Love and Literature

This post isn't just for the sake of Valentine's Day; love is a constant theme in literature, and regardless of the day on the calendar, it's worth contemplating.

This is not the first time I've written about love in books on this blog, either. My first post, on Albert Camus' The Plague, remarked on the novel's rather bleak outlook on human relationships. Leo Tolstoy's "The Kreutzer Sonata" is about marriage. Romantic longing is a motif throughout the Combray chapter of Swann's Way, and becomes even more prominent in "Swann In Love." Love is part of the human condition, a mysterious force that affects everyone. Authors will write about it, scholars will analyze it, and everyone else is striving to figure it out too.


I'm uncertain of how helpful literature is in that quest to figure it out; novels, plays, and short stories often dramatize when love fails. Jealousy, infidelity, disparity between ideals and reality, objectification, conflict of natures, fears of lost freedom, desire for possession: all of these are well-represented in literature. In Camus, love generally fails because of the impossibility of mutual freedom. In a similar vein, for Tolstoy, love is a struggle for power and control. Anna and Vronsky attempt to dominate each other and strive to break the other's desire for independence in Anna Karenina. They use guilt and anger as tools of manipulation, to force the other to make grandiose declarations of their love. Their affair ends tragically. So does the marriage in Tolstoy's "The Kreutzer Sonata"; it ends in death, caused by domestic violence after a fit of jealousy and lucid fury. Even the one "successful" couple in Anna Karenina, Levin and Kitty, complete their narrative with Levin's withdrawal from his family life as he retreats into solitary spirituality. He and Kitty are alienated; she can never comprehend his spiritual experience, and he only reluctantly returns to her and their son in the novel's final scene. Tolstoy offers a view of love as an impossible, frustrating attempt to bring two individuals into union through possession.



Possession and love are also closely linked in Proust, although in a less violent and tragic way than in Tolstoy. In Search of Lost Time's first instance of love, between the narrator as a young child and his mother, is so fulfilling because the narrator believes that he possesses his mother completely. With her, he feels "that untroubled peace which no mistress, in later years, has ever been able to give me, since one has doubts of them even when one believes in them, and never can possess their hearts as I used to receive, in a kiss, my mother's heart, whole and entire, without qualm or reservation, without the smallest residue of an intention that was not for me alone" (Proust, p. 261). The narrator feels at ease with his mother's love because, he believes, that when she kisses him goodnight, he occupies the entirety of her thoughts and feelings. In that kiss, she exists for him alone. Sartre points out that the narrator requires not only physical possession of the person he loves: "It is certain that the lover wishes to capture a 'consciousness'" of his beloved (McDonald, p. 199). In this episode of the maternal kiss, the physical contact fulfills the desire for physical possession, but what distinguishes her kiss from that of any subsequent mistress is that he may be secure that there is not "the smallest residue of an intention that was not for me alone." He dominates her consciousness in that evening kiss; in true Freudian fashion, he is confident that this mother is an object without her own independent consciousness. She is the Freudian archetype of an object of desire, and to compound this desire further, it is not even challenged by his father; in fact, the night when the boy appeared in the hallway to demand a kiss as his parents went to bed, his father suggested that his mother sleep in the boy's room, rather than with him. Apparently, the narrator never feels that complete and uncomplicated possession of a woman, and I think it's because, as an adult, he is no longer able to so easily deny the subjectivity of another.

Swann's love for Odette also involves his belief that he possesses her. Proust remarks that, "in his younger days a man dreams of possessing the heart of the woman whom he loves; later, the feeling that he possesses a woman's heart may be enough to make him fall in love with her" (p. 277). Indeed, Swann fails to find Odette physically attractive or even particularly interesting, but her persistence in flattering him provokes love. He does not stop there, though; he sustains his love by superimposing an ideal Odette over the real woman, obscuring her with similarities he draws between her physical appearance and Boticelli's Zipphora, with invented virtues she lacks entirely. Through this idealized image and disregarding the actual Odette, he achieves total possession; she becomes his creation, and thus completely under his control. It is not easy to maintain this control, however; Swann has to continuously delude himself and dispell his recognition of her separateness.

Love in Proust, however, is not so simply explained-- not even Swann's delusional love for Odette. Mixed with this desire to possess is the intrigue of mystery, remoteness, and the exotic. Part of why Swann finds Odette desireable is her position outside of proper society; she is described as a demimondaine (a woman of ill repute, on par with a prostitute), which is wildly divergent from his aristocratic social sphere. Her perverse secret life simultaneously titillates Swann (because she is exotic and her sordid world a mystery to him) and disturbs him (because he still longs to possess her). The narrator experiences similar ambivalence toward Swann's daughter Gilberte. When he sees her, he feels that she looks at him with disdain and mockery; at this assertion of her superiority, of an unbridgeable gap between them, his "humiliated heart sought to rise to Gilberte's level or to bring her down to its own" (Proust, p. 200). This is the desire for, if not possession, then at least admission into her now-exotic world of dinners with Bergotte (an author the narrator admires) and his family's refusal to receive her or her mother in their home. Yet the remoteness from himself and his experiences, the notion that she occupies a separate plane of existence, is what first stimulated his interest. He is conflicted between wanting possession (symbolized in his voracious attempts to remember the nearby hawthorns and bringing up her name in conversation whenever possible) and attraction to the distance that separates them.

The question remains, however; is this useful? In Search of Lost Time has thus far presented love in terms of pain, unfulfilled longing, possessiveness, and self-delusion. Not exactly a model for a good relationship. Tolstoy of course offers few comforting words, and Camus and Sartre declare love impossible because mutual freedom cannot exist. I could give numerous other literary examples of failed love or superficial love, but I've already gone on for long enough. In spite of all this negativity, though, I believe that love does work, it doesn't have to be possessive and frustrating (although I think that there is truth in the simultaneous desire for complete union and maintaining separateness).

This weekend, I'm going to read the Symposium, and I may return here with some better insight into the nature of love. But for now, I will invoke Sartre again, in a more helpful way. Perhaps Sartre was right in saying that the thing itself can never be described. Love is the thing, and attempts to describe it necessarily distort it, constrain it, reduce it. In that case, I shall let it be as it is, in its entirety, without any attempt to label and control it. That may be the best approach to love: not to elaborate or put it into a narrative.

Love is. And that's all that needs to be said.