Into the Fray

"A good deal has been said since then about the relation of language and silence, but real silence is the end of speech, not the stopping of it, and it is not until we have shared something of this last Sabbath vision in our greatest romance that we may begin to say that we have earned the right to silence."-Frye, 188 "You are going to die. Let it come over you. Let go of your thoughts. It is ok. it is ok. Let it come over you." or so paraphrased are the words of Liam Neeson in his new film "The Grey." I seem to have an enormous mental block for approaching romance in the way Dr. Sexson has asked us to approach it (which isn't very uncommon, now is it Sexson?). Whereas he has been asking us to look at the conventions of romance as they exist in naive and sentimental romance stories, I cannot help but find the tendrils of romance in every existing story I see. I hope all of my peers, as well as Sexson, will oblige me as I think it will be quite useful for our imagination if we look at the way romance lingers, that is affects the other seasons of writing. As we have noticed in Romance, there is the immediate ability for confrontation to be introduced anywhere, as well as repetitively, and we have also noticed that resolution may be done instantaneously no matter the conglomeration of loose ends that need tying up. Yet, tragedies, those gems, also contain romance. Either perhaps inverted, or unfulfilled, we don't refer to the romantic thematics underlying the story because they are a mystery to us, and it is the very mystery of the romance that causes the tragedy since we are unaware of romance at work. The titanic was a romantic image of the western ideal, and so when a movie was made about it, the story tellers focused on the love affair of a lowly man and an upper class woman (ever noticed the connection?). This is done because the titanic, while a tragic happening, is only so marked because of the event happening during the great transcontinental victory of mankind. It is only tragic because of humanities romanticization of its own miraculous achievements. Now,If anyone has read enough tragedy they will tell you that you are being deceived. And rightly, we are. That is the beauty of imaginative literature. It is a deception. A fiction. An artificial. And just as we need the gift of dionysus to help us ease away when our lives augment passed our control, so do our minds need good hearted dishonesty. Certainly all of the Romances we have read so far we could group under the title of dishonest, could we not? Yet a beuaty and a plurosis of spirit happens from our reading of them (and for those of you who hate happy endings, I believe you will find that that effect of kenosis, or emptying out, is actually a progression towards a pleurosis). These effects of beauty and filling or emptying out of the soul are not actually affected by the overused conventions. They are in fact part of the overused conventions. Yet, we being of a different time often finding ourselves upset over the politics and civilities that exist in these romances. The virginity of the woman being a bartering chip might upset us, or the fact that in order for it to be a romance it has to end with an elevation of status. It has become the progression of our society to fixate on these things, and it seems to me that it often comes at the cost of the story. Professor's have to say such silly things as the "moral is the story" becuase we have become so reductive (partially because of our instruction) in our thinking that we cannot overhear the message of the story. Perhaps this has to do with a modern novel expounding in a fifty page chapter what the Arabian Nights will merely accept and say as "he loved her, and she loved him". THe mind is a scary place, and with the current popularity of the novel begin a vessel in understanding the inner workings of the psyche as it works in the characters, a division in the distintction of stories has been crafted. For Example, Each of Ovid's myths in his metamorphoses is a psychological event", The moral is the story". THis goes for all the ancient collection of secular bibliotech's which we are sampling from. The stories are set down in memorable, and often short episodes, which are easily remembered and influential upon the readers. It seems with the rise of the novel humanity has been attempting to imaginatively weave together all the disassociated episodes together in a more likely verisimilitude, or reality. And perhaps this is why their has not been any "great" romance novels as of late. THat is except, as i believe, and Ashley incitefully states, Lolita. I'm sure you will disagree as we all have those romances we know which touch our hearts and fill us up. In fact I believe you will notice that lots of the novelists and writers over the past few hundred years have been suffers of mental illness, nervousness, and suicide. Wolf, Jarrell, Thompson, Hemmmingway, Kerouac, Wallace, Crane, etc. etc. etc. the lsit goes on and on. And seems that the pull of the novel to weave these episodes in a beautiful method often has a sacrificial nature on these secular writers who attempt to pull these things together. Sexson early mentioned on "the book of virtues" that was authorized by a man who had quite a "vicious" life during its writing. America herself, while claiming to be the beacon of a new world and democary for all is acting quite different in her actions with comparison to her ideals. But perhaps this is just part of her Romance? We, students, have been called the prozac nation. We are often defined as the age of anxiety. And perhaps this depression our country is struggling through is merely the last gap, perhaps it is a piracy, a robbing, a willful deception of ourselves, an anxious awaiting of apprehension for our chloe (or daphnis), a final emptying out of all things that will hold us back--so that we may find that all the struggles we've been forced to endure were merely the progressive work of pleurosis so that we might have that great romance. That beautiful silence. You are going to die. Let it come over you. let go of your thoughts. it is ok.