Throughout the history of literary fiction, discourses of love have been all the rage. As Julia Kristeva puts it, each and every story is about love, for the great artistic oeuvres talk about nothing else But they rarely talk about happiness in love, and pleasurable, lasting and requited love. My reading follows Niklas Luhmann 10 , who says love is both an 'anomaly' and an 'absolutely normal improbability'.
If, by and large, love goes beyond the bounds of sanity, literary amour passion does so intensively. More often than not, in literary fiction, the surge of passionate love does not result in fulfilled lovers, but in the failure of love and individual breakdown, for which young Werther serves as the classic example. Even if it ends in a grave, true love means loving one, and only one person for life.
Distance rather than closeness, trouble rather than ease, imagination rather than fact are necessary to make this model of exclusive love work. One strategy is to wrap the beloved in a tight garment of virtual images. To maintain the barrier that passionate love requires, one must be willing to love a substitute, a substitute of the body that reveals its true character as being ultimately textual. He reads her eyes like a book, and so her body evaporates to become a text.
But what appears to be a clear message to its reader is, in fact, ambiguous and open to abuse. In his letters, he can communicate the incommunicable: love. In his fantasies, he can breathe life into its images and signs. Amongst others, the novel shows what it means to feel the thrill of love in the world of art: the body vanishes and is replaced by a work of art, or a text cf. Kremer In the deluge of literary love stories since Goethe, women are often connected with pictographic material, and various optical instruments come into play.
The German Romantic period imposes many types of glass barriers between the hero and his beloved, such as telescopes, looking-glasses, or windows. Typically, it is the man who looks, and the woman: she is subject to his gaze. The male gaze through a window turns the woman into a mental picture enclosed by a frame. Modern literary fiction is littered with windows because they emphasise the importance of the eye.
