Where is (neo-)romanticism in modern fiction?

[HareBrain]

I'm not sure how many will even know what I mean by the term, which is a bit vague anyway, but I hope a couple of well-read types will be able to venture an opinion. It might tie in a bit with Extolleger's thread on long description.

I'm more aware of neo-romantic art, which was a crossing of modernism and romanticism between the wars by (mainly British?) painters. I still come across painters who have the same kind of sensibility, but it seems to me that many writers of about the same time also showed a Romantic sensibility, but that few now do, even in fantasy, which you'd think would be about as Romantic as it gets. It was there in Tolkien, John Fowles (in a more modern form), and to some extent in children's authors Susan Cooper and Alan Garner, but it seems to have vanished since the 70s, despite the environmental movements that one might have thought would encourage it (to an extent -- I'm not suggesting anything as simplistic as that a love of nature and Romanticism are synonymous). Is that true or am I just not seeing it?

I find it interesting that neo-romanticism flourished around WWII in England because of the threat of invasion and the risk of loss of a kind of identity. Alan Garner has written that his and Susan Cooper's fantasies, though written decades later, were charged with wartime experiences as children: again, the sense of dire threat to a familiar home.

I'd also be interested to know how or whether the Romantic tradition survives in non-British writing, and what form it takes. I'd say Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses fits the genre very strongly, for example.

Hope this waffly post makes sense to someone!

 

[svalbard]

Patrick McCormack's Albion fits that bill. Although not well known I consider it bone of superior Arthurian books published in the last 20 odd years.

I also think Tad Williams fall's into this category with his Memory, Thorn and Sorrow series.

 

[HareBrain]

I also think Tad Williams fall's into this category with his Memory, Thorn and Sorrow series.

Could you say why those in particular? (I have read them, though long ago.)

One problem with posing these questions is that Romanticism can mean different things. I've tried to define what it means for me, and I'd say something like "a bitter-sweet relationship with those parts of the imagination that might once have given rise to religion". Would others define it similarly, or am I way off?

 

[svalbard]

With Albion it was the way the author painted a post-Arthurian world using images of deep regret, characters who were attempting to hold back time, relive ancient glories. There was a pathos to the story. Language describing mood played a massive part in the telling from the author. I suppose there was a sense of otherworldlness, but without the grimness of say a Martin, Bakker or Erikson.

The important reason that I believe it ranks as neo-romancticism is that the story evoked feelings within me as the reader. Emotions of longing for a world that no longer exists.

I will have to think more on MST, because it is years since I read it, but I think it falls under the category of my sentence above. I believe Williams story was the last great, flourishing of the Tolkien tradition.

 

[HareBrain]

That's interesting, thanks. I think the Tolkien tradition has died in terms of new writing, which is fine, but I was wondering where and in what form (if any) the Romantic strain would crop up. What I love about the neo-romantic artists was that, via modernism, they took it somewhere completely new. And some artists I really admire (local ones, mostly) have gone further, painting abstracts of the Sussex downland landscape that are still firmly Romantic despite being abstract. But that kind of development seems almost completely lacking in fiction of any kind. Unless I've missed it.

 

[Toby Frost]

Interesting point: given the current belief that fantasy should involve nothing but misery (I exaggerate), people being spiritually linked to their surroundings seems to have fallen from fashion.

I would nominate Mythago Wood by Robert Holdstock, which isn't really about the goodness of nature, but certainly about its power, and for a nightmarish view of the landscape coming to life, the short story "Rawhead Rex" by Clive Barker. I would also strongly recommend The Acts of King Arthur by John Steinbeck, which I think is massively underated (and pre-1970).

For various reasons over the last year, I've come to realise that the British - and perhaps the English in particular - are quite strange, and their attitude and relationship to the land is quite difficult to depict.

(Oh, and although it's not SF at all, and published in the 1930s, Rogue Male by Geoffrey Household).

 

[Extollager]

I'm more aware of neo-romantic art, which was a crossing of modernism and romanticism between the wars by (mainly British?) painters.

Such as -- ?

Engravings?

Paul Nash, Graham Sutherland?

 

[HareBrain]

Paul Nash, Graham Sutherland?

Them, and John Piper, Eric Ravilious, John Craxton, Henry Moore and Ivon Hitchens are the ones that come immediately to mind.

Also forgot to mention Mervyn Peake, not so much for his art as for Gormenghast.

Plus, in poetry, Dylan Thomas and Ted Hughes also belong to that period and movement. But I'm not familiar with new poetry so I can't say whether the neo-romantic strain also seems to have died in that.


Toby, I think you're right about Mythago Wood -- I would place Holdstock in this category, and he was writing not long ago, so that makes one!

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

I believe Williams story was the last great, flourishing of the Tolkien tradition.

I interviewed Tad a while back (you can find the whole thing in the Interviews forum here), and this is what he had to say about MST:

an examination (among other things) of Tolkien's tropes and the way other people had picked them up without understanding them, and parroted them on to another generation. For instance, the idea of a Golden Age, which has become a staple in most mainstream epic fantasy. Tolkien, both as a Catholic and an anti-modernist, actually believed (or wanted to believe) in such a better time, in an unFallen world. I don't. So my book was going to reflect that, but in such a way as to draw attention to it -- namely, by pulling in the readers who had become used to taking it for granted.

 

[Toby Frost]

Does this have to be fantasy? If not, then how about John Wyndham, whose books often involve nature and have a British setting, or even the pastoral bits of 1984? On a non SFF note, the older films Went the Day Well? and I Know Where I'm Going discuss this. And then there's The Wicker Man and Excalibur (You and the land are one!).

As an aside, I think MST is slightly underrated. Probably because it's not self-consciously grim, and too early for that movement, it seems to get lumped in with David Eddings and the like.

 

[svalbard]

Does this have to be fantasy? If not, then how about John Wyndham, whose books often involve nature and have a British setting, or even the pastoral bits of 1984? On a non SFF note, the older films Went the Day Well? and I Know Where I'm Going discuss this. And then there's The Wicker Man and Excalibur (You and the land are one!).

As an aside, I think MST is slightly underrated. Probably because it's not self-consciously grim, and too early for that movement, it seems to get lumped in with David Eddings and the like.

I think Excalibur is a good example as is the Edward Woodward version of The Wicker Man(less said about the reboot the better). Agreed on MST.

 

[HareBrain]

All those are valid, Toby, but they're all old (even Excalibur, which is a good example, is about 30 years old). I'm interested in where that strain has gone now. (And yes, not just in fantasy.)

Also, I think it's about more than relationship with land/landscape. Gormenghast is Romantic, even though the "landscape" is a castle. Gothic is (or was) an offshoot of Romantic, as was the Decadent movement of the 1890's, and Art Nouveau -- I can feel they're linked, but I struggle to identify what it is that links them. Something to do with emotion and setting, which can include the land but isn't limited to it? A backwards-looking connection with nature (or super-nature)?

If it helps, I wrote a couple of sentences yesterday to try to illustrate what I, personally, consider the Romantic tone or "mood":

When you stand on a hilltop in the thick darkness of a summer night, with wafts of grass-chill in your nose and the lights of towns spread below you and the stars spattered above you and the moon two days past full rising ochre in the southeast corner of the world, and you feel master of it all and also a tiny speck that might be crushed by the dark at any moment.

Or when you’re lying in the itchy long grass staring up at the fathomless burning of an August sky and the scissoring song of the grasshoppers reminds you of the smell of the long-ago passion you had for someone who couldn’t quite return it.

 

[Extollager]

Harebrain,

I think you should read Holloway:

Holloway by Robert Macfarlane, Stanley Donwood and Dan Richards

Review: Holloway, By Robert Macfarlane, Dan Richards and Stanley Donwood - Reviews - Books - The Independent

 

[HareBrain]

Extollager, I think you're probably right!

Back to MSW, I've come to the conclusion that there are strong romantic elements, what with all the lost overgrown cities of the Sithi and so on. Also, the Hayholt itself is a strongly romantic place, with its various layers of past and its ghosts and its attractiveness as a place to explore.

I've been reading a biog of Mervyn Peake (Mervyn Peake's Vast Alchemies by G. Peter Winnington, highly recommended), and by coincidence this morning I reached where the author discusses to what extent Gormenghast can be said to be Gothic and what makes it so. He quotes the opening to Titus Groan, in which the castle is described not in terms of visuals (surprising, given that Peake was an artist) but in terms of physical sensation, even disease -- as though it were a body. And I think this combines two of the aspects that perhaps make something Romantic -- a focus on physical sensuality, and the elevation of setting to the level of character.

 

[Stephen Palmer]

Mythago Wood for sure, and all the books that followed.

 

[HareBrain]

Googling Holdstock + Romantic, I came across a book of essays: "The Mythic Fantasy of Robert Holdstock" (ed. Morse and Matolcsy), which talks about the "romantic sublime" and seems to position him quite nicely within the "genre".

Is there anyone publishing now who seems to have been strongly influenced by him?

 

[Stephen Palmer]

I can't think of anybody off the top of my head. He was a unique voice. Even his early SF is like no other.

 

[HareBrain]

I've since remembered an early book by Paul Kearney, A Different Kingdom, which I think had quite a Holdstockian feel. That was published about twenty years ago.

I also think Michael Moorcock's Mother London could be called Romantic, and some of Peter Ackroyd's books. Both suggest London as a character in itself, one whose pasts are always present. I was reading about Paul Nash last night. A critic said of him that he "had no interest in the past as past, but [in] the accumulated intenseness of the past as present", and this resonated strongly with me. I think this is the reason Nash (and Moorcock, and Ackroyd) belonged to a different strain of romanticism than those who were interested in the past as past, such as maybe Tolkien and Walter Scott (?) and so on.

 

[Randy M.]

Googling Holdstock + Romantic, I came across a book of essays: "The Mythic Fantasy of Robert Holdstock" (ed. Morse and Matolcsy), which talks about the "romantic sublime" and seems to position him quite nicely within the "genre".

Is there anyone publishing now who seems to have been strongly influenced by him?

Coming at if from a different perspective, I've heard that Holdstock was influenced by Machen. I would assume any recent writers influenced by them would be likely candidates for neo-Romanticists.

Randy M.

 

[HareBrain]

Machen's "Hill of Dreams" I would certainly place in the Romantic camp (I first heard of it in another book on Paul Nash, funnily enough). In fact, its basic plot -- isolated teenage boy has weird, sort-of erotic experience in a place where ancient history and nature combine, and then wastes away the rest of his truncated life pining for whatever it was he may or may not have experienced -- might seem to be almost a parody of the Romantic because it ticks all its boxes so well. (The description almost fits the plot of Kearney's A Different Kingdom too.) But I think Machen became more a horror writer and from what I know, his influence seems to have been felt more by people like Lovecraft.