Is the love story dead?
June 5, 2009Last night I took part in a literary debate in Perth, with fellow writers Ewan Morrison and Carmen Reid, and with academic Dorothy McMillan and Scotland on Sunday literary editor Stuart Kelly. The event was chaired by novelist and Perth writer-in-residence Ajay Close. I was asked to join the debate because my second novel, The Bee Dancer, which I’m still working on, is loosely themed around the fictions and illusions we create for ourselves of romantic love, and how those romantic fantasies can ruin us for love in the real world.
What was interesting to me was the great variety in the views expressed by that panel about love. The three writers arguably were selected for their differences: Carmen writes chick-lit, Ewan writes contemporary novels about love that are centred around issues like the ‘menage a trois’, and my writing tries to tear down some of the illusions we subscribe to when we think and talk about love, so that we recognise them for fictions. None of us was exactly anti-love story (though it is true that on average we were talking more about literary heavyweights like Nabokov and Milan Kundera than your average Mills & Boon), but at least one member of the panel argued strongly that the reason we don’t have any great love stories any more – stories of overwhelming passion and obsession (except for stories set in the past, or in situations of extremity like war zones, or countries in which individual liberties are severely restricted) – is because we just don’t love in the same way any more. That our consumer- and media-driven, deeply sophisticated western society doesn’t lend itself to grand passions any more, and that instead anything goes: there are no more taboos, we’ve broken them all, and so people write about their family and their children with all the passion with which they used to write about love.
It’s a line I have some sympathy with: many of the great love stories – including great modern love stories – are indeed set in times of great turmoil. But not all. Not ‘Madame Bovary’, not ‘Jane Eyre’, not a whole bunch of others. (I don’t consider Jane Austen’s books, often cited in this context, as great love stories – rather as very well-written but fairly conventional social romances – sorry, all Austen fans: I know the arguments but I just don’t buy them!) And if we are now doing ‘love by managerial process’ and we all know far too much about relationships because we read too many self-help books and so we take no risks any more, as was suggested, then I’m obviously living in a different (maybe just older…) world.
But I shan’t give too much away here: we hope to have an audio recording of the entire debate soon and will link to it on our website from this blog. And look forward to your thoughts and comments.
Sharon
Is the love of story dead?
The need to connect with narrative seems to be one of the defining characteristics of humankind. In making the documentary, YARN, I travelled around readers groups across the midlands, talked to people about their love of story and tried to figure out why it was such a profound need for so many. There were many overlapping reasons, of course. But I was left with a sense that narrative is part of human nature. It is one of the ways we make sense of a chaotic world.
Ursula le Guin famously said: “There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.”