I just finished reading A.S. Byatt’s Possession. Yes, I finally read something that was not Twilight. Of course, it still fed into my obsession with the romance. The layered pairs of lovers in this book are meant, I think, to describe the multitudinous possibilities of romantic connections. And yet, underneath, it is not different from Twilight, except that only the minor characters get something approaching a traditional happy ending. But it startled me, in a way, that underneath the erudite use of language, of metaphor, of post-structuralist theories, the story of romance remains unaltered. You can dress it up, you cacn change the details, but the story is still mainly the same. A story of obsession, of desire, of the need for newness. In this book, only one relationship stands the test of time, and they remain almost outside of time, living the lives of English gentry of a century before.
I find myslf wanting a different story. I want something that isn’t about newness, but about growth and continuity. Yet I find it difficult to imagine that story. Our cultural obsession with newness leads us to privilege stories of falling in love, of newness, over the stories of being and staying in love. The breadth of the canon is constrained in ways I never saw before: the stories repeat, clothed in different fabrics, but with the same basic cut and style.
Romeo and Juliet die because we can’t imagine what could come next for them. We divorce one another because in part we can’t imagine what might come next in life. After the wedding, what does marriage look like? What does life look like? Is it so ordinary, so mundane, as to be impossible to write about?
Rhizomes and Assemblages 