Booking It--Coupling

Here’s the next question from Booking through Thursday:

“Name a favorite literary couple and tell me why they are a favorite. If you cannot choose just one, that is okay too. Name as many as you like–sometimes narrowing down a list can be extremely difficult and painful. Or maybe that’s just me.”

I’m going to answer, but before I do, I’d like to talk about the question—No, I’d like to celebrate it. Remember my post the other day (10/24/08) when I said that one of the reasons I read is because of the sense of recognition, when I come across a passage and say, “Yes. That’s it exactly!” Well, I had that feeling when I read this question.

You mean someone else finds it painful to have to make a literary choice? Someone else is agonized when having to rank books, or choose the one book that changed her life, or name her favorite character of all time? I find this discovery validating.

Every time I read articles like “So & So’s Top Ten Books that Shaped His Life,” I’d feel like I should make my own list. I’d get paper and pencil, try to think, and then literally freeze, unable to write down a single thing. I couldn’t understand it—I mean, I’ve read literally thousands of books in my life. I’ve re-read them, thought about them, discussed them, and written about them. Why couldn’t I make a simple list? Why couldn’t I commit? Was I not a good reader? Not intelligent enough? Unable to process and rank data? What was wrong with me?

Now I know the answer: I’m simply avoiding pain.

And, really, literature is not something you can rank like ball teams or Olympic athletes. We don’t have measuring instruments like score boards or stop watches. Different books and different characters touch our hearts or shape our thinking in different ways at different times. How we respond to a particular book (or poem) may have something to do with how old we are or whether or not we’ve had certain life experiences yet. A particular book may strike a chord because of our gender or race or religion or because of who our best friend is. It may answer a question we’ve been pondering or validate an experience we thought made us somehow less than other human beings. Books do so much for us. How can you choose only one? Or several to put into brackets, giving one top seed?

Jerome McGann, in his work The Poetics of Sensibility, scoffs at our tendency to rank works of literature: “‘The most celebrated poem by a women of the period,’ the title promises. . . . Do we rank the passion of Anne Elliot and Catherine Earnshaw?”

Well, I certainly don’t. Here’s my list of literary couples, in no particular order—memorable for various reasons and from different times in my life. And even as I post this list, I’m feeling the pain. I just know that I’ll read your lists and my stomach will clench when I realize that I’ve slighted a couple I should have honored. You readers will know what I mean. :-)

--Anne Elliott and Frederick Wentworth from Jane Austen’s Persuasion
--Trixie Belden and Jim Frane from the Trixie Belden Mysteries series
--Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler from Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind
--Kay Scarpetta and Benton Wesley from Patricia Cornwell’s Scarpetta series
--Almanzo and Laura Ingalls Wilder from the Little House series
--Kit Tyler and Nat Eaton from Elizabeth George Speare’s Witch of Blackbird Pond
--Lucy Snowe and Paul Emanuel from Charlotte Brontë’s Villette

Again, feel free to answer the question in the comments section. If you answer on your blog, post me a link. Anybody got any Tylenol?