Are Romantic Books Possible Anymore?

I've thought for some time that it's really impossible to have a genuine love story set today. As Allan Bloom says at one point in his book, "we keep going back to the bottom of the barrel and coming up empty." Romantic love between man and woman is the signature invention of Christian civilization in the middle ages (partly as a reaction to Christianity, and an overcoming of it), and replaced religious passion as the foundation of the arts. Without it both the arts and actually life--if by this one understands something beyond mere life--have become sterile and boring. Much of modern anomie is to be understood as the drying up of this source of vitality. There were some genuine attempts to replace it with something new in the 1920's but both German nihilism and existentialism are crisis-mode attitudes that are too dependent on historical events and in the end too dour to serve as the foundation of arts and of life. Without longing and fanatical belief in sexual passion (romantic love) there's really little to live for. And I think it's not possible to have genuine love stories told in movies or books.

I can think only of a couple of examples of books and movies, and both are Asian. I think this is because there are still some social obstacles to strong individual sexual passion in Asian culture. Love stories depend on demonstrating the primal superiority and power of sexual love over all merely human conventions, tribal laws, etc., all obstacles, even to the point where lovers are willing to sacrifice their lives; Romeo and Juliet is the blueprint, but even when it doesn't come to death, that has to be a possibility, and the principle of obstacle is the same. Well one big problem is there aren't any obstacles to conquer and partly as result, partly as cause, Western people pretend to take sex casually. Of course they can't take it casually which is why this leads to sexual dysfunction especially among the middle and upper middle classes (often ridiculed by the rich and the poor in history for their sexual repression and ridiculousness...anxious, socially insecure people don't make good lovers), or otherwise to hysterical fits, nagging, petty jealousies, and reabsorption into the female muck of every day life; instead of romantic and idealistic flights of passion. Still I think the cause of why romantic passion has dried up is deeper and is possibly biological (feminism being only a reaction).

As to whether it is possible in books, let's consider this. I don't know of any novels after 1950 that capture the sense of romantic passion, other than Mishima's.

bump

of course it's possible, just need to find a decent enough writer to pull it off.

>never had a real romantic relationship

explain

1984 is a modern love story

>do it to julia, not to me

if you cant relate to this as a modern caucasian, I feel bad for you senpai

1984 isn't romantic

today, it's a teenage moment. you'll find most of what you seek in young adult literature and pornographic novels.
it's also just another form of sublimated libido, not inherently more raw, though certainly more self-centered and unambitious.

My favorite romance novels are Stendhal's Charterhouse of Parma and Red and the Black

bummer

...

what is this from?

Read japanese contemp lit and you're in for a ride my lad.

Except you probably never will since you need to learn japanese. Well, probably is not certainly.

love for big brother is all you need pham. the family unit is a patriarchal institution

you should check out lena dunham's hbo series

don forget to sub barack obama's feed

In The Mood For Love

What authors?

I believe it is but it takes someone to know what true love, deep down obsessive pure time dwelling gorgeous love, truely is. The best people to bring the farie tale quality of love to lif me are Leos. The envious and fully engaged passion they are able to put in their romance is heretic.
I began the thought of working with another author on a somewhat ill-obsessive romance driven book, but he’s left me high and dry. I really wish he would come back to that, I enjoyed our exchanges of mind.

any good pham?

I love me some good mandarin movies

It's Cantonese. But yes, it's a great movie.

yeah we totally need more romeo and juliet. dumb chad meets a stupid roastie bitch at a party and they immediately fall in """love""" and want to get married so he can stuff his dagger in her ripe gash but oh no they're from rival families and her parents want her to marry someone else so she fucking devises some autistic scheme to elope without telling him of course and they both fucking DIE. did i mention she was 13 and totally mature and intelligent (except for, you know, literally everything she does in acts 4 and 5) how the fuck that dogshit escaped from the same pen that gave us the tempest is beyond me

the reason people stopped writing romance-centric novels for the most part is because they realized they were fucking garbage and only read by housewives and autistic losers. every truly great author, composer, painter, etc. probably had a woman somewhere in their life but they kept it to themselves and used it as fuel for the fire because that's the whole point of having personal experiences. there are some things that art can't capture well enough to do justice and making them the focal point of it defeats its purpose. anime and manga are probably the modern day evolution of old love stories and they're fucking shitty too.

stop being a worthless piece of shit and go find someone else that isn't a worthless piece of shit and i guarantee the experience will be 1000x more intense than anything someone else can put on paper for you despite being nowhere near as dramatic in reality. but of course that's much easier said than done and you'll likely continue to search for things in places where they won't be found.

can confirm, is an excellent movie

If you think middle age romanticism was driven by sexual passion you're rushing in the complete fucking opposite direction of where that leads to. Most of romantic literature in that time was based around the idea of heroic knights showing extreme acts of heroism as tribute to their respective lady, and according to chivalry this was supposed to be a relationship that was in it's purest form non-sexual.

Jfc dude, you sure have a chip on your shoulder. Did you even read the entire OP or did you just read the first 2 lines and assume what it was saying?

Plenty of romance in VNs and such desu

Are you white? Why are young middle class whites so damn unpassionate about everything. I feel like a life of relative privilege has left them to make up their own problems and ills. As a Hispanic immigrant in the US i feel sad when i see how much middle and middle upper class whites long for a bland existence without any romance, everything is planned. Everything has to be perfect. Analyze everything until the joke is meaningless. But who am i to talk, i have my own insecurities too. But my God, i pray if i ever marry it is to a passionate and loving women.

It is our generation's destiny to raze the world to it's foundations. Be grateful.

This world will never want for lovers.

Don't you see how this permissiveness you complain about is itself one of the greatest societal obstacles for lovers to overcome?

they don't seem to be overcoming it

The thing with romantic writing is that it often feels contrived, derivative and stale. Love is something that all of us struggle with so its deffinatly a strong inspiriation for any art but what is not rational is very hard to put in words (in the case of literature) so it ends up feeling very plastic and does not portray the feeling of what would it be like to in the position of the character the author wants us to identify with. Also the amout of romntic writing in history and the post-modern cinism (not saying its a bad thing) tend to raise the bar of what feels genuine and organic. the vast majority of romantic literature fails in making love story connect with the reader in souch a way that it doesnt seem absurd. I think a really good love story still has a posibility of being writen in todays age but it would take a insainly good writer to articulate the finesses and details that a romantic entanglement brings to ones existence.

You are simply wrong OP. What do you think the fight for same sex marriage is about? Love in defiance of society.

Homos don't 'love' silly, it's a pathology.

What are your thoughts on Mishima?

Sexual energy/ libido is the life energy per se, that is to say Orgone Energy as described by Wilhelm Reich and not a psychical idea. And despite the "sexual liberation" we have been sold in the 60s, I would venture to say there is more sexual repression than ever. Although we have sodomy, homosexuality, transgenderism, promiscuity and every form of debauchery imaginable, society has never been more proficient at stifling sexual energy and all these debauched things are pathological outlets that dammed up libido flows to when it cannot completely surrender to the orgasm reflex.

What causes this? I'm just a layperson but I would guess it is a combination of estrangement from nature in the city, infants subconsciously picking up on parental disgust at their genitality and sexuality, hypnotic cultural engineering via the media, pornographic depictions of sex which numb the senses and the tendency of a man to become absorbed in either a mechanistic or mystical paradigm as opposed to a functional paradigm.

Chivalry is a noble attempt to purge the perverse and pornographic ideas of sex that come with mass cultural repression but it is a dangerous path because neurosis is caused by a stasis of sexual energy. That being said, there are allegedly ways to circulate bodily energy without orgastic release and ways to transmute sexual desire into other desires.