Not So Happily Ever After: Romantic Love in Novels by Alain Claude Sulzer

Summary

[N]o love is original.

—Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse

“DIE EINZIGEN LEBEN, die sich berühren, sind die, die einem Manuskript folgen, das nicht das eigene ist.” For contemporary German writer and director René Pollesch, love alone is an inadequate basis for long-term relationships. Since the feeling's initial intensity is impossible to sustain, love relations are destined to become unsatisfying or to end. Only on stage—and, one may add, in literature, film, or art—may audiences witness seemingly eternal passionate love, because the characters' “lives” are limited by the perspectives of the respective works. Arguably, this is most obvious in traditional romantic love stories, or romances, that conclude with the couples' happy unions.

The novels by Swiss writer Alain Claude Sulzer (1953–) evoke the popular romance genre and its ideal of unconditional, never-ending love. However, as Sulzer expands the scope of the typical romance plot beyond the height of the partners' emotional connection and explores the aftermath of infidelity and rejection, readers encounter figures who try to overcome the tensions pinpointed by Pollesch. The protagonists' efforts to preserve their relationships beyond the break-ups are informed by the ideals promoted in literary, operatic, and cinematic romances. Thus, Sulzer's characters try—though in vain—to emulate the heroes and heroines of the well-known genre and go to great length to protect their romantic stylizations of themselves and their lovers against the frustrations of reality. Simultaneously, Sulzer creates a similar experience for his readers, as his works conjure the traditional romance, yet only to subvert the romantic plot and reveal limitations of the romantic paradigm. As a result, his novels emerge as explorations into the ways in which the genre's conventions may shape audiences' expectations of relationships. Read through the lenses of Jean-Paul Sartre's work on subjectivity, Jacques Lacan's concept of desire, and Elke Reinhardt-Becker's comparison of romantic love and “sachliche Liebe,” Sulzer's novels Ein perfekter Kellner (A Perfect Waiter, 2006), Privatstunden (Private Lessons, 2009), Zur falschen Zeit (At the Wrong Time, 2010), and Postskriptum (Postscript, 2015) emerge as insightful depictions of the power of socially constituted and endorsed concepts of love and desire and of the difficulties involved in overcoming an all-pervasive, culturally idealized model such as that of romantic love.