Interesting that recently I have seen a fair amount of stuff on 'love in Fiction'. Last night it was Sebastian Faulks and he was looking at love in the novel. He started off by saying something about where we get our ideas about love from and deciding that we get it from books. I first fell in love at the age of ten (before I had read any books that contained love, and before we even had a television and the only film I had seen was 'The Jungle Book' - and ok there is that bit at the end where Mowgli is so smitten that he ditches his friends for the girl!... but I am not sure that my falling in love had much to do with that). But maybe Faulks does have something of a point.
I read literature at University and I soaked up Shakespeare and Emily Bronte and Thomas Hardy and D.H. Lawrence. Did these reading experiences define for me what love is? Did they lay down the blueprint of what I expect from love - unreasonably expect? And does film now do the same in fashioning these expectations for the whole of society?
I write a lot, and love and relationships enter into the writing. Vonnegut professes not to write about love because as in life so in fiction: it takes over. And it can. It takes over my writing... a lot of the time it does. But it is the failure of love and the madness and the pain and the yearning and the obstinate hope that colours what I write. I don't think I say anything new. I don't think I teach anything about love... but the idea that a reader might learn something about what love is from reading me, that feels like some kind of responsibility.
Then I read an interesting question somewhere online: Do men read love stories? They might say they don't. I don't do Mills and Boon, (I protest I don't) but clearly I do the rest (see my university reading above). 'Love in the Time of Cholera' and Barriccio's 'Silk' and Winterson's 'The Passion'... I have read and loved these. Maybe they have shaped my imagination and maybe that imagination shapes my view of love. Maybe. But maybe it is our experience of love that rather shapes what we read and how we see love. Few of us fall in love just the once and marry our childhood sweethearts and live happy ever after... 'the course of true love never did run smooth'. We mostly fall inexpertly in and out of love at first, experiencing all the pain and rejection and longing, before some way down the road finding someone to build a life with. And even then, another few miles down the road we may find love beset with further trials (a cooling of passion or infidelity and divorce and heartache). Maybe it is this that shapes our view of love, and what we write or read (what we are drawn to read) is what mirrors our experience of love... a bit.
The web of influence on who and what we are is a complex one... love books, though.
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