Peter J. Rabinowitz

SOURCE: "The Turn of the Glass Key: Popular Fiction as Reading Strategy," in Critical Inquiry, Vol. 11, No. 3, March, 1985, pp. 418-31.

[In the following essay, Rabinowitz investigates the assumptions readers make when they delve into genre fiction.]

1. INTRODUCTION

Even among critics not particularly concerned with detective fiction, Dashiell Hammett's fourth novel, The Glass Key (1931), is famous for carrying the so-called objective method to almost obsessive lengths: we are never told what the characters are thinking, only what they do and look like. Anyone's decisions about anyone else's intentions (which, in this underworld of ward politics, often have life-and-death consequences) are interpretive decisions, dependent on correct presuppositions—on having the right interpretive key. The novel's title, in part, refers to this kind of key. Ned Beaumont, the protagonist, has to decide how to govern his relationship with Janet Henry; one of his major clues to her mind is a dream that she tells him, a dream that climaxes in an attempt to lock a door against an onslaught of snakes. Dream interpretation is difficult enough to begin with, and Janet Henry compounds that difficulty by telling the dream twice. In the first version, the attempt to lock the door succeeds; in the second, the key turns out to be made of glass and it shatters. Ned Beaumont, in deciding which dream to use as his key, chooses the second (as do most readers)—but it is a choice based on an intuitive mix of experience and faith, knowledge and hunch.

A reader often faces the same difficulties that Ned Beaumont does. Reading a book, too, requires us to make a choice about what key to use to unlock it, and that choice must often be based on an intuitive mix of experience and faith, knowledge and hunch. For example, as I shall show, the experience of reading certain texts—not all, but a significant number of them—is problematic because it depends in part on whether the reader has chosen, before picking them up, to approach them as popular or serious. My argument hinges on two prior claims. First, I contend that one way (but not the only way) of defining genres is to consider them as bundles of operations which readers perform in order to recover the meanings of texts rather than as sets of features found in the texts themselves. To put this crudely but more modishly, genres can be viewed as strategies that readers use to process texts. Second, I argue that popular literature and serious literature can be viewed as broad genre categories.

Before discussing each of these points in detail, I would like to offer a limitation and a definition. When I address the distinction between popular and serious literature, I limit myself to American and British novels from the 1920s to the 1960s. Although I suspect that parallel arguments would hold for other countries and other periods, I am sure that many of my more specific claims would have to be altered. When I discuss interpretation and appropriate questions, I'm talking in the context of what I define as "authorial reading," the attempt to recover the author's intended meaning. My purpose in so doing is not to deny the problems that reader-response critics and post-structuralists raise about the priority of such author-centered meaning but rather to make my task manageable in a short essay by focusing on a single type of reading. In other words, I am not claiming, as F. D. Hirsch does, that we have a moral injunction to read in this way. All I am claiming here is that authorial reading is one way of approaching a text. It is certainly significant enough to justify close scrutiny—for two reasons.

First, a lot of people actually do read (or attempt to read) this way a great deal of the time. The critical revolutions of the past few years may have blinded us, but it is hardly likely that the millions who turned to Len Deighton's SSGB or Judith Krantz's Scruples were interested either in deconstructing texts or in discovering their underlying semiotic codes. In fact, even among the most jaded readers—academics—authorial reading is still the most prevalent form of literary interpretation, as is clear if you consider the sum total of academic production and not just the journals devoted particularly to literary theory. I suspect that it is more common still in the classroom, where the pressure to be original is less intense.

Second, authorial reading provides the substructure for most (although not all) other kinds of reading. True, some ways of approaching a text seem to skip over the author entirely: certain kinds of structuralist or stylistic studies, for instance, or the kind of subjective reading proposed by David Bleich in Readings and Feelings, a reading validated by community concerns rather than authorial intention. But then again, many types of reading depend for their power on a prior understanding of the authorial meaning. The manifest/latent distinction of certain Freudian studies, for instance, collapses if we do not have a manifest meaning to begin with; Georg Lukács' analysis of Honoré de Balzac depends on the distinction between what Balzac wanted to see and what he really did see. Most important—if critical importance has any connection to the degree to which criticism can make us recognize the world with fresh eyes—we see the same dependence on authorial intention in much feminist criticism. Judith Fetterley's resisting reader can only come into being if there is something to resist.

Let me turn now to my three claims.

2. GENRES AS READING STRATEGIES

Genres can be viewed as strategies for reading. In other words, genres can be seen not only in the traditional way, as patterns or models that writers follow in constructing texts, but also from the other direction, as different bundles of rules that readers apply in construing texts. There are three parts to this assertion.

First, a reader is not a tabula rasa. Even before we pick up a book, we need to know, among other things, certain reading conventions—using the term to refer not to plot formulas but rather to rules that regulate the reader's operations on the text. These conventions, part of what Jonathan Culler calls "literary competence," go well beyond the linguistic.

Second, not only must we learn a vast number of implicit conventions of reading before we can understand anything as complex as a novel, more significant, we must learn different "rules" for processing different books. Indeed, if any analogy holds between literary and linguistic systems, we must view Life with Father and The Sound and the Fury not only as different utterances but also as manifestations of the equivalent of different languages. Although we may not frame it in these terms, the principle that there are different ways of reading is fundamental to the ways we think about teaching. When we complain that students don't know "how" to read, we mean that they do not know how to read in the "right" way. The same notion informs our critical discourse as well. Everyone who has worked on The Turn of the Screw has confronted the question of whether or not it should be read "as" a ghost story; no one is apt to think it eccentric when a critic like Fernando Ferrara says "Just as one can study A Midsummer Night's Dream as document, one can also study Das Kapital as fiction."

To a large extent, then, our actual practice as teachers and critics confirms that "reading" is always "reading as." It is significant for my argument that the terms used to describe various modes of reading are often genre terms: The Turn of the Screw can be read as a ghost story. For this brings me to the third part of my first claim: not only is reading a process of applying rules, not only do different books call for different operations, but, furthermore, rules tend to come in generic packages. Even though each text, examined in detail, calls into operation a specific collection of rules, on a more general level of analysis each work shares a large number of rules with other works of the same genre. We often know to apply rule d to a certain text because that is usually the case in texts where we have already applied rules A, B, and C.

So far, I have talked about rules of reading in the most abstract way. What kind of rules are these rules A, B, and C? How, specifically, do the operations that readers perform differ from work to work or from genre to genre? There are a number of ways of putting it. For instance, different questions are appropriate to different genres—using the word "appropriate," as I have said, in the context of the search for the author's intended meaning. It is appropriate to ask about the metaphorical implications of William Faulkner's title Sanctuary in a way that it is not appropriate to ask about the metaphorical implications of Agatha Christie's title The Mystery of the Blue Train; it is appropriate to ask what will happen to Janet Henry and Ned Beaumont after the end of The Glass Key in a way that it is not appropriate to ask what happens to the happy lovers after the end of Philip Barry's Holiday. Similarly, we approach different genres with different sets of expectations. The ending of Raymond Chandler's Big Sleep has the impact it does only because, given our assumptions about what sort of text it is and given our knowledge of how that sort of text is "supposed" to wind up, we falsely expect some kind of justice at the end. The same kind of presupposition can be seen in our experience of Anton Chekhov's Cherry Orchard: the perennial question of why it is called a comedy is usually answered in terms of the text per se. But we can also see it as a question about the reader's experience—especially about what sorts of desires and expectations are aroused by the explicit signal to read it as a comedy.

Our understanding of the conventions of reading may become clearer still once put into some kind of order. There are numerous ways of classifying them, but I'd like to suggest now a four-part system which, while neither exhaustive nor privileged (for instance, it complements, rather than replaces, the typology suggested by Steven Mailloux), is at least useful for a rough sorting out of an extremely thorny area.

First, there are what I call "rules of notice." Despite repeated claims by critics that, in literature, "everything counts," we know from experience that there are always more details in a text—particularly a novel—than we can ever hope to keep track of, much less account for. We have learned to tame this multiplicity with a number of implicit rules, shared by readers and writers alike, that give priority to certain kinds of details and that thus help us sort out figures from ground by establishing a hierarchy of importance. Some of these rules of notice seem to cover a wide spectrum of texts: for instance, the simple rule that titles are privileged. This may seem trivial, but it's a tremendous help, for instance, for the first-time viewer of Hamlet: in the opening scenes, there are so many characters that we would not know where to focus our attention if we did not have the title to provide a core around which other details could crystallize. Similarly, the first and last sentences (like the first and last chapters) of most texts are privileged: that is, any interpretation of a text that can't account for those sentences is generally deemed more defective than a reading that cannot account for some random sentence in the middle. Other rules of notice apply specifically to smaller groups of texts. For instance, when we are given some apparently obscure detail about a character's grandmother in a novel by Faulkner or Ross Macdonald, we are supposed to pay more attention to it than we would in a novel by Fyodor Dostoevsky.

Second, "rules of signification" tell us how to recast or symbolize or draw the significance from the elements that the first set of rules has brought to our attention. Included here are rules for determining symbolic meaning (the rules that tell us when to invoke the religious connotations of words, for instance); rules for distinguishing degrees of realism in fiction (the rules that allow us to discriminate, for instance, among the degrees and types of realism in the various representations of Napoleon in War and Peace, Napoleon Symphony, and Love and Death); the rule that allows us, in fiction, to assume that post hoc is propter hoc; rules that permit us to draw conclusions about the psychology of characters from their actions.

Third, there are "rules of configuration," which enable us both to develop expectations and to experience a sense of completion. Certain clumps of literary features tend to occur together; our familiarity with such groupings prompts us to assemble disparate elements in order to make patterns emerge. Our ability to perceive form—in Kenneth Burke's sense of the creation and satisfaction of appetites—involves applying rules of configuration; as the work of Barbara Herrnstein Smith demonstrates, so does our ability to experience closure; so does our recognition of the plot patterns and formulas so often illuminated in traditional genre studies. We need not get much further than the opening scenes of Holiday to know how it is going to end. That is not, however, because it signals its own unique form. Rather, it is because we know how to put together a few elements—a charming man, a rigid fiancée, an attractively zany fiancée's sister—and see an emerging pattern.

Finally, there are "rules of coherence." The most general rule here states that we should read a text in such a way that it becomes the "best" text possible. From this follow more specific rules dealing with textual disjunctures, rules that permit us to repair apparent inconsistencies by transforming them into metaphors, subtleties, and ironies—or, in the case of deconstructive criticism, that allow us to tear apart the text, revealing the abyss behind it. The relationship between rules of configuration and rules of coherence is roughly analogous to that between rules of notice and rules of signification. Rules of configuration alert us to particular patterns and tell us what to expect; rules of coherence permit us to take the details of the text (including those patterns) and extrapolate to larger meanings. Thus, it is rules of configuration that lead us to expect justice at the end of The Big Sleep; it is rules of coherence—which demand that the work fit together as a whole—that require us to interpret our frustration at the novel's irresolution in terms of Chandler's overall political message.

While there is a certain logical order to any discussion of these sets of rules, I am not suggesting that we read a text by applying them one after another. Reading is a far more complex, holistic process in which various rules interact in ways that we may never understand (the old hermeneutic circle again), although we seem to have little difficulty in putting them into practice intuitively. Thus, for instance, rules of notice would seem to precede rules of configuration, since we cannot notice a pattern until we notice the elements. But one of the ways that elements become visible is by forming parts of a familiar pattern. Thus, in Dombey and Son, Charles Dickens heightens our awareness of the traditional pattern of the manipulative underling by giving Mr. Carker even, white teeth. But we tend to notice his teeth in part because they are an element in that larger pattern.

Nevertheless, even if this classification of conventions does not reflect the order of our mental operations, it is still a useful analytic device. For, by allowing us to view texts as sets of strategies performed by readers rather than as sets of concrete verbal features, this approach makes explicit some of the normally unrecognized assumptions involved in the act of reading. Specifically, it reminds us that literary works "work" only because the reader comes to them with a fairly detailed understanding of what he or she is getting into beforehand. I am not denying that every work of fiction creates its own world, but I am saying that it can do so only because it assumes that the reader will have certain skills to begin with. Every literary theoretician these days needs a governing metaphor about texts: text as mirror, text as body, text as system. I suppose that my metaphor would have to be "text as unassembled bunk bed from Sears." It is a concrete thing, but you have to assemble it; it comes with rudimentary directions, but you have to know how to perform basic tasks and must have certain tools at hand; most important, the directions are virtually meaningless unless you know beforehand just what sort of object you are aiming at. If you have never seen a bunk bed before, your chances of sleeping comfortably are slight.

3. POPULAR FICTION AS A GENRE

Once we map out some of the parameters of reading in this way, we can see that the pop/serious distinction has many of the characteristics of a genre distinction. Genre categories, of course, vary in their specificity, from such broad classes as the epic through such smaller groupings as the classic locked-room mystery, and Tzvetan Todorov's "fantastic," on to more and more precise categories. And needless to say, the pop/serious distinction is the broadest possible. The rules that apply, therefore, are both extremely general and subject to numerous exceptions. Still, we can say that, as a genre, popular literature seems to differ from serious fiction in two ways.

First, popular fiction emphasizes a different category of reading rules, Roland Barthes has made a similar claim, in different terms, when distinguishing popular tales from the psychological novel—one of the epitomes of serious fiction in the period I am discussing. "Some narratives," he claims, "are predominantly functional (such as popular tales), while some others are predominantly indicial (such as 'psychological' novels)." In Barthes' own vocabulary, popular tales tend to be more métonymie, while psychological novels are more metaphoric; translated into traditional genre terms, this means that popular tales are more plot oriented, psychological novels more character oriented. Recast in my terminology, his remarks suggest that when we read popular fiction, we tend to stress operations of configuration, while in reading psychological novels, we tend to emphasize operations of signification.

Pop and serious fiction differ not only according to which type of rule their readers put into effect more often but also with respect to the particular rules that readers are asked to apply within each category. First, rules of notice: what we attend to in a text is greatly influenced by two factors—the speed with which we read, and the other works we have in the background of our minds and against which the text is read. Particular details stand out as surprising, significant, climactic, or strange only in the context of a particular intertextual grid—a particular set of other works of art. And we not only read pop fiction more quickly, with less intensity, but we also tend to read it against a different background. Whether or not we pay particular attention to the name "Marlow" that Eric Ambler gives his hero in Cause for Alarm (1939) will depend on whether it is read "against" other popular spy novels or against the tradition that includes the works of Joseph Conrad. And while one is apt to be on the lookout for ciphers and anagrams in serious post-Joycean fiction (without such predisposition, the climax of Vladimir Nabokov's "Vane Sisters" would be missed completely), we are not apt to do so in a popular spy novel—even one that, like Robert Littell's Amateur, concerns a code breaker who has discovered, encoded in The Tempest, proof that Francis Bacon wrote Shakespeare's plays.

Even when what is noticed is the same in popular and high art (for instance, a title), there is often a difference in the rules of signification applied to it. Titles in serious novels during the period under discussion are supposed to be treated largely metaphorically or symbolically. Thus, when a college teacher is at a loss for an exam question about a serious novel, he or she can always ask, Why is the book called Sanctuary?—or For Whom the Bell Tolls or Edna His Wife? But in reading popular titles, we are supposed to treat them, on the whole, as broadly descriptive (they give clues about genre and general content) and discriminatory (they help distinguish one book from another so that we will know whether or not we have read it already). You could not reasonably ask students to write for an hour on Why is this book called The Case of the Sleepwalker's Niece? because the function of Erle Stanley Gardner's title is less rich. The reader is merely supposed to determine from it that it is a mystery story and that it is a different book from The Case of the Howling Dog; the title is not supposed to provide a springboard for metaphoric association.

Rules of configuration, as well, differ for the two types of literature. As I have already suggested, popular art tends on the whole to encourage activities of configuration rather than activities of signification anyway. But in addition—as I will demonstrate in detail in the last part of this essay—the particular configurations you impose on or expect in a book depend, in part, on the books you are reading it against.

Finally, in high art, we demand—and seek out—greater and more elaborate forms of coherence. We are, for instance, more apt to look at apparent inconsistencies as examples of irony or undercutting, whereas in popular art we are apt to ignore them or treat them simply as flaws. This, too, has something to do with the speed of reading—as well as with the reader's tendency, in serious fiction, to reread, to refine interpretations, and to exercise ingenuity.

4. THE AMBIGUITIES OF READING

It would be a pleasure to stop theorizing at this point and move on to the task of listing the differences in the rules for the two genres in more specific detail. But the argument sketched out so far leads into some theoretical problems that cannot be ignored. The rules I am talking about, remember, do not exist in the text but rather are rules applied by a reader. Furthermore, their application is conventional, not logical. That is, there is no way to determine by reason alone what rules apply in a particular case. When we read Christie's Mystery of the Blue Train, we should expect that the culprit will be an un-likely suspect. That is not because there is any logical imperative to do so but instead because we live in a community where it is usual to apply that rule in novels that present themselves as Christie's does. Thus, not only do readers, as free beings with subjective concerns, have the power to apply them in a personal or eccentric fashion; more important, even readers aiming at the recovery of the author's intended meaning will often find themselves faced with alternatives that are hard, if not impossible, to decide among. And the experiences that result from applying these alternative processes may be quite different.

In other words, there are always a variety of sets of rules that one can apply to a text; and while some texts are more or less resistant to certain kinds of misreadings, it is the case—more often than those of us committed to the notion of "better" and "worse" readings would like to believe—that a work will leave considerable leeway and that several different sets of rules will apply to it equally well. I am not here taking the fashionable position that all books are, by their very nature, inherently ambiguous. Quite often, a text will give fairly precise signals as to how the author intended it to be read. For instance, Gardner's title The Case of the Sleepwalker's Niece nudges us into a pop strategy of reading by blocking a metaphorical interpretation, just as the title The Sound and the Fury, by forcing us both into metaphor and into Shakespeare, steers us into the serious mode. The recur-ring religious imagery of Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts—which begins with Shrike's poem in the very first paragraph—makes it nearly impossible for an experienced reader to infer that the author wanted us to treat the novel as a popular tale; the play-within-a-play format and the exaggerated stylization of the opening of Tom Stoppard's Real Inspector Hound signals the reader that he or she should take the work not as an imitation of a detective story but rather as a parody of one; the flat, unresonant prose of most paperback romances discourages us from the kind of attentive reading we usually apply to high art.

Other works are more confusing—even a work as apparently straightforward as Mickey Spillane's Vengeance Is Mine. Its title can be read as a pop tide, a marker to distinguish it from yet relate it to /, the Jury. But it can also be interpreted as a serious title, as a call to read the novel in the context of Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina (which starts with the same biblical citation), to notice its ironic religious implications, and to take a critical attitude toward the arrogant hero who takes God's work on himself.

Now good reading is a process of matching presuppositions against text and revising strategies as the text moves in unanticipated directions. And it would be comforting to believe that the reader who assumed that Vengeance Is Mine was the title of a serious ironic novel would soon find his or her reading corrected by other elements in the text. But as we have all seen in the variety of readings put forth by our journals—and as we have seen argued theoretically by critics such as Stanley Fish—it is not easy for a text to win over a reader who is committed to finding in it values that do not belong there, particularly when that reader is a sincere one. Given the numerous references to hell and damnation, to playing God, to "making" people; given the antagonist's name, Juno, and the frequent references to Olympus; given what can be interpreted as its Sarrasine references (references especially noticeable in a critical climate greatly influenced by Barthes' S/Z)—it would not be hard to read Spillane ironically.

I am not claiming that such an ironic reading would be a good one. Rather, I am saying something quite different: bad as it is, it would not necessarily run against stumbling blocks in the text. In other words, the success of any genre placement—that is, the success of any particular reading strategy—is no guarantee of its correctness. The ironic reading of Spillane, whatever its textual grounds, would be wrong as an interpretation of the author's intentions, just as I suspect that Samuel Rosenberg's ingenious reading of Sherlock Holmes, however successful, is wrong when it concludes that Arthur Conan Doyle had Friedrich Nietzsche in mind when he invented Moriarty. In neither case, though, does the text itself dictate conclusively what rules ought to be applied. Whether you hit upon the right reading will often depend simply on what you think it likely to be before you begin.

This brings us back to The Glass Key. As I noted at the beginning of my essay, the novel itself raises the issue of how presuppositions influence interpretation. In analyzing the dream scenes as a metaphor for reading, though, I had already made a decision to treat the novel as serious rather than as popular. But the book is nowhere near as clear as I pretended it was; in fact, it really holds itself open for placement in either broad genre.

Take the opening sentence: "Green dice rolled across the green table, struck the rim together, and bounced back." In either genre it is a privileged position, and in either it raises questions for the reader. But the questions—that is, the expectations that it nourishes, the way it is experienced—are quite different for each genre. If it is a pop detective story, we will ask configurational questions: Who is playing? Did he or she win or lose? How will that trigger future actions? If it is a serious novel, we will stress questions of signification: What is the role of chance in this novel? Why the symbol "bouncing back"? In either case, the book follows through: the dice game does generate much of the early action, but the images of chance and resiliency are also central to the novel's metaphoric structure.

One might legitimately argue that the good reader can take both of these approaches at once and read the novel in both classes simultaneously—although I suspect only academics actually read in that way. Be that as it may, there are other consequences of genre placement that demand an either/or decision about reading strategy. Take configuration: If we construe the book as a popular novel, subgenre "detective story," we will be on the lookout for a particular configuration—a problem, a false solution (often stemming from a false confession) about three-quarters of the way through, a correct solution about ten pages from the end, and a postclimax wrap-up of secondary importance. If we look for that pattern, we will find it. As a consequence, we will not for a moment believe Paul's "confession," and we will concentrate more on the solution than on the wrap-up. The book will not, even in this reading, be a particularly jolly one, but its despair will be muted by the reader's privileging of Ned Beaumont's investigation. But if we read it as a serious novel, subgenre "personal discovery novel" under the spell of Proust, Conrad, and Faulkner, we will be alerted to another potential configuration. The correct solution will come earlier than it would in a detective story but will be followed by something even more important—an examination of its psychological and philosophical ramifications. If we are on the lookout for this configuration, we will find it, too, with a bit of a twist: we are more likely to believe Paul's confession and be surprised by the real solution, but, in any case, we will be more interested in the consequences of the truth than in the facts of the murder itself. In this reading, we will give less attention to the solution, and we will stress the novel's final image more strongly: Ned Beaumont staring at an empty doorway, a doorway we will immediately begin to tie metaphorically to the door in the dream and all the other doors and entry ways into mysterious psychological blanks that give this book much of its character when it is construed as a serious novel. Intellectually, perhaps, we can have it both ways and call the novel some kind of hybrid. But for the actual act of reading, we must choose one genre or the other (or some discrete third): we cannot both emphasize and de-emphasize the solution. And our genre choice will substantially color our entire reading experience.

As I have said earlier, of course, the pop/serious distinction is a genre distinction on the broadest level of analysis. When we read, we think also in terms of far smaller groups: detective story, spy novel… or even classic British detective story, cynical they're-all-bastards spy novel. But the principles enunciated here are just as applicable to those genres as well. Even though I have raised the issue in the most general terms, I hope that my analysis still does at least serve as a reminder of some-thing about which we need to think more: the ways in which and the extent to which a reader's initial assumptions about genre determine the route that a reading experience follows, and the difficulties that a novelist may face in trying to force his or her readers to make the right turns.

Thomas J. Roberts

SOURCE: "A Variety of Readers," in An Aesthetics of Junk Fiction, The University of Georgia Press, 1990, pp. 71-86.

[In the following essay, Roberts groups the readers of genre fiction into distinct types based on their relationships to the material.]

We often speak of readers of popular fiction as though they were simpler and more predictable than they are. Carelessly, we speak as though one discrete group of readers always chooses westerns and nothing but westerns and as though a different group reads only detective stories, a third only fantasies, and so forth. We would say, I suppose, that the groups overlap thinly at their edges, but we probably feel that they remain fundamentally distinct. We would be willing to grant that individual readers look now and then into the stories other groups admire and that one genre occasionally does win readers from another genre; for we would grant that there must be some mechanism that permits readers to abandon one genre and take up another; but we are not likely to be much interested in this.

And we seem to be assuming that the relations between a genre and the people who read in it are equally simple. That is, we think (or at least we speak as though we think) that even readers who display excellent critical judgment when reading outside the paperback traditions lose their critical standards while reading inside one of the popular genres.

Whether we individually credit it or not, it is this image that determines which questions we shall ask and whether we shall accept the answers people give us. We ask, what kind of person reads the romance? what kind reads the western? science fiction? the detective story? And we expect that the answers to these questions will be different, that the people who read the romance and the people who read the western will appear on different pages of a national census of readers and, additionally, that they are different in character and situation and in the rewards they are getting from their genres.

Sometimes we need simple images if we are to get anything done, but this image of discrete readerships, of single-genre loyalties would be difficult to validate. People who read most often in one genre usually follow other traditions too; they dip into still other genres with moderate frequency; they manifest strong though temporary enthusiasms for something they have just discovered; they develop fierce genre antipathies.

Here I set that familiar one-genre/one-readership image aside to look more closely at the relationships readers have with the genres they know. The following, I suggest, is a minimal set of distinctions, the smallest number needed to make sense of the variety of reader-to-genre relationships that we find among readers of the paperbacks: the exclusivists, the users (who include certain odd forms of the reading addict), the fans, the occasional readers, and the allergies.

EXCLUSIVISTS

Exclusivism is enthusiasm at its highest pitch. For exclusivists, a certain genre is not just the preferred, it is the only acceptable source of fiction. Donald A. Wollheim, the science-fiction editor, spoke of enthusiasms and exclusivisms.

The phases of being a science-fiction reader can be traced and charted. So many read it for one year, so many for two, so many for life. For instance, reading it exclusively can be as compulsive as a narcotic for a period of an intelligent teenager's life. The length of time as I see it—and I have seen and talked with and corresponded with hundreds and hundreds of such readers in my lifetime—is about four or five years of the most intense reading—usually exclusive, all other literature being shoved aside. After that a falling off, rather rapid (often due to college entry or military life or the hard stuff of getting a job for the first time). There is, I suspect, something like an 80 per cent turnover in the mass of readers of science fiction every five years.

There has been so little interest in the reading of fiction outside literature that I find nothing in print on patterns of exclusivism among adult readers. Wollheim himself may have been a lifelong exclusivist for science fiction, and most of the romance readers Janice Radway located and studied were still exclusivists. My impression, nevertheless, is that adult genre exclusivists are less common than we suppose, that single-focused reading enthusiasms are short-lived. There are exceptions, but the old rule is sound: the people who read anything read everything.

Exclusivism, which readers themselves think of as a temporary aberration, would not be worth our attention if it were not that a certain kind of inquiry into popular fiction is predicated on that default assumption that the typical reader of popular fiction is an exclusivist. The results, too often, are essays and books that bibliographers if they were not so polite would lump together under the label Thunderings. The thunderers want to show us how ugly, or how violent, or how mindless modern culture has become; and so they use the comic book or a television series or pornography or the stories of Mickey Spillane to create for us an image of Calibans of both sexes created by and living under the exclusive governance of these materials. (A better-than-average example of this sort of thing is William Ruehlmann's Saint with a Gun, an essay on the origins and significance of private-eye fiction that sets out to demonstrate, with crushing contempt, that Spillane, his characters, and his simple-minded readers are all dangerously psychotic.) The weakness in the thunderers' presentation, as we have seen, is their unlikely assumption that anyone who reads pornography or watches television or reads comic books, or westerns, or science fiction, or detective stories or anything else, reads that and nothing else. To show that a culture is unhealthy by citing the deficiencies of one popular genre or one successful writer is like demonstrating that all America will soon be toothless because one of the popular soft drinks lacks five essential vitamins. The exclusivist reader is a fiction convenient for the thunderers; but while we can find isolated instances of the exclusivist reader and while most of us have at one time or another (sometimes, many times) briefly been exclusivist in our reading, no genre, and certainly no writer, could survive for long if it had to depend wholly on exclusivistic enthusiasm. The exclusivist is not a significant presence for popular fiction. There are only people who also read science fiction or who also read westerns, and so on. That, of course, is something entirely different.

USERS

To readers outside a genre, users are indistinguishable from exclusivists, but the two are never in doubt about their differences. If, as we have seen, an exclusivist's motto is, say, "X only!" (that is, "The romance only!" or "The western only!"), the user's motto is "X also." Most of Wollheim's 20 percent of science fiction's readers who retain a lifelong interest in the genre are users, not exclusivists. Though users are not so visible as exclusivists in the many activities that buzz around the various genres (the publication of fan magazines, the organization of conventions, and the like) there is evidence enough even in the fan magazines that readers of any one genre are deeply interested in others as well. In an article in The Armchair Detective, Richard Meyers interrupted a survey of mysteries on television to write angrily about television's misunderstanding of science fiction. Locus: The Newspaper of the Science Fiction Field regularly surveys its readers, and each year they report that they are interested in more than science fiction. The 1985 survey shows that 74 percent of them are interested in movies, 44 percent in mysteries, 32 percent in historical fiction, and 23 percent in the comics, for instance ("Locus Survey Results,"). Zimri, an excellent British fanzine of a few years ago, was not at all atypical in combining an interest in science fiction with an interest in poetry.

It is its users, not its exclusivists, who keep each vernacular genre alive, and each of those users has several reading interests. The romance readers that Janice Radway studied were exclusivists, but we would suppose that the more characteristic romance reader is not exclusivistic, that she does not read romances only. She may read two or three dozen each year—an average of three per month, say. Eight or ten weeks may pass without her having any interest at all in the romance, but she will one day find herself standing before a shelf of romances in a drugstore, idly poring over the titles, the cover illustrations, the back-cover blurbs. An experienced reader, she also studies the title pages, since she knows that paperback publishers do clever things with titles. (Frank Herbert's first science-fiction novel has appeared as Under Pressure, as Dragon in the Sea, and as 21st Century Sub. Forrest Carter's Outlaw Josey Wales, a fine western, first appeared as The Rebel Outlaw: Josey Wales and was then reprinted as Gone to Texas.)

If our romance reader is like many of the rest of us, she may find herself standing outside the store a few minutes later with a sales slip in one hand and books in the other. She may feel that she is afflicted with an innocent form of kleptomania, as though she unconsciously steals books but then unconsciously pays for them. It is of course one of her reading addictions that is governing her.

She will feel momentarily foolish, but she will read those romances—perhaps in one glorious weekend binge. When whatever drew her to those stories in the first place has been satisfied, she will stop reading. She cannot predict when she will stop, but, of course, the better the stories the longer the binge. She will put the romance completely out of her mind. Two weeks later, however, she may find herself standing in front of some shelves in a library, looking through the detective fiction: the start of a new but different binge.

Plainly, we are dealing in cases like this with addictions, no less addictions for being multiple and discontinuous. We readers dislike it when others say we are "compulsive" and "addictive," but these terms do seem to describe some of our behavior. So much has been said about popular fiction being an opiate, however, that we should also insist that these reading dependencies are found not only among readers of paperbacks. That devout Christian who cannot let a day pass without reading a chapter in the Bible is an addicted reader, as are those among us who cannot go for more than a few days without reading in Shakespeare or in Karl Marx or in history.

The taxonomies of readers that we would find most useful in the study of the vernacular genres have yet to be designed. These would identify readers not by reference to their favorite genres alone but by reference to their addiction clusters: that, say, one group that reads westerns also reads eighteenth-century fiction and Proust, but that another group that reads westerns reads nineteenth-century poetry and James Joyce. The mysteries of taste lie hidden in curious, overlapping patterns of superficially contradictory addictions that defy easy explanation. It is an indication of the inadequacy of older explanations that the people who do read in one of the vernacular genres always feel that the explanations describe other readers, not them.

We can lump exclusivists and users together as enthusiasts. Most—not all—of the next group are enthusiasts, too.

FANS

In "Paradise Charted," a good history of pulp science fiction, Algis Budrys explains the importance to the genre of its fandom.

While tens or perhaps hundreds of thousands of "science fiction" readers have never heard of it, everyone who publishes, edits, writes, or illustrates in the field must take its articulations into account. It is the repository of the amorphous oral tradition; almost all professionals who are now adults were imbued with its preconceptions as children.

…"Science fiction" has hundreds, perhaps thousands, of amateur publications; at least one convention of some size nearly every weekend, culminating in an annual world convention with attendance approaching five thousand; innumerable subgroups founded on special interests within the special interest, particularly heroic fantasy; art shows; costume balls; its own repertoire of folk ("filk") songs; a well-developed jargon sufficient for good communication without more than passing reference to English.

Its development of its own special vocabulary in its amateur magazines is a sign that fandom is a special world that knows it is a special world. Budrys offers the following sample: '"I used to look at things in a fiawol way, you know. I was really into crifanac. Then I sent this poctsard to all the smofs about my idea for marketing filksongs. Well, it turned out four of them had gafiated, and three of them were just letterhacks. So, I don't know, man. I feel this fijagh attitude coming on'". The playfulness of the language suggests something of the feelings of the fans about the stories that are at the putative center of interest. The jargon, like most jargons, amounts to a few hundred new nouns, verbs, and adjectives firmly embedded in English syntax: Crifanac is "critical fan activity"; a poctsard is a postcard about science fiction; smofs are the sardonically termed "secret masters of fandom"; to gafiate is to "get away from it all"; a letterhack is a fan whose only fannish activity is the writing of letters to the fanzines, the magazines the fans publish for one another. The acronyms fiawol and fijagh advance the opposed opinions that "fandom is a way of life" and that "fandom is just a goddamned hobby." The nontechnical gafiate, to "get away from it all," that is, to withdraw temporarily from social activity, may eventually find a wider use; but the jargon seems designed chiefly to serve as a barrier between fans and others. It is interesting—significant, I should say—that the jargon seems to have little analytic value for students of the genre. Fandom is a quasi-orgy, an erotics of reading, not a scientific assault on a genre.

While everyday usage names any reader of any genre a fan of that genre, the more careful use of the term identifies fans as those readers of a genre who correspond with one another. Very few of any genre's readers know that a fandom exists, and few who do learn of it have any interest in becoming a part of it. (When Radway questioned romance readers, she learned that as enthusiastic as they were about the stories they were reading they had no interest in keeping in touch with others like themselves.) The modal genre reader, in the statistical sense, is the isolated user.

Genre fans are a tiny minority; but, as Budrys suggests, they are of special importance both to the genre itself and to anyone who is trying to understand it. Fans can easily be located, are very cooperative, and every year are writing thousands of pages of comment on the stories, the genre, its writers, and its readers. Even if their sociability as readers makes them atypical, they are invaluable as sources of information for students and readers of any of the vernacular genres.

It is with the fanzines that we would begin. One definition of the amateur fan magazine is that its editor pays no one for anything he or she prints and that it appears at least four times a year. Its readers contribute most of the text and art; the editor puts it all together and mails it out to his readers. The fanzines come and go so quickly that any list of purely amateur fanzines is quickly out of date, and any attempt at quick characterization is doomed. They come, for instance, in many forms: in 1984, a fanzine calling itself FSFNET: BITNET Fantasy-Science Fiction Fanzine began to be sent out from the University of Maine via a computer network (BITNET) to readers at other universities. Some of the fanzines I have enjoyed were Ed Cagle's Kwalhioqua, a zany publication that became too popular for its editor's wallet; Harry O. Morris's Nyctalops, which dealt intelligently with fantasy; Richard E. Geis's Science Fiction Review; Edward C. Connor's SF Echo, which came in the shape of a hand-made paperback; Dave and Mardee Jenrette's wide-ranging and inimitable Tabebuian; Otto Penzler's prozine The Armchair Detective; the lighthearted obeisance to sword and sorcery, Amra, which came to us from the Terminus, Owlswick and Ft. Mudge Electrick St Railway Gazette. I have been reading Bill Danner's Stefantasy with pleasure for years, and I remember with a special regard J. J. Pierce and Paul Walker's argumentative TA.D. (Tension, Apprehension, and Dissension), which insisted upon taking science fiction seriously. Some twenty to fifty of the hundred and more fanzines I have read were as interesting as the stories they discussed.

In 1973, Fredric Wertham published his World of Fanzines: A Special Form of Communication, which, though hasty and inadequate, at least identified the cultural significance of the fanzine. Through fanzines, any group can create its own network of literary criticism, can give the books that interest it adequate review (they are mostly overlooked elsewhere), can publish its readings of those books, can query its writers (and have them answer), can award prizes, and can publish its own first, shy efforts in the writing of genre fiction.

Students of popular fiction who do not search out and study the fanzines and fandom associated with it put themselves at great disadvantage. The fanzines are easy to locate. Some of them announce themselves in the professional magazines, and their editors read and talk about one another all the time. A single LOC (letter of comment) to one of them puts one's address on display to all, and one is soon receiving issues from strange places. At least in the case of science fiction, readers who write letters of comment to the fanzines can find themselves receiving fifty different magazines within a few months of getting their first. Some fanzines are worth reading in their own right: some of the fanzines devoted to the art of the comic book (Witzend, for instance) have been better than most of the comics they discuss.

In the fanzines the readership of a genre becomes conscious, and if the silliest and most naive remarks on any genre are found in its fanzines, there too appear the shrewdest, the best-informed, and the most imaginative criticism.

These users and exclusivists, some of them fans, are a genre's readers. Beyond their number are other readers and nonreaders who contribute to the floating mass of misinformation about any genre that we all accept as a part of general knowledge. Among the nonreaders are people who, though they do not read, are sure they understand the western novel or the detective story, say, because of the films they have seen. I will not look at all the sources of sincere inaccuracy, but I will examine the people who read stories in a genre now and then but not often enough or widely enough to get an intuition into the life of the tradition. I will then complete this minimal survey with a consideration of the people who detest certain genres, who will read anything except the stories that come out of these genres.

OCCASIONAL READERS

All readers are users of more than one reading category and only occasionally a reader of many others, by which I mean that we are all willing to read now and then in some area we favor less—in this author, in that genre—but that we never become interested enough to stay with it. That reader who loses control of herself in a bookstore or a library every few weeks is a user of romances and detective stories; we can imagine that she is an occasional reader of spy stories, ready to read Eric Ambler's Mask of Dimitrios if strongly urged to and even to enjoy it but won by neither Ambler nor the espionage tradition to read more. Against the exclusivists' "X only!" and the users' "X also," occasional readers would hoist aloft that mildest of all reading mottoes, "X sometimes."

As occasional readers we come in different forms, each producing a characteristic misunderstanding. In some cases we were enthusiastic readers of a genre when younger and are now returning to it as adults, anticipating a misremembered simplicity. We had last read the John Buchan style of spy thriller, something like The Thirty-Nine Steps, or the E. E. Smith type of science-fiction novel, Skylark Three, say, and now pick up John Le Carré's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, a story in which our spies are just as bad as theirs, or Ian Watson's Embedding, a novel about the human incapacity to accept multiply embedded linguistic structures, and we become annoyed. We were looking for a nice little daydream but are being asked to think. If we are not careful, we may find ourselves speaking of a Golden Age of this or that genre and complaining that a once-delightful tradition has become self-conscious and pretentious. The probable truth is that we had then known only adolescent versions of the genre's stories or had read adult stories with an adoles-cent eye, quite naturally and properly overlooking those features that would catch our attention later. We certainly had not thought the stories mindless while we were reading them.

There are other varieties of the misinformation-generating occasional reader: for instance, the one-book expert. Every now and then, a popular genre will produce a book that sells hugely, as did A. B. Guthrie's Big Sky, a western; Walter Miller's Canticle for Leibowitz, a science-fiction novel; Frederick Forsyth's Day of the Jackal, a crime thriller; and John Le Carré's Spy Who Came in from the Cold. These books are widely read and discussed and they produce a blossoming in us of one-book expertise. Our opinions are the stronger and more powerfully advanced because they have the virtue of extreme simplicity. When we do look into other stories in that tradition, we are disappointed. We had expected a certain characterology, the thematics we find in the reading categories we do use, or at least that solidity of specification that so often distinguishes best-sellers. We do not find any of this, and we feel we have been misled—that, contrary to the implied promise of that book, only a few writers (the kinds of writers who specialize in the genres we favor, of course) can do anything with the tradition. Readers of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, an interesting novel which is from, but not in, the science-fiction tradition (for one thing, it is shot through with Huxley's curiously obsessive hatred of "vulgarity"), typically feel that way when they try to read Robert Heinlein's novels or one of science fiction's short-story anthologies.

We are one step closer to understanding a genre than we were as one-book experts when we become one-writer experts. There are many one-writer experts among us, for it seems to be the case that when we occasional readers visit another genre more than once we go usually to the same writer. Those of us who read no more than two or three detective stories a year may know only the works of Agatha Christie. For us, to read the mystery means little more than reading an Agatha Christie novel; reading the western, reading a novel by Louis L'Amour; reading science fiction, reading something by Isaac Asimov; and reading the spy thriller, reading one of Ian Fleming's stories. The writers of choice differ from one reader to the next, of course, and with each generation; once the best-known writers in their genres would have been Conan Doyle, Zane Grey, Jules Verne, and E. Phillips Oppenheim. Against this identification of the genre with a single writer, the users of that genre protest in vain. We occasional readers are surprised to learn, if we ever do, that none of those names has nearly so high a reputation with the genre's regular readers as we outsiders suppose.

We are occasional readers when we pick up a story in a new genre out of curiosity or while we are still learning how to read a genre that is beginning to interest us.

Neither the curious reader nor the novice reader is likely to issue ex cathedra statements about the genre, however. Other occasional readers are not always careful: most notoriously, those angry journalists who read one detective story or horrific fantasy randomly chosen and then bemoan (and in themselves reveal) the death of mind in Western civilization. Academic scholars who assign themselves the task of discovering the appeal of some genre or subgenre they do not read themselves—historical romances, sword and sorcery, the caper novel—and who solemnly read and annotate some six or twenty of the novels are handicapped by the ignorance of the occasional reader, though they cannot afford to allow their readers, or themselves, to recognize this. The misunderstandings they foster do more mischief, for their descriptions are supported with massive citations and are snugly embedded in method.

It would of course be impossible to say at what instant an occasional reader has become a user. The one-book reader who evolves into a two- or three-writer reader may soon be a genre user and no longer an occasional visitor.

When we are genre allergies, of course, no one who listens to us is in any doubt about that.

ALLERGICS

In the course of her research for Reading the Romance, Janice Radway discovered that the suburban readers she was studying detest the pornographic romance.

The reactions of the Smithton women to books they are not enjoying are indicative of the intensity of their need to avoid offensive material and the feelings it typically evokes. Indeed, twenty-three (55 percent) reported that when they find themselves in the middle of a bad book, they put it down immediately and refuse to finish it. Some even make the symbolic gesture of discarding the book in the garbage, particularly if it has offended them seriously. This was the universal fate suffered by Lolah Burford's Alxy (1977), a book cited repeatedly as a perfect example of the pornographic trash distributed by publishers under the guise of the romance.

When we feel like this, we find it difficult to read the stories, as though we were trying to eat spoiled or taboo food. We do not think of ourselves as having an allergic reaction, of course, but as truth seeing: this or mat sort of story is obscenely violent, or viciously snobbish, or stupid, or grossly ignorant, and those who read it are themselves violent, brutish, stupid. Our reading motto then replaces the words "only," "also," and "sometimes" witii "never": "X? Never!"—that is, "The detective story? Never!" or "Science fiction? Never!"

Readers of any genre learn to live quietly—if possible, anonymously—with that genre's allergies. As allergies we are just as abrasive, and so fierce and simple in our dislikes that our voices have an influence out of proportion to our numbers. The occasional readers, the nonallergic avoiders, and the inexperienced will always hear our voices of hatred more clearly than the milder approval of the users.

Reading allergies have indirect consequences when not recognized for what they are. Even if we are expert in fiction and in the theory of fiction, when we look into a genre or writer to which we are allergic we will not be able to read enough of the stories to make sense of them: Mickey Spillane has suffered grievously from the hit-and-miss reading that is all that allergies can manage. An allergic historian refuses to acknowledge, even to see, that a book worth admiring comes from the hated tradition, as when the science-fiction allergic insists that Hawthorne's "Artist of the Beautiful" and Twain's Connecticut Yankee in the Court of King Arthur are not science fiction, not even nineteenth-century proto-science fiction, and when readers allergic to westerns deny that James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales are westerns. Sometimes it is useful to think of proposals for censorship of this or that kind of book as the consequence of unadmitted reading allergies.

No one has taken the trouble to study reading allergies, though they are interesting in their own right. Walker Gibson offered one (partial) explanation for our dislike of some reading materials. He suggested that each book elicits from its readers a personality appropriate to it. A story that is intelligent, or nasty, or comic creates in its real human reader a mock reader who is intelligent, or nasty, or amused. Mark Twain asks us to be one person; Henry James, another. When we find that a story is making us into someone we do not want to be, Gibson continued, we throw it down and say it is a bad story.

I am not persuaded that this alone accounts for the Smithton rejection of pornographic romances, but it does help us understand some of our more passionate dislikes. Readers who pass up the British, country-house tale of detection, as I do, are perhaps suffering from a mild allergic reaction. Those of us with other social origins and loyalties feel that the British style of detective story asks us to give full approval to the preoccupations of the middle class—to its love of gossip, for instance. In the course of the inquiries, the detective uncovers precisely the kinds of secret about each of the suspects that would send delighted shivers through a middle-class dinner party: this woman has been having an affair with her husband's brother, that man has embezzled, a third proved a coward while serving in Northern India, that woman has had an illegitimate child, that man has gone broke. Only one of these people is a murderer, but the gossip-hunting season is declared open on anyone unlucky enough to be named a suspect. It all seems definitively "tribal," and some of us are not sure we want to join the dance of social excommunication. Other readers, some of them our friends, feel a similar reluctance to participate in the ceremonies shadowed forth by the genres we favor.

The people who read paperbacks are not the simple souls their critics make them out to be. They read across genre boundaries. They manifest intricate patterns of reading addictions, reading preferences, reading avoidances, and reading allergies.

They are not easy to understand even when they are speaking about a single, favored genre. Few of the enthusiasts can even agree as to what is and what is not science fiction, say, or what is and what is not a detective story. They politely overlook their differences when they meet, but the differences are not trivial.

Suppose that we want to know what a detective story is to its admirers and so turn to Barzun and Taylor's Catalogue of Crime, which is described on its dust jacket as a "Reader's Guide to the Literature of Mystery, Detection, and Related Genres." This is a fine collection of notes on hundreds of stories, and when we have learned to compensate for its biases it makes an excellent guide and companion to our reading. Barzun and Taylor tell us about (a) tales of detection and (b) ghost stories, but they do not tell us about (c) spy stories. That is one ostensive definition of the detective story.

We might turn instead, and with equal assurance, to Julian Symon's Mortal Consequences: A History—From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel. This is not a reading companion; as its title tells us, it is a history of the detective story, but it will also serve as an excellent reading guide. Symon's history does not cover (b) ghost stories, however, but does cover (c) spy stories. For people who are interested in the two volumes only for their help in finding a good read, these differences are only mildly amusing. When we are trying to understand what the detective story is to the people who read it, however, they are unsettling. Ghost stories and spy stories are not at all alike. What is the detective story to its readers, we ask, if some of them think of it as the tale of detection plus the ghost story and others think of it as the tale of detection plus the spy story?

There are other differences, differences in topography between the two genrescapes these readers map for us. The tale of detection—the sort of story that Conan Doyle made famous with his tales of Sherlock Holmes—looms large in Barzun and Taylor's Catalogue of Crime. For them, the later "crime novel"—the study that focuses on motivation rather than detection—is a decline from the Olympian heights of an earlier, golden age of the detective story. In the genrescape that Julian Symons describes in Mortal Consequences, however, the tale of detection that Barzun and Taylor love is snobbish, silly, adolescent—merely a stage the tradition had to go through if it was to mature into the crime novel. What is the detective story to its readers if some of them think that we shall find its center in those tales of detection and others think we shall find it in the contemporary crime novel? Nor are these the only images of that detective story we encounter when we listen to its readers. Neither of those two volumes is greatly impressed with die American style of detective story that descended from the Black Mask school of writers and included such honored names as Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler—a school of writing that other, equally expert readers value above all others. "What can readers be finding in the detective story?" its critics ask. Which readers? we ask. Which detective story? "What can readers be finding in the romance?" Which readers? Which romance?

It would be difficult enough to identify the "typical reader" and the "typical science-fiction story" if we had only exclusivists to consider—people who read nothing but science fiction or the detective story or the romance. Few readers are so simple of focus, and most of those who are will be shifting to something else later.

Within every reader there lies an intricate pattern of addictions, preferences, random interests, avoidances, and allergies which is never quite the same as the pattern in any other reader. We can easily imagine two friends who exchange detective stories. One of them, though comfortable with that genre, is uncomfortable with the ghost story, is only occasionally a reader of a western, is indifferent to science fiction, violently allergic to romances. The other, also a user of the detective story, enjoys ghost stories too, however, but is allergic to westerns, uncomfortable with science fiction, and merely indifferent to the romance. What, other than the detective story, do these two readers have in common? As often as not, the reader of paperbacks is a user of many genres who becomes exclusivist only briefly. It is easier to study the long-term exclusivists; they have an attractive, laboratory-like purity about them; surely we will not be satisfied until we understand the multigenre users, however. It is the exclusivists who are atypical.

There are some other standards we can set for ourselves in our slow progress toward a better understanding of some very subtle matters: for instance, that when we set out to investigate any of the genres we first determine our own relationships to that genre—that is, whether we ourselves are exclusivists, users, fans, or occasional readers—and that when we start giving explanations, we decide whether we are addressing our remarks to users, to occasional readers, or to nonreaders. While it is not always easy to know whether we are still operating under the handicaps of the occasional reader or have through some creative leap of reading insight grasped the logic and potentiality of a genre, we should be able to tell when we are allergic, at least, or when our information about a genre comes from stories in the same tradition but in another medium—from television programs or from feature films, for instance.

We shall also want to be wary when we read the explanations that others give. We should not entirely trust either praise from exclusivists or blame from allergies, of course. We should recognize that the observations of occasional readers, though well meant, are astigmatic: occasional readers just do not know enough. A still unexploited resource, as we have seen, is the body of readers who have become fans. The men and women who write for such fanzines as The Armchair Detective and The Science Fiction Review know more about those two genres than do academic sociologists, ethnologists, and literary scholars. Further, they are intelligent, and they too want to know whether, how, and why they are different from others.

Their explanations, too, are governed by tradition, however, and we can be confident that some of them will enthusiastically assure us that reading thrillers or romances or science fiction is "fun" and that it provides "escape" and that the writers are providing them with "surrogate daydreams." One of these explanations is worth looking into, but the other two should have been thrown out long ago.

Gry Heggli

SOURCE: "Talking with Readers: An Alternative Approach to Popular Literature," in Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. XXVI, No. 4, Spring, 1993, pp. 11-17.

[In the following essay, Heggli utilizes discussions with a sampling of female readers to explain the popularity of weekly family magazines in Norway.]

In the many-sided world of popular culture, weekly magazines stand out as products of some significance. The 4.2 million inhabitants of Norway constitute a relatively limited market, but the Norwegian weeklies boast a circulation of 1.6 million, half of which is contributed by three major family magazines. According to recent market research, though, their actual audience verges on a staggering 2.8 million.

The Norwegian family magazines are marketed as reading for the entire family—grandparents, mothers, fathers and children alike. The tables of contents includes serials, short stories, true confessions, interviews and articles covering ordinary people who have done remarkable things, Norwegian celebrities and European royalty, quizzes, recipes and letters to various columnists.

The weekly magazines are labeled as popular literature and have been subject to numerous studies that have focused on their texts while leaving readers standing on the sidelines. Traditional studies of popular literature have primarily been preoccupied with assessing the magazines from an ideological point of view, and they generally conclude that the weeklies represent inferior reading. The lack of "literary" qualities is said to have negative effects on the readers; the magazines blur causal relations and power structures and distort reality.

How do the users relate to the magazines? There seemed to be a conflict between the weeklies' vast number of readers and their bad reputation. As a folklorist I was interested in finding another reality, invisible in public debate, but in which readers feel at home. I was curious as to how readers use their magazines, what they read, how they read it, and how they relate to their own reading. As a consequence, I carried out in-depth interviews with a group of female readers with highly varied backgrounds, all of whom had been reading one or more family magazines regularly over a period of up to 30 years. By closing in on these women, I hoped to understand more about their motivation, preferences, interpretations and involvement in relation to the magazines. I wanted the readers to voice the pleasure that they found in reading, and based on their accounts I hoped to come up with an answer to the overwhelming popularity of the weekly magazines, an answer that was richer in detail man previous studies.

In spite of the fact that they are being marketed as reading for the entire family, the family magazines are clearly written for, and are read by, women and must therefore be regarded as part of female culture. In order to understand the femininity of these weeklies, I found that recent American reader-response criticism would be a useful instrument of thought, because its theories cover issues such as the implication of gender on reading. Studies have shown mat men and women approach texts differently. Whereas men tend to establish a certain distance to the text, women easily identify with persons in the story, even with emotions and situations, and they often go through a range of social emotions while reading (Flynn and Schweickart).

The magazines offer problem-oriented reading as well as idealizing stories, but both kinds of text stimulate the inclusive, compassionate attitude that values attentiveness and identification. Whether it was the readers' demand that fictional characters recognize the need for close relations, as shown by their partiality to articles that emphasize compassion and helpfulness, or the congenial activities that they were encouraged to by the practical pages, the readers' interpretations clearly showed that they related themselves to the text with understanding and involvement.

THE READERS AND THE SERIALS

The serials are popular and are usually one of the first columns to be read. However, my interviews clearly showed that the readers were selective; certain criteria had to be met for the stories to please them. Key concepts were credibility and compassion, credibility being a prerequisite for identification. The texts had to describe a known world that the reader knew how to relate to. Reading involves confirmation of identity and construction of a reality in which the events must be probable from the reader's point of view. One of the women I talked to mentioned a story that failed to meet this criterion, and that she consequently rejected. She was unaware of what was bothering her about it before we started talking. Then she gradually realized that the principal character's passivity was the cause of her annoyance:

Unni: I think I'm bothered about the whole thing, that she doesn't tell the police how crazy her husband is, for instance, that's probably what it is, that's what's so bloody annoying.

Gry: You've been thinking about that?

Unni: Yes, she can't go on like that, you know, it's dangerous, isn't it? He's a bastard and a criminal and should have been reported ages ago. She keeps putting things off all the time. I think that's probably what annoys me.

Gry: That you think she acts kind of stupid?

Unni: Yeah…

Because Unni cannot vouch for the principal character's passivity, the lingering conflict fills her with dismay, and consequently the story fails to provide the prerequisite for identification. Earlier Unni described how she was able to ignore everything else when reading a catchy story, and when she was asked to pick the serial that she liked the most, her arguments were based on the quality of the feelings they aroused in her.

One of the most popular serials proved to be a story called "The Gipsy Boy." The principal characters are a grown man who suffers from cancer and a ten-year-old gipsy boy. The story tells us about their friendship and how the child brings the man to new awareness during the last stage of his life. One of my interviewees described the story's qualities like this:

Else: It was just fabulous, 'cause you'd have thought that you'd want that man to go on living, right? But it was all about this boy and how he used his intuition and feelings to understand what that guy needed and what he was thinking before he actually said it, right? He made the last part of that man's life a wonder, and he sort of realized that he'd been living all his life without really realizing what it was all about, the animals and nature and all. So he sort of calmed down and got some peace of mind. Harmony, you know. Yeah, it sure was a fabulous story.

The Gipsy Boy must have given the readers special cause for involvement. The gipsy is not just any child, he belongs to a commonly stereotyped people. The story emphasizes that the boy is a "child of nature," that his intuition is unspoiled and that his capability of identification surpasses that of ours which has been weakened by "civilization."

By using a gipsy child instead of a woman in the caring role, the story strengthens its message. The fundamental values that form the basis of a full life stand out more clearly; we have to take care of each other and free ourselves from the chase for physical comforts.

The story describes the last stage of the principal character's life in a way that grants the female readers closeness to a man's inner thoughts and feelings in a critical situation. In her article "Rhythms of Reception," Tania Modleski writes about the frequent use of close-ups in soap operas: "Close-ups provide the spectator with training in reading other people, in being sensitive to their (unspoken) feelings at any given moment".

The emotional effect is strengthened by the fact that the dying person is a man. His strength and masculinity crack, and he realizes that his previous priorities were not the right ones; he has underrated the importance of values such as intimacy, simplicity, care and love. The female readers have their choice of values confirmed; living for and with others, is a prerequisite for satisfaction.

As follows from the readers' liking for stories that create the right atmosphere of compassion and care, they dislike stories in which the characters are "evil." One of my informants told me how she distinguishes between serials that are marked by "compassion and love" and serials whose characters "bug each others to death." Some of them used words like "brutal," "mean" and "unpleasant" when asked to say what was wrong about a certain story, whereas others found it "annoying" when heroes were up against adversities, and felt "disturbed when things turned out bad." However, behind all of these statements we find the same disheartened state of mind.

This does not imply that popular serials lack dramatic events that give cause to suffering. The readers accept great portions of war, disease and death, as long as the misery can be claimed to be caused by fate, or reasons beyond the characters' control. Once the characters become aggressive and violent, however, the readers lose interest.

THE SOCIAL ACT OF READING

The social act of reading is another aspect of women's reading habits. What do they signal to the people around them when they sit down with their magazines?

Reading calls for concentration—it is difficult to do other things at the same time. It is an activity that makes interaction with other people impossible; there is room for nothing but the reader and the text. This means that when a woman sits down to read, she deliberately chooses to indulge in her private pleasure for a little while.

Through the years my informants had developed rigid reading habits. They usually read their magazine in the evenings, and they often pick it up while sitting in the living room after they are through with the chores of the day. Nevertheless, most of them prefer to read in bed, as this is the place that provides them with the peace and quiet they need to concentrate.

The family magazines are all published on Tuesdays, and normally my informants read them on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. In other words, reading is a weekday pastime. In her article "TV and Ritualization of Everyday Life," the Norwegian folklorist Torunn Selberg points out how we assign meaning and content to the hours of the day and the days of the week based on their position in a pattern, its distance from the weekend is an important criterion for the emotional content of a certain weekday. We find the same qualitative difference between weekday leisure and weekend leisure. Our expectations differ according to whether it is a weekday or a day of the weekend—Saturdays and Sundays are assumed to be spent in the company of others. Weekends offer the best opportunity for social contact.

"Weekend" is commonly understood to be the time between Friday afternoon and Monday morning. It is defined by the work week that most of us have to conform to. Weekends are supposed to be spent on recreation and rest, and family life is supposed to receive top priority in order to create a meaningful feeling of community with partners and children.

Women take on the responsibility for protecting their families' common leisure. They are to set up strategies so that they can provide for the welfare of other people, primarily children and husbands, no matter the inconvenience to themselves. The magazines are part of women's weekdays and are not supposed to be read during weekends. This is in line with the policy that is advocated by the magazines; women should spend their weekends on strengthening family ties. The family magazine deals with every aspect of family life; during weekdays women spend their spare time reading about how to care for their families during the weekend.

My informants' reading habits show that they refrain from reading the magazine until they are given the chance to indulge in it. One of them puts it like this:

Gry: So the magazine usually lies on the bedside table, then?

Randi: Yes, but I keep it down here in the kitchen, so that I can pick it up whenever, except it's impossible to concentrate then, you really need some peace and quiet.

The way these women make their priorities shows that they rarely or never let their own urge to read stand before others' call for attention.

The weekly magazine is a flexible product; its composition offers a varied mix of texts, which makes it well suited for browsing during short breaks. Those of my informants who were housewives used to pick up the magazine every now and then in between various chores. Constant interruptions and multiple concurrent tasks are part of their normal workdays:

… she must be prepared to drop what she is doing in order to cope with various conflicts and problems the moment they arise. Unlike most workers in the labor force, the housewife must be beware of concentrating her energies on one task—otherwise her dinner could burn, or the baby could crack its skull. (Modleski)

This is how Unni described the day of the week when she used to buy the magazine:

Unni: Well, it used to be Tuesdays, you know, when we were living in the city center. I put the little one to bed, and Lisa sat down with her bricks, and then I picked up the magazine.

Gry: So you were looking forward to it?

Unni: Yeah, sure, it was great. Couldn't sit for that long, though, they kept interrupting me all the time, but it was kind of nice, yeah…

The way the magazine is composed, then, makes it satisfy two different needs: that for intensive, concentrated reading as well as that for superficial browsing.

Some of the women described situations in which they picked up the magazine in order to dissociate themselves from the people around them, their message being "leave me alone for a while." They had been using their energies for associating with their families and needed to withdraw for a while to collect themselves and to gather strength to join the family again.

Unni: Well, it's in the evenings now, after I've put the kids to bed. "Now I'm gonna sit down"—sort of, 'cause then I know I won't be interrupted, that's probably why I'm doing it. I'm kind of tired then, you see, and I need to relax. That's when I sit down with things like that, and a little snack perhaps, and a cup of tea.

Gry: What happens if someone interrupts you?

Unni: The first 30 minutes I get real cross and grumpy, 'cause then I really want some peace and quiet. I always demand that half-hour, and if my husband has been waiting for me to join him for some reason, then those first 30 minutes are banned. He's not allowed to say anything. He has to wait, no matter what. (She gives a little laugh). I've been nagging for a couple of hours then, you see, to make this work…

In Janice Radway's study, Reading the Romance, she interprets the act of reading as a deliberate choice to attend to one's personal needs rather than to those of others:

In picking up a book, they refuse temporarily their family's otherwise constant demand that they attend to the wants of others even as they act deliberately to do something for their own private pleasure.

Reading becomes a refuge where women feel unattached from the duties that they normally fully accept as their own.

The reader of family weeklies has part of her female identity confirmed by her reading. The magazine tells her that feminine values related to care and reproduction are central and important, and that the intimacy and intensity that she wishes to have in relation to other people are ideals that are worth fighting for. The aim is to gain male recognition, and ultimately, that men should also recognise their feelings towards their fellow human beings and their needs to be intimate.

Traditionally, the weekly magazines have been considered ideologically confirmative and suppressive. However, once we change our perspective, another view seems compelling: that women's reading of magazines is a tacit protest against the underrating that women's care for others has been subject to. Women are not merited for the work that they do in this area of society, financially or status-wise, and there are few places for them to find encouragement and confirmation that certain central feminine values are in fact valuable. Having read their magazines, women return to their domestic duties with renewed inspiration, convinced that their priorities are right when they choose to put all their effort into caring for the common good of their families.

THE WEEKLY MAGAZINES AND THE FOLK NARRATIVE

In an essay from 1958, Herman Bausinger, the German folklorist, describes how the time of the classical genres has past, but that their themes survive in different forms. The tales of magic, the legend and the joke were parts of world that was small and surveyable, but in which inexplicable supernatural phenomena were important elements. The tales of magic voiced the dreams and the fantasies, the longings that were sought beyond the limits of this restricted world. The legends discussed the borderline between the known and the unknown. The world we live in today has become big and chaotic, and what used to be supernatural has become natural. Today's narratives draw their content from the factual world that we all have to relate to, and are there to tell us about the various revelations of the "real" world. In Bausinger's opinion, the basic structures of the classical genres can now be found in our preference for telling about and listening to happy events, crazy incidents and merry situations (Bausinger).

If the family magazines are read with this in mind, we will see that the happy events of the magic tales are reflected in the descriptions of weddings, child births, reunions and remarkable cures found in serials, true confessions and articles. The legend's discussion of the frightening and the strange is primarily found in true confessions and in the many readers' letters that discuss personal experiences and problems. Bausinger's third genre, the joke, is practically non-existent in the family magazines, but it is well covered e.g. in men's magazines.

We have seen that readers wish for realistic serials, as credibility is an important criterion for identification. Corresponding tendencies can be found if we examine folk tales. The novella with its emphasis on realism used to be more popular among women than men (Hodne). Early folklorists reflected on the differences between men's and women's relation to the narrative. Several researchers have described the intensity with which women narrate. Moltke Moe, who was Norway's first Professor of Folklore, characterized women's narratives in a essay from 1894 as "rounded and communicative, somewhat gentler and smoother". In 1939, the German folklorist Merkelbach-Pinck experienced that "Frauen erzählen innerlicher, sie erzählen mit dem Herzen". In 1962 Linda Degh, the folklorist, characterized the stories told by female narrators in her thesis, Folktale and Society: "(… ) feeling, finesse, tenderness and sentiment are prevalent in the tales of the female narrators". Both Moltke Moe and Linda Degh emphasize the fact that women base their stories on personal experience; events and feelings that concern them are woven into their narratives. "They can never remain as factual as male narrators" (Degh). This indicates that the features that characterize women's reading can be found in their narrative style as well. They enter into the experience offered by the story and easily involve themselves with persons and situations.