Reading Sally Rooney
The publishing industry has for some time now been heavily publicizing a few figures whose success is keeping the whole thing afloat. Sally Rooney is one of those figures.
Her work fits in with two trends in the literary novel since it began to be run by multinational conglomerates and media corporations. The first is autofiction. While Rooney's books are not directly about her, her career started in an autobiographical vein, as she first came to the attention of editors when she published a popular piece about her life as a champion college debater. She is comfortable with her books being marketed as having an autobiographical dimension, which in turn is meant by publicists to exemplify a generational archetype. Her characters are young and Irish and working through their first intense friendships and relationships while trying to find a footing in school and work.
The industry likes autofiction for several reasons. It is helpful to use authors' biographies in marketing, attaching attractive and articulate real people to book titles; and authors are expected to work on this, to travel to promote their books on radio, TV, and the internet. Additionally the literary novel industry and the industries of therapy and popular psychology have dovetailed. There is some correlation between being a novel reader and being a person interested in oneself as a therapeutic subject, a self with a psychology that should be explored and cared for and improved and fortified. The novel in English has long become, among other things, one site for the exploration of inner lives, especially those of people in particular social strata, namely bourgeois with university education and not insignificant private wealth; and novel reading can be a kind of therapy and can encourage people to understand themselves as therapeutic characters in journeys of self-discovery.1 Autofiction intensifies and personalizes the novel as therapy.
All of this applies to Rooney's work, even if there is something occasionally cold, vacant, and depthless about her characters. She presents some absent affect or depth as the psychological truth of their inner lives. They are detached and distant; and Rooney has stated that she wants us to see these qualities as the result of contemporary social conditions broadly conceived: debt and difficulty finding work and struggling to pay rent, which aren't propitious for long term planning of traditional family life and other bourgeois norms. All of this — marketing via biographical author who can speak from the heart of the product, the emergence of the novel as a key site of expression of a (if flattened) inner life, the therapeutic turn — makes autofiction work.
The second trend is the literary-genre hybrid, which Dan Sinykin has recently studied as a form supported by the industry once it was demanded that it do its part within the new media monopolies that absorbed most of the major publishing firms so completely. In Rooney's case the genre is romance. Whatever else her novels are, they are also romance novels. My saying so is simply to observe the nature of their success, without derision. Romance is one of the key genres for the mediation of uncertainty; wanting the kinds of relief and release it can offer — described in this cluster by Gloria Fisk — is easy to understand.
The literary-genre hybrid has qualities that distinguish it as literature so it can be sold in the literary B-format, but it is accessible enough that those who are willing to go outside of mass-market reading — as for instance into forms like chick lit — can be encouraged to purchase. Thanks to its hybridity, Rooney's work has two other qualities prized in the industry today: it is translatable and versionable. It is translatable in that it's written in relatively simple prose and the settings are not especially important to the meaning; the experiences are common to young people growing up in many places. And it is versionable in that the material appeals to film and TV executives looking for adaptations.
The romance tropes deployed in Rooney's work have already proven to be a strong draw for contemporary audiences.
I am thinking here of:
— The troubled female protagonist with a difficult past, whose traumatized psyche is the source of some of her difficulties in love and is also meant to explain something about the nature of her sexual desire.
— The fitful on-again-off-again romance characterized by a certain withholding, a desire to maintain autonomy and avoid dependency, and a reluctance to appear to be "too much."
— The uncertainty and doubt about romantic love and the "couple form," a phrase I pick up here from other materialist feminist thinkers because it conceives styles of coupledom as mutable but sedimented ways of being in life that emerge into dominance in response to capitalism.
— The styles of affective detachment characteristic of heteropessimism, in which heterosexual love is faulted — as Peter Coviello and Claire Jarvis write about in this cluster — but in a way that often serves to justify it further, since it is now entered into with wisdom and irony, and without naivety about its limitations.
— Uncertainty is partly resolved through the idealization of "the one," although the resolution can never be complete, because the doubt is built into contemporary coupledom and explains many of its forms, such as polyamory, or the idea of the "wifey," or tropes of boredom like "Netflix and chill."
There are two contemporary romance tropes worth highlighting in Rooney's work. One is the suggestion that a young woman's apparent rejection of coupledom stems from unresolved trauma in life and psychic malaise and pain; and related, there is the presentation of the female masochist as someone who hates herself or feels she deserves punishment. We might describe these as ideologemes because of the work they do to de-radicalize anti-coupledom, and to construe masochism as "born of self-loathing, desperation, or pain," as Jordan Stein writes, rather than, for instance, "something that could reach in the direction of shared or social space." As Sophie Lewis recently observed, "the novels' skinny heterosexual white cis women at various points crave obliteration, numbness, real contempt, at their male lovers' hands. It is never clear whether this is (all of) what Rooney thinks kink is."
Rooney presents masochism as a form of desire to be overcome via love, rather than as something that can be compatible or synonymous with care. The effect of this particular set of tropes — think for example of Maeve from the Netflix series Sex Education — is pretty transparent, I suppose. A young woman deviates from the standards of romantic coupledom not because of queer / feminist critique or because it is inadequate to her needs or politically suspect, but because she suffers and hasn't found the right person with whom she might find some solace or escape, however temporary, from the maddening world. (The idea that one should escape rather than unmake the maddening world, a world whose maddening features include one's own feelings of incapacity and ineffectuality, is another de-radicalizing ideologeme.)
In Rooney's version of romance, one's unresolved doubt and general world-weary despair can be at least temporarily pushed into the background so that one can foreground another feeling that is not quite certainty or happiness: more like finally being together in the confusion with someone sympathetic. This is not the same as the sense of resolution in finding "the one" that long characterized mass-market romance, and is still evident there, though residually. Instead, as for many romance writers today, Rooney leaves things a bit unresolved and open ended, with the relationships feeling like inadequate but necessary consolations.
Rooney's work is knowingly anti-capitalist and engaged with leftist thinking. She has spoken movingly about her political orientation in many interviews. She has said that she is trying to work out a literary technique that can present psychic events as conditioned by underlying socio-economic phenomena. Her characters are smart young people who care about things, debate often, and are wary of conventional politics as a means of doing anything with their many worries. Nevertheless, Rooney doubts that her work is, to use her word, "worthwhile," given the current world situation. I agree. She remarks that "if we're all in the struggle together then we'll need art as a form of consolation to make our lives feel meaningful while the struggle goes on." And yet, she adds, "we haven't actually really gotten to the bit, culturally speaking, where we're in the struggle yet."
My rejoinder is, well: aren't we in the struggle? Rooney's books are telling people that "we" aren't, and this is perhaps part of what people like about them. Her clustering of romantic coupledom, escape, treatment for broken selves, and consolation amounts to pacification. She does not see the social world, including our ways of being with others in love, as manifesting a struggle that we are already in, or as somewhere we might go for support in struggle. In this she has no doubt identified a common experience; people find her work highly relatable! But it doesn't have to be like this. There are other possibilities — already all around us, and as yet to be realized in and through struggle — for organizing anti-capitalist social life going forward.
Sarah Brouillette is a Professor in the Department of English at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. She has written three books: Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace (2007); Literature and the Creative Economy (2014); and UNESCO and the Fate of the Literary (2019).
References
- See Timothy Aubry, Reading as Therapy (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2011); and, Ela Illouz, Oprah Winfrey and the Glamour of Misery (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003). [⤒]
