memento mori
remembering in a romance
Sometime in 2021, I thought to email an old professor I had in undergrad about my new genre fiction obsession. I had taken both his medieval romance and detective fiction classes and while I was never as close to him as other mentors I had in school, I did really love his coursework. I have been thinking about it constantly as romance excitedly opens up avenues of thought that I had believed cauterized forever when I felt I lost the ability to read novels in law school.
He had been working at my college since the 1980s and I figured he might have retired since I was last on campus. I googled his name to look for a Professor Emeritus email and instead found an obituary from my college’s Living Wage campaign, a program he has been the advisor for.
I can’t properly eulogize Professor Guthrie because we really weren’t that close—he intimidated me deeply (I have no memory of ever going to office hours) and his classes were some of the first and only English classes I ever took that felt difficult. Traditionally what was difficult about any course for me was keeping up with assignments and writing papers without run-on sentences, but the intellectual stuff1 of literature classes has never been particularly difficult for me.
Professor Guthrie’s classes melted my brain, but I kept taking them. I graduated with three of his classes on my transcript, more than any other English professor at my college. I think I struggled with the lack of neatness in the forms that he was interested in—medieval romances and detective novels are both made for popular entertainment and it means that they don’t always have the tidiest plots or tightest architecture of form. Medieval romances with the same characters may seem to contradict each other or even themselves. Detective novels may become more atmospheric or pulpy than plots that make much sense. Think of the plot of The Big Sleep, a book and film we read and watch in The Detective Novel. The plot is notoriously difficult to follow. The book is slightly easier than the film, which was beholden both to censorship laws and a studio that wanted more Bogart and Bacall scenes but still has loose threads.
Someone asked Professor Guthrie about this in one of these classes once (they really do blur together in my mind, plus I’m pretty sure every class I took with him was in the same seminar room). I don’t remember his exact answer, but he used the visual metaphor of letting something be turned inside out instead of packed neatly into a shape and said something along the lines of “let there be holes, let there be contradictions” in the work as you look at it.
This may be the thing from my undergraduate degree that I think about more than anything else. I was very invested in being someone who studied the Best Art—I was a double major in Art History and English and I loved Renaissance paintings and Italian sonnets and big, canonical Victorian novels. I ended up writing my senior seminar papers about a Dada artist’s early surrealist work2 and an Edwardian novel3 and have since broken even further away from that conservative impulse that I’m surprised I ever held onto so dearly to lay prostrate at the mercy of a Canon.
I’ve reviewed some of Professor Guthrie’s scholarly work4 and realized just how much my perception of the medieval time period as a setting in literature was shaped by him—I’ve paraphrased him on Reformed Rakes at least three times. And now I spend more of my time thinking about romance novels, a genre that the moment I picked it up, it felt so obvious that I should have been reading them the whole time. I wish I could ask him his thoughts on how the medieval period in the romance genre and I wish I had read genre fiction when I had the option to go to his office hours.
Here he is, from one of the syllabi I’ve kept, talking about the question of genre fiction: ”We will raise questions about labels like literature, art, serious, popular, pulp, and trash. These were explicit or implicit critical categories through much of the twentieth century. Do they mean anything now? Is the detective novel an escapist genre? Is escape the opposite of catharsis?”
The latest book that I wish I could email him about is By Possession by Madeline Hunter, which Beth gifted me when I was in Salt Lake City on a trip to hang out with her and Chels. I had read Madeline Hunter’s Regency-set romances before and my primary reaction has been “huh, I’m not sure anyone writes like this.” She’s a great example of a genre author who gave me more questions than answers about how her genre iterations work. I’ve always been particularly interested in how she manages to have characters who have setting-appropriate judgments that the narrative as a whole doesn’t endorse.
While in the past, I’ve given Hunter recommendations with an asterisk (*I’m interested in this, but I’m not sure if it’s widely good or enjoyable), I love By Possession, particularly the way that Hunter wrote the characters experiencing “having a memory” and her extremely tight 3rd person POVs. Thinking about thinking about the past is what I wanted to write about in this review of By Possession and that got me remembering Professor Guthrie. So below is the email that I would write him if he were still here. I’ve footnoted information that I wouldn’t condescend to include in an email to a medievalist, but I thought was useful context.
Dear Professor Guthrie,
I hope your retirement is going well and you are getting to spend lot of time with your tomato garden.
I’ve been thinking about the coursework I took with you a lot in the past couple of years because I’ve fallen into a hobby that exists at the intersection of pop culture perception of the past and genre fiction: historical romance novel reading. This past year I’ve been on a medieval-set romance kick and one book and its relationship to its setting in particular made me think of your classes.
In By Possession by Madeline Hunter, Addis de Valance is a knight, thought to be dead on a crusade, but he has returned and wants to reclaim both his lands (usurped by a stepbrother) and his son (temporarily raised by a friend and servant of his late wife). It is 1326 and Edward II5 is on the throne. Hunter takes the tact of depicting the king as incompetent and easy to manipulate by his advisors/rumored lovers. Addis’ claims to his land are in opposition to a fictional ally of Hugh Despenser the Younger, who appears in the text.
The woman raising Addis’ son is a villein6 Moira Falkner. Her mother was the mistress of Sir Bernard, the knight that Addis squired for, and his father-in-law and Moira claims he freed both mother and daughter before he died. There is no written proof of this available and Addis contends that she and her mother were bonded not to Sir Bernard, but to land that a part of Addis’s wife’s dowry. He insists she is still his bondwoman and must pay an exorbitant fee for her manumission.
Addis and Moira knew each other as children. Moira was close with Claire, Bernard’s beautiful daughter and Addis’ future wife. Addis called Moira “Claire’s shadow” since she was always underfoot to the more luminous and vivacious Claire. Addis and Claire were childhood sweethearts and their families approved of their marriage. But their marriage was less idyllic than the “romantic poem” they were promised and Addis left on the crusade a bitter husband and returns a widower with no love lost for his late wife.
A fairly common structural convention of historical romance is a dual-timeline romance. I think this is one of the hardest structures to pull off since it is often coupled with a dual POV structure between the two main characters. An author has to manage essentially five knowledges of information: two for each character and the reader who is experiencing the story non-linearly and it becomes clunky and belabored quite quickly. But usually, these timeline shifts happen at chapter breaks, with some strong indicator to let us know we’re going back in time.
But in By Possession, Hunter gives the reader the experience of a dual timeline book while doing something different with the shape of the included memories that suits the setting she is deploying astutely, given the genre’s relationship to chivalric romances. Rather than jumping back in time, Hunter has the reader enter a character’s memory of a moment, sometimes for quite a few pages, in order to give the simulation of a dual timeline. The visual signal that we are going into the past is the text in italics, but the order of the scenes is gleaned from context clues.
Further emphasizing this structure is the gap between Addis and Moira in their memories of their earlier acquaintance: though Addis is more interested in pursuing a relationship in the 1326 setting, Moira is the one who remembers their acquaintance in detail, given her childhood crush on him. Her deeper memories give her pause about being seduced—she remembers her idolization of the young squire and does not trust herself to focus on her goal (obtaining manumission) if she opens that affection again. In Addis’ point of view chapters, we may see echoes of phrases or memories that we learn from Moira, but they are whispers compared to the full scenes that take in Moira’s mind.
In genre romance spaces, the defining of a romance novel is often done in opposition to other genres that share its nomenclature, namely romantic stories or chivalric romances. But given the popularity of medieval romances as a setting in the genre, it feels foolish to put such a strong firewall up between the two, even if their etymologies diverge.
The romance’s relationship to memory and Hunter’s distinct way of carrying two temporal threads reminded me of chivalric romances and Bakhtin’s characterization of how time works in a medieval romance. The defining feature of the “suddenness”7 that changes the characters’ relationship to the accepted and expected rules of a world is shared between chivalric romances and many romance novels, where the interiority of a character experiencing an internal conflict of romantic love makes up the narrative structure and the processing of externalizing that makes up the conflict. What might look like a prophetic dream sequence in a chivalric romance could be a romance novel character viewing a memory through a new light, even as the reader is getting to see that memory for the first time. The process of these novels is often characters attaching language and articulation to an abstract concept (romantic love). And in order for there to be resolution that language must be understood by another character, who is going through their own version of the same process.
The requisite “suddenly” often comes when a character is bounding their emotions and abstract thoughts with language, preparing to articulate it to another. Though chivalric romances may be far removed from the genealogy of these mass-market paperbacks, I feel the lineage, especially when looking at the medieval set books.
I hope you’re well—I just wanted to know that I think about your course work all the time. I wish I had been reading more genre fiction when I was in college so I could pop by your office hours and discuss.
Best,
Emma
Professor Guthrie’s interactive edition of Troilus and Criseyde by Geoffrey Chaucer is free and open-access. In his words “[m]y object is to provide an online edition of Troilus and Criseyde which is both editorially responsible and accessible to present-day readers, including students. It is not a translation or modernization…Early in the poem, it normalizes the more obscure spellings of high-frequency words, not to the broad range of Middle English but to the more recognizable values of Corpus Christi and the other principal early manuscripts of the poem. As the poem continues, normalizing diminishes, so that by the end of the text the spelling closely resembles that of the base manuscript. This should give a beginning student a foothold, and it should also serve as a self-teaching device for Chaucer's Middle English.”
I read this poem with Professor Guthrie in the Medieval Romance class, with an earlier edition of this project. By means of the internet, I can revisit a poem from the 1380s in the form that I first read it in 2012, first taught to me by a person who is no longer with us, by viewing a project that he created with accessibility to all students in mind. The flattening of time happens in our minds, in medieval romances, and on the internet, it seems.
recommendations
A bunch of things that I read in Professor Guthrie’s classes!
Maigret novels by Georges Simenon: I’m not actually very good at finishing detective novels. I’ve seen every episode of Poirot (and once made a David Suchet fan cam), but I’ve never finished an Agatha Christie novel. But I can reliably pick up a Maigret novel a couple of times a year and have a great time. Simenon’s detective tends to focus on someone’s motive, from a very humanist perspective. He is also huge and a wife guy. Lots to love! We specifically read Maigret and Hotel Majestic in Guthrie’s class.
Strong Poison by Dorothy Sayers: Sir Peter Wimsey, one of the most perfectly named characters in all of literature. Matched, perhaps, only by Harriet Vane.
Devil in the Blue Dress by Walter Mosely: I don’t remember this book as well, but I did see the movie directed by Carl Franklin this summer (all summers are Denzel summers) and it’s fantastic.
I read Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes in a History of Photography class that I took the same semester as I read Mythologies in Professor Guthrie’s theory class. I think about one or the other most days of my life?
Except poetry scansion. I’m almost 13 years out from my BA in English, so I’ll disclose this in a footnote: I cheated on absolutely every scansion exercise I was ever given in a poetry class. I simply can’t tell the different between stressed and unstressed syllables without a lot of hand holding, so I got my twin brother, who is a drummer, to help me on every scansion assignment.
Max Ernst
A Room with a View, which in Forster studies get the short end to the stick next to the masterpieces Howard’s End and A Passage to India and the thornier/more tragic Where Angels Fear to Tread and The Longest Journey.
Including a chapter that was published when I was in his class called “Time Travel, Pulp Fictions, and Changing Attitudes toward the Middle Ages: Why You Can’t Get Renaissance on Somebody’s Ass” in Medieval Afterlives in Popular Culture.
Edward II has a controversial legacy and Hunter takes the tact of depicting him as incompetent and easy to manipulate by his advisors, who there are rumors of him taking a lovers.
A type of feudal serf. A villein can receive manumission for a fee, and the period the book is set in represents the transition from villeins in serfdom to tenant farmers, so the transition from taxes that only villeins were subject to rents. This process in the change of the economy was accelerated by the Black Death in the late 1340s.
“This “suddenly” is normalized, as it were, in chivalric romances; it becomes something generally applicable, in fact, almost ordinary. The whole world becomes miraculous, so the miraculous becomes ordinary without ceasing at the same time to be miraculous. Even “unexpectedness” itself—since it is always with us—ceases to be something unexpected.” Mikhail Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and Chronotopes in Novels” in The Dialogic Imagination.