Fifty years of life devoted to contemplating life and her fellow men from the singular balcony of journalism and writing led Vivian Gornick (New York, 1935) to realize, with sad and brutal precision, that although writing and literature help us understand ourselves. on the contrary, love, especially the romantic love that Western literature has sold to us in recent decades, is not – as we think – the world and therefore will not save us. or make us happy.
Written in 1997 and now published in Spain by Sexto Piso, the writings collected under the prophecy title of El fin de la novela de amor retain their intellectual freshness 25 years later. In them, Gornick constantly dives into the meaning of life and points out rationally and realistically that although romantic love remains important, it is not the sole and final transmitter of true happiness, but necessary but necessary, like food or air. insufficient. Finally, they are clever and feminist essays in which the author tries to show how romantic love has ceased to be the central focus of women’s lives in literature and in real life. This is because he realizes that while she continues to be fascinated by the promise of love, he no longer gives her almost any of what she expects from him.
literary milestones
He uses a subtle and indirect style in his reasoning, turning his eyes and thoughts to figures and literary touchstones of the last century. Some of Gornick’s characters are well known: Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Willa Cather, Ernest Hemingway, Raymond Carver, and Richard Ford.
In the opening article of the collection, George Meredith’s forgotten masterpiece Diana of the Crossway, we see a portrait of a passionate intellectual woman who sabotages her love affair with a politician over the terrifying knowledge that intimacy will destroy rather than destroy. acquired love, individuality, and autonomy.
It is in the End of the Romance Novel, the final essay in which Gornick turns all his central thought into the subject. He recounts his experiences when he was little, believing that love has transformative powers. They believed in the loving and true ideal. “Confusion came when love or marriage failed to get us to the promised land, something went wrong, but we continued to believe in love.”
Then the world began to change and that expectation dissipated. Divorce, psychotherapy, free sex, drugs. “We thought we would fall in love again and then do it right. But that didn’t happen”.
“We loved the second time and we did it wrong, the third and also.” They believed the solution was a new love experience. But this is a failure that leads to another failure. Until some finally realized that love doesn’t revolve around everything.
Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger also remember falling in love; A gifted student subdued by her brilliant teacher. His devotion to Nazism spoiled the relationship for years. But despite Heidegger’s Nazism, his was a bond that lasted through time, contrary to all logic, between two people who, according to all social laws, should repel each other. Irrationality is interesting here; How could she continue to love a man who was a Nazi and went against all his ideas of an independent and confident woman?
The field of this struggle, which Arendt and many others are waging, is love and marriage in general, and this is the scenario Gornick chose and explored in his articles in The End of the Romance, an apparently familiar area he has studied closely. with intelligence.
Here, as with most of Gornick’s writing, his writing is excellent and highly perceptive. She never demands submission or abandonment of her stances and ideas, but her thought-provoking explorations, her close and strong connection with literature, her keen feminist gaze earn nothing but respect and admiration.
Ultimately, this collection of essays aims to teach that the search for love has lost its status as a central literary metaphor for transcendence and fulfillment, and that “love as a metaphor today is an act of nostalgia, not a revelation.”