Mark McGurl writes in this 2021 book:
* all fiction is genre fiction in that it caters to a generic desire.
* With its by – all – accounts absolute requirement of a happy ending for it to even receive recognition as a member of the genre by its devotees, the romance’s unforgivable sin is that it flagrantly satisfies the “imaginative needs of the community”… What other genres do indirectly, or even “critically,” it does shamelessly in the open and in resourcefully new ways.
From Pamela to the present, the novel in the English – speaking world has developed alongside and within a capitalist economy increasingly oriented toward consumer enjoyment and, if only implicitly, has been telling the story of that economy the whole time. What we now label the “romance” novel is the reflexive expression of the novel’s original appeal: not only is it written for the satisfaction of the imaginative needs of the reader, but it is about that satisfaction in the figure of the heroine and her mate, who always get what they want, and who in getting what they want reassure their readers of the legitimacy and continuity of the social order.
* Entering through the eyes as a succession of words, the novel is transformed into a series of affectively charged mental images of people and places.
* It would be for Norman Holland, whose classic Dynamics of Literary Response (1968) argues that the better part of what we do when we read is to activate emotional resonances between the text and our unacknowledged fantasies of return to pre – oedipal pleasures.
In his view, the conferral of interpretive meaning on the literary text is a form of defense against the unruliness and unspeakability of those pleasures, which are nonetheless the text’s primary raison d’être and source of generic appeal. In this sense, and never more so than when it is utterly obscene “adult entertainment,” all literature is children’s literature at its core.
* In the mostly unconscious act of introjection, which converts words into psychic events, the reader finds (or feels) analogies between the text’s fantasy material and their own. I have added an additional “basement” level, representing something like the Lacanian or Lovecraftian Real — that is, the substratum of utter indifference to human well – being from which literary and all other forms of fantasizing are obsessively repeated attempts to recover. The literary text is in this sense a therapeutic processing of that indifference as a pleasurable sensation of narrative meaning, and each distinct genre a quasi – algorithmic form of doing so.
