It
had never occurred to me until I read it in E.M. Forster's Aspects
of the Novel
(1927). Novels differ from life in two major ways. First they have a
plot, and second, boy and girl always live happily ever after. Think
of a novel, in a vague sense, and you can almost always think of a
man or a woman who strive to be united, and by the end they mostly
succeed and live happily ever after. Think of your own life,
generally, and you are left with a very different and a more complex
impression. So why is it that love is so prominent in novels (and
movies) and why does it last forever?
Humanity
is defined by two major instincts: survival and perpetuation. They
literally drive us. Take them away and we perish. Today our lives are
secure from danger and for most of the adult population, marriage
places a barrier on falling in love. We are seemingly in equilibrium
but we are not. Survival and the sexual instinct—and the emotions
we associate with them: fear and falling in love—are well embedded
in our genes. The less they appear in everyday life, the more we
desire them. And if we are imaginative and too lazy to bungee jump or
start an extramarital affair, we turn to literature (and the movies)
to extinguish our desires. And by the same token, an author's mind
constantly wonders over fear and falling in love for the same
reasons. We all need a love story to fuel our sexual instinct and so
the author and his reader meet on the printed page and love becomes
prominent in literature.
