When a Form Comes out of the Closet

Abstract

Abstract is great love literature still possible? every day people fall in love, but shrewd readers report they no longer take seriously Western literature’s major theme. Why? The experience of romantic love involves the intense feeling of extraordinariness, a sense that the two who share it are uniquely suited for each other, “soul mates,” as the cliché goes. For this reason, one cannot love just anyone. Classic love literature places this desire as the key to self-understanding, to a life passionately lived. Many contemporary readers are far too suspicious to accept such a claim, except ironically. The experience of love, they know, is hardly unprecedented; even when a novel or a poem asserts that the depicted love affair makes the characters extraordinary, the artistic form confirms that the declaration follows a well-established literary convention. The lovers are as ordinary as the emotion they experience. This situation’s awkwardness defines “the postmodern temper,” as Umberto Eco argues: “I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows he cannot say to her, ‘I love you madly,’ because he knows that she knows (and that she knows that he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland.”