An Affection Altogether Ignorant of Our Faults: The Canine Romance

Tuesday, December 6, 2011

Waikiki, HI

Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend.

Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read.

(Groucho Marx)

Often I find myself buying romances on the strength of a recommendation from someone I really trust.  As with all other genres and art forms, my taste doesn't run so much towards particular sub-genres, tropes, and tones as it does towards innovation, quality, and complexity within a particular form. (This is how I got looped into romance reading as a literary scholar at all, not to mention comics, horror films, anime, reality dance competitions, curling, etc.) So from time to time I just take the risk and buy while thinking that the less I know about what I am about to read the better.

And then I open up the ebook, and it has an adorable puppy on the cover, and I think, "Oh Jesus.  What have I done." (I can't even make this last a question, so heavy is the weight of dread upon my soul at the sight of that cheerful furball.)

Jean-Honore Fragonard "Girl with a Dog" (c. 1770) Dogs and erotics Seriously: what's this about?

I don't know why I have such an entrenched bias against dog-themed romances, but I encountered it again when I cracked (clicked?) the e-spine of Nikki and the Lone Wolf*.  I think it is the feeling that the text I'm reading has been so heavily engineered to fit within a marketable trope.  ("Banksia Bay," goes the tag-line for this series, "where lost dogs heal lonely hearts.")  I feel the burden of the commodification of literature particularly heavily when I see that I'm being manipulated by an adorable mammal.  But also, as an inveterate cat-person, I feel alienated by this creaky, ubiquitous association between dog ownership and romantic healing:  why dogs, I find myself asking?  Why associate dogs, of all creatures, with romantic (or, more unsettlingly, erotic) triumph?  Why not cats? Too on the nose?  I suppose the same must be true of snakes.  When are we going to see a rash of romances (a phrase that I should really put on my "never use again" list) about people brought together by their mutual love of ferrets?  Judith Ivory's already laid out the seminal text for that movement in The Proposition, a Pygmalion tale about a rat catcher and his linguist love. [And see Laura Vivanco's excellent note below on the continuing role ferrets have had to play in the scandals of romancelandia.]

I'm troubled by the idea that dogs have an entrenched role to play in a certain genre of romance because they set out a silent, adorable and adoring model for love as faith.  What the routinely skittish protagonists of a dog romance see in their canine companions is love that is patient and kind, love that does not envy, does not boast, and is not proud, love that does not dishonor others, is not self-seeking or easily angered, and that keep no record of wrongs.  Love that always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.  Beautiful, Biblical stuff - the love of dog as a model for romantic love, which itself becomes a model for love of god.

But, curb the canine and call me Darcy, I myself prefer romantic love with a touch of pride about it. Not love as self-abnegating devotion.

There's a certain irony here: despite my initial stomach-churning sense of dread, I often quite enjoy a good dog-themed romance.  One of my favorite authors, Jennifer Crusie, frequently features dogs in her  books, and they are fully-fledged characters, with as much personality and autonomy as any of the human players in the drama. And certainly I am a sucker for the sentimentalization of animal-owner relationships, and perhaps this is why I so resent being manipulated by them when they are in less skillful hands (or more blatantly mobilized by publishers) - I will snuffle into my drink about an ill-treated animal, but I'll also resent you for exploiting this empathy cheaply.

In Nikki and the Lone Wolf, Marion Lennox draws a vivid portrait of Horse, a massive and mistreated wolfhound who draws the hero and heroine from their homes one gothic night by howling inconsolably at the ocean.  His owner threw him overboard to drown, but still he's faithfully waiting for this abusive scoundrel, and will be until the hero can persuade the heroine to take a dominant tone with the poor misguided soul (and thereby provide a new home, a new bond of love).  Horse is a great character, as are his owners, but the resolution [SPOILER], which comes by way of a massive community-wide oceanic search for the beast, after he goes swimming off into the ocean like he's Edna Pontellier, desperate to find his mistress (who has herself, with irksome parallelism, stormed off in a fit of romantic pique), seems not just implausible but also exasperating.  Is this the model of love we're looking at, I found myself asking, suicidal, irrational devotion that takes a village to soothe?  If so, the hero and heroine are right to resist it.





*Is it piling on to talk about these silly titles?  Admittedly this one is less egregious than the previous two in the series, Misty and the Single Dad and Abby and the Bachelor Cop, but it's the formula that gets me.  Heroines get a name - a diminutive, early 90s identity - while heroes get a social role.

Mink in the Woodpile, Mongoose in the Engine

Monday, December 5, 2011

Honolulu, HI

Right: so.

The term is finally over, and Mt. Grademore and I have cast conniving, sidelong looks at one another, packed our weighty selves into suitcases, and left for Hawaii.  No kidding: Mt. Grademore on parade takes up half my freaking luggage.  But now, after only four flights and a total of 27 hours of travel, here we are in sunny Oahu.  And within 24 hours of arriving in Honolulu, I could already cross "hug a cylon" off my to-do list. Such is the benefit of having a partner who works on Hawai'i Five-0.

Best story to come into our lives recently as a result of D's time in Hawaii?

When D was last with me at Farfara (our new house in Nova Scotia), he got a message from the friend who'd been his replacement on the show for the previous three weeks. "I came back from a hike and started your car," it read, "but it was making a terrible squealing noise.  When I lifted the hood, I discovered that there was a mongoose in your engine."

"In Halifax, do you occasionally find a moose under your hood?" asked one witty friend of ours, upon hearing this story.

"No," I replied, "but D did find a mink in the woodpile the other day."

"Mink in the Woodpile," chimed in another, "Best lesbian bar name ever."

I couldn't help it: "'Mink in the Woodpile, Mongoose in the Engine' sounds like the title of a conference paper I'd write." I paused to reflect. "It's subtitle would be 'Constru/icting Sexualities from Atlantic to Pacific."

"Mieux vaut un mangouste dans son moteur qu'un tigre (Proverbe Chinois du 3eme Millenaire BC)," intoned a French friend, who then sent me this video:

In the face of that brilliance, what was there really left to say?

Just this: "When I form my mongoose conference panel, the second paper is going to be titled 'Mongeese: Allegories of Collectivism.'"

Gunpowder, Lego, and Snowth

Friday, November 11, 2011 (11.11.11)

Farfara

Remember, remember the sixth of November.  It's the day-old residue of gunpowder, treason, and plot, but also my traditionally undercelebrated anniversary.  D called, somewhat late in the day, since he's in Hawaii and I'm in Nova Scotia, and these places might as well be on the opposite sides of the world.

"So," he says, by way of an opener, "Happy Day After Guy Fawkes Day."

"Yup," I reply with caution, thinking (foolhardily) that I can wait him out.

"Can't imagine there's much else worth celebrating today."

I frown at the phone, but he can't see that, and I refuse to reward him with any audible sign of frustration.

Sometime later, he breaks the silence with a carefully wrought ponder: "Why is it," he asks me weightily, "that Lego people always look so evil?"

Since this does move me from my taciturn stoniness, he expands on the point: "Have you heard about the giant Lego people who have been washing ashore?  Google it.   As someone who lives in a coastal community, it's important that you be prepared."

Still nothing from me.  He moves on: "So today I ate the new Mango Guanabana [Doo DOO doo-doo-doo**] yoghurt... it was kinda hard work.  Greek yoghurt is so thick."

**This is when D paused, mid-sentence, to sing the Snowths' back-up part from the Muppet Show under his breath, as I can only presume that he does every time he names the guanabana fruit.

Twelve years, people. Twelve years.