Notes Toward an Article on Blogging and Reading

In a burst of creative/critical energy this morning, I decided to collect everything I have said about notable moments--on my original class blog, which is private, in a conference presentation I gave, in an article I wrote that was rejected, and on this blog--to prepare to shape them into one of the articles I've been avoiding.  I have a number of thoughts about the benefits of the notable moment post.  However, in the meantime I had a revelation about Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents...  I had latched onto Freud's idea that intellectual activity is beneficial because it helps us to stave off suffering, but I have decided that this is only the case when the intellectual activity itself is not the source of the suffering!

I get stuck on research.  When I research, I get lost in trying to be exhaustive, fighting the urge to completely disregard everything everyone else is saying because I'm saying something different anyway.  In the meantime, I become overwhelmed by the cacophany of voices who are not quite saying the same thing, and end up comvinced that I have nothing new to add to the conversation.  This is where I was at about 2 P.M. today, and I have not yet had the courage to look back at all of those open tabs of scholarly and non-scholarly sources discussing blogs and close reading.  The last time I researched blogs and education, I was ultimately rejected by an editor for not citing the right sources (which are pretty difficult to find, frankly).  Here is where not having anyone to ask "how's that article coming," and no real mentor from whom to seek advice really hurts me--because everyone who used to be a mentor has washed their hands of me, since I failed in finding an academic job that would lend intellectual community.  And because of that failing, I am doomed to continue to spiral into failure.  But enough of that.  Trying to lift myself out now!  

I wound up finding the outline I wrote last night, which goes something like this:

• What we think about reading on the internet

• What academics/teachers say about blogging

• Where close reading happens online

• How it can shape how we read

• How it can shape the way we teach

• How it can shape literary criticism

Perhaps if I stick to finding articles that can bolster each of these, I will not need to be terribly exhaustive in order to prove that I am saying something different.

In the meantime, at the end of the above outline was a second outline--this one a little more "conversational"--meant to be expanded into a book.  What I need to decide is who my audience would be, and why they would care...

Blogging the "Notable Moment"

It started with a class…

…and continued with a blog.

It happens on political blogs…

…and religious blogs…

…but is not typically a feature of book blogging…

…or online book reviews.

It can change the way we teach…

…and the way we interact with books.


It can change online literacy, or at least bring literary culture and reading online in a less shallow sort of way--don't you think?

Books that Define You/Me

There's a meme on Facebook that circulates about once a year--and like all Facebook memes, there are several versions--that asks what the 10 books (authors, songs, albums) that most influenced you.  You're supposed to list these off the top of your head without thinking too much about it so that you can tag your friends and keep the ball rolling, or whatever memes do.  This is is not really practical for someone like me, who tends to overthink things--and who doesn't simply read books, but ingests them, internalizes them--lives them.  When I came up with the list, it looked something like this:

1. The Little House Books (mostly The Long Winter and These Happy Golden Years) by Laura Ingalls Wilder
2. The Chronicles of Narnia (mostly The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, The Last Battle, and The Magician's Nephew)
3. The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley
4. The Vampire Lestat by Anne Rice
5. The Odyssey by Homer
6. The Inferno by Dante Alighieri
7. The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien
8. Victorian People and Ideas by Richard Altick
9. Dreamers of Decadence by Philippe Jullian
10. Orality and Literacy by Walter Ong

My Facebook list looked a little different, as I had forgotten #4, and couldn't come up with another to take its place.  I had to scramble a little for #8, #9, and #10, which were all influential nonfiction.  But fiction was what defined me at various points in my life.

In fact, #1, #2, #3, #4, and #7 were all on the list because I read them more times than I know--and the list is in rough chronological order.  I read Little House on the Prairie in 3rd grade, and perhaps the following year, I got the boxed set of books, and read them voraciously for the next several years.  I remember specifically brining the books to school each day in 4th, 5th and 6th grades, and reading one of the books in a single day.  The Long Winter and These Happy Golden Years became worn from being read over and over, more than the rest--the former because it was an amazing tale of endurance, the latter because it was a portrait of growing up.

When I was in 6th grade, I attended a Christian school for part of the year because my mother had a job there, and at one point, the librarian, impressed with my appetite for books, and recognizing my resistance to "girl books" like Sweet Valley High and The Babysitters Club, or books about animals, directed me to the Chronicles of Narnia.  I was in love.  I read all but The Magician's Nephew while I was at the school--repeatedly.  When I returned to my public elementary school that same year, I bought The Magician's Nephew from Scholastic.  Years later, when I was 15, I worked as a camp counselor of sorts at Camp-of-the-Woods in Upstate New York, and I was able to buy my own set from their bookstore.  They fell apart almost immediately, and I wrote HarperCollins for a refund of the $40+ that they had cost.  The following year, it began to click for me that they were not simply fantasy, but Christian allegory--and so began my disillusionment wiht the Chronicles, and in a way, with Christianity (a symptom, also, of the particular type of Christianity I encountered at Camp-of-the-Woods, the superficiality, the compulsory nature of faith, and the loneliness....)  The books remained with me for a long time, as I learned more about Lewis, wrestled with his Christian identity, his adpotion by the evangelicals who made me feel alienated from Christianity, and his curious and often disturbing biography....  But even so, they stayed close as the more I read, the more I understood Lewis's influences, allusions, and techniques.  By the time I entered my M.A. program, I wanted to "redeem" The Chronicles of Narnia from those who would dismiss them on the basis of their Christianity.  My first graduate paper, my first abstract, and, consequently, my first article and my M.A. thesis came from that impulse.  From rereading, I was able to see exactly how to make a complex argument about how to read the books.  I squeezed another conference paper out of the Chronicles as well.  And this is what books should do--stay with us, grow with us, and lend themselves in some way to our intellectual or spiritual development.  My daughter has started reading The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, though she might be a little young to get through it on her own.  Someday, I'm sure I will reread them again.

The first non-children's lit--although it might justifiably be called"adult"--novel on the list is The Mists of Avalon--I credit--or blame--a high school English teacher for introducing it.  It's about a million pages long--longer than any of the Outlander books, for certain.  And sort of a poisonous, intoxicating book for a young woman/girl, disenchanted with Christianity, and sexually curious.  I read it probably ten times over the years, and fashioned myself into Morgaine--Bradley's version of Morgan le Fay.  For me, it epitomizes a "dangerous book"--I might say more about that one day soon, as I am currently rereading it--20 years later--to find out what my younger self found so captivating.  And really?  It is still captivating.  And I have found that the little bit of serious fiction I have written is heavily influenced by Marion Zimmer Bradley's tale, but perhaps I'll return to that in another post.

I may or may not have read The Vampire Lestat before The Mists of Avalon.  Or it might have been the same time.  It is the second of Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles.  At the time, she had written up to The Queen of the Damned, and by the time The Tale of the Body Thief was written, I was disenchanted.  I read them out of order, so I worshipped Lestat and hated Louis--narrator of Interview with a Vampire--which is not what is supposed to happen.  Rice's vampires showed me an agnostic vision, at best, and a homoerotic one, and I dwelt there for a while, idealizing something I could never know.

I would think it odd that I did not find another book that I could reread and live in for many years, but as an undergraduate, I was a poet.  Then, as a new mother at 20, and in graduate school, I simply didn't have the time.  The Odyssey was influential intellectually as my introduction to Orality-Literacy theory, while the Inferno started tipping me toward Catholicism.  The next on the list was Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, and in a very short time, I read it as many times as some of the others.  As the first book I "lived in" as an adult, and a new Catholic, I found a lot of ways to work out ideas in The Lord of the Rings.  It refreshed my spirit, much like the story Lucy read in the magician's house in Voyage of the Dawn Treader--and I was able to share it with my husband as well.

So as I'm rereading--and reliving--The Mists of Avalon, and wondering what thoughts it will yield about books, about my former self, and about ideas that I could not have seen in the novel 20 years ago--I want to ask you--and consider it a tag:  what books have defined you?  What books have you read again and again, and lived in, so that they shaped the person you were, or who you would become?  Because a book can do that--it's the beauty of books, and also what makes them feared (the missing narrative of banned books week, present in dystopian literature).

Comment, blog about your books, and if you would, link back and leave a comment!  Happy reading.

The Question of Literacy in The Hunger Games (Pt. 3): Scripted or Unscripted?

Continued from Pt. 2

It is Catching Fire that introduces the reader to one of the grand literacy themes in the Hunger Games trilogy, which can be best summed up in the question:  scripted or unscripted?  Up to this point, we have become acquaited with the artiface of the capital in The Hunger Games, and we have learned, in particular, of the artiface of the games, which require the tributes to play to the audience, deliberately providing the grand entertainment in order to have their efforts to engage the Capital rewarded in the form of help in the arena as the citizens throw support behind their favorite tribute by buying gifts to help that tribute survive.  However, the artificiality very deliberately does not translate into something that is scripted.  Unlike in Brave New World, in which the "feelies" are scripted (by such as Helmholz Watson), the entertainment in the capital seems reality-based, like the games.  Other events in support of the games are televised, including, significantly, interviews with Caesar Flickerman, which are not scripted, but are the result of coaching from the District mentor and Effie Trinket (in the case of Disctrict 12), who is a kind of escort to the tributes.

That entertainment is artificial, but not script-based does not seem to have much to do with literacy--after all, we have reality television, and though the games are extreme, there is an element of familiarity to the genre of television portrayed.  It is in Catching Fire, when Peeta and Katniss are given scripts, and when Katniss tries to write for herself a memorial of Rue that the script--or lack thereof--becomes important.  During the victory tour, Peeta and Katniss are expected to follow a set routine, which Katniss describes:

Peeta and I will be introduced, the mayor of 11 will read a speech in our honor, and we’ll respond with a scripted thank-you provided by the Capitol. If a victor had any special allies among the dead tributes, it is considered good form to add a few personal comments as well. 

Her dilemma is that though she knows she should add a personal statement about Rue and Thresh,  she faces what one of my English teachers in high school would call the "tyrrany of the blank page":  "every time I tried to write it at home, I ended up with a blank paper staring me in the face."  (56-57).  However, as the narrative stresses over and over, Katniss cannot perform by creating or recreating context in her mind alone.  She can not fool herself into acting--or in this case, writing--as if the contrived or imagined situation is real.  By contrast, she is able to deliver a speech to District 11, following Peeta's gift of one month of their winnings every year--once she is actually present in the moment:

“Wait, please.” I don’t know how to start, but once I do, the words rush from my lips as if they’ve been forming in the back of my mind for a long time. “I want to give my thanks to the tributes of District Eleven,” I say. I look at the pair of women on Thresh’s side. “I only ever spoke to Thresh one time. Just long enough for him to spare my life. I didn’t know him, but I always respected him. For his power. For his refusal to play the Games on anyone’s terms but his own. The Careers wanted him to team up with them from the beginning, but he wouldn’t do it. I respected him for that."  

. . .  

I turn to Rue’s family. “But I feel as if I did know Rue, and she’ll always be with me. Everything beautiful brings her to mind. I see her in the yellow flowers that grow in the Meadow by my house. I see her in the mockingjays that sing in the trees. But most of all, I see her in my sister, Prim.” My voice is undependable, but I am almost finished. “Thank you for your children.” I raise my chin to address the crowd. “And thank you all for the bread.” (60-61)

Katniss's struggles with writing her feelings, contrasted with her ability to speak in context, stresses one of the essential properties of writing.  It is decontextualized.  Usually, this observation is made of writing itself--that it is, as Walter Ong noted, "separate from the human life-world."  The book is decontextualized; the reader has to recreate the context from the available clues.  However, the writer is often separate from the context as well.  Katniss's difficulty stems from that decontextualization, and recalls Wordsworth's description of poetry as the "spontaneous overflow of powerful emotion recollected in tranqility."  Clearly, Katniss is not a poet, since even when she feels "powerful emotion," her recollections, which cannot really be said to take place "in tranquility," do not translate into words.

When the Quarter Quell is announced, and Peeta and Katniss are reaped and then, without being allowed to say goodbye, taken to the Capital, Katniss actually muses on the limitations of literacy, and specifically, its removal from the immediacy of real life as it is happening:

I sit on the bed, knowing I will never write those letters.  They will be like the speech I tried to write to honor Rue and Thresh in District 11. Things seemed clear in my head and even when I talked before the crowd, but the words never came out of the pen right. Besides, they were meant to go with embraces and kisses and a stroke of Prim’s hair, a caress of Gale’s face, a squeeze of Madge’s hand. They cannot be delivered with a wooden box containing my cold, stiff body.  (188-189)

Writing lacks immediacy; it is decontextualized, cold and impersonal.

Although Katniss can conjure words when she is moved, Peeta is represented in the novel as being particularly good with words, particularly as compared to Katniss, and by Katniss in particular.  The difference is that Peeta is able to perform on command, to play to a crowd, and that he can lie--he can "make anyone believe anything" (346).  In short, Peeta has a natural gift for rhetoric.  Nevertheless, on the victory tour, he is also scripted, with a speech prepared by the Capital.  In Distrct 11, he deviates:

Peeta had his personal comments written on a card, but he doesn’t pull it out. Instead he speaks in his simple, winning style about Thresh and Rue making it to the final eight, about how they both kept me alive — thereby keeping him alive — and about how this is a debt we can never repay. And then he hesitates before adding something that wasn’t written on the card. Maybe because he thought Effie might make him remove it.  (59)

Peeta's addition is the offer of one month of their winnings each year, which prepares the way for Katniss's speech, which in turn incites defiance in District 11.  The result for Peeta and Katniss is that, seeing how easily they can cause a crisis, they resolve to stick to the script:

Listen to a speech in our honor. Give a thank-you speech in return, but only the one the Capitol gave us, never any personal additions now.  (71)

Katniss's commentary is telling, and reveals another weakness of writing:  it can be discovered, and censored.

There are a few other interesting literacy moments in Catching Fire:  Snow reading the card with the Quarter Quell challenge, supposedly written 75 years before, but clearly altered; Madge's access to capital newspapers by way of her father the Mayor of District 12;  Peeta making notes on the other victors, then tearing the pages of notes from his notebook of victors who were not reaped.  The idea of being scripted continues into Mockingjay--the artificiality of the Capital and Katniss's inability to conform to others' expectations is a major theme in the book, and the "Propos" in District 13 further develop the theme and help the reader to discover Katniss, and Katniss to discover herself.  The underlying point, however, is that literacy has limitations--not everyone can use it to their advantage, as Katniss certainly is unable to command written language.  Literacy is risky, since it can be discovered.  And if she can't be scripted, Katniss can't easily help the rebels by being their mouthpiece in Mockingjay.  Literacy carries very little power in the Hunger Games Trilogy.

What, then, is its power?  I think the answer is something much more akin to the power of Peeta's painting.

To be continued in Pt. 4

The Question of Literacy in The Hunger Games (Pt. 2): Snow as Literate Dictator

Continued from Pt. 1

So where is literacy in the Hunger Games?  It is clear that the people of Panem are literate.  There is education in all of the districts, though Katniss gives a hint of what that schooling is like:  in District 12, everything is coal-related.  I imagine their curriculum being like Abeka books for homeschooling, in which everything is Biblical.  The math problems are about tithing.  In my mind, I substitute coal-related word problems for District 12.  The history of Panem is included for purposes of indoctrination--to make certain that the school children grow up knowing their inferior position in relation to the Capital.  And while limited information is given about the districts, it is not information that conveys the reality, as Katniss discovers when she visits the vast, firmly controlled District 11 during the victory tour.

There is a very small, isolated example of literacy in The Hunger Games (the novel rather than the series) that I am choosing to ignore for the moment.  It is both utilitarian and heartening.  It demonstrates both the ability to read and command of writing, and how those things relate--in a tangible way--to the ability to cope.  But I plan to come back to it because it is easy to miss the importance when reading the first novel.

Let me, instead, jump into Catching Fire.  There are a couple of very striking references to literacy in the beginning of the novel.  I am still double-checking, but I think that there are only two books in the entire Hunger Games trilogy, and one of them is wielded by President Snow.  When he visits Katniss in order to intimidate her into helping him to pacify the districts, Snow is reading a book.  "He holds up a finger as if to say, 'Give me a moment'" (17).  Katniss is expected, so she does not surprise him in the act of reading.  Reading is either something he routinely does to pass the time, or it is a pose, indicating his relative importance.  After all, he has to finish his reading before addressing her.  Or perhaps simply possessing a book indicates his relative importance, since we are not told that the house in Victory Village has books.  This is the single time that someone is shown reading in such a way that attention is drawn to the act of reading--the deliberateness of the act of reading--and to the book itself without any indication of the subject or purpose of the book. (Perhaps if the Slate article that uses statistics as a substitute for analysis looked up occurrances of the word "book," it would have been useful!)  The book itself becomes an object of note in the scene.  Although we lose sight of it in the exchange between Katniss and Snow, he "places his book on the corner of the desk" when Katniss's mother brings tea (22).  When he leaves, he "retrieves his book."

One of two books mentioned specificially in the entire series (if I find another, I'll blog it--I promise!), and we don't know anything about the book.  The book must, then, tell us something about the reader, just by its very presense.  We know very little about Snow, but we know that he wants to be seen reading.  A book accompanies him, whether he reads it or not.  This is very little to go on, but it does call to mind another--perhaps more benign--dystopian dictator, Mustapha Mond in Brave New World.   Apart from the fact that the populace tends only toward context-specific, utilitarian literacy, and the dehumanization common to all dystopias, the societies of the two works are vastly different.  The only similarities between the governments are the desire to keep order and the presence of a single president.  In the case of Brave New World, the president is Mustapha Mond--the only character in the novel who is, in fact, highly literate, possessing both the ability to read and process at a high level, and also the access to books and knowledge gained from books.  He can read them because he has chosen to value order above ideas; in widespread literacy, he sees the dangers of disorder. In higher-level literacy, he sees the potential for competition between the most intelligent citizens.  In Brave New World, the reader is given these insights when Helmholtz Watson discusses these things with Mond--before being banished because he strives for greater art than his society can provide, or finds useful and safe.  In the Hunger Games, we are given no such insights because Katniss is given no such insights.  Snow is not so forthcoming, and literacy is not an obvious primary concern in the novels.  However, by placing a book in the hand of President Snow, against the backdrop of a functionally-literate society lacking in literary pursuits, or the opportunity to pursue reading and writing for pleasure, the novels are setting up an image of a dictator who is, perhaps, highly literate--perhaps the only highly literate member of the society.  It is not too difficult to imagine Snow as controlling all literacy--whether for pleasure or for a purpose--to his own ends, since he certainly controls all information.  In addition, his use of the book is deliberately calculating.  He reads it in order to show his ease; he will not be called out of it until he is ready.  Even in this, higher-level literacy makes one calculating.  And it is hardly a leap to say that this is a man who lives in his own mind.

In a narrative that is not only told by a single character, but by a character whose perspective is limited by her own tendency to live in the moment, by her own lack of introspection, and by her own lack of importance (she does not merit the kind of talk that Helmholtz Watson gets as high-level Alpha in Brave New World), a book--even one without a title--says something about a character who wields it.  It also says something about the link between literacy and power.  Those who have literacy have power.  Those without power have more limited literacy--or perhaps those with more limited literacy have limited power.  Culturally, we no longer question what the specific link is between literacy and power, because it is almost a trusim that literacy empowers.  What the actual link is between literacy and power is discussed most often in reference to new media, which gives a venue to basically whomever wants one and is willing to court an audience.

Might there be an underlying distrust of literacy in the Hunger Games?  Literacy is not, in fact, the means to undermining the society.  Action--often unpremeditated--seems to assume that role.  Snow's use of the book actually suggests literacy as a cloak for insecurity--a guise of control rather than control itself.  Literacy has an important higher-order function in the novels (TBA).  But it is not intimately connected to maintaining political power.

After all, we don't even know what book Snow is reading.

To be continued in Pt. 3

The Question of Literacy in The Hunger Games (Pt. 1)

It's been a while since my Hunger Games posts, but after seeing Catching Fire last night (it was good; go see it!), and after reading an essay on Neville Longbottom that typifies the kind of literary criticism I want to do, I want to return to my final commentary on the Hunger Games trilogy.

The topic here is literacy, and originally I saved it until last because at first glance, there doesn't seem to be much to say about literacy.  But that, in itself, is highly significant in children's and young adult literature, genres which never quite get themselves away from asserting the importance and significance of reading.  It's as if they're still aware that their primary audience is in school, and might need encouragement to read.  With female protagonists in particular, it is a sort of young adult trope (since Anne Shirley, perhaps--or maybe Jane Austen or Jane Eyre) that the female character is unusual for being a reader, and consequently for being introspective.  But the primary reason that I think writers who stress the importance of reading do so is because writers tend to be readers, and so they are fully aware of the benefits and joys of reading in their own lives, and want to share these with their own readers--much as I do.  It is also always in a writer's best interest to stress the importance of reading, is it not?  So when a young adult author seems to neglect this message, it can register as significant, particularly when the heroine is neither introspective, nor a reader.

The other reason an absence of literacy is suspicious and worthy of further investigation is that Hunger Games portrays a dystopia.  And like utopian literature, dystopian literature always treats literacy in some way.  I need to double check C. S. Lewis's That Hideous Strength, but science rather than government is the primary danger in that novel, which calls into question whether or not it is a dystopia--but that is a different topic entirely.  Take the two most prominent examples:  1984 and Brave New World.  In both cases, literacy is strictly regulated if not forbidden outright, because ideas derived from reading pose a thread to the State.  In both cases, this fact is played out in the text.  Not so in the Hunger Games.  Why?  And where is literacy?

Well, let's look at the first question first.  The question of Katniss.  I have said before that as a character, I was not drawn to identify with her.  I did come to admire her, for some of the same reasons the other sympathetic characters admired her--her strength, her loyalty, her ability to act, often without thinking.  One of the reasons that I was not drawn to her is that I felt, as a reader, like I was kept at arm's length by the narrative voice.  She is not an introspective character.  In fact, we get the action as it happens.  There is no reflection in part because the narrative forbids it--it is first person present tense.  But as the story progresses, this becomes more natural. Katniss doesn't ruminate.  She's not that kind of personality.  But what if she did?

Returning for a moment to the character of Anne Shirley--it has been decades since I read Anne of Green Gables and Anne of Avonlea, and I didn't particularly like her character.  But she typifies, first, the slightly odd literate heroine--perhaps a bit more odd than some, since authors seem to be trying to make the reading heroine seem unique, special, normal, and popular all at the same time.  I'm thinking here of Cassandra Clare's Tessa Grey in her Infernal Devices series, who, we are told, is very unique, interesting, and bookish, but who is actually just an empty brown-haired shell who likes books; the books supply the personality, in fact.  But Jo March is another slightly odd literate female protagonist... and the list goes on...  So Anne of Green Gables thinks and dreams about everything.  In some ways, she is a female Don Quijote.  She thinks about everything because she has read, and read, and read, and because she sees herself as living her own story, akin to the story in a book.  And sometimes, for fear of what will happen next in her story, she becomes paralyzed, and unable to act.  This typifies a character who is not only literate, but hyper-literate.  A character for whom life is something to ponder, and to analyze, and in some ways, to construct.  Such characters are also highly self-conscious.  Early twentieth-century British literature has notable examples:  J. Alfred Prufrock.  Gabriel Conroy in "The Dead."  They are dreamers and ponderers--over-thinkers, and they don't function terribly well in the real world.  Both of those examples are men, as is Don Quijote.  Looking back to Jane Austen, you have Mary Anne Dashwood the Romantic.  While literate, Margaret Dashwood is more practical, as is Jane Eyre.  When constrained by their social situation, it was perhaps difficult for female characters to be swept into inaction by introspection as the men were, or as Ane Shirley is; however, novels were often described as dangerous for other reasons, as in Louisa May Alcott's works, in which they were potentially a path to immorality for boys and girls.

This little survey is meant to illustrate that for a female (or male) protagonist, reading about life tends to skew one's impression of life, and to cause one to analyze, ruminate, and philosophize about the meaning of life, sometimes to the point of inaction.  Immediately, it should become clear that Katniss cannot operate in the typical mode of a highly literate or hyper-literate character.  Her circumstances require quick and decisive action.  She is strategic, so there is no quesiton as to her intelligence.  And she is capable of analysis, but not for the sheer sake of analysis.  Analysis, for her, is a means to an end--to the specific end of deciding what to do next in order to survive.  Survivial is her life, so in a way, she doesn't have time to read for its own sake--for pleasure, or for the development of her mind.  And in a very real sense, because she has to survive, she doesn't necessarily want to analyze, to philosophize, and to ruminate, either on the purpose of her existence, on her past experiences, or on what she has to do to survive.  She doesn't want to analyze the situation in District 12.  Literacy doesn't offer a path for improvement.  She doesn't want to kill the other tributes, but she has to.  So she does what she can to keep herself from analyzing the problem of the Games. They are inescapable.  It won't help her to dwell on them.  And caught up in the problem of survival, there is neither the need to consume art, nor the leisure to create it.

Having said this, Katniss is literate.  She and Prim go to school.  Like the castes in Brave New World, their education is utilitarian and appropriate to their district's particular trade.  But literacy neither defines her nor helps her.  It is a very minor, utilitarian part of her life--for the most part.

To be continued in Pt. 2

The Pensieve as Literacy Magic

In The Goblet of Fire, J. K. Rowling introduces a very interesting device, the Pensieve.  Harry, while waiting for Professor Dumbledore to return to his office, is attracted by the glow of the silver strands of memory in the stone bowl, and unwittingly plunges into three of Dumbledore's memories--memories that have significance for the mysterious events involving Barty Crouch.  When Harry is recalled by Dumbledore to the present, he asks Dumbledore what the Pensieve is. Dumbledore's explanation runs as follows:

"This? It is called a Pensieve," said Dumbledore.  "I sometimes find, and I am sure you know the feeling, that I simply have too many thoughts and memories crammed into my mind."

[.....]

"At these times," said Dumbledore, indicating the stone basin, "I use the Pensieve.  One simply siphons the excess thoughts from one's mind, pours them into the basin, and examines them at one's leisure.  It becomes easier to spot patterns and links, you understand, when they are in this form." (596)

 The Pensieve proves to be an extremely useful device from a narrative perspective--it provides instant flashbacks, and gives a character who is not a participant in a memory access to that memory from the perspective of the person who was there.  Thus, the author is able to fill in a lot of gaps and give a character (Harry) the tools to figure out the puzzle and unravel the mystery--and of all of the novels, Goblet of Fire has a plot that is most like a mystery (well, ONE of its plots--there are a few).

But when I refer to the Pensieve, I refer to it as "Literacy" magic, not "Literary," magic.  So its function as a plot- and flashback-enabling device is not what I have in mind.  Rather, the Pensieve, in the story--in Dumbledore's description--in the wizarding world (we're suspending our disbelief now) functions rather like writing, and registers as symbolic of written accounts of thoughts (and, to a lesser extent, dreams).

Now, writing the above, it occurs to me that Harry has, in fact, gone into Dumbledore's office in order to tell Dumbledore about a dream.  Meanwhile, he becomes absorbed in the thoughts that Dumbledore siphoned out of his head in order to be able to look at them more clearly (perhaps objectively?) and to make connections.  Considering that Freud's method of dream analysis relied heavily on analysis of written accounts of the dream--whether written by the dreamer (often himself) after waking from the dream, or written down by a second party (himself) while the dreamer recounted them verbally--having Harry's quest to tell Dumbledore his dreams interrupted by the Penseive becomes somewhat more interesting.  According to the model that Freud provides in The Interpretation of Dreams (or perhaps a different/shorter work on the subject?), dream analysis in fact looks much more like close reading than like the typical model of patient on the couch and psychiatrist in the chair.  Had Harry written his dream instead of rushing to Dumbledore's office to wait, he might have had a fuller account of the dream as well as a text to analyze, though his written accound would be mediated by the choices he made as a writer--which would arguably be different than his choices if providing a verbal account.  Freud saw significance in the representation of the dream in language; the Pensieve, however, keeps the memory contained in a nonwritten, verbal state.  The extra layers of consciousness that go into writing a dream or memory do not create that overlayer, and the immediacy of the perceotion remains unmediated by the deliberate processes of inscription and the thought processes involved in forming the perceptions into words and sentences.

Nevertheless, for all of its immediacy, the Pensieve is like written language because, lacking a magical device to record memory as it actually happened, and to frame it without the application of additional layers of language and conscious thought, the tool we have to record memory is, in fact, writing.  And writing functions, according to Walter Ong (and other literacy theorists, like Goody, whom he quotes), in much the same way as a Pensieve in Goblet of Fire and future books:

"Texts are think-like, immobilized in visual space, and subject to what Goody calls 'backward scanning.'" (Ong 97)

Here's a nice summary of the concept:

Goody (1977) explains that writing transforms speech by abstracting its components. Words in written texts are more "thing-like" (Ong, 1982, p. 97). Their meaning can be looked up in other written texts and do not require direct ratification through interpersonal situations. Written texts enable backward-scanning of thought to make corrections and resolve inconsistencies. This self-analysis or criticism is inhibited by face-to-face communication in oral cultures. 

Writing enables both the recording and the dissecting of verbal utterance. Literate cultures have permanent records of past thought which can be compared and questioned skeptically. Such skepticism enables the building and testing of alternative explanations of knowledge. In ancient Greece, the shift from oral to literate thought processes resulted in the "logical, specialized, and cumulative intellectual tradition" of Plato. (Goody and Watt, 1968, pp. 68-69)

So looking back over things and being able to make connections and draw conclusions is a consequence of literacy, according to the foundational 20th century theorists.  It is the permanence and fixity of the written word--the knowledge that it will not change from one reading to the next--that allows us to refer back to what we read earlier at a later date, when some new idea occurs to us, or when some new data presents itself to us, or when we grow in knowledge or understanding.  (And this, incidentally, is why I reread--and reread--and reread.  The book does not change.  But I do.  And the situation of reading does as well.)  

The Pensieve has all of this as well--without the mediation of written language, which can distort the actual memory.  Memories can be modified and distorted, as we realize in The Half-Blood Prince, but in general, they are not mediated by the conscious process of writing.  In Goblet of Fire, the Pensieve shows memories.  They can be replayed and examined.  They do not change because rather than being subject to retelling, they are direct and permanent records of the event as it was received by the mind of the person who experienced it. So like writing--only better.

But I still don't like the name Penseive.  Too punny.

Close Reading on the Web

This blog has become, more or less, an excercise in close reading--which suits me just fine, because it's what I enjoy the most!  However, I do see myself as being somewhat outside of internet book culture because, with few exceptions, I avoid book reviews.  I also tend to write critically--not only in terms of exercising "critical thinking" and having a "critical eye," but also by being somewhat negative.  By offering critique.  By saying what I see as being wrong with a book.  And this is something that many book bloggers avoid or sugar coat.  I think it's part of the culture.

This is how I do close reading, although most of the time my close reading has more to do with interpretation and analysis, discourse and association.  At least, I think so.  I haven't been told otherwise--yet!  But what I'm wondering is. . .  where else is Close Reading happening on the web in general, and on blogs in particular?  Book reviews are not close reading.  They can't be!  Their goal is to give an overview and promote the book (usually)--or else not so  much.

I will actually be presenting a paper in September on the "close reading" method of blogging, because I know it's out there.  I can't see that anyone has labeled it as such, but I've seen it in political and religious contexts, when a blogger focuses very closely on words and phrasing in order to reach a fuller understanding, as in Melanie's Waste Land and Nicene Creed projects, or in order to argue for a particular point or interpretation.  I have also seen it in Ann Althouse's Great Gatsby Project, which must be getting an absurd number of hits since the movie re-adaptation (and here's Althouse getting indignant about her idea--*sigh*).

So I will be gathering some data on this particular topic, and if I find anything interesting, I'll share.  It's good practice and good accountability!  Because you know.  I might be writing the conference paper in the hotel otherwise...

And please--if you find any examples of close reading, no matter what the context (well, okay, I do have some limits, but I don't think my readership will take it there...), please leave a comment and link and tell me about it!

A Literacy Moment: Courtesy of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

Every now and then, I come across a literacy moment that is too good to simply gloss over while reading.  I may not have something specific to say about it, but as the moments accumulate, a pattern might emerge.  I have been re-reading the Harry Potter books from the beginning--slowly, and without a particular purpose--and I cam across this little gem, well-worth sharing!:

     "Dangerous?" said Harry, laughing.  "Come off it, how could it be dangerous?"
     "You'd be surprised," said Ron, who was looking apprehensively at the book.  "Some of the books the Ministry's confiscated--Dad's told me--there was one that burned your eyes out.  And everyone who read Sonnets of a SOrcerer spoke in limericks for the rest of their lives.  And some old witch in Bath had a book that you could never stop reading!  You just had to wander aroud with your nose in it, trying to do everything one-handed.  And--"
     "All right, I've got the point," said Harry.  (230-231)

And it is, in fact, a dangerous book capable of posession, definitely representative of a sort of subtext in Harry Potter about the dangers of books--an interesting subtexts, given some parental fears about the series, and also given their genre (children's lit first, school story second).  The subtext is also interesting because literacy is literally everywhere in the novels.  And where there is literacy, apparently, one will find dangerous books.  That burn out your eyes.  Or make you wish your eyes had been burned out, most likely!

Why I like The Hunger Games (Pt 2): Katniss

Starting with the main character is as good a place as any, and is perhaps an obvious place to start.  But let me say that I'm not in love with Katniss.  I don't relate to her particularly well, and I think that the first-person, present-tense narrative keeps the reader at arm's length in a counter-intuitive sort of way, preventing the reader from getting in her head.  But all of this is why the construction of her character is so intriguing to me.

First, her personality.  I have this one figured out.  She's an ISTJ to my INFP.  From Wikipedia:

ISTJs are faithful, logical, organized, sensible, and earnest traditionalists who enjoy keeping their lives and environments well-regulated. Typically reserved and serious individuals, they earn success through their thoroughness and extraordinary dependability. They are capable of shutting out distractions in order to take a practical, logical approach to their endeavors, and are able to make the tough decisions that other types avoid. Realistic and responsible, ISTJs are often seen as worker bees striving steadily toward their goals. They take special joy in maintaining institutions and are often highly religious. Despite their dependability and good intentions, however, ISTJs can experience difficulty in understanding and responding to the emotional needs of others. 

Although they often focus on their internal world, ISTJs prefer dealing with the present and the factual. They are detail-oriented and weigh various options when making decisions, although they generally stick to the conventional. ISTJs are well-prepared for eventualities and have a good understanding of most situations. They believe in practical objectives, and they value traditions and loyalty.

If I am slightly uncomfortable with analyzing a character according to the Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator, I am buoyed by Freudian analyses of characters, and by the very fact that, in this particular case, it makes so much sense!

So what does this mean?  In terms of the narrative voice, the emphasis in the ISTJ description on "the present and the factual" in conjunction with focus on the individual's "internal world" justifies the slightly irritating first person, present tense narration.  In fact, it's a little too neatly packaged. In terms of audience engagement, and I can only speak for myself, we have a character who is opposite from me in every possible way--except introversion.  So having figured out intuitively (INFP) why I can't find myself in the character, suddenly I can see it in concrete terms. Katniss resists introspection.  An INFP would reflect back--almost incessantly.  Katniss lives in her mind, but in the moment.  For whatever reason--personality or circumstances--she easily leaves the past behind (at least, when she is operating from her conscious mind--and trauma notwithstanding).  She is living in the moment--because she has to.  And because she lives in the moment, she survives--or, because she is a survivor, she knows to live in the moment.

Katniss is not a reader.  Literacy does not figure prominently into The Hunger Games (more on this later), but even in its absence, literacy is conspicuous.  In the children's/young adult genre, female characters are readers.  In the development of female characters, there seems to be an unspoken, unwritten, but understood rule that girls need smart characters who read to teach them that reading and being smart are okay.  The exceptional, very bright, slightly odd, female reader is such a commonplace motif as to make claims to the exceptionality of such a character hollow.  Consider, for example, the very mundane female protagonist of Cassandra Clare's Infernal Devices series.  Every now and then, the narrative shows Tessa with a book to remind the reader that her literacy is one of her distinguishing features, when otherwise, she is pretty bland.  So Katniss's very difference from these supposedly extraordinary female characters is refreshing.

So why do I like Katniss?

Although I am not particularly engaged by being able to relate to Katniss's personality--so different from my own--my own personality type causes me to read empathetically (I'm hammering the Meyers-Briggs, but it's sort of fun from a "rhetoric of reading" standpoint, because it can explain, to an extent, why certain readers engage with texts and characters the way we do!)  So I am sympathetic to Katniss's circumstances, and more sympathetic to her manipulation by those around her, when that comes to light in Catching Fire.  In fact, it was while reading Catching Fire that I really started to like the books and Katniss's character.

It is easy to understand Katniss's motivations, given what the reader knows about her character and her circumstances.  She is exactly what she should be, given what the reader knows.  And as a reader, I don't like to be unfairly manipulated by an author into feeling something I don't want to feel (as in The Giver), or thinking something that is untrue.  Katniss is satisfyingly well-constructed as a character.  And above all, what is predictable are her convictions.  There is a moment in book 3 when she votes in favor of "one last Hunger Games," and I wonder, as a reader, if this is an inconsistency in her character.  But then, I wonder whether that vote is sincere given the subsequent turn of events.

It her predictability (another ISTJ quality) as enacted in the novels that makes her vulnerable to manipulation--and having one's values subject one to manipulation is something an INFP can understand.  So there's a connection after all.  As a person of action rather than contemplation, Katniss acts from her convictions.  When she acts, she makes it count, as in volunteering for Prim in the Hunger Games, or survival in the games themselves.  Haymitch recognizes this trait throughout, and uses it for various purposes--most notably the revolutionary propaganda in book 3.

But finally, I come back to that narrative voice.  When the author's choice of a technique is so obvious as to register as a little bit wrong, there should be a definite reason for drawing attention to that choice.  I learned this from Robert Browning's verse, though Robert Frost has moments as well (Something there is that doesn't love a wall - one of the clunkiest lines in iambic pentameter).  As she moves through the events of the three novels, Katniss resists contemplation, even as she tries to work out what's happening to her.  She focuses on details rather than abstract concepts.  The narrative reinforces the sense of moving forward rather than looking backward, and does not give the reader advantages over the character's self-awareness, or lack thereof.  Rather, the reader experiences how baffling it is to be living one's own coming-of-age.  I can't speak to how it would have been to read this as a young adult.  I likely would have been more frustrated by the lack of introspection, because I wanted to figure out what was happening, or what had happened, and theorize about it.  I still do.  But looking at The Hunger Games, I can read the narrative, and live with the character, and think--yeah, it was exactly like that.  So at the end of the day, Katniss's narrative feels authentic.  And so does she.

Voyager: More Archival Research and Literacy Clues...

In Voyager, literacy provides the final proof to validate Claire's time travel story, the deed of sasine that ceded Lallybroch to Jamie's nephew, Jamie.   It is by using the deed as a handwriting sample that they are finally able to determine his whereabouts 20 years later.  The narrative provides a good dramatization of the detective work that goes into historical scholarship:

     I stared at the scrawling letters, browned with age. They were written by someone of difficult penmanship, here cramped and there sprawling, with exaggerated loops on “g” and “y.” Perhaps the writing of a left-handed man, who wrote most painfully with his right hand.
     “See, here’s the published version.” Roger brought the opened folio to the desk and laid it before me, pointing. “See the date? It’s 1765, and it matches this handwritten manuscript almost exactly; only a few of the marginal notes aren’t included.”
     “Yes,” I said. “And the deed of sasine  …”
     “Here it is.” Brianna fumbled hastily in the top drawer and pulled out a much crumpled paper, likewise encased in protective plastic. Protection here was even more after the fact than with the manuscript; the paper was rain-spattered, filthy and torn, many of the words blurred beyond recognition. But the three signatures at the bottom still showed plainly.
     By my hand, read the difficult writing, here executed with such care that only the exaggerated loop of the “y” showed its kinship with the careless manuscript, James Alexander Malcolm MacKenzie Fraser. And below, the two lines where the witnesses had signed. In a thin, fine script, Murtagh FitzGibbons Fraser, and, below that, in my own large, round hand, Claire Beauchamp Fraser. 

Interestingly, the literacy that has created the paper trail also provides evidence of the writing process:

     “See?” she said, twenty minutes later, as I bent over the desk in the manse’s study. On the battered surface of the late Reverend Wakefield’s desk lay a sheaf of yellowed papers, foxed and browned at the edges. They were carefully enclosed in protective plastic covers now, but obviously had been carelessly used at one time; the edges were tattered, one sheet was torn roughly in half, and all the sheets had notes and annotations scribbled in the margins and inserted in the text. This was obviously someone’s rough draft— of something.
     “It’s the text of an article,” Roger told me, shuffling through a pile of huge folio volumes that lay on the sofa. “It was published in a sort of journal called Forrester’s, put out by a printer called Alexander Malcolm, in Edinburgh, in 1765.” I swallowed, my shirtwaist dress feeling suddenly too tight under the arms; 1765 was almost twenty years past the time when I had left Jamie.

Jamie has entered into a literacy-based profession, though one that is also political.  As a writer and a printer, he achieves immortality of a sort, and is hence able to be traced.  As a former scholar, a former literacy scholar, and the wife of an archivist who works with early printing, this is a gratifying testimony to the power of the printed word.

For a scholar, or an archivist, the power and the value are intellectual rather than tangible.  We believe in access, and we believe in the knowledge that the written word preserves and provides.  But as a time travel novel, Voyager makes the power and value more tangible by way of Claire's reaction--and, indeed, the reaction of those who believe in her story:

     I sat down quite suddenly, putting my hand over the document instinctively, as though to deny its reality.
     “That’s it, isn’t it?” said Roger quietly. His outward composure was belied by his hands, trembling slightly as he lifted the stack of manuscript pages to set them next to the deed. “You signed it. Proof positive— if we needed it,” he added, with a quick glance at Bree.
     She shook her head, letting her hair fall down to hide her face. They didn’t need it, either of them.

Nevertheless, the narrative stresses the tangibility of the written word:

     Still, having it all laid out in black and white was rather staggering. I took my hand away and looked again at the deed, and then at the handwritten manuscript.
     “Is it the same, Mama?” Bree bent anxiously over the pages, her hair brushing softly against my hand. “The article wasn’t signed— or it was, but with a pseudonym.” She smiled briefly. “The author signed himself ‘Q.E.D.’ It looked the same to us, but we aren’t either of us handwriting experts and we didn’t want to give these to an expert until you’d seen them.”
     “I think so.” I felt breathless, but quite certain at the same time, with an upwelling of incredulous joy. “Yes, I’m almost sure. Jamie wrote this.” Q.E.D., indeed! I had an absurd urge to tear the manuscript pages out of their plastic shrouds and clutch them in my hands, to feel the ink and paper he had touched; the certain evidence that he had survived.  (285-286)

Not content, however, Roger provides--from a scholar's instinct--corroborating evidence, this one literary:

     “There’s more. Internal evidence.” Roger’s voice betrayed his pride. “See there? It’s an article against the Excise Act of 1764, advocating the repeal of the restrictions on export of liquor from the Scottish Highlands to England. Here it is”— his racing finger stopped suddenly on a phrase—“  ‘ for as has been known for ages past, “Freedom and Whisky gang tegither.” ’ See how he’s put that Scottish dialect phrase in quotes? He got it from somewhere else.”
     “He got it from me,” I said softly. “I told him that— when he was setting out to steal Prince Charles’s port.”
     “I remembered.” Roger nodded, eyes shining with excitement. “But it’s a quote from Burns,” I said, frowning suddenly. “Perhaps the writer got it there— wasn’t Burns alive then?” “He was,” said Bree smugly, forestalling Roger. “But Robert Burns was six years old in 1765.”
     “And Jamie would be forty-four.”  (286-287)

Perhaps it still doesn't matter outside of academic or fictional contexts.  But in a world that denies the value of scholarly activity, it is nice to see a testimony to its value, even it is to corroborate a story of time travel, and to locate a fictional character--20 years later--in the past...

Gabaldon, Diana (2004-10-26). Voyager (Outlander). Random House, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

Voyager: A Portrait of Professor Randall Pt 1

Well, I'm getting behind.  *sigh*

The truth is, I've been reading a new book--Cassandra Clare's Clockwork Princess. I may or may not have anything to say about that one.  It's the last of the series that I got hooked on a while back, and I'm glad it's the last, because I don't like Clare's worldview.  I'm hoping it will tie up some loose ends in the series so that I don't have to continue with her Mortal Instruments series, which is pretty awful--engaging at its best, demonic and dangerously transgressive at its worst.  Very disappointed.

I have also been sewing--first my daughters' Easter dresses, and then a casual dress for myself.  I would like to make another dress for myself, and some hooded knit dresses for the girls.  So basically, when I sew, and when I read, I am less inclined to blog.  I should have timed things better so that I had a backlog of posts scheduled.  Oh well!  Hindsight and all...

So I mentioned that I don't like Frank.  Perhaps this is why I have beaten around the bush for two full paragraphs before getting to the point.  Since a dream that Claire had in Outlander about Frank in his "professor" role, I have been meaning to write a post about Frank's teaching persona.  Teaching persona is something that I have thought a lot about.  I have written about it formally and informally.  It's how a teacher presents him- or herself to a class--on what his or her credibility rests, and how she or he establishes a rapport.  When I was an undergraduate, I wanted professors who were experts.  They were scholars.  They knew everything, and I could drink of their wisdom.  Ideally, I also wanted them to be approachable.  I wanted to be able to ask a question and have a conversation as we walked back to his or her office.  In grad school, I was taught that that model was outdated--students did not benefit from having experts, because being lectured to by an expert made them passive rather than active learners.  I was never a passive learner.  I was uncomfortable learning that the scholar/lecturer model was "outdated," because that was how I liked to learn.  I soon grew into it, as I realized that that was not how I liked to teach.  I like to be a co-collaborator and co-investigator with my students (when I have students).  I like to explore the subject with them so that we're discovering new things.  Frankly, I'm not confident enough to be a scholar/lecturer.  I do not have an "expert" persona, because I am always so very aware of what I don't know that I can't rest on what I do know.

Gabaldon--who, as a former professor herself, has thought of this as well--gives a few cues as to Frank's teaching persona.  And my assessment is that in this, as in everything, Frank is a bit of an ass.

The first thing to know, for our purposes, is that being a professor is all about literacy.  It's why Roger is all about the archives (which, of course, has nothing to do with wanting to seduce the 6-foot tall redhead--no, I'm not talking about Jamie).  It's why, at the beginning of their last conversation, Frank is in bed "reading with the book propped upon his knees" (265).  Being a professor.  It's a literacy vocation.  Like printing--but that's Jamie's gig.  That book-reading figures heavily in this scene.  Every snarky comment is punctuated with a gesture involving the book, which is related to being a professor:

“But what good does thinking do?” he asked, sticking a bookmark in his book. “You’ve done whatever you could— worrying about it now won’t change  …   ah, well.” He shrugged irritably and closed the book. “I’ve said it all before.”  (265)

Though specifically in reference to Claire's thoughts about her patient, and the surgery she had recently performed, there is something that feels wrong--sarcastic on Frank's part, or ironic on the part of the author--with a professor asking what good thinking does.  I rather feel as though it reflects back on his pedagogy in some way.  Don't think--just accept what I tell you.  The other angle is that it certainly sets his own vocation--one that involves thinking--above hers, which, by implication, only involves performing.

More to come in part 2...

Voyager: Claire's Romance Habit (Literacy and Metafiction)

Throughout the early part of Voyager, as I think I've mentioned before, we see Jamie's trials existing in parallel to Claire's 20th Century life.  It isn't too surprising, then, when, after Jamie participates in a romance-novelesque scenario, and reads Fannie Hill, that Claire is depicted reading an actual romance novel, and reflecting on her introduction to the genre via her med school friend, Joe Abernathy:

I closed the book in my lap and sat tracing the extravagant loops of the title with one finger, smiling a little. Among other things, I owed a taste for romance novels to Joe. (254)

Gabaldon has some notes on how her books fit in with the romance genre, here.  The short version is:  they don't.  But she is definitely familiar with the genre.  Some highlights from her FAQs related to the genre:

• I’ve probably read a couple of hundred “real” romance novels, ranging from traditional category romances to F/F/P (Futuristic/Fantasy/Paranormal). That’s why I say I don’t write romance; because I don’t.
• It’s not just that I didn’t intend to write romance (though I didn’t); there are major differences between what I write and the standard form of the genre—as a good many “real” romance writers were only too eager to let me know, when Outlander won the RWA’s RITA award for Best Book of the Year when it came out (that award, btw, isn’t—or wasn’t—limited to romances).
• [O]ne (quite well known) author sent me a private e-mail, saying that she thought she had better come out and tell me, since there were several messages from her on the board saying so, that she felt it was not right for OUTLANDER to have won, since “it wasn’t really a romance—there wasn’t enough concentration on the relationship between the hero and heroine, she was older than him (hey, everybody knows you can’t do that! (You want to know how many times I’ve heard “You can’t do THAT in a romance!”—from romance writers at romance conventions?) they didn’t meet until page 69, you didn’t know he was the hero until much later, it was much too long, and it had all that HIStory, it was in the first person!! (an utterly heinous crime in that genre, apparently), and as for what I did to Jamie…!!
• OUTLANDER alone has some elements of a standard romance—enough to make it appealing to romance readers in general—but none of the other books do; they deal with an ongoing relationship between two decent people who already love each other— there’s no falling-in-love, getting acquainted, now-we-like-each- other-now-we-don’t** kind of conflict.
  [**isn't that how I described it?]
• When we sold OUTLANDER, the publisher held onto the book for 18 months, trying to figure out what to sell it as. They finally decided that—of all the different classifications the books could fit in—”Romance” was by far the largest single market.   I agreed that they could market the paperback that way—provided that we had dignified covers (no Fabio, no mad bosoms), and provided that if and when the books became “visible” (which is publisherese for “hit the New York Times list”), they would reposition them as Fiction.

And that is heavily abridged!!  (But then, the author--like this reader/critic--is not really given to brevity!)

As it turns out, Claire was introduced to romance novels when she was finishing up her med school residency--specifically, after her first surgery--by way of the waiting room and the other "different" med student, Joe, with whom she later bonds over the fact that the other students wonder why she isn't at home tending to her husband and child, and "mostly don’t ask...anymore why [he] ain’t cleanin’ the toilets, like God made [him] to" (259).  The race issue in Voyager is one that is worthy of analysis, but which I will mention only with specific reference to Frank and the influence of his vocation on his perspectives (or lack thereof).  What I find interesting here is the med school-romance novel connection, as I'm pretty sure my mother mentioned that when she was in nursing school, many of the nurses did read romance novels to decompress.

As she bides time in the lounge, waiting for her patient to awake, we encounter a literacy moment:

The lounge wasn’t empty. Joseph Abernathy sat in one of the rump-sprung stuffed chairs, apparently absorbed in a copy of U.S. News & World Report. He looked up as I entered, and nodded briefly to me before returning to his reading. The lounge was equipped with stacks of magazines— salvaged from the waiting rooms— and a number of tattered paperbacks, abandoned by departing patients. Seeking distraction, I thumbed past a six-month-old copy of Studies in Gastroenterology, a ragged copy of Time magazine, and a neat stack of Watchtower tracts. Finally picking up one of the books, I sat down with it. It had no cover, but the title page read The Impetuous Pirate. “A sensuous, compelling love story, boundless as the Spanish Main!” said the line beneath the title. The Spanish Main, eh? If escape was what I wanted, I couldn’t do much better, I thought, and opened the book at random. It fell open automatically to page 42.  (254)

The range of reading material is interesting, as well as her reason for choosing the particular novel--escape.  Joe's reading material is notably respectable and non-escapist.  That the novel "fell open automatically" to a particular scene--a sign of frequent reading--is an amusing (and telling!) detail.

Strikingly, in addition to bad writing and a particularly incongruent metaphor ("fine white breasts to leap out of their concealment like a pair of plump partridges taking wing"), we have a scene that parallels Jamie's experience with Geneva, though unlike Geneva the heroine is (mostly? partly?) unwilling from the beginning:

     “Ah, mi amor,” he gasped. “I cannot wait. But  …   I do not wish to hurt you. Gently, mi amor, gently.”
     Tessa gasped as she felt the increasing pressure of his desire making its presence known between her legs.
     “Oh!” she said. “Oh, please! You can’t! I don’t want you to!” [Fine time to start making protests, I thought.]
     “Don’t worry, mi amor. Trust me.” (256)

Jamie's position as a parodic romance hero (which looks more like Valdez's parody of Jamie's unwilling participation in a similar sexual initiation) is cemented here: we have the romance hero unable to contain his desire, and the heroine protesting when he is past the point of no return--just as with Jamie and Geneva.  And ironically (that's dramatic irony), we have Claire's comment:  "Fine time to start making protests."  Against the backdrop of Geneva's fear, and the internet accusations that Jamie committed rape, Claire's critique of the romance heroine is particularly... prescient?  (Well perhaps not, since the event was in the past...)

There is far more (unpleasant) irony to come for the reader who remembers, while reading The Fiery Cross, that Claire's first romance novel involves rape by a pirate.

When Joe observes Claire's reaction to the novel, and as she retrieves the book she has dropped, they engage in what can only be called "literate discourse," given that it is conversation that is dependent on, and occasioned by, a shared reading experience:

     “Excuse me,” I murmured, and bent to retrieve it, my face flaming. As I came up with The Impetuous Pirate in my sweaty grasp, though, I saw that far from preserving his usual austere mien, Dr. Abernathy was grinning widely.
     “Let me guess,” he said. “Valdez just teased aside the membrane of her innocence?”
     “Yes,” I said, breaking out into helpless giggling again. “How did you know?”
     “Well, you weren’t too far into it,” he said, taking the book from my hand. His short, blunt fingers flicked the pages expertly. “It had to be that one, or maybe the one on page 73, where he laves her pink mounds with his hungry tongue.”
     “He what?”
     “See for yourself.” He thrust the book back into my hands, pointing to a spot halfway down the page.
     Sure enough, “ …   lifting aside the coverlet, he bent his coal-black head and laved her pink mounds with his hungry tongue. Tessa moaned and  …” I gave an unhinged shriek.
     “You’ve actually read this?” I demanded, tearing my eyes away from Tessa and Valdez.
     “Oh, yeah,” he said, the grin widening. He had a gold tooth, far back on the right side. “Two or three times. It’s not the best one, but it isn’t bad.”
     “The best one? There are more like this?”
     “Sure. Let’s see  …” He rose and began digging through the pile of tattered paperbacks on the table. “You want to look for the ones with no covers,” he explained. “Those are the best.”
     “And here I thought you never read anything but Lancet and the Journal of the AMA,” I said.
     “What, I spend thirty-six hours up to my elbows in people’s guts, and I want to come up here and read ‘Advances in Gallbladder Resection?’ Hell, no— I’d rather sail the Spanish Main with Valdez.” He eyed me with some interest, the grin still not quite gone. “I didn’t think you read anything but The New England Journal of Medicine, either, Lady Jane,” he said. “Appearances are deceiving, huh?”  (257)

The literate friendship of Joe and Claire again parallels the literary friendship between Jamie and Lord John, though in the former case, people gossip about (and Frank implies) an affair that doesn't exist, and in the latter case, Lord John wishes to initiate an affair that can't exist. Claire reflects:

[T]he friendship begun on page 42 had flourished, and Joe Abernathy had become one of my best friends; possibly the only person close to me who truly understood what I did, and why.
     I smiled a little, feeling the slickness of the embossing on the cover. Then I leaned forward and put the book back into the seat pocket. Perhaps I didn’t want to escape just now. (259)

Gabaldon, Diana (2004-10-26). Voyager (Outlander). Random House, Inc.. Kindle Edition.