Great Literary Loves

It's Valentine's Day, so I thought I'd share some great couples in storytelling. Most seem to be either archetypes or very particular people who are straining against their trappings (fate, foolish pride, or family/social strata) to be with their one and only. This, of course, keeps the stakes high, the longing painful, and the friction together boiling.

My short (but incomplete), list:

• Romeo & Juliet
• Elizabeth & Darcy of Pride and Prejudice
• The three types of couples in Anna Karenina (love, unfaithful love, lust)
• Esmeralda and Quasimodo loved from afar in the fractured fairy tale of Hunchback of Notre Dame
• Count Almásy & Katherine Clifton from The English Patient
• Superman & Lois Lane
• The Lady & the Tramp

But then, I haven’t read everything. Who am I missing and why are they great couples?

Couples Start With Characters

Ultimately, it is more proof that if you create great characters – often, though not necessarily, on a passionate quest (even if it be of the heart) - you have a better shot at immortality than almost any other method. (To me, this is why American master Don Delilo probably will become a literary footnote.) Think about it:

• Jane Eyre may be a better character than book, but it was among Britian’s favorite titles in a recent contest. To my tastes you can lop off the first third (the “growing up pious” section), and then it becomes a daring story that turns Jane Austen – and much of Dickens - on their respective heads, while maintaining a passionate romance.

• Despite its underdeveloped story structure, To Kill a Mockingbird will remain in the American canon because of Scout and her storytelling voice.

• As long as people remember the phrase “The Misfit,” Flannery O’Conner’s status is safe.

• Shakespeare is remembered for his great, complex characters and dialogue, not for story consistency, original ideas, or sensible plotting.
  

• Dostoyevsky is remembered for his great, complex characters and dialogue, but often featured story consistency, original ideas, and sensible plotting – they were just captured in 800 page tomes. Most of us would rather watch a two hour play than read one book for two months.

• Maurice Bendix, Graham Greene’s doubting atheist in The End of the Affair, captures a certain modern spirit well.

Whither Love Today?

It strikes me that few contemporary authors have attempted a great love story. Granted, I haven’t read everything, but I wonder if “the love story” has been relegated by literary snobs to “genre fiction”? You look at Gabriel Garcia-Marquez or Haruki Murakami or any recent Nobel winners and there are many aspects of greatness, but you don’t often see a love story. Lust, yes. Love, no.

Yet it’s one of the three essential staples for a great story – love, greed, pride – that can’t be relegated away by fads. So whatever your status, let’s hear for love! For without it, none of us would be saved.