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Introduction The Romance is an ancient literary form, first invented as a way of incorporating Greek myths into poetic forms by Greek poets (esp. during the Roman Empire). These poems (or very early novels) became strung together stories, episodes of adventure usually of Greek princes traveling the Mediterranean. The form then was preserved and manuscripts traveled through Europe with the armies of the Roman Empire. In the Middle Ages (especially in the Court of Eleanor of Aquitaine), the form of the Greek Romances was incorporated into the Romances of, for example, The Knights of the Round Table. During Eleanor’s reign as Queen of England, this story-telling tradition became a part of the culture activities of the English Court. Geoffrey Chaucer used the Romance form in some of his more epic tales (and some of the tales in Canterbury Tales qualify as Romances). His contemporary John Gower is another example of a late Medieval Romance writer. In the early 1600s
in England, the Romance had become an archaic form eclipsed by the Romantic
Comedy, Pastorals and Tragedies. At the end of his prolific career,
writing for the new King James I and his eldest children, Shakespeare
decided to revitalize and experiment with the Romance genre. His first
Romance, Pericles, Prince of Tyre, is a dramatic retelling
of an ancient Greek Romance. His other three Romances, however, Cymbeline,
The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest, show the
writer shaping and molding the art form to become vehicles for an elaborate
and theatrical form. FROM THE CRITICS On reading Shakespeare’s
dramatic romances that marked the last years of his career. . . one
is immediately conscious of an artistic and philosophic unity binding
them together. All four make use of traditional romantic conventions,
and all four conclude on the same note of forgiveness, reconciliation,
and hope, Shakespeare’s peace with the world after the Sturm and
Drang of Hamlet, the hopeless tragic irony of Othello
and King Lear, the onrushing door of Julius Caesar
and Macbeth. . . . There is a note of unreality to the evil
and an assurance of only temporal agony, a legacy, perhaps, from the
romantic components of their structures, episodes, and plots. Shakespeare’s
achievement in Pericles is totally different from that of his
earlier work and, indeed, quite different from that of the old Apollonius
romance. By use of the archaic romance materials with their inevitable
circular movement from prosperity and well-being through adversity to
joy and prosperity again—a stringing out of events which seem
to end where they began rather than the development of plot out of character—he
has infused the play with an air of oft-repeated ceremony and ritual,
giving it the tone of old myth, the quality of pageant and spectacle
reenacting the predictable cycles of life. Pericles has been turned
from a scholar-prince to a kingly Everyman: Job, who must be tried by
loss and adversity, who must bear it patiently, not because he must
be purged of evil, but because suffering is an aspect of his human condition.
Pericles’ submission to fate in his loss, his joy in the recovery
of his child and his wife become an enactment of a ritual of wonder
at the inevitable. Much of this air of ceremony and ritual is achieved
by the addition of music and spectacle in the presentation. Each of Cymbeline’s
three story threads is characteristic of the Greek romance genre: the
wager story and Imogen’s travels, the loss and restoration of
Cymbeline’s heirs, and Cymbeline’s war with Rome. The Old French
word romanz originally meant “the speech of the people,”
or “the vulgar tongue,” from a popular Latin word, Romanice,
meaning written in the vernacular, in contrast with the written form
of literary Latin. Its meaning then shifted from the language in which
the work was written to the work itself. Thus, an adaptation of Geoffrey
of Monmouth's Historia regum Britanniae (c. 1137), made by
Wace of Jersey in 1155, was known as Li Romanz de Brut, while
an anonymous adaptation (of slightly later date) of Virgil's Aeneid
was known as Li Romanz d'Enéas; it is difficult to tell
whether in such cases li romanz still meant “the French version”
or had already come to mean “the story.” It soon specialized
in the latter sense, however, and was applied to narrative compositions
similar in character to those imitated from Latin sources but totally
different in origin; and, as the nature of these compositions changed,
the word itself acquired an increasingly wide spectrum of meanings.
In modern French a roman is just a novel, whatever its content and structure;
while in modern English the word “romance” (derived from
Old French romanz) can mean either a medieval narrative composition
or a love affair, or, again, a story about a love affair, generally
one of a rather idyllic or idealized type, sometimes marked by strange
or unexpected incidents and developments. The
marvelous The
Setting “I’m
working on the subject of romance for my doctorate. . . and it seemed
to me that a lot of what you were saying applied very well to romance..
. . I mean, the idea of romance as narrative striptease, the endless
leading on of the reader, a repeated postponement of an ultimate revelation
which never comes—or, when it does, terminates the pleasure of
the text. . . “ “Jacques Derrida has coined the term “invagination” to describe the complex relationship between inside and outside in discursive practices. What we think of as the meaning of “inside” of a text is in fact nothing more than its externality folded in to create a pocket which is both secret and therefore desired and at the same time empty and therefore impossible to possess. I want to appropriate this term and apply it, in a very specific sense of my own, to romance. If epic is a phallic genre, which can hardly be denied, and tragedy the genre of castration (we are none of us, I suppose, deceived by the self-blinding of Oedipus as to the true nature of the wound he is impelled to inflect upon himself, or likely to overlook the symbolic equivalence between eyeballs and testicles) then surely there is no doubt that romance is a supremely invaginated mode of narrative. Roland Barthes has taught us the close connection between narrative and sexuality, between the pleasure of the body and the “pleasure of the text”, but in spite of his own sexual ambivalence, he developed this analogy in an overly masculine fashion. The pleasure of the classic text, in Barthes’ system, is all foreplay. It consists in the constant titillation and deferred satisfaction of the reader’s curiosity and desire—desire for the solution of enigma, the completion of an action, the reward of virtue and the punishment of vice. The paradox of our pleasure in narrative, according to this model, is that while the need to “know’ is what impels us through a narrative, the satisfaction of that need brings pleasure to an end, just as in psychosexual life the possession of the Other kills Desire. Epic and tragedy move inexorably to what we call, and by no accident, a ‘climax’—and it is, in terms of the sexual metaphor, an essentially male climax—a single, explosive discharge of accumulated tension. Romance, in contrast,
in not structured in this way. It has not one climax but many; the pleasure
of this text comes and comes and comes again. No sooner is one crisis
in the fortunes of the hero averted than a new one present itself; no
sooner has one mystery been solved than another is raised; no sooner
has one adventure been concluded than another begins. The narrative
questions open and close, open and close, like the contractions of the
vaginal muscles in intercourse, and this process is in principle endless.
The greatest and most characteristic romances are often unfinished—they
end only with the author’s exhaustion, as a woman’s capacity
for orgasm is limited only by her physical stamina. Romance is a multiple
orgasm. |
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