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February 13, 2009
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What we talk about when we talk about love
Since it's almost Valentine's Day, I thought I'd just do a quick post on some of the more compelling love stories I've read recently. Of course, when I started thinking about it, everything seemed to be a love story of one sort or another (just like everything, when you think about it, is a bildungsroman of some kind or another). Does that mean the category is meaningless? Or that it is all the more resonant and interesting? I don't know, and I don't suppose it matters. Far more important is the reading list itself.
--Bernhard Schlink's The Reader. Not in theaters in my remote rural location--so when friends raved about the film, I had to do the old-fashioned thing and read the book. There is so much in this book about how unrealized even the most intimate relationships ultimately are--and how even the most sustaining ties can be the source of great loneliness and isolation. Also, very spare and compressed writing, which gives it a fairy tale quality. A vital aspect of the plot is telegraphed a bit too obviously, but Schlink's compact control is such that you wind up thinking he meant to do that.
--L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between. This obscure and forgotten novel of the English 1950s is a primary source text for Ian McEwan's Atonement. All the destructive-adolescent-meddling-in-romantic-cross-class-assignations-at-old-country-house stuff that McEwan does so well is actually heavily indebted, and self-consciously so, to Hartley. This is a novel about pre-adolescent crushes -- but, more importantly, it's about how immensely a child of a certain age (old enough to begin to grasp what adults do, not old enough to fathom why they do it) can be creeped out when they bump up against other people's sexuality.
--Claire Keegan's "Night of the Quicken Trees," a story from her collection Walk the Blue Fields. Keegan is an Irish writer who gets compared to people like William Trevor and John McGahern. This story is just so rich with the special mythical tone, at once achingly beautiful and hilariously funny, that one associates with a certain strain of Irish storytelling. There is magic mixed into the remote rural Irish everyday--and this makes for marvels and for mischief. If you liked The Secret of the Roan Inish you will like this; if you also enjoy the more outrageous Irish folktales (like the one about the bewitched pudding), you'll love it.
--Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter. I don't know how many times I have read this novel. The first time was as a sophomore in high school, and I didn't understand a word of it. The writing was too murky and obscure and tense. It's still that way to me, but I think I'm finally starting to get it. Hawthorne was pretty murky and obscure and tense himself, a cynic and an idealist at once with a perennial feeling that the past had him in a stranglehold he couldn't escape. His writing is as tightly coiled as he was--or as I imagine he was. Every time I return to this novel, I have different reasons and I am looking for different things. This time, I'm not reading it as a love story--I am far more interested in how the novel thinks about shame and guilt and the weird way that ostracism can be purifying (not for the community, necessarily, but for the one ostracized). Also very interested in the opening, largely autobiographical section about working in the Salem Custom House. Still, as I read, it strikes me that this is also a very sad and touching love story.
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I've been meaning to go back to _The Scarlet Letter_ but haven't yet. It's probably much better than I remember and will read better than Blithedale or Gables.
"What we talk about when we talk about love"
Dare I mention Ethan Frome in such a context? I read it on my own, my senior year in high school. That was a long time ago, but try as I might I've never forgotten it.
I've just started teaching *The Odyssey* to my sophomores, and I want them to appreciate the love stories at its core. The love Telemakhos has for a father he's never met, with the fear he has of living up to such a father's reputation; Penelope's simultaneous mourning of and refusal to give up Odysseus, along with her stringing along (quite literally) of the suitors and the male attention they give her; Odysseus's own struggles with eros and the temptations of Kalypso, Nausikaa, and Circe; the love that binds Eurykleia and Eumaios and Laertes with Odysseus in the homecoming: it's a love story about all the different kinds of love and how they compete within the human soul.
Speaking of of Ethan Frome, how about The Age of Innocence? In addition to The Odyssey, which strikes me as more about social propriety than love, maybe The Symposium--perhaps glossed with Hedwig and the Angry Inch's "The Origin of Love." To balance Athens with a bit of Jerusalem, I'd throw in the Song of Songs, esp. Ariel and Chana Bloch's translation, in which "your navel is the moon's / bright drinking cup. / May it brim with wine!" And just for fun, maybe Anita Loos' Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (and the decidedly queer Jane Russell & Marilyn Monroe film version).
It is curious that you pair Carver ("What We Talk About") with Hawthorne. Mel McGinnis in Carver's tale says that the five years he spent in a seminary were the most important years of his life. (And Hawthorne, of course, has the Rev. Dimmesdale prominent in "The Scarlet Letter.") What does Mel mean? What DO they talk about when they talk about love in seminaries? They of course talk about corporal works of mercy, the giving of one's time, one's energy, or one's material substance for the benefit of any in need (having done it for them one has done it for HIM). This "Christian caring" culminates logically in the Christ's "new commandment," wherein he says "no greater love has a man than that he lay down his life for his friend." Giving one's life is giving full measure (Terri, Mel's wife, perversely equates her abusive ex Ed with the Christ because he killed himself: "He loved me ... he died for it."). After death, there is no time remaining, no energy left, nor any material goods still under one's control. But, then, there is no call for such giving, such "love," in the kingdom that is allegedly to come. Faith and hope have no relevance in the father's mansion, only love remains, as Paul says in his famous homily in II Corinthians. But what sort of love is it? Seminarians are taught (or essay to learn!) that the ultimate form of love is experienced in the "beatific vision," that immediate witness of ultimate beauty that is the Divine. Such lovers are out of all time, caught up to the seventh heaven, whether in the body or out of the body they do not care. But may human beings experience this zenith while on this earth, while in these rags of flesh and bone? Of course they may, which is what Mel suspects when he cites the case of the injured elderly couple, where the greatest pain for the old man is that he cannot "turn his goddam head and SEE the fucking woman!" (He resorts to Anglo-Saxon partly because he is twitch-slapping his snotty mate Terri and partly because he is trying to eff the ineffable: "Do you see what I'm saying?")
If this revelation is possible, and maybe even a human birthright, why isn't it more common. (Abram Maslow, who never got to finish his research on the subject, speculated that only four per cent of the population ever got to know such fulness of love.) Hawthorne gives a compelling clue in "The Minister's Black Veil," wherein the Parson Hooper, who wears a literal veil all his adult life, announces on his deathbed that he sees, Lo, on every face, a black veil. We are all well hidden from each other, so inveterately, so successfully, none of us recalls when it was our masquerade began. Or could it be that we are nothing much to look at, and do well to cover up? Only the sinless Son of Man is worthy of contemplation, and that by select mystics. But the Christ, in "The Last Temptation of Christ," says to his buddy: "You know, Judas, I have seen, even in the eye of the ant, the face of God." If it's there--and it is--it is everywhere.
I once had a young woman, a student, wonder whether she had ever loved her boyfriend of three years. To ask is already to have answered, and the answer is no, at least not yet. Have you ever, I inquired, adored him, certain in the knowledge that you were privileged to witness all the beauty there is in the universe? And did he reciprocate in kind, so that each of you knew what Perfection it is was transfiguring your souls? No, she said. Perhaps one day. For the essence of love is this knowledge, this knowing. And the most potent thing any being can say to another is not "I love you," that ambiguous and shopworn enigma, but "I know you." I do not just have feelings about you or for you (feelings are here today, maybe, and not back until a month from Tuesday). I have knowledge of you, I KNOW WHO YOU ARE. And that's the fact of beauty that is a joy forever.
Happy Valentine's Day
Forgive me if I don't applaud Nathaniel Hathorne(his real last name)...in 1852 he wrote the official campaign biography of Franklin Pierce,his college classmate at Bowdoin College and probably one of the worst Presidents in American History...
