Is fictional love real or is real love fiction?
"I love you madly, as Barbara Cartland would say." Glitterland, Crusie, and Disneyland
Conceptions of popular romance fiction tend to assume the texts, its readers, and its writers believe in romantic love as a truth rather than a fantasy.
Why then do so many romance novels draw our attention to love, not just as something holy and true, but also as something scripted, confected, and unreal? And how are these explorations interpreted when viewed through the lens of literal scripted fiction?
Please enjoy this excerpt from a conversation between myself, Andrea Martucci, and Dr. Eric Selinger, that was originally presented at Deakin University in Australia's Concepts in Popular Genre Fiction Conference in December 2021.
Eric Selinger: The concept of romantic love is so central to romance novels that you'd think it would be central to the scholarship about them too. We do have scholars who've looked at how historically the type of love that counts as true has changed in romance fiction. It's become more sexualized, more psychologized, more grounded, in what David Shumway calls the discourse of intimacy or relationship dynamics, as opposed to the older, more idealized tradition he calls the discourse of romance, and so on.
What hasn't been studied as much so far is how romance novels do their thinking. And in particular, how a genre that's often assumed to be unequivocally sincere when it comes to true love, actually offers, not always, but often what Eva Illouz calls an ironic structure of romantic feeling. Even if the ironies involved are more poignant and playful and tender than what we find in other genres.
So one way to think of ironic structures in popular romance is to think about how love in these novels gets conceptualized through some ratio of what Illouz calls (following Faber) enchanted and disenchanted accounts of what love is, how it starts, how it feels, how it should be expressed.
A second way is to use a phrase that novelist Jennifer Crusie borrows from Max Luthi.
Romance novels, she says, tell love stories that are quote "unreal, but not untrue." Where the irony lies in the interplay between the truth and the unreality."
Love: A Citational Emotion?
Eric Selinger: There's a wonderful passage in Roland Barthes' A Lover's Discourse which I've been thinking about since I was in my twenties which is a lot of decades now.
He says "anguish wound, distress, or jubilation: the body overwhelmed" by emotion.
And yet when I actually look into myself to see what's going on in my mind and in my heart, I realize that what I'm doing is repeating a quotation. That these intense bodily affective experiences are not somehow outside the world of signs and cultural scripts, that they are inextricably bound up in them.
For Barthes that scriptedness often seems to be a source of embarrassment. He talks about love as a citational emotion.
You're not getting something that is unmediated and beyond culture, what you're getting is a whole stockpile of tropes and rhetorical moves and all of the signifiers of love are there to be drawn on and put into action.
So potentially the scriptedness of love can be a source of embarrassment, of chagrin, of self-consciousness, of irony in a really negative sense. This is something that we see sometimes Barthes talking about, "obscenity of sentimentality" is his phrase for it. We see sociologist Eva Illouz talking about this, when she says that in the postmodern world romantic love has an ironic structure of feeling.
And she means that as something that undermines love, that undermines our ability to wholeheartedly feel passion, desire, affection, connection, et cetera, because we're hyper aware of how scripted all of this is.
Glitterland by Alexis Hall
Eric Selinger: And partly we're starting with Barthes because in one of my favorite romance novels, Glitterland by Alexis Hall, one of the heroes, Ash Winters at moments of emotional intensity and vulnerability with Darian, the other hero - he will often try to control the situation or deal with this overwhelming emotion by flipping into analytical mode. He's very well educated and he'll begin quoting Roland Barthes to the effect that, of course, we're just falling into this empty set of signifiers and so on and so forth.
And he has to figure out how to get past that undermining version of irony. That's not the only kind of irony that's out there though. You can have an ironic structure that is playful, that's poignant, that's tender, that's amused. And I think that version of irony is much closer to what it is that the romance novel often traffics in.
Yes, we know it's a script. The scripts are what we have, we can't not be aware of it, but being aware of it doesn't stop us.
Umberto Eco has that famous bit about the postmodern condition being like a hyper educated man trying to court a hyper educated woman. And he can't say, "I love you madly" because that's the kind of thing they say in cheesy romance novels.
So he can say, "I love you madly as Barbara Cartland would say."
I think the whole genre of the romance novel is to the reader as that character in Eco is to this person he's courting. The whole genre keeps saying to us, " Love madly as Barbara Cartland would say." And we know that there's a game and the author knows it's a game and that we are then playing it together.
And that opens up this space for connection, for affection, for emotion and so on.
“Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real.”
Andrea Martucci: Yes. So this brings me to Baudrillard, my favorite philosopher.
I think that Jean Baudrillard and the work he did in Simulations provides an interesting way of thinking about the self-awareness of an audience who is bringing in their own skepticism of media and how hard it is to distinguish between a convincing fake and the real thing.
Jean Baudrillard discusses the idea of the hyper real, which is symbolically like reality without having an origin in reality. It's a simulation of reality that is more real than real. And he discusses how our consciousness is fundamentally unable to distinguish between the hyperreal, as a simulation of reality, and reality.
He uses the example of Disneyland, which is a fantastical exaggerated simulation of America and American ideologies that visitors knowingly lose themselves in while acknowledging it as a land of fantasy.
Baudrillard says, and this is a quote from Simulations, "Disneyland is there to conceal the fact that it is the real country, all of real America, which is Disneyland, just as prisons are there to conceal the fact that it is the social in its entirety and its banal omnipresence, which is carceral." End quote.
(Baudrillard is a real barrel of laughs.)
He continues. "Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real."
So we can maintain our idea that the real world exists as separate from the fantasy world when we immerse ourselves in these hyper real worlds. The ironic mode that you described, Eric, is an example of the texts themselves acknowledging that they are hyper real, which nobody would dispute because they know that they're reading a book.
Opening a romance novel is like walking through the gates of Disneyland. Intellectually you know that you're stepping into a fantasy because you bought a ticket to get in.
Some romance novels are the equivalent of Cinderella's castle, which is a blatant fairytale. And others are like Main Street USA, which are just a little more exaggerated than your lived experience, but simulate places you may actually go every day.
Eric Selinger: There were some books where the imaginary, or let's say the explicitly fictive is presented as a fantasy so that we will believe that the rest of love is real. Jeannie Lin's The Lotus Palace does this incredibly well.
We get this world of ninth century Tang dynasty, love, culture, poetry songs, elegant flirtations, and all of that is the fictive romance against which, or within which, some truer love based on tiny gestures of intimate care plays out for our protagonists and also for our hero's parents in ways that he has to learn to recognize.
But, of course, both of these loves are living in the fiction of the novel and the second one is just as scripted as the first, it's just a different script. What David Shumway calls the discourse of intimacy as opposed to the discourse of romance. So that's very much in line with Baudrillard.
On the other hand, we also get novels where the fictiveness of love is played up precisely to get us thinking about how inescapably the fictive and the real are interwoven in every kind of love, including out here in the world outside of books.
These are books that teach us to deploy what Michael Saler calls a mindset of disenchanted enchantment, where we are enchanted, not deluded by the tropes and the scripts in the books and those that we live by. Books like that are doing Baudrillard in their own small way.
They're guiding us to think multiply and playfully and provisionally about love and also how to use that extravagant language that convention has bequeathed to us as a way to enoble and deepen and get more joy from a world that might otherwise look kind of mundane.
The Function of (Romance) Fiction
Andrea Martucci: Yes. And I think Baudrillard's work is explicitly asking us to flip our cynicism around the other way.
What if instead of focusing on the fictive nature of fiction, we turn our attention to our lived experiences and question to what extent we are constantly filtering our experiences through a collection of familiar storylines and considering what's possible based on where we think we fit in the narrative?
So rather than questioning to what degree do romance novels present real love versus fantasy or manufactured, scripted love, what if we ask, to what degree am I living my own life according to a script? Or with an awareness to that script of romantic love, or even in defiance or resistance to that script.
Once you acknowledge that your own experience is heavily influenced by the narrative that you're familiar with, you're able to see that the truth of romantic love is not carved in stone: it's clay, and you can mold it and reform it. And that can be re-imagined to your specifications.
And that frees you to ask, what do I want for myself? What can I imagine for myself?
Is this real life?
And I think it's helpful to come back to the reason why we love stories and how stories serve a practical function. Fictional narratives generally can be understood as a way for audiences to explore other ways of living that are outside their own experience.
In popular romance fiction, specifically, when they focus on exploring the process of falling in love and share a vision for what they believe romantic love looks like and use narrative and rhetorical choices that present some visions of love as desirable and others as undesirable, they're presenting fantasies that are a way for the audience, real people, to try out another way of being in a safe space, where they can consider how they feel about it before committing to it.
In the Truman show, a movie that engages with Baudrillard's ideas of the hyperreal, the creator of Truman's hyperreal existence says, "we accept the reality of the world with which we're presented."
Romance novels can present alternate worlds of romantic love that we can then accept as possible or viable realities.
It makes a lot of sense to me that portraying romantic love, even knowing it's a fantasy, can be a practice of manifesting real outcomes of love in one's own life. Even if it's not specifically or exactly the script you want in your own life, the script just becomes one more in your repertoire that you can draw on.
Dr. Eric Murphy Selinger is a popular romance scholar, executive editor of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies, AKA “Jeepers,” and is a Professor of English at DePaul University.
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