ROMANCE- THE FIRST STORY
The most typical romance narratives take place in the world of innocence.
Many of these romance stories dwell on birth and parentage, and their heroes frequently
have origins that are shrouded 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: Pharoah 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 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 such types.
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 is 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 spring. The
archetypes of this story are found in the New Testament account of Christ’s resurrection,
in the Egyptian myth of Osiris, and in the Greek myth of Persephone. (Modern use of this
archetype is found in such expressions as Ossie Davis’s 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 saviour must conquer, and sometime 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 onedimensional: they are either good or bad, either for the quest or against it. The women in
romance are usually either rescued maidens or brides (Sleeping Beauty, Brunhilde,
Madeline Usher, the rescued heroines in Tom Jones), or supporters of the hero (Beauty,
Ariadnes, 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 an 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 be some means of unifying a
“heavenly” world and a “lower” one. This union is frequently achieved by a vision,
commonly set on a mountain or an island, in a tower or a lighthouse, or on a ladder or a
staircase. 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 lives in a space station waiting for atomic poison to
disappear from earth.
Typical romances deal with some sort of progress toward 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 some
place 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 usually destroyed before her
innocence is vindicated. This may account for our sense of loss in Hawthorne’s The
Scarlett Letter and Miller’s The Crucible.
Another kind 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 are frequently young people, baffled by their first contact 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, 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, by the saves the nation
or passes 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, center around a hero who is not part of the world of
innocence, but of the world of experience. Such a hero can still be a figure of stature,
like Anthony, Macbeth and Lear, but he is less victorious in is downfall and more
responsible for it than the saviour victim. He may be the victim of a 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 crushed fate is so set things right. Hamlet
and Macduff. The major interest of the story may center 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 is a state that offers him less freedom than what we would see as
normal. Oedipus the King belongs here, as does Willy Loman 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 uses it in “A Rose for Emily”.
SATIRE AND IRONY- THE THIRD STORY
It is hard to say what plot of satire and irony is. As structural it 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 for
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 all about 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 is
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 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, and
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 to get his her, Tristam 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. 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 the giants, the world of
enchanted animals, and the pleasant wonderland of pastoral myth. And one wonders
whether 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 ion Rostand’s Cyrano do Bergerac,
the insane catalogs 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
expectations are provided for the catastrophe, where we have no sense that the central
figures are larger than life, only all too human, limited and fallible. Eugene O’Neill’s 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, but there is little hope. We
get from this kind of irony a sense of the relentless cycle of life, with no hope or 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 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 if 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 most comedies 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 e has been subverted, the comic hero
triumphs because of his wit or balance, or by some twist of 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 tends to include as many people as possible. This may account
fro some otherwise miraculous transformations: a curmudgeon like Scrooge is transformed
into a loveable character in Dickens’ 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 also can 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 of development in comedy, which emphasize either
the blocking society (the usurpers or impostors), or the reconciliation and the founding of
a new society. The comedies or manners frequently focus on a single blocking figure, a
miser, a misanthrope, a hypocrite or a hypochondriac- and are frequently named after
them, just as the titles of romantic comedies often reflect their interest in the 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 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 cosmic 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.”
But 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 is less festive and more pensive, as in Shakespeare’s
late plays. Here belong 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 interest 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.