The End o f the Novel o f Love
Gornick, Vivian
Not bloody likely Sara Maitland V ivian Gornick has a clear thesis; she embodies it in the title, and summarizes it at the end of her book: "Put romantic love at the center of a novel today,...
...I am dubious about whether this is the contemporary function of the novel, and even if it would be a good thing if true...
...In fact I do agree intellectually, sort of...
...This confusion is increased by a classic life-and-works approach: we know what the authors meant by looking at their biographies...
...But it does seem a pity that she chose to publish her ideas as a collection of essays rather than work them into a book...
...Perhaps as we venture into dangerous places of self-discovery, fiction provides a desirable haven of moral nostalgia...
...Today there are no penalties to pay, no world of respectability to be excommunicated from," and consequently love does not push a woman (or a man) to the point where that "suffering which brings clarity and insight" becomes operative...
...Today, I think, love as a metaphor is an act of nostalgia, not of discovery...
...My problem is not with Gornick's working out of her thesis, but with some of her underlying assumptions...
...But Gornick gives the interpretations of actual lives--Clover Adams, for example-and fictional characters like Diana Warwick as though they were identical...
...I am not at all convinced by this...
...Leaving a marriage, for whatever reason, has lost its risk...
...But it was also we who taught ourselves and those younger than we that love is not the most important thing in a woman's life...
...and certainly not that love was the route to female self-knowledge...
...There are all the genre novels to start with, plus satirical fiction, the bildungsroman, and the enormous number of novels that use faith, work, politics, or magic as their core metaphor (Robinson Crusoe, Moby Dick, War and Peace, Middlemarch, Voss, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Passage to India, Orlando, The Satanic Verses--for starters...
...Ironically, Gornick really does have a high moral view of the novel--its purpose is edification, which means for her "discovery" not "nostalgia...
...Commonweal 2 3 February 13, 1998...
...I'd further question that the inadequacies of love are a discovery as new as Gornick suggests...
...And unlike Gornick, I did indeed frequently "walk into a house where I felt the parents loved each other...
...Gornick's emphasis on love may be a cultural phenomenon...
...Moreover, all the postmodern work on the demands of genre, the readers' intentions, and so on cannot be written off so casually...
...Actually, I think what we were taught was that serene marriage would be the reward for self-knowledge gained through education plus moral and political endeavor: but that's another story...
...I am an old-fashioned moralist too...
...Perhaps they are about language, and not about morals at all...
...I agree that, in British and American society, the choice between marriage and passion no longer creates the tension that it used to...
...I imagine that I am about Gornick's age but I do not believe that was the message that I was given as a child...
...This emerges in three specific ways...
...I agree that "all for love and the world well-lost" is pretty meaningless when you are most unlikely to lose the world...
...I lived in one...
...Following from these old-fashioned critical instincts is Gornick's apparent Commonweal 2 2 February 13, 1998 certainty about how representation works: what characters do in novels is the same as what we do in reality, and reality is instructed very directly by art...
...It may be not that the metaphor of love in the novel is coming to an end, but the metaphor and the place of the novel in society has run out of steam...
...This is fun, and it's the tradition in which I was taught English literature, but I do not think it really holds water any more...
...The End of the Novel of Love is remarkable and seductive, tn the first place Gornick writes exceptionally well...
...but she has given herself no way to address them...
...To begin with, I think she gives an excessive centrality to the novel-of-love as forming the central metaphor of self-understanding over the last two hundred years for Western men and women...
...And that if she must choose between love and work, she should never hesitate: it is work, a woman's own creative work, that gives her the only real satisfaction and makes her life worth living...
...The aesthetic pleasure that I experienced inclines me to agree intellectually...
...Interestingly, Gornick's examples are uncritically "straight": she does not mention the metaphor of tabooed passions--homosexual, incestuous, or otherwise inappropriate...
...For every fiction that ends with the heroine sinking into his arms, or wishing she had, or repenting that she did, or deciding to stay with what she had got, there are far more that take other subjects as their controlling metaphor...
...her lucidity, the subtle elegance and highly crafted intimacy of tone, carry a weight of conviction...
...I am quite certain, because of the intelligence of her prose and the sensitivity of her perceptions, that she is aware of these problems...
...At one level I am enchanted by the ethical demands Gornick makes of both novels and readers...
...Reading Gornick I was frequently reminded of Angela Carter's scathing comment, "Novels are etiquette manuals for teaching young ladies how to behave in the social circles to which they aspire...
...She writes, "When I was a girl the whole world believed in love...
...Intentionality is not so straightforward...
...The "whole world" of Gornick's Bronx may have "believed in love," but at least some swaths of the Europe of my postwar childhood did not, at least not in the same way...
...The form of this essay collection itself precisely prevents the "large thing" that she so admires in fiction emerging out of some exquisite small analyses...
...Surely some distinction has to be drawn between Gwendolen Harlech, George Eliot, and Mary Ann Evans (Eliot's actual name...
...What seems to underlie the questions I find myself needing to ask of The End of the Novel of Love is that Gornick has a somehow old-fashioned critical apparatus...
...First, she seems to make no distinction between fictional characters, their authors, and other historical persons...
...I would have thought these considerations would be particularly strong in the case of premodern women writers...
...The novel, by Carter's definition at least, is necessarily a bourgeois form...
...Carter's unfashionable view is a possibility, at least as strong as Gornick's elevating certainty...
...Sara Maitland's most recent book is Angel Makers: The Collected Stories (Henry Holt...
...Perhaps novels are not about self-discovery but about emotional information...
...But it may be too late...
...she embodies it in the title, and summarizes it at the end of her book: "Put romantic love at the center of a novel today, and who could be persuaded that in its pursuit the characters are going to get something large?...that we will all learn something important....No one, it seems to me...
...Here is Alexandra Kollontai in the 1920s: How much energy and time we wasted in all our endless love tragedies and their complications...
...It is not clear to me that just because so many novels use love as a central metaphor, it necessarily follows that it is the major theme of people's lives--or vice versa...
Vol. 125 • February 1998 • No. 3
