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.
A
novel may provide a diversion to a boring life that will recharge our
batteries and satisfy our instincts. But it can't last forever. When
we read its last line we want to close the book and go back to our
lives. We want a closure. In reality, closure occurs when we die. In
fiction, when a novel ends and we close the book we must feel so
comfortable about what has happened that we won't wonder what will
happen next. One of the most effective means the author can bring
this about is by the use of an illusion.
We
know, for example, that good doesn't always triumph over evil, but we
would like it to. This is one of our illusions. If the author decides
to close the novel with the opposite, evil destroying good, the
reader will find it disturbing. This will bring about discussion,
examination of values, etc. It might be what a particular author
wants but the truth of the matter is that the novel hasn't closed
effectively. We question what has happened and feel uneasy about it.
Another
of our illusions is that money brings happiness. We feel that if we
win the sweepstake ticket, we will be happy forever. We know that we
won't really. In a few months we will get accustomed to wealth and
fall back to our previous emotional state. We have only to talk to
people who have a lot of money to discover that they are as unhappy
as the rest of us, perhaps more so because they can't dream that
money will solve their problems. Once again, if the author decides to
end the novel with the protagonists becoming poor (unless this is
some sort of poetic justice) he will disturb the reader and the novel
will not close effectively.
In
real life, 'falling in love' (or romantic love) is a temporary, sex
linked erotic experience. It is not real love. Real love develops
over time and it's not an erotic experience. We do not want to have
sex with our children or our friends even though we love them very
deeply. But just as it happens in real love when we 'fall in love'
our ego boundaries partially drop and we begin to trust an other
person albeit they are virtually a stranger we hardly know. This
feeling of trust is in essence identical to the feeling we have in
real love and it is nothing more than a trick of nature—the great
illusion—that leads us to feel close to our lover and proceed to
have children and create a family. Without this illusion, we would
have retreated in terror from the realism of marriage and humanity
would have perished. But this illusion is temporary. History and our
own experience have shown us that sooner or later the ego boundaries
snap back and the lovers are left with an ordinary human
relationship. Of course a human relationship is not constant. It is
as unstable as the two people who compose it, who must now, like
jugglers, continuously balance with each other, if they want to
sustain it. (If we are ignorant of history and have no experience, we
can arrive at the same conclusion by looking at statistics: only 4-6%
of long term couples continue to have sexual relations right up to
the point where their relationship ends.)
In
the first version of my latest novel (Bird
of Prey)
I kept the two lovers apart at the end because I felt that their
characters didn't match enough for them to continue with a
relationship. Of the 20 people that read this version about half
commented. When I sorted out the comments made, I discovered that the
comments mostly complimented each other. For example if someone
didn't like chapter one, there was usually someone who loved chapter
one. This was a good sign. It showed that the novel was balanced to
most tastes. There was one point however that was exceptionally
mentioned by almost all who had commented: They wanted the boy and
girl to live together happily ever after. Yes, they understood that
their characters didn't match, but...
It
would be uneasy and disturbing to think that at the end lovers would
not satisfy their sexual instinct or end-up juggling to sustain a
relationship. My readers, like all readers, wanted to close the book
with a smile and get back into their lives. They wanted the illusion
of love.
And
I gave it to them.
Note:
You can find a more thorough examination of illusions, love and
friendship in my novel Fantasy Land.
See, for example, the idea of 'falling in love' through metaphors
(with excerpts from the novel) here:
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