The Romance of History
As genres, romance and history are often felt to be at odds with one another. The main sticking point has something to do with the “fictionalized” nature of romance — history (it is asserted) deals with real, verifiable things. Thus history can be said to act as a guide to truth and understanding in a way that a romance novel cannot. Besides all of that, romance novels are principally stories about passion, more frequently in the vein of lust and its expression. History, again, deals with real things. Passion figures in, but it’s often easier to leave such things to the fantasies of the novelists. But they aren’t so different. They enjoy a charmed interdependence. After all, put simply, both are roadmaps of seduction. Romance focuses on turning a “no” into a “yes” — history with its consequences (turning that “yes” back into a “no”).
Much like the interpretations of history, the gulf between romance novels is wide: 50 Shades of Gray and the Outlander share a pretty thin set of surface-level similarities, but ultimately explore the same intersections around desire, awareness, and satisfaction. There is no surprise in this. As humans we live in this zone, and the act of fantasy is an attempt to navigate it. If you can’t help but be played by your desires, neither can anyone else. Thus the need for romance, a means for structuring what might otherwise be a terrible shortcoming — a way to weave consent from chaos.
But what manner of consent? Enter history — the document; the narrative of narratives. History is the process by which we check the stories against the ruins. History, in its attempt to explain what’s happening now, takes on the impossible task of turning every historical “yes” into a referendum on one’s present lot — the revelation of the heretofore unconsidered assent, an act which turns the engine of negation. Consequently history tends to embrace a strain of sadism. It focuses it attention on displacement and struggle — indeed, like in the world of romance, the Nazis have traditionally sold more books than the Janes. Fear is more stimulating than stillness.
Romance has long concerned itself with imagining this interplay between desires: what a person wants and what they can do to get it. So the romance of the romance novel is ultimately found in the framing — does the story require us to open up or work though? The answer, like all romance, requires negotiation, negotiation establishes consent, consent establishes trust, and trust opens up the possibility of choices. In short, people make history out of their passions, their romances. And to be met, passion requires we negotiate. These negotiations leave us with artifacts are in turn subject to our passions, which must in turn be negotiated with. After few generations of changing hands, the synchronic and the diachronic waveforms collapse, and the living can only imagine how such things actually came to be theirs. By way of explanation, one is just left holding a very heavy book with a story.
In the old days, the story of the king was a story of impossibility. No peasant could ever become king. The story of his decadence was also the story of their more pitiful lot. No person can be in two places at once, after all. This is the basic theory of political economy: society has always been built on a balancing act between the twin pistons of production and consumption — traditionally framed in terms of “who” produces and “who” consumes. One’s relative position defines one’s fate. History can help the living see this, to craft metaphors for it, but otherwise offers little that one can’t find through physics (even quantum models struggle with co-location). Meaning is, after all, fundamentally subjective; born out of ones conflict with context.
In other words, we are each trapped, in our own unique way, by the inertia of culture. And this is why countless sheep lost their skins so that scribes across the ages could offer solace to the souls of kings — divine right is just another way of acknowledging that no one asks to be born. But more importantly, our masters are composed, and history is a love letter to the comforts of repression — a way of learning about what could have been refused.
The soul of romance in history is most evident when considering the “Great Man” theory. If you aren’t familiar, this is a model of human and historical action that places figureheads at the center of events. You know the kind of thing: the world as you know it would be unrecognizable if Caesar had never been. The story of a Genghis or a Hideoyshi or a Napoleon or a Stalin or of any of the other conquerors that history has thrown up are similar in their manifestation. Their passions, their lusts (in the catholic sense), are constantly inflamed by the secret wishes of their fellows (if you’ve not seen the film Death of Stalin, it draws this conclusion pretty directly—the phrase “turtles all the way down” comes to mind). Much like great romantics, great men served as catalysts for their societies, somehow knowing the pressure points that could turn the hearts of their fellows. This magic act starts to smack of wish fulfillment, inspiring the Steven Millers of the living world to take their insanity to its logical conclusion.
Which takes us back to this relationship between romance, history, and consent. The real lesson of the choices “great men” make lie not simply in ensuring we’ve no need for their reproduction, but in how we come to understand their failings. Most romance encourages us to get out of our own way, history teaches us to get out of its way. Both do this by framing expectation, and lessening our reliance on private trust networks. History, like romance, teaches us a particular language by attempting to describe the topography of society’s ideological faciality. For Putin to redeem Stalin is simply a matter of looking deeper into his soul. The same is true for any of history’s great men. “You can’t always get what you want”, as the song says, “but sometimes you get what you need.” Moving from want into need, and insisting on the primacy of the one over the other, is a road to either forced exile or a more comforted form of servitude.
Because for most of us, what we want is pretty mundane. We want our children to love us, or our YouTube video to get likes. We want to be more “genuine”, we want to get fucked. For others, nothing short of global domination will do — to be cheered in our choices by everyone. But it doesn’t matter: because we are so fundamentally, collectively “shallow”, the judgement of history is really a judgment of applause. What did we choose to love and what did we choose to condemn? What did we “like”? Knowledge of this does little to illuminate the truth of our actions or choices in the moment. But this darkness is essential: only through ignorance could the great warlords of antiquity find the help they needed to slake themselves all over their neighbors. This is just as true today.
And as they tore into their enemies — so did we, rushing in alongside for want of anything better to do. Great men surrounded themselves with people who wanted it the same way (men usually, but women played their role). But the consequences of their actions, the stories about who won and who lost, what they created and what they destroyed, have a moral content that depends entirely on us, the witnesses. We are the subjects upon whom the ancient texts operate. We take them as guides or as challenges or as pure fiction because the language of history, like romance, is really private one; one that pretends at universality for the sake of belonging, for a shot at purity and the sacred self.
