[Sheeran quotes extended passage from House of Gold (1929) in which Fr. Considine, parish priest of Barra, is troubled by sexual temptation and secretly observes the object of his lust after midnight by the sea shore:]

‘He held his hands stretched out in front of him, with his elbows to his sides, as if he were saying Mass. But the movement of his hands was unholy. They were long and thin, covered on the back with an intricate labyrinth of pink veins; and with lifeless dark hairs. There were thick bunches of hair between the second and third joints of his long fingers. His thumbs were short and thick. His hands swayed, half-turning and twisting limply on his wrist, resembling the movements of the many-tentacled Jelly-fish that float, belly sideways, in the sea, mid-waters, waving their bladdery arms. Their movement was slow and awful, without seeming purpose, unguided by reason, weaving strange patterns, a sorcery beckoning mystically to the waves that rolled in similar undulations to the strand. Protruding white, from the black sleeves of his priestly coat, they seemed unattached, and with his distraught eyes he seemed to watch their mime in horror.’ (House of Gold, 1929, p.36.)

The melodrama is patent enough: Midnight, the sea, a guilt-ridden priest, a hidden woman, mysterious actions. Yet there is nothing in the scene itself which would make it unavailable to any one of those novelists whose attention is directed at the texture of social life and the appearance of things. No doubt it would be treated with greater subtlety. Yet we are disturbed here by a certain crudity, there is something grotesque and excessive in the Priest’s gestures. They are not of the kind we find in Jane Austen, George Eliot, or Henry James where

[...] gestures are counters which have value in terms of a system, a social code, which forms their context and assigns their meaning. (Peter Brooks, ‘Balzac: Melodrama and Metaphor’, in The Hudson Review, XXII, 23 (Summer 1969, p.214.)]

Gestures refer us to the larger contexture of other gestures, “the structure of appearances we call ‘manners’”. (Brooks, op. cit., p.225).

The “Box Hill Episode” where Emma insults Miss Bates, for example, operates within a code of manners in terms of which her action was wrong, literally unmannerly. In the O’Flaherty passage the priest’s gestures invoke a context completely other than the social, it calls into play mystery and melodrama. The image of the hands is crude, gross. They are linked by an unsubtle metaphor to the aimless movement of jelly-fish. The surface of social propriety is shattered, we are plunged into a world of motion without purpose. Such a metaphor would be out of place in the worlds of Austen, James or Conrad. Literally a gesture - a movement of the hands - it is charged with such vague significance as no movement of the hands could “really” contain. The gesture virtually disappears under weight of meanings - however vague - which the narrator attaches to it. Present in the passage is a haunting sense of something behind, a mystery to be dreaded. Technique passes quickly beyond realism in the sense of the concrete and visible (“His thumbs were short and thick”) to something a good deal less solid and opaque - “a sorcery beckoning mystically to the waves”. The contexts which the metaphors join together are hostile and very disparate. There is, on the one hand, the priest performing what seems a sacrilegious mime of his sacred office and on the other the subhuman, almost sub-animal world of the jelly-fish. Repeatedly, in O’Flaherty, we find him moving out of the world of manners and morals to find a context for human actions in terms of natural and preternatural life. He is unable or unwilling to remain on the plane of comedy of manners, his narrative reaches after what is above (the supernatural or preternatural) or below (the merely natural). We in turn have to find a context for his work other than that offered by the realistic novel per se. To do so is not to deny the over-all realistic framework but rather to point to disruptive elements, which we [161] may provisionally call romantic, incorporated within that framework. His works springs inevitably from the English gradition but there is an “outer darkness” which is at odds with the form and assumptions of that tradtion. We turn to consider the form where these elements receive their fullest expression: the Romance.

[Quotes Henry James:]

By what art or mystery, what craft of selection or omission or commission does a given picture of life appear to us to surround its theme, its figures and images, with the air of romance while another picture close beside it may affect us as steeping the whole matter in the element of reality? (In The Art of the Novel, ed. R. P. Blackmir, NY 1934; Scribner’s Library 1962, p.30.)

[Quotes Daniel Hoffmann on romances:]

these latter lead the imagination of their authors and readers, not towards the treatment of society as a complex interaction of classes and forces, but instead towards an historical depiction of the individual’s discovery of his own identity in a world where his essential self is inviolate and independent of such involvement in history. (Hoffmann, Form and Fable in American Fiction, NY 1961; Galaxy Edn. 1965, p.x.)

In short, the main difference lies in the way in which they view reality. Reality is rendered, in the romance, without that attention to detail and particularity which characterizes the realistic method. The “hero” will encounter less resistance from the world of men and. things, he acts with greater freedom, he is less tied to time and circumstances. In this sense romance has less volume, is more lucid and is consequently less complex than the novel. Typically it prefers action to character, an action unencumbered by the weight of ordinary everyday obstacles. Characters are two dimensional, in E.M. Foster’s sense and do not enter into any complex relation to one another, to society or the past (they have frequently a complex relation to nature).

[Quotes Richard Chase:]

[...] in a romance, “experience” has less to do with human beings as “social creatures” than as individuals. Heroes, villains, victims, legendary types, confronting other individuals or confronting mysterious or otherwise dire forces - this is what we meet in romances [...] in romances characters appear really to be given quantities rather than emerging and changing organisms responding to their circumstances as these themselves develop one out of another [...] we are not shown a “development”; we are left rather with an element of mystery or a simplified and conventionalized alteration of character. (The American Novel and Its Tradition, London 1958, p.22.)

There is, in romance, a preoccupation with the instinctive forces of life, with preconscious values, and irrational meanings. The relative freedom of the form from social and moral perplexities allows it to move form heightened representatins of abstract symbols and ideas to the twists and turns of the private psyche. Uncommitted to the mimetic representation of reality the roman moves towards melodramatic,allegorical, and symbolistic forms. [...]

[Quotes Nathaniel Hawthorne:]

When a writer calls his work a Romance, it need hardly be observed that he wishes to claim a certain latitude, both as to its fashion and material, which he would not have felt himself entitled to assume, had he professed to be writing a novel. The latter form of composition is presumed to aim at a very minute fidelity, not merely to the possible, but to the probable and ordinary course of man’s experience. The former - while, as a work of art, it must rigidly subject itself to laws, and while it sins unpardonably so far as it may swerve aside from the truth of the human heart - has fairly a right to present that truth under circumstances, to a great extent of the writers own choosing or creation. If he thinks fit, also, he may so manage his atmospherical medium as to bring out or mellow the lights, and deepen and enrich the shadows of the picture, he will be wise, no doubt, to make a very moderate use of the privilege here stated, and especially to mingle the marvellous rather as a slight, delicate and evanescent flavour, than as any portion of the actual substance of the dish offered to the public. He can hardly be said, however, to commit a literary crime, even if he disregarded this caution. (Preface to The House of Seven Gables, 1851)

Historically the term romance is a general label for narratives in the romance vernaculars [...] With the rise of the novel, itself a new synthesis of mimetic, historical, and romantic material, the term romance was confined to narrtive which was both anti-mimetic and anti-historic. (Vide Robert Scholes & Robert Kellogg, The Nature of Narrative, NY 1966, p.76.)

[...]

[The ensuing discussion concerns the historical justification of romance among writer such as Richard Hurd (1762) and Horace Walpole - viz., ‘Visions, you know, have always been my pasture; and so far from growing old enough to quarrel with their emptiness I almost think ther eis no wisdom comparable to exchanging what is called the realities of life for dreams.’ (Quoted in Gillian Beer, The Romance, London 1970, p.57.)]

[Quotes Chase, op. cit., on melodrama:]

[...] a vision of things that might be described as a heightened and mysteriously portentous representation of abstract symbols and ideas on the one hand and, on the other, of the involutions of the private psyche. (Chase, The American Novel ... &c., 1958., p.30; and see further from Chase, infra.)

[...]

[Quotes Walter Allen:]

solitary heroes dominate American fiction. They appear, by contrast with the heroes of English novels, often to belong to a different order of experience and conception. Abstracted, alienated from the society of the times, surrounded as it were by an envelope of emptiness, they seem somewhat larger than life, at any rate than life as rendered in the broadly realistic English novel in which the crowd of men and women depicted must bring the central figures down to a level approximating to their own. They have, these American heroes, an epic, mythic quality. [...] They are characters not in process of discovering the nature of society and of themselves in and through society but are, on the contrary, characters profoundly alienated from society.

These heroes strike one as being, in a sense, figures of dream, projections even of a national unconscious, and the novels as being really interior dramas in which the author works out, often violently - the violence frequently being as much evidenced by the texture of the prose as by the action delineated - the courses and consequences of what Henry James called, in a famous phrase, the complex fate of being an American. (Tradition and Dream, London 1964; Penguin 1965, pp.17-18.)

As we have seen, there were other fates in the world as complex as that of being an American. (Sheeran, p.169.)

One final inclusive distinction between the ways in which the two forms, romance and the novel, approach reality will be found serviceable for subsequent discussion: the novel is representational, the romance is illustrative. Our terms [169] are taken from Scholes and Kellogg’s massive study of the nature of narrative. By ‘representational’ our authors mean ‘an attempt to create a replica of actuality’ (Op. cit., p.84.) - as do the images in certain paintings. There is a constant search ‘to reshape and revitalize ways of apprehending the actual, subjecting convention to an empirical review of its validity as a means of reproducing reality’ (ibid., p.75).

The ‘illustrative’ tendency on the other hand is ‘an attempt to remind us of art aspect of reality rather than convey a total and convincing impression of the real world’. It depends on artistic tradition and convention, ‘it does not seek to reproduce actuality but to present selected aspects of the actual essences referable for their meaning, not to historical, psychological or sociological truth but to ethical and metaphysical truth’ (ibid., p.73.)

Our interest lies in a form of narrative which straddles the border between the illustrative and the representational - the Romance Novel.

[End Chap.]