now, I’m reading Chaucer’s THE CANTERBURY TALES again. The difference is that this time, I can’t stop thinking about a very interesting passage in the introduction by Donald R. Howard. Here’s a good chunk of it, so you can see his argument:
“…To us the unity of a work ought to be “organic”—every part and element should have a function which contributes to one total response. Our own aesthetic predilections are most easily seen, perhaps, in architecture: a modern building is thought good if it seems of a piece, a single conception which can be grasped and felt from any vantage point. Details in such a design much be functional and “integral”, not decorative or extraneous. In the same way, our rhetoric is one of “logical” development, topic sentences, transitions, and beginning-middle-end organization. With respect to literature “organic unity” has been a major conception of criticism since the nineteenth century, and such an idea is reflected in book-trade jargon which seeks “development” and admires what “jells”. We prefer a work with “an idea” and tend to scorn what seems “unnecessary” or “unmotivated.” But it was not so in the Middle Ages.
The medievals admired detail, digression, and effulgence quite as much as they admired order. They liked details or images to have more than one possible meaning; they were not bothered but delighted by decorative detail which drew attention to itself; and they did not feel that details should be “consistent.” On the contrary, they painted realistic and sometimes lewd drawings in the margins of psalters and prayerbooks, covered their cathedrals with exquisite carvings often grotesque and earthy, and read romances whose intricate plots led the reader into mazes of happenstance. Their sense of order and structure involved hierarchy and multiplicity in a way that ours does not… “
Now, this is very intriguing. You have only to take the barest glimpse at medieval vernacular literature – those stories that people told each other – to find loose ends, plots resolved by happenstance or coincidence, subplots that are never resolved or details that seem to have nothing to do with anything. For a modern reader, these segues can be frustrating, and smack of the work being “incomplete”. But if this writer is correct, medieval people simply had a different idea of what made a good story.
That’s an incredible idea. We’re so sure of what makes a good story, that it’s hard to imagine anyone having a different view. What if there are different kinds of good stories? What if we could find some common ground between our ideas of good fiction and the medieval taste for multiplicity, digression, contrasting tones and mingled perspectives?
One way that I think we do echo this tendency is in the use of subplots, and in the use of point-of-view perspectives from secondary characters. Those elements do give a more dimensional view of the action of the story, but we’re pretty tough about those inclusions – they have to contribute directly to the development of the story, or they’re cut. I have the sense that medieval authors would leave them in place if they read well or were interesting or evocative, regardless of their contribution to the story overall.
What do you think? If you’ve read THE CANTERBURY TALES, THE DECAMERON, or any other medieval literature, what did you think of their style of storytelling? Would it drive you crazy to read a modern book with some plot threads left unresolved – or would you feel that you had a more realistic view of the story and the characters?
Deborah Cooke: Author 