#5 pages away from finishing berlant's desire/love; read rose's lectures on frankfurt school recently

[zielenna]

It is as if, on some level, Margaret grasps that she is a character in a novel, bound by its specific laws and customs (the requirements of the marriage plot, the classic romantic archetypes, the flattening effect of Rooney’s prose), and all these strike her as an alien imposition on her very being. Love, in this sense, is the lover’s name for the desire not to be fictional: It is a tunnel out of the novel that, being part of a novel, is always bound to collapse. Even the casual reader of Pride and Prejudice, for instance, knows that Elizabeth will fail to escape her circumstances, that she will get married precisely because she says she will not, and that she will fall in love with Darcy precisely because he is the “last man” she would ever choose. In accepting his proposal, she merely superimposes her vibrant inner life onto the dead world of convention, acting out of pure feeling while, as if by happy accident, making the most advantageous match in the entire book. This, I think, is what Lukács means when he writes that the novel’s characters are “compelled by irony.” In attempting to assert their freedom, they come face-to-face with their existence as characters; the senseless mass of conventions that looms overhead is ultimately the novel itself. It is no accident that Pride and Prejudice, however groundbreaking in its day, is now the comp of all comps in the romance industry, which is hell-bent on supplying readers with an abundance of mass-produced and utterly fungible Darcies.

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In becoming “normal,” Marianne has been forced to give up the illusion of having transcended the tropes and archetypes that have, in truth, been quietly sustaining her all along — in a word, her literariness. The literary novel is, as it were, the missionary position of literature: In order to pass itself off as a representation of “real life,” it must deny the inherent conventionality common to all novels, whether “literary” or not. Compare genre fiction, where the same conventions may be used as selling points in marketing campaigns and openly consumed by fans.