Literary Love
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I've read a couple of interesting nonfiction books recently.
One is A Vindication of Love, by Cristina Nehring: She talks about love and passion in general and also in various famous literary love stories. I like her general comments a little more than her literary analysis. For example, she notes that Tristan and Isolde keep separating and coming together, putting up unnecessary obstacles to their love, and sees this as evidence of the characters' need for drama to keep the passion alive. I would say rather that it's evidence of the author's and readers' need to repeat the drama of overcoming barriers in order to experience that passion of reunification over and over within the same story, rather than just once. In other words, that plot pattern doesn't arise from the psychology of the characters but from that of the readers and author. A small distinction.
Overall, the book is great. I like particularly how she argues that love is not blind: "Love, far from being blind, is the very emotion that allows us to see. It is the only state of mind in which one is entirely and uncompromisingly open to another person." I used to get mad at slow or timid drivers on the highway, but Jay is a slow, careful driver---it's just not in his nature to look ahead and plan out how to get around the cars in front of him. He just goes with the flow. He also doesn't have good night vision and can really have trouble driving at night. So now when I come upon a pokey driver, I think, "That could be Jay," and I'm much more sympathetic. This also happened when my mom got older and started driving much more carefully. When I see an older driver, I think, "That's somebody's mom."
Another book is The End of the Novel of Love, by Vivian Gornick. I read this a few years ago and didn't think much of it. But I read it again this month and was able to appreciate it much, much more. My feeling toward it was exactly the opposite to the Nehring book. I felt like Gornick's book was weaker in the general comments (e.g., people don't believe in the redeeming power of romantic love anymore---I don't think that's true) and stronger in the literary analysis.
Her literary sense is so fine, I've rarely seen the like of it. One chapter discusses the hard-boiled detective genre and its cousins (e.g., Hemingway, Richard Ford). Here's what she writes about Ford's novel The Sportswriter: "It is inconceivable in The Sportswriter that a person who is a woman should strike Frank simply as a familiar, as another human being floating around in the world. . . . He feels compassion for women but not empathy. . . . In his mind, the people who embody his condition are other men he runs up against in a random fashion. There are these men, who are like himself, and then there are the women, who can no longer give comfort against the overwhelming force of life."
She finds writers like Ford to be, not misogynistic, but sentimental. Their whole existential dilemma is predicated on a romanticization of a sexual love that they've had and lost. But did their relationships ever work like the authors and characters want to believe they did? Or is it just nostalgia for the time in their life when they believed it worked redemptively? Nostalgia for an idea they had, not a reality they had? This is what Gornick objects to: The characters don't learn, which would be okay if the author demonstrated a distance between what he knows and what his characters know---but this isn't the case. The characters persist in a "dreamy" confusion about their state that the author doesn't give lie to, narratively.
I disagree with Gornick about the inevitability of romantic disappointment. For her, romantic love can never be redemptive or transformative, and she would like authors to evince an understanding of this. I'd say rather than it can sometimes be redemptive, sometimes not. There is way too much variety in relationships to allow for a single rule. It does seem hard for writers to convey the reality of redemptive romantic love. I wouldn't say that it's an impossible task for literature, but apparently a very difficult one. The kind of day-to-day, year-by-year transformation that love can bring is perhaps not very plot-friendly.
That's why, in the past, the wonderful and life-changing effects of love were couched in stories of courtship. Anne Elliot (in Jane Austen's Persuasion) is almost a spinster, with all that that implies. She foolishly spurned the love of a good man because of family pressure about his social status. Now she is 26 years old, lonely, and---without a husband or family of her own--lower in social status herself than ever before. She is subject to the whims and the disdain of others. When against all odds she meets again with her suitor, the painful awareness of all that she's lost is devastating. By the end of the novel, her life has turned around in a way she never could have hoped for. She is married to someone she loves, someone who adores her, and she is embarked upon a life of adventure and interest. The novel ends with the wedding---Austen never tackles married life itself. But we feel, in that one ecstatic moment in which the characters have everything they ever dreamed of, a lifetime's worth of the joy, comfort, and companionship of true love over time.
I can't think of one single novel that tackles the reality of love in a detailed, extended way---not through a metaphor like a wedding after a trying courtship but directly. If you can think of one, let me know!
-
I've read a couple of interesting nonfiction books recently.
One is A Vindication of Love, by Cristina Nehring: She talks about love and passion in general and also in various famous literary love stories. I like her general comments a little more than her literary analysis. For example, she notes that Tristan and Isolde keep separating and coming together, putting up unnecessary obstacles to their love, and sees this as evidence of the characters' need for drama to keep the passion alive. I would say rather that it's evidence of the author's and readers' need to repeat the drama of overcoming barriers in order to experience that passion of reunification over and over within the same story, rather than just once. In other words, that plot pattern doesn't arise from the psychology of the characters but from that of the readers and author. A small distinction.
Overall, the book is great. I like particularly how she argues that love is not blind: "Love, far from being blind, is the very emotion that allows us to see. It is the only state of mind in which one is entirely and uncompromisingly open to another person." I used to get mad at slow or timid drivers on the highway, but Jay is a slow, careful driver---it's just not in his nature to look ahead and plan out how to get around the cars in front of him. He just goes with the flow. He also doesn't have good night vision and can really have trouble driving at night. So now when I come upon a pokey driver, I think, "That could be Jay," and I'm much more sympathetic. This also happened when my mom got older and started driving much more carefully. When I see an older driver, I think, "That's somebody's mom."
Another book is The End of the Novel of Love, by Vivian Gornick. I read this a few years ago and didn't think much of it. But I read it again this month and was able to appreciate it much, much more. My feeling toward it was exactly the opposite to the Nehring book. I felt like Gornick's book was weaker in the general comments (e.g., people don't believe in the redeeming power of romantic love anymore---I don't think that's true) and stronger in the literary analysis.
Her literary sense is so fine, I've rarely seen the like of it. One chapter discusses the hard-boiled detective genre and its cousins (e.g., Hemingway, Richard Ford). Here's what she writes about Ford's novel The Sportswriter: "It is inconceivable in The Sportswriter that a person who is a woman should strike Frank simply as a familiar, as another human being floating around in the world. . . . He feels compassion for women but not empathy. . . . In his mind, the people who embody his condition are other men he runs up against in a random fashion. There are these men, who are like himself, and then there are the women, who can no longer give comfort against the overwhelming force of life."
She finds writers like Ford to be, not misogynistic, but sentimental. Their whole existential dilemma is predicated on a romanticization of a sexual love that they've had and lost. But did their relationships ever work like the authors and characters want to believe they did? Or is it just nostalgia for the time in their life when they believed it worked redemptively? Nostalgia for an idea they had, not a reality they had? This is what Gornick objects to: The characters don't learn, which would be okay if the author demonstrated a distance between what he knows and what his characters know---but this isn't the case. The characters persist in a "dreamy" confusion about their state that the author doesn't give lie to, narratively.
I disagree with Gornick about the inevitability of romantic disappointment. For her, romantic love can never be redemptive or transformative, and she would like authors to evince an understanding of this. I'd say rather than it can sometimes be redemptive, sometimes not. There is way too much variety in relationships to allow for a single rule. It does seem hard for writers to convey the reality of redemptive romantic love. I wouldn't say that it's an impossible task for literature, but apparently a very difficult one. The kind of day-to-day, year-by-year transformation that love can bring is perhaps not very plot-friendly.
That's why, in the past, the wonderful and life-changing effects of love were couched in stories of courtship. Anne Elliot (in Jane Austen's Persuasion) is almost a spinster, with all that that implies. She foolishly spurned the love of a good man because of family pressure about his social status. Now she is 26 years old, lonely, and---without a husband or family of her own--lower in social status herself than ever before. She is subject to the whims and the disdain of others. When against all odds she meets again with her suitor, the painful awareness of all that she's lost is devastating. By the end of the novel, her life has turned around in a way she never could have hoped for. She is married to someone she loves, someone who adores her, and she is embarked upon a life of adventure and interest. The novel ends with the wedding---Austen never tackles married life itself. But we feel, in that one ecstatic moment in which the characters have everything they ever dreamed of, a lifetime's worth of the joy, comfort, and companionship of true love over time.
I can't think of one single novel that tackles the reality of love in a detailed, extended way---not through a metaphor like a wedding after a trying courtship but directly. If you can think of one, let me know!
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posted by Anonymous at
12:41 PM
2 Comments:
you're right---i can't think of any that tackle the issue in a detailed, extended way, either. but the following address or reference healthy marriage and, for that, have always stood out to me.
1. i love the discussion of love, marriage, and the reality of ongoing commitment in the sparrow.
2. a vision of mutually respectful, passionate, and companionable marriage is explored in busman's honeymoon, but, of note, the marriage is only a few weeks old for the duration of the discussion.
3. in my youth, i read two series of christian romances by author janette oke. the first, love comes softly, explores the marriage of a devoted couple in the 1800s on the american (i think) frontier. the second, when calls the heart, looked at the marriage of a canadian school teacher to her mountie, living in the early 1900s on the canadian frontier. the relationships were decidedly patriarchal, but otherwise respectful. the household roles were sharply divided by gender. and sometimes i felt the circumstances and resolutions were overly simplified. but each relationship depicted was loving, strong, and full of mutual respect.
4. and everything i read of julia child and her hubby, especially my life in france, seems to indicate theirs was a union of great respect and companionability.
5. ON THE CONTRARY: evidently e. m. forester wrote a scathingly hilarious post-script to a room with a view that was highly unflattering to the married couple. he didn't have a great opinion of the happily ever after, evidently.
the best extended examination of a healthy marriage i can think of is on TV, not in literature at all. Eric and Tami Taylor on Friday Night Lights rule me.
Hear, hear, on both Busman's Honeymoon and Friday Night Lights. So far, you have me convinced that Busman's Honeymoon might be the only literary gem on transformative love. I will also try a Janette Oke book. Your comment about Julia Child makes me think that perhaps memoirs are a better field for this topic.
I think I read and hated The Sparrow.
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