Foucault, Death and the Happily Ever After.

Thinking about the metanarrative possibilities of the Happily Ever After trope, it has occured to me, in re-reading Foucault's "What is an Author?" that there is a kernel of something here to be explored. In examining the relationship between writing and death, Foucault gives us two examples: the hero in the Greek epic and case of death postponed in 1001 Arabian nights. In the Greek epic, the hero must die a young death in order to be immortalized. Not just immortalized within the boundaries of the story, but beyond it. It is, in a way, as if his death buys his passage out the confines of the fictional text, out the back cover of the book and into our collective cultural landscape. It's a very religious notion. He dies in the text so that he can be resurrected to a sort of immortality in the real world. Perhaps in this same way, the 'happily ever after' ending serves as a similar veil between the fiction and the world. Does it allow for the the essence of romance, always new, always in a state of desiring, always at that glorious point of consumation, of 'I love you' to be captured in [...]