Old loves
August 19th 2006 01:46
In the traditional love story, the protagonist pursues or seeks to be reunited with the beloved. At journey's close, bliss is achieved, and it's smooth sailing into eternity, and the audience has yet again been sold various lies -- perhaps including the myth of essence (that true love is distinct from simple attraction and like), the myth of mutuality (if you love her, she'll love you back; you were destined), and the myth of permanence (true love lasts forever).
In modern stories, there are perspectives from after the break-up (violating permanence). Realism intrudes (violating essence). Soap operas often play this out in terms of Hamlet-like ponderings. Did I make the right decision in leaving? Do I still feel anything for them? How soon before I move on? Etc. And since conflict is the cheapest path to drama, if you want to liven things up, you and give the two parties wildly different post mortem feelings (violating mutuality): one is madly in love, and the other loves someone else.
Modern stories are characterized by practical, down-to-earth questions -- love is stripped of its spiritual aura and reduced to contract and biology. We approach scientifically; we want to know all the angles. Variations on cliché hero narratives are replaced with analyses, enumerations of situations and perspectives. And these situations beget their own clichés.
The rarest angle might be that of old love -- the perspective from ages after the relationship has ended. The relationship past enough to be adorned with memory and reflection.
So what is the cliché? How is old love typically presented?
At one end of the romance spectrum: In Godfather III, Michael and Kay both still love each other, but there's no way -- too much has happened. The relationship is now a sad kindness and distance. In "Adaptation", Kaufman's brother speaks of how much he used to love that girl, and how his love was his, and it didn't matter that she laughed at him. In the Beatles, There are people and places I'll with pleasure remember. Some have changed forever. I'll never lose affection for them, but they're all over, they belong to the past.
In such depictions, love is less than might be hoped, but there's still a warmth there, a comfort. Romantic ideas are evoked, but qualified.
Insights are provided into human nature and meaning.
Old love often has various "rhetorics": for instance, the rhetoric of knowledge earned through suffering; the rhetoric of the authority of long reflection and worldly experience; and the rhetoric of complexity, the equation of the complex with the true -- emotions are mixed in old love, characterization is sophisticated, and wisdom is melancholy, both kind and cruel -- nostalgia tastes bittersweet.
At the other end of the romance spectrum is ended love: In Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveller… the protagonist sees a group of old people, interacting with groove-like familiarity, devoid of feeling, and he imagines, in contrast, their long ago affairs. In "The Seventh Seal", a knight returns from the crusades, years later. He and his bride are duty-bound by virtue of the love they once had, but there's little connection -- they barely recognize one other. They eat the bitterness of the wasted years, but are beyond blame and complaint.
In the traditional narrative, love is the ultimate value. Craig Schwartz in "Being John Malkovich" might be pathetic, but is ennobled by desperation, by passion, by preparedness to do and sacrifice anything. Whereas what ended love particularly symbolizes is denial, unattainability, of the most precious. It is romantically anti-romantic. The fact of ended love mocks ennoblement and the capacities of human achievement. What does love come to in the end? It goes. The characters of ended love are hollow and accept limitations. Time contradicts romanticism, erodes values, ideals, identity -- forces a betrayal of past promises and past self, and a reassessment of what that past self stood for. Time brings you to admit that it was all vanity, or was all a waste.
We are defined by our loves, our passions -- they are the essence of meaning -- they are what means. So what happens when passion leaves you? Doesn't meaning, this lifeboat, this bedrock truth you cling to, depart with it?
In the finality of old love, you see death.
In modern stories, there are perspectives from after the break-up (violating permanence). Realism intrudes (violating essence). Soap operas often play this out in terms of Hamlet-like ponderings. Did I make the right decision in leaving? Do I still feel anything for them? How soon before I move on? Etc. And since conflict is the cheapest path to drama, if you want to liven things up, you and give the two parties wildly different post mortem feelings (violating mutuality): one is madly in love, and the other loves someone else.
Modern stories are characterized by practical, down-to-earth questions -- love is stripped of its spiritual aura and reduced to contract and biology. We approach scientifically; we want to know all the angles. Variations on cliché hero narratives are replaced with analyses, enumerations of situations and perspectives. And these situations beget their own clichés.
***
The rarest angle might be that of old love -- the perspective from ages after the relationship has ended. The relationship past enough to be adorned with memory and reflection.
So what is the cliché? How is old love typically presented?
At one end of the romance spectrum: In Godfather III, Michael and Kay both still love each other, but there's no way -- too much has happened. The relationship is now a sad kindness and distance. In "Adaptation", Kaufman's brother speaks of how much he used to love that girl, and how his love was his, and it didn't matter that she laughed at him. In the Beatles, There are people and places I'll with pleasure remember. Some have changed forever. I'll never lose affection for them, but they're all over, they belong to the past.
In such depictions, love is less than might be hoped, but there's still a warmth there, a comfort. Romantic ideas are evoked, but qualified.
Insights are provided into human nature and meaning.
Old love often has various "rhetorics": for instance, the rhetoric of knowledge earned through suffering; the rhetoric of the authority of long reflection and worldly experience; and the rhetoric of complexity, the equation of the complex with the true -- emotions are mixed in old love, characterization is sophisticated, and wisdom is melancholy, both kind and cruel -- nostalgia tastes bittersweet.
***
At the other end of the romance spectrum is ended love: In Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveller… the protagonist sees a group of old people, interacting with groove-like familiarity, devoid of feeling, and he imagines, in contrast, their long ago affairs. In "The Seventh Seal", a knight returns from the crusades, years later. He and his bride are duty-bound by virtue of the love they once had, but there's little connection -- they barely recognize one other. They eat the bitterness of the wasted years, but are beyond blame and complaint.
In the traditional narrative, love is the ultimate value. Craig Schwartz in "Being John Malkovich" might be pathetic, but is ennobled by desperation, by passion, by preparedness to do and sacrifice anything. Whereas what ended love particularly symbolizes is denial, unattainability, of the most precious. It is romantically anti-romantic. The fact of ended love mocks ennoblement and the capacities of human achievement. What does love come to in the end? It goes. The characters of ended love are hollow and accept limitations. Time contradicts romanticism, erodes values, ideals, identity -- forces a betrayal of past promises and past self, and a reassessment of what that past self stood for. Time brings you to admit that it was all vanity, or was all a waste.
We are defined by our loves, our passions -- they are the essence of meaning -- they are what means. So what happens when passion leaves you? Doesn't meaning, this lifeboat, this bedrock truth you cling to, depart with it?
In the finality of old love, you see death.
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