I happened to be reading an article by Umberto Eco which has nothing to do with romance when I came across the following, about old and new types of fiction, which did seem relevant to the study of romance:
the account greatly favored by antiquity was almost always the story of something which had already happened and of which the public was aware. One could recount for the nth time the story of Roland the Paladin, but the public already knew what happened to the hero. New additions and romantic embellishments were not lacking, but neither would they have impaired the substance of the myth being narrated. [...]It seems to me that romance novels resemble the older stories inasmuch as their readers know in advance what the ending will be. There may be considerably more room for "additions and romantic embellishments" given that the entirety of a romance's plot is not already known to the readers but I suspect that in very large part romances "work" for their readers "because the mechanism of the 'plot,' [...] succeed[s] in making them once more co-participants" in the emotions experienced by the protagonists.
The "civilization" of the modern novel offers a story in which the reader's main interest is transferred to the unpredictable nature of what will happen and, therefore, to the plot invention which now holds our attention. The event has not happened before the story; it happens while it is being told, and usually even the author does not know what will take place.
At the time of its origin, the coup de théâtre where Oedipus finds himself guilty as a result of Tiresias' revelation "worked" for the public not because it caught them unaware of the myth, but because the mechanism of the "plot," in accordance with Aristotelian rules, succeeded in making them once more co-participants through pity and terror. The reader is brought to identify both with the situation and with the character. In contrast, there is Julien Sorel shooting Madame de Rênal, or Poe's detective discovering the party guilty of the double crime in Rue de la Morgue, or Javert paying his debt of gratitude to Jean Valjean, where we are spectators to a coup de théâtre whose unpredictable nature is part of the invention, and as such, takes on aesthetic value. (15)
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- Eco, Umberto. “The Myth of Superman.” Trans. Natalie Chilton. Diacritics 2.1 (1972): 14-22.
I agree with your theory about being "co-participants" in the story, to me the interesting part is the mechanism or action of getting from the beginning to end. The suspense will always be 'how' they get their happily everafter.
ReplyDelete"to me the interesting part is the mechanism or action of getting from the beginning to end. The suspense will always be 'how' they get their happily everafter."
ReplyDeleteYes, maybe I was underplaying the extent of the "additions and [...] embellishments" in romance. They certainly provide more suspense in romance novels than they would in a retelling of a myth because, as you say, the reader doesn't know the "how" of the story in a romance novel. We only know that there will be a happy ending.
So probably romances are in a halfway position between (a) myths/fairytales/chivalric tales in which the audience knows the whole story in advance, and (b) "The "civilization" of the modern novel [which] offers a story in which the reader's main interest is transferred to the unpredictable nature of what will happen."
That would mean that romances are more dependent on evoking an emotional response than the "modern novel," but don't have the cultural status of classic works which were intended to evoke emotional responses (and even with classic works, comedy has always had a lower status than tragedy).
Adding to your note that, "It seems to me that romance novels resemble the older stories inasmuch as their readers know in advance what the ending will be"; Northrop Frye in _The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance_ writes: “[r]omance is the structural core of all fiction: being directly descended from folktale, it brings us closer than any other aspect of literature to the sense of fiction” (CW XVIII:14).
ReplyDeleteWhat definition of "romance" is Frye using there? I'm curious because he states there that romance is "directly descended from folktale" but in the Anatomy of Criticism he includes folktales in romance:
ReplyDeleteThe hero of romance moves in a world in which the ordinary laws of nature are slightly suspended: prodigies of courage and endurance, unnatural to us, are natural to him, and enchanted weapons, talking animals, terrifying ogres and witches, and talismans of miraculous power violate no rule of probability once the postulates of romance have been established. Here we have moved from myth, properly so called, into legend, folk tale, märchen, and their literary affiliates and derivatives. (33)
{Totally non-subtle hint coming up} You don't fancy writing a post or posts about Frye and romance, do you?{/a}
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Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000.