Romance

Barbara Fuchs

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134615261
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Collections littéraires

Often derided as an inferior form of literature, 'romance' as a literary mode or genre defies satisfactory definition, dividing critics, scholars and readers alike. This useful guidebook traces the myriad transformations of 'romance' from medieval courtly love to Mills and Boon, and claims that its elusive and complex nature serves as a touchstone for larger questions of literary and cultural theory, such as:

• How does the history of 'romance' as a category force us to rethink the historicization of literary genres?
• What definitions can we provide for our own time to help us recognize and analyze new forms of 'romance'?
• To what extent is the resistance to romance a resistance to the imaginative force of literature?

The case for 'romance' as a concept is presented clearly and imaginatively, arguing that its usefulness to contemporary critics can be maintained if it is regarded as a literary strategy rather than a fixed genre. In encouraging the reader to consider the fluidity of literature, Romance will be of equal value to all students of historical and comparative literatures and of modern literary forms.

1
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CLASSICAL ROMANCE

We often use Greek terms and definitions such as tragedy, epic, lyric, to describe texts composed much later, yet for the fictional narratives of the classical world we are forced to rely on more modern terms, retrospectively applied. Discussing romance in Greek and Latin texts, that is, entails bringing to bear much later categories on earlier texts. Antiquity never theorized romance; in fact, much of the neglect that classical romance suffered in scholarship until very recently had to do with the theoretical vacuum where fictional narratives were concerned.

The Greeks had terms for different aspects of these texts: plasma (fictitious creation), drama (story of action), diēgēma (narrative), historia (account of what has been discovered), but no overarching category like novel (Reardon 1991: 7). Critics have speculated that this critical neglect reflects the low regard in which these fictions were held, despite their presumed appeal to a popular audience (Perry 1967: 4–5). Although critics have traced the connections between the prose fiction of antiquity and such genres as biography, travel literature, and historiography, they generally agree that there was no classification of fictional narratives as a particular genre. In analyzing classical romance, as we will do here, we are therefore necessarily working with categories that would never have been applied by authors, readers, or critics at the time the texts were produced. Yet these categories are hardly arbitrary; in some ways, they have structured our modern understanding of literary history. As subsequent chapters will show, central distinctions such as that between epic and romance organize our understanding of texts from the Renaissance onwards.

The opposition between epic and romance, explored most recently by David Quint, is perhaps most clearly visible in Virgil's Aeneid (29–19 BC) the story of the Trojan Aeneas' foundation of Rome. Virgil juxtaposes Homer's Odyssey and Iliad in his poem, sharpening the distinctions between these predecessors and exacerbating the ideological implications of their form. Aeneas is nearly derailed from his fated mission by a series of Odyssean adventures, and most seriously by the amorous welcome he receives in Africa from Dido, Queen of Carthage. The Iliadic portion of the poem finally takes Aeneas to Italy, where, after much bloodshed, he will found the Roman nation. It is through the lens of the Aeneid that we read epic as an account of warfare leading to the birth of a nation, focused on a martial hero who represents the group. In this context, romance appears instead as a detour or wandering from the teleological thrust of epic, characterized by circularity or stasis and by the seductions of eros and individual adventures.

In order to understand this foundational opposition, this chapter first analyzes the romance strategies of Homer's Odyssey (750–700 BC), which one critic calls the “fountainhead” of romance (Reardon 1991: 6). It then surveys the texts that fall under the category of “Greek romance” in the generic sense, and examines the controversies over that classification. At the same time, it charts a broader, alternative understanding of romance as literary strategy in the classical world and touches briefly on some of the many texts that exemplify romance in this sense.

ODYSSEAN WANDERINGS

Keep Ithaka always in your mind.

Arriving there is what you are destined for.

But do not hurry the journey at all.

Better if it lasts for years,

so you are old by the time you reach the island,

wealthy with all you have gained on the way,

not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

C.P. Cavafy, “Ithaka”

Homer's poem on the hero Odysseus' return (nostos) to Ithaca and his wife Penelope after the Trojan War establishes some of the most enduring and recurring of romance strategies. While the Odyssey shares the overall epic form of the Iliad, it is focused on a very different set of issues. This is not a poem about war but about the vexed return home. It is concerned far more with the individual hero and his transformations than with any corporate goal. The interest of the narrative lies precisely in the obstacles and detours in Odysseus' way; that is, in the romance that delays his progress while advancing the text.

The urgency of the return is determined by the dire straits in which Penelope and Telemachus find themselves. After twenty years of Odysseus' absence, Penelope is being aggressively courted by suitors who, while they wait for her favor, make free with Odysseus' possessions and consume his wealth. As the suitors become increasingly impatient, Penelope despairs of being able to hold them off any longer. Meanwhile, Odysseus, unwillingly detained by the nymph Calypso on her island, longs for home. (Author's note: For all Greek names, such as Calypso, I have chosen the spelling most commonly encountered in subsequent literary texts in English. I have silently modified the spelling in translations to conform with this principle.) When the goddess Athena finally arranges his release, he is thwarted once again by the vengeful Poseidon and shipwrecked on the coast of the Phaiakians, who, from his first encounter with the princess Nausicaa, receive him kindly. In an extensive narrative detour, Odysseus relates to them his previous adventures, from the aftermath of the victory at Troy to the loss of his men and his sojourn with Calypso. The Phaiakians provide him with a ship and he finally returns to Ithaca, where he must face the challenge of the suitors, grown ever more arrogant in his continued absence.

In a sense, the poem itself opens with a detour. A brief council of the gods serves as exposition, establishing Athena's concern for Odysseus and giving us the basic rudiments of the plot. The scene then moves to Ithaca with the goddess. Instead of Odysseus, we first meet his son, Telemachus, as we follow him on his search for news of his father, a miniature quest in its own right. This embedded narrative of Telemachus' wanderings heightens readerly expectations, providing an oblique introduction to the hero – we hear much about Odysseus before we finally encounter him – and foreshadowing the voyages and encounters of the main plot. Telemachus travels to the wondrous court of Menelaos, Helen's husband, who describes his own difficult return from Troy to Greece. Although Menelaos has recovered Helen, and acquired a great treasure on his wanderings, his life is marred by melancholy:

How painfully I wandered

before I brought it home! Seven years at sea,

Kypros, Phoinikia, Egypt, and still farther

among the sun-burnt races….

How gladly I should live one third as rich

to have my friends back safe at home! – my friends

who died on Troy's wide seaboard, far

from the grazing lands of Argos.

But as things are, nothing but grief is left me

for those companions.

(Homer 1998: 4.87–111)

(Author's note: Because this translation is so widely used in English-language contexts, I have given Fitzgerald's line numbering for the verse instead of the original's.)

Menelaos' wanderings to the far confines of the Greek world on his roundabout route home anticipate the marvelous travels of Odysseus. Yet Menelaos, who has managed to return home, is paradoxically full of nostalgia (from nostos, return and algos, suffering) for Troy. So powerful is the yearning for the past that it colors Menelaos' life, even among the splendor of his possessions. Such longing pervades the poem, and this early episode complicates the possibility of resolution to so much wandering desire. The strategy that we see here in the Odyssey comes to be one of the primary features of romance: the dilation or postponement of the object of desire rather than its achievement.

Odysseus himself is introduced as the object of Menelaos' longing:

And there is one I miss more than the other

dead I mourn for; sleep and food alike

grow hateful when I think of him. No soldier

took on so much, went through so much, as Odysseus.

That seems to have been his destiny, and this mine –

to feel each day the emptiness of his absence,

ignorant, even, whether he lived or died.

(Homer 1998: 4.114–20)

This is different from Penelope or Telemachus' longing for Odysseus, but equally powerful. Before introducing Odysseus on his own quest for Ithaca, the poet renders him as an absence experienced from multiple perspectives, a man missed by a vulnerable wife, a diffident son, a melancholy comrade-in-arms. This perspectivism is literalized in the figure of the shape-shifting Proteus, the Ancient of the Sea, who must be forced to retain his shape before he can provide Menelaos with news of Odysseus. His mutability and slipperiness make Proteus a powerful symbol for romance transformations. Menelaos tricks Proteus with his own shape-shifting, disguising himself in the skin of a seal (Homer 1998: 4.469–79), a ruse which anticipates both Odysseus' escape from the Cyclops and the enchantress Circe's actual transformation of his men into beasts.

In a heavily ironic moment, Menelaos recalls also how Helen, “drawn by some superhuman power” (Homer 1998: 4.296), had tried to undo the Greeks in Troy by playing on their nostalgia as they lay in hiding inside the famous wooden horse, itself another animal disguise of sorts:

Three times you walked around it, patting it everywhere,

and called by name the flower of our fighters,

making your voice sound like their wives, calling.

(Homer 1998: 4.299–301)

This key passage connects the generalized longing of Menelaos' court with a much more dangerous and deliberate use of desire against military might. It sets up some of the central oppositions that animate romance as a counter-strategy to epic progress or achievement. Desire, whether associated with Helen's voice, here prefiguring the sirens, or with the warriors' actual longing for their wives, has the potential to sabotage heroic exploits. It is only Odysseus' own intervention, as he forcibly silences a comrade, that safeguards the stratagem of the wooden horse.

As this brief recollection of Helen's duplicity suggests, romance associates female figures in particular with both treacherousness and erotic enchantment. These characters – nymphs, sirens, witches – are ultimately linked with a kind of stasis that contravenes the quest, which is typically gendered male. As such, they occupy a central role in Odysseus’ story of his travels and travails. When we finally encounter our hero, in Book 5, he is trapped by the nymph Calypso. This is a sweet captivity, to be sure: the nymph offers him all kinds of blandishments and even immortality, yet Odysseus longs to escape:

The sweet days of his life time

were running out in anguish over his exile,

for long ago the nymph had ceased to please.

Though he fought shy of her and her desire,

he lay with her each night, for she compelled him.

But when the day came he sat on the rocky shore

and broke his own heart groaning, with eyes wet

scanning the bare horizon of the sea.

(Homer 1998: 5.159–66)

It requires divine intervention to free Odysseus from his thralldom, in the form of Hermes, the messenger god, sent by Zeus to compel Calypso to free him. This intervention contra romance becomes a hallmark of the tension between epic and romance in the classical tradition and its Renaissance avatars. The “descent from heaven” motif serves as a literal deus ex machina who releases the hero from romance enchantment (Greene 1963).

The release of the hero will be a central turning point in Virgil's recreation of the Odyssey in the first half of the Aeneid. Aeneas relates his own Odyssean adventures to the sympathetic Dido, Queen of Carthage, who offers him solace and sustenance after he is shipwrecked on her coast. Unlike Odysseus, Aeneas is not trapped by Dido: he has simply become too fond of her and her city, and forgetful of his duty to found Rome. In a crucial reformulation of the Odyssey, eros here obstructs not the hero's return from past martial exploits, but his readiness or availability for future combat. Virgil's echo of the Odyssey in Mercury's descent to admonish Aeneas to move on cements the tradition of romance derailing epic, and maps a series of patriarchal and imperial oppositions onto the narrative forms: female versus male, East versus West, chaos versus order, nature versus reason (Quint 1993: 24–31). Dido accuses Aeneas of heartlessness and worse: “Liar and cheat! Some rough Caucasian cliff/ Begot you on flint. Hyrcanian tigresses/ Tendered their teats to you” (Virgil 1984: 505–7). Aeneas, the narrator curtly tells us, is “duty-bound” (545). In a literary tradition deeply influenced by the Aeneid, the opposition of eros, associated with romance, and war, associated with epic, develops into a major theme. Thus, by contradistinction, romance becomes an alternative to teleology and historical destiny (Quint 1993: 9).

The fabulous world of Odysseus' travels already limns some of these oppositions, albeit in a less rigid fashion. When Odysseus relates his travels to the Phaiakians, he recalls a number of perils gendered female that threatened to derail him: the monsters Scylla and Charibdis, between whom it is impossible to pass unscathed, the sirens whose songs bewitch sailors (in a reference back to Menelaos' nostalgia, the sirens choose a “song of Troy” to lure Odysseus and his men [Homer 1998: 12.234]). Yet although the geography of the monstrous and marvelous is closely associated with the feminine, the episode of the Cyclops, perhaps the most frightening of them all, is gendered male throughout. In this bloody encounter based on folk narratives, Odysseus uses his guile to trick the savage monster, who is a creature without law or civility. He tells Polyphemus that his name is “Nohbdy,” then plies him with wine until the monster is too drunk to defend himself. Then Odysseus puts out his single eye with a sharpened stake, confident that the monster's cries for help will be ignored when he bellows “Nohbdy, Nohbdy's tricked me, Nohbdy's ruined me!” (Homer 1998: 9.444).

Perhaps the most dangerous version of feminine stasis occurs on the island of the enchantress Circe, “dire beauty and divine” (Homer 1998: 10.150) who turns men into beasts:

Low she sang

in her beguiling voice, while on her loom

she wove ambrosial fabric sheer and bright,

by that craft known to the goddesses of heaven.…

On thrones she seated them, and lounging chairs,

while she prepared a meal of cheese and barley

and amber honey mixed with Pramnian wine,

adding her own vile pinch, to make them lose

desire or thought of our dear father land.

Scarce had they drunk when she flew after them

with her long stick and shut them in a pigsty –

bodies, voices, heads, and bristles,...