The Importance of Adventure Fiction
by Joshua Fagan
Until the twentieth century, “romance” as a genre did not necessarily refer to a love story. It meant something much closer to The Lord of the Rings than Romeo and Juliet. The term survives, albeit in semi-obscurity, in the phrase “chivalric romance,” which suggests the general connotations of the idea. Romance meant travel and wonder, the interaction with the extraordinary and bizarre in an environment significantly different to that of mundane life. It did not necessarily involve the supernatural, but it occurred in an elevated atmosphere wherein the appearance of the supernatural would not be particularly bizarre. It implied brave heroics and wild cunning, as well as ancient feuds and dastardly rogues and inscrutable mystery. Love often occurred in these stories, and it was the most exhilarating and celestial kind of love, such as that between a selfless knight and a radiant, wise lady of noble birth. There is not really a term for this kind of story anymore—the closest phrase available is “adventure fiction.”
These romances were incredibly popular, becoming one of the dominant forms of prose storytelling starting in the Middle Ages. In many languages, such as French and German, the standard word for what an English-speaker calls a “novel” is “roman,” a reference not directly to the Romans but to this genre. By the time Don Quixote parodied the form in the early 1600s, audiences already associated it with particular stereotypes and cliches. As the age of knights further faded into the hinterlands of cultural memory, the old “chivalric romances” became anachronistic. Still, the tonal register they represented did not fade. It was not myth or epic, necessarily, but it was distinctly different from the routines and customs of everyday life. As the great literary critic Northrop Frye writes, “prodigies of courage and endurance, unnatural to us, are natural to” the romantic hero, and “enchanted weapons, talking animals, terrifying ogres and witches, and talismans of miraculous power” exist without seeming dissonant. At its worst, the journeys of romance can seem sentimental and even a bit ridiculous, like nothing but the desperate wish fulfillment of fools, which is why the form attracted parodies like Don Quixote even hundreds of years ago. The contemporary age largely views realism as equivalent with quality, and romance is an intentionally non-realist form of storytelling, at least in the sense of reflecting human situations and feelings as they actually are.
Still, the genre did not entirely disappear. H.G. Wells referred to his early science-fiction works as “scientific romances,” meaning science joined to heightened journeys of discovery and mystery and wild daring in distant lands. The works of Jules Verne are also absolutely romances in this sense. In the nineteenth century, the first time in history where the average Brit had the opportunity to travel to distant lands, this kind of adventure narrative boomed in the United Kingdom, not just with the works of Wells but with those of H. Rider Haggard and Rudyard Kipling. It is a form that still has significance, even though the original name for it has become obsolete. The romantic register tends nowadays to be associated with children’s literature, from Treasure Island to The Secret Garden. These works are gorgeous, but their association with romance is unfortunate in that it conveys the image of romance as naïve or silly, something for children to shed around the same time they stop believing in Santa Claus.
In reality, romance is not only important but essential. Gathering the fragments and shards of awe and enchantment that exist in everyday life, it forges a narrative from them. A romantic world is not necessarily a better world than ordinary reality, but it is a more meaningful world. Battling a dragon or pirate has a greater sense of risk than, say, suffering under the petty tyranny of a selfish boss, but the former has excitement and exhilarating significance utterly missing from the former. Romance implies constant immediacy and vitality, an environment where even the miseries and sorrows of existence have to them a memorable grandeur. The pursuit of these feelings is a large portion of the appeal of travel, both for children and adults. What matters for a trip to Paris, for instance, is not simply the buildings and sites but the experience of being there, the hope of gaining access to wild and profoundly visceral sensations that do not exist in the habits and customs of everyday life. Inevitably, even if these kinds of sensations appear, they do not linger. The messiness and confusion of ordinary life always make their reappearance. Romance’s appeal as a genre is how it provides a space for these heightened sensations and experiences to last and flourish.
Though the ideals of romance are inevitably distanced from reality, they are not irrelevant to reality. They manifest in fullness and vividness the exhilaration and awe of experience that even the most daring and intelligent individual in everyday life can only find in scraps and fragments. James Bond is arguably a character of romance, but as many cynics have asserted, a real-world version of the character would have to spend his time between his exciting missions completing a mountain of tedious paperwork. Many romances these days are fantasies, such as Harry Potter or Star Wars, but fantasy does not necessarily equal romance. Game of Thrones, for instance, has very little of the romantic spirit in it and is more akin to a realist medieval drama that happens to include dragons. George R.R. Martin has a relatively famous quote where he asks, “What was Aragorn’s tax policy? Did he maintain a standing army?” The true answer is that these questions simply did not concern Tolkien, as they did not concern the medieval romance writers who inspired him. The form has a different focus than simply astutely imitating material reality, whether of the past or the present.
Adventure romance exalts the wonder and mystery that exist outside the mechanistic conventions of mundane life. Its environments are not simply reducible to information and data points; they have symbolic and metaphorical resonances. The actions of individuals, whether brave and selfless or cowardly and selfish, matter significantly to the course of history, and individuals do not lead existences largely shaped and conditioned by broader socioeconomic forces outside of their control or even comprehension. Arguably, the most simple way to define romance is to see it as the diametric opposite of the alienation, constant anxiety, and inert languor that define the worst elements of modern life. Romance of course predates modernity, but the romantic register gains poignancy when evoked against modern fragmentation and disoriented ennui. Though Romance and Romanticism are not the same, they have a similar root: a thirst for wonder and mystery, a desire for a strong connection with the past, and a celebration of the individual spirit.
A significant overlap exists between myth and romance, but romance tends to be less extreme and overt in its wonder. Cosmic clarity and harmony exist, but they do not appear as readily as in myth. Romance heroes are usually not gods or supernatural beings, and they are notable less for their bloodline than for their extraordinary wit and daring, as well as their yearning for adventure. Hercules is a typical hero of myth, while Indiana Jones is a typical hero of romance. A classical rogue like Odysseus fits both categories. The openness of romance, the possibility for any individual possessed of daring to journey to distant lands and seek exhilaration and strange mystery, made it appealing to the folklorist Andrew Lang. “There is no more natural, true, and simple picture of human nature, human affections and passions in Balzac or Shakespeare,” he wrote, than in one of the Norse sagas, “a savage tale which begins with the loves and hates of serpents and were-wolves.” For Lang, romance had as valid a function as realism, as it revealed the primordial yearnings for action and visceral, meaningful experiences that still existed beneath the sophistication and wry cynicism of modern society.
In romance, love does not simply mean attraction or even two people growing to care for each other and understand each other; it means the cessation of suffering and the awakening of lasting peace and serenity. Travel does not simply mean seeing a cool place and taking a few pictures before returning to the routines of everyday life; it means exploration and adventure, the destruction of narrowness and insularity by the immensity and grandeur of unforeseen experiences.
Adventure romance resembles nothing as much as an extremely vivid dream: nothing is expected, but nothing is random or irrelevant. Intrigue and awe hide in the most mundane moments, evoking the kind of soul-encompassing exhilaration that, in life, appears only briefly or in fractures. Simply because a dream differs significantly from waking reality does not make it meaningless. It can still offer comfort, and it can still offer reminders of sensations and passions that the overstimulating distractions of modern life obscure. Such is true, too, of romance. Yearning and sincere, wonder-thirsting intensity define it, the desire of the spirit to, as Yeats has it, “clap its hands and sing, and louder sing / For every tatter in its mortal dress.”
Joshua Fagan is an award-winning writer and critic currently residing in Scotland. His creative work has previously been published in venues including Daily Science Fiction, The Fantastic Other, and Star*Line. He is the author of The Philosophy of Avatar, an extended study of Avatar: The Last Airbender in the context of the Western philosophical tradition. As an academic, his work focuses on the intersection of literature, myth, and technology in the aftermath of Darwin, and he has published a variety of articles on writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such as William Morris, H.G. Wells, and Robert Frost. He is the founder and editor-in-chief of the literary speculative-fiction publication Orion’s Belt.