Conclusion: Kingdoms of Romance in Twilight and Fifty Shades of Grey

Abstract

Romance has always been nourished not only by individual memory and international history but also by the cultural myths that enable the creation of whole alternate universes, epic kingdoms of romance. From Camelot to Metropolis to the Federation they emerge, and merge with each other and with memory and history. They re-inscribe, sometimes in “pedestrian” prose, the magical powers of proper names and fugitive meanings that de Certeau’s walker in the street craves as s/he passes through urban spaces reduced to mere numbers, looking for a “crack” in the “techno-structure.” They are the “magical narratives” that Fredric Jameson (1981) half welcomes as “a place of heterogeneity and of freedom from that reality principle to which a now oppressive realistic representation is the hostage,” even though they themselves may be hostage to the capitalist marketplace.¹

Reading is thus situated at the point where social stratification (class relationships) and poetic operations (the practitioner’s construction of a text) intersect; a social hierarchization seeks to make the reader conform to the “information” distributed by an elite (or semi-elite); reading operations manipulate the reader by insinuating their inventiveness into the cracks in a cultural orthodoxy. One of these two stories conceals what is not in conformity with the “masters” and makes it invisible to them; the other disseminates it in the networks of private life. They thus both collaborate in making reading an unknown out of which emerge, on the one hand, only the experience of the literate readers (theatrical and dominating) and on the other, rare and partial like bubbles rising from the depths of the water, the indices of a common poetics.

Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 172