Romance: The First Story
The most typical romance narratives take place in the world of innocence. Many of these romantic stories dwell on birth
and parentage, and their heroes frequently have origins that are surrounded in mystery. Infant heroes may be rescued
from an ark floating in water, like Moses and Perseus, or raised by animals, like Tarzan, or Romulus and Remus, or
Helena in Faust. The youthful heroes are often searched for by a false ‘father’ who seeks their death: Pharaoh in the
case of Moses, Herod in the case of Christ, the wicked uncle in the case of Jason. The false “mother” can be seen in the
wicked stepmother of the folk tale. True “fathers and mothers” appear as wise and kindly, and frequently their role is to
teach the hero. Merlin in the Arthur stories, Prospero in The Tempest, and Cinderella’s fairy godmother are examples of
this.
The most common plot of romance is the hero’s quest. In broad outline, this plot involves a perilous journey, a
crucial struggle or test in which the hero proves himself and the triumph and exaltation of the hero when his quest is
successfully completed. This plot can be seen in the myth of Perseus, the folktale about Jack the Giant Killer, and
Tolkien’s trilogy The Lord of the Rings – to name only a few. The hero’s struggle in analogous to ritual death, symbolizing
the victory of fertility over the wasteland. In fact, in many stories the hero actually does die or disappear, and here the
triumph of the hero may consist of his rebirth or reappearance, like the sun in the morning or the green world in in
spring. The archetypes of this story are found in the New Testament account of Christ’s resurrection, in the Egyptian
myth of Osirus, and the Greek Myth of Persephone. (Modern use of this archetype is found in such expressions as Ossie
Davis’ eulogy on Malcolm X, where images of spring’s return suggest that the hero will return someday also). The
dragon-slaying story is central to romance quests. The dragon symbolizes the fallen world which the hero as messiah or
savior must conquer, and sometimes be consumed by, before he can redeem the good, desirable world.
The two central characters of the quest story are the hero, who is associated with spring, dawn, order, fertility
and youth, and his adversary, who is associated with winter, darkness, confusion, sterility, and old age. Most other
characters are similarly one-dimensional: they are either good or bad, either for the quest or against it. The women in
romance are usually rescued maidens or brides (Sleeping Beauty, Brunhilde, Madeline Usher, the rescued heroines in
Tom Jones), or supporters of the hero (Beauty, Ariadne, Dido). Don Quixote knows the conventions of romance, which is
why he needs his
“Dulcinea”. Their opposites are evil witches, betrayers, and seducers (Medusa or Medea in the Jason story).
The settings of romance usually fulfill our desire for order and meaning. They show and idyllic world, often one
removed from the world of experience (the pastoral settings of Shakespeare’s romantic comedies are examples). The
hero’s environment offers possibilities for magic, mystery, and miracles. Trees and animals might talk and can be
summoned to the aid of the hero. The central figure of romance often has a mysterious rapport with nature (Arthur is
transformed into animals in preparation for his quest, birds warn Snow White in the forest, and St. Anthony is fed by a
raven in the desert). In the modern, more plausible romances, the weather might break suddenly or the moon be
obscured on the crucial night so the hero can make his getaway successfully.
Many romance stories make use of visions and revelations. In stories that deal so exclusively with moral
opposites, it is not surprising that there is some means of unifying a “heavenly” world and a “lower” one. This union is
frequently achieved by a vision, commonly set by a mountain or an island, in a tower or a lighthouse, or on a ladder or a
staircase. The mountain vision is parodied in the story of the tower of Babel. Moments of vision frequently come to a
small group of people who, because of the vision, are cut off from the rest of the world, separate and special. With this
group of stories belong Noah’s flood and its counterparts in science fiction, where the survivors of a cosmic holocaust
must pick up the pieces and begin life again in some sheltered spot. An example of the latter convention is seen in
Arthur C. Clarke’s story If I forget thee, O Earth, about a group of survivors who live in a space station waiting for atomic
poison to disappear from earth.
Typical romances deal with some sort of progress towards fulfillment – the released bride, the acquired
treasure, the victory over an enemy. The achievement usually means some transformation of life or release from a
threatening past, or the establishment of social, sexual or personal identity. Inversion of this typical romance theme are
seen in stories that present a shadow-side of romance. In such ironic versions of romance, we have the fatal treasure,
the demon bride, the triumphant rival, or the discovery that the real enemy is YOU. Coleridge’s The Ancient Mariner
depicts this shadow-side of romance, with purgation and release at the end. In these ironic romances, we have the
ambiguities of Eden, the problems of appearance and reality and mirages, instead of visions.
Tragedy: The Second Story
Tragedy tries to understand a world which can crush human greatness. Tragedy is a pattern of action that shows
us something that we wish did not have to happen: the death of nature in autumn, the cutting down of the hero. As we
have seen, some tragedies strike us as romantic, and some as highly ironic. Most tragedies would fit someplace in
between these two extremes. At the heroic end, are stories in which the tragic hero is given the greatest possible
dignity. The source of this dignity is the character’s courage and innocence. Such a hero is like a stag pulled down by
wolves. A central figure of this phase is the calumniated woman, who is destroyed before her innocence is vindicated.
This may account for our sense of loss in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and The Crucible.
Another type of tragic story at the heroic end of our scale is the archetypal story of the loss of innocence.
Innocence in such stories is more like inexperience, and the central figures here frequently young people, baffled by
their first experience with the adult world. These may be stories about a youthful life cut off, as in Romeo and Juliet, or
about the loss of innocence and the newfound knowledge of death, as in the story of Adam and Eve’s fall. These stories
usually end with the character making some adjustment to a new and more mature experience, such as the Montagues
and Capulets make in Verona and Adam and Eve make outside Eden. This archetype of the loss of innocence is used in
many autobiographies: Parks’ The Learning Tree, Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, Knowles’ A Separate Peace, and Williams’
A Glass Menagerie.
Another type of tragedy with heroic dimensions is the story of the man who suffers or dies for some cause,
usually a nation. These heroes are victims too, but willing ones, and there is a victory in their defeat. The victim is
destroyed, but he saves the nation or passes on an ideal. This archetype of victory through defeat is frequently used in
speeches of various sorts: Lincoln’s Second Inaugural and Vanzetti’s death speech are examples.
Many tragic stories, however, centre around a hero who is not part of the world of innocence, but the world of
experience. Such a hero can still be a figure of stature, like Antony, Macbeth, and Lear, but he is less victorious in his
downfall and more responsible for it than the saviour victim. He may be the victim of fate that he himself has put into
motion. He may be the victim of time – of time “running out” – a motif very much present in this kind of tragedy. There
is often a sense that this kind of tragic hero has disturbed the balance of nature (Macbeth), and retribution is necessary
to restore order to the world. The wheel of fortune is a typical image for this kind of tragedy. The tragic hero has had an
extraordinary destiny almost in his grasp, and even in his final catastrophe there still lingers an aura of that destiny.
These tragic heroes are immensely “larger” than ordinary human beings, but they are overwhelmed by something
immensely larger than themselves.
In this kind of tragedy, the hero and his family are often isolated from their society (Lear, Antony, Coriolanus).
There is commonly a chorus or chorus-like character who represents the society that the hero is isolated from, a role
taken by Horatio in Hamlet , the Common Man in Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons, and Kent in King Lear. Though the hero is
isolated from his society, his fall frequently has social consequences. A typical pattern has to do with social legitimacy
and usurpation. The legitimacy resides in an order figure like Duncan or Old Hamlet. The usurper figure: Macbeth and
Claudius. The usurpation of power is followed by a nemesis figure whose cursed fate is to set things right: Hamlet or
Macduff. The major interest of the story may centre on one or the other of these characters: for example, the order
figure in Julius Caesar, the usurper in Macbeth, the nemesis figure in Hamlet. In tragedies of this type, there is usually a
glimpse of a new order figure if only in the wings, like Malcolm Octavius and Fortinbras.
There Is another kind of tragic hero, the man who lives even further down in the world of experience, almost in
a state that offers him less freedom than what we see as normal. Oedipus the King belongs here, as does Willy Lorman
in Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Images of mazes and labyrinths are frequent in such stories. The hero is sometimes
bewildered, unable to control his destiny; he has lost his direction. He may not be mutilated but he is often ridiculed,
like the biblical Samson and Job. Tragedies like this are frequently concerned with metaphysical and existential
problems, with the problem of evil and the suffering of man.
The final type of tragic story is very close to irony. The chief symbols are prisons and madhouses. The hero is
not only humiliated but frequently tortured or mutilated. Dante uses this archetype in his description of the lowest
circle of the Inferno, where Lucifer chews on the head of Judas Iscariot and Faulkner’s uses it in A Rose for Emily.
Satire and Irony: The Third Story
It is hard to say what they plot of satire and irony is. As structure is can best be described as a parody of
romance. Where romance is the mythical pattern of innocence, irony is the mythical pattern of experience. Irony gives
form to the ambiguous and unidealized world of experience – a world, like our own age perhaps, that can best be
characterized as a world without heroes.
Satire demands at least an implicit moral standard, and it needs an object to attack. One type of satire appeals
to the conventions of society and uses them as the norm. It grants that the world is full of folly, crime and injustice, but
it never doubts that the world is real and worth reforming. This is the counsel-of-prudence type of story, in which the
reader is urged to keep his balance, remember the tried and true, laugh at the folly around him, and not get involved.
The spokesman in this kind of satire is a form of the plain dealer type in comedy or the blunt advisor in tragedy. A good
example in American folk humour is Will Rogers, who didn’t lose his head though people all around him were losing
theirs. Such a character is a parody of the romance archetype of the giant killer. In this kind of satire, the bigger they
come, the harder they fall. The object of attack frequently defined by its giant size and small brain – like modern
industry or modern society in Chaplin’s films, in which the little guy takes them all on.
In another type of satire the conventions themselves are objects of attack. Here belongs the successful rogue
who shows up society for what it is, such as Mack the Knife in Brecht’s Three Penny Opera. Related to him is the
pragmatic character who ridicules social norms, theories and generalizations, and points out the discrepancy between
them and what they are supposed to explain. In what we could call intellectual satire, the writer attempts to break
down stereotypes, fossilized beliefs, superstition, crank theories, dogmatism, and all the other lumber that prevent the
free movement of society.
Satire goes too far. That is its stock and trade. The landscape of satire is likely to be crowded-frequently with
ridiculous objects and details-and swarming with people. The action is likely to be frenzied as people change their
masks, reverse their direction, lose their way. The form itself can even tend to disintegrate. There is a constant
tendency to self-parody, as though the conventions of writing itself will not serve in an irrational society. Digressions are
frequent. Narrative is frequently purposeless - Sterne takes hundreds of pages just get Trisham Shandy born. It is
probably no wonder that so many great satires are fragmentary or unfinished. In ironic fiction, a good deal is made of
the difficulty of communication. The form itself amply illustrates this.
The technique of disintegration brings us to fantasy and invective. Satiric fantasy tends to question not only our
reason but also our perceptions. Like Alice in an insane “wonderland, we begin to doubt that what we see is really
there. The satirist does this by shifting the perspective of ordinary life slightly askew. Swift suddenly shows us society
through a telescope, as a collection of posturing pigmies, then through a microscope, as a group of hideous reeking
giants. Such fantasies are parodies of romance conventions – the fairyland of the little people, the land of giants, the
world of enchanted animals, and the pleasant wonderlands of pastoral myth. And one wonders whether such things
seen in delirium might really be there, even though we are unable to see them, like stars in the daytime.
A related type of satire is invective, or the torrential abuse, the terms of which are frequently very near to
fantasy: the abusive epithets in Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac the insane catalogues in S. J Perelman, and the erudite
technicalities in Keller’s Catch 22.
The stories that we have called ironic resemble satire, in that they also take place in the world of experience
rather than in the world of innocence, and with them, too, heroism is impossible. They differ from satire in that no
moral ideal seems possible.
Some stories in this group strike one as explicit realism. These stories frequently look at tragedy from ‘below’,
as it were, from a realistic perspective. Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People and The Master Builder probably belong here,
where social and psychological explanations are provided for the catastrophe, where we have no sense that the central
are larger than life, only all too human, limited and fallible. Eugene O’Neil Long Day’s Journey into Night belongs with
these stories.
Other ironic plots reveal more bitterness and resignation. The characters are stoical despite the certain
knowledge of evil and death. Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, which parodies the romantic quest, belongs here. The heroes
in these plots endure, as in Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and Hemingway’s The Killers, by there is little hope. We get
from this kind of irony a sense of the relentless cycle of life, with no hope of rebirth or renewal. The motto for such
stories could well be Browning’s “There might be a heaven; there must be a hell.”
At the bottom of the “circle of stories” is a picture of a man in unrelieved bondage. The typical character here
might be Kafka’s Gregor Samsa in Metamorphosis the man who turns into a giant cockroach. The settings feature
prisons, madhouses, and lynching mobs. In the present day, stories of social tyranny such as Orwell’s 1984 are most
typical, and the telescreen there parodies the heroic plight of Samson, eyeless in Gaza, humiliated by being watched by
his enemies. The observation, “Guilt is never to be doubted”, from Kafka’s In the Penal Colony, is an ironic parody of
original sin.
Comedy: The Fourth Story
The simplest pattern of comedy is expressed in an old Broadway cliché: boy meets girl, boy
loses girl, boy finds girl. This simple pattern, however, can become quite complex, and in mostcomedies it is clear that a
whole new society is being formed around the hero and heroine once they
are united. The boy loses the girl or is unable to marry her because of some blocking figure, frequently parental, who
represents a bound society that restricts the hero’s freedom. When this blocking figure has been subverted, the comic
hero triumphs because of his wit or balance, or by some twist in the plot a freer society becomes possible. At the end of
many comedies there is a wedding, a dance, or a feast, and some recent Broadway comedies, keeping to an old
tradition, invite the audience to join in and celebrate the new society. The new society at the end of comedy is not only
free, but it is open and it tend to include as many people as possible. This may account for some otherwise miraculous
transformations: a curmudgeon character like Scrooge is transformed into a loveable character in A Christmas Carol, and
a beast like Caliban is reprieved in The Tempest.
We have said that some tragedies seem very ironic and others quite romantic. Comic plots can also stretch from
the ironic to the romantic. (From Austen’s Pride and Prejudice to Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream). We
could account for this difference in feeling by the two usual methods development in comedy, which emphasize either
the blocking society (the usurpers or impostors), or the reconciliation and the founding of the new society. The
comedies of manners frequently focus on a single blocking figure, a miser, a misanthrope, a hypocrite or a
hypochondriac – and are frequently named after comic resolution: As You Like it. But both types of comedy move
toward a happy ending, to which the audience response is, “this should be”. And in even the most ironic comedies, our
judgment is more of a social one, against the absurd, than a moral one, against the wicked.
In comedy, the miser, the misanthrope, and the hypochondriac mentioned above usually also have a good deal
of social prestige and power – they may be the father, or the guardian of the hero or heroine, or the judge, or the
husband of a younger wife. Because of this power they are able to force much of their society into line with their
obsession. They are bound themselves and they force bondage on others. The society that emerges at the conclusion
of a comedy is a pragmatic society free of bondage. The society controlled by habit, obsession or an arbitrary or cruel
law is opposed to a society which we feel is closer to how things “should be”.
The theme of illusion and reality is very common in comedy, and the comic resolution frequently involves
dispelling illusions caused by disguise, obsession, hypocrisy, or unknown parentage. The society of the hero is real
because it strips away illusion, and the feeling is frequently not only of a new society but of a return to an older society
closer to the golden age.
There are a number of comic plots worth mentioning. In the first, most ironic phase, the obsessed society
remains undefeated. In this initial comic phase the demonic world of irony is never far away: we find punishments,
torture and their instruments, such as the cross in Eliot’s The Cocktail Party and the stake in Fry’s The Lady’s not for
Burning.
In another comic plot that is close to irony, the hero does not succeed in reforming the obsessed society, but he
does escape it. A typical example is Huck Finn “lighting out for the territory ahead of the rest.”
Bu the dead centre for comedy is the plot where the hero outwits or reforms the blocking forces that stand in
his way. This is the story in which love conquers all.
In the plots that move away from experience and up into innocence and romance, the new society is frequently
associated with a particular woodland place, what is called “the green world.” Sherwood Forest in Robin Hood, the
Forest of Arden in As You Like It, and the Promised Land flowing with milk and honey are the most familiar.
In more romantic plots the tone the tone is less festive and more pensive, as in Shakespeare’s late plays. Here
belongs the rescued and shipwrecked heroes of so many Shakespearean comedies. The sea represents chaos; an island,
the chance for a new start. There is also a feeling in these comedies that we are moving out of a lower world of
confusion to an upper world of sense.
The most romantic comic plot and the culmination of the “circle of stories” involves the change or
transformation of the comic society, and often we have here stories of small, detached groups, frequently set up in
secluded places. This small group is detached from routine existence and there is in such stories usually an interested in
the occult and the marvelous. Arthur C Clarke’s Childhood’s End concludes with the group of earth-children moving off
into another, higher plane of existence, as earth and its last survivor are destroyed.