To recap: Stendhal says love is projected onto the loved one by the lover. It is, therefore, the passion that aggrandizes the lover and not the loved person. Therefore, the way to keep love alive is to throw up obstacles. The woman (and with Stendhal the real lover is always the man) who would keep her lover's passion alive will find ways to deny her lover her presence. In fact, Stendhal insists that a woman cheapens herself any time she grants sexual favour to her lover.
Now I think that perverse vision has something in common with Romantic love and that thing in common is a respect for obstacles. Romantic lovers do not take obstacles as some sort of inconvenience or tragedy but as an essential part of any real erotic love.
The opposite of romantic love is found in ancient heroes such as Achilles and Aeneas. Achilles loves Briseus whom he has taken in war and is little more than a concubine and flies into a rage when Agamemnon takes her a way from him. He cuts Troilus's head off when the youth denies him sex. He turns into a vicious killing machine when his lover Patroclus is killed. Aeneus falls in love with Dido but, when reminded that his destiny is to found Rome, he cruelly abandons her. Love is a strong passion for these men but it is not a quest, it is not part of their heroic identity but merely something they do.
During the late middle ages, as the idea of courtly romantic love came into full flower, Achilles's victims were celebrated as the real heroes. Their quests, to find love, became the real heroism and the destroyers and founders of cities were devalued.
And there we have a literary explanation for the obstacles that always seem to crop up in Romantic love. It wouldn't be a heroic thing if it were easy. But romantic love is not the story but what two people actually are for one another. And here lies a danger but I'll get back to that.
There are a whole series of complementary reasons that might also play a role:
- As mentioned above, there is the sense that love is a heroic quest and cannot be easy.
- There is the sense that love is a sacred and holy thing and, like all sacred things, must be surrounded by respectful ritual and sacrifice.
- There is an epicurean instinct that says the pleasure will be highlighted and enhanced if we discipline and deny ourselves. Better to have a single glass of the fine port in front of the fire later than to guzzle away whatever is at hand now.
- There is a sense that love is powerful, irrational force that might lead us to destruction and that is often at odds with social priorities.
- Related to the previous but I think slightly different, there is the sense that love is like starting a fire and that there are aspects in the early stages that we can and should control when possible.
- Finally, there is a sense that real love will survive denial and the fact that two people deny themselves sexual satisfaction now will test the mettle of their love. If it is real, this denial will only strengthen it and if it is not real, better to have done without the sex that would debase real love.
And that, I think, is what distinguishes romantic love from what Stendhal and Proust go on about. For if we get focused on the story rather than the people, something can and probably will go wrong. Then the obstacles can become the whole point and it is the passion not the person that matters.
There is also the Disney version wherein the grand stories are told with all the heroes replaced with animated cartoons. Here the actual love becomes a gauzy, ill defined thing summed up by the phrase "happily ever after". Worse, romantic love becomes something that only princes and princesses and movie stars can have and not the residents of 5135 and 5133 Kensington Avenue or over there in the suburbs.
The odd thing about the Disney version is that it feeds narcissism in that it encourages us to think like children and think that we are somehow elevated above everyone else by our love. Again, the humble residents of Kensington Avenue get pushed aside because having to relocate because your father has a job in another city somehow suggests that, well, this happens to ordinary people all the time. Worse, it suggests that once you move into a new suburb, you might meet someone else and fall in love with them.
Cristina Nehring doesn't ignore the important role obstacles play in the story. She couldn't. But she doesn't think much about any role they might play other than being part of the passion.
The next front of the polemic is with Christianity. It will come as a surprise to those who have been paying attention to find that there is a tradition within Christianity of attacking romantic love as unhealthy and disordered. After all, if anything saving yourself for your spouse, the sanctity of marriage and the theology of the body ought to sit well with Romantic love. What is more, Romantic love came into full flower in a Christian culture and it is hard to imagine how it could have happened anywhere else.
But that is for next week.
This series begins here.
The next post will be here.
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