Assorted Prose

by John Updike

  So long as the life and even the identity of Shakespeare remain matters of speculation, it is futile to inquire whether or not he was privy to the secret traditions of the troubadours. But it may be noted that Verona [the site of Romeo and Juliet] was a main center of Catharism in Italy. According to the monk Ranieri Saccone—for seventeen years a heretic—Verona contained nearly five hundred Perfect, not to mention the far more numerous Believers.

  After such a titillating piece of scholarly gossip, de Rougemont unhesitatingly caps Romeo’s tomb soliloquy with this triumphant gloss—“Death’s consolamentum has sealed the one kind of marriage that Eros was ever able to wish for.” Consolamentum, it should be explained, is the specific term for a Gnostic sacrament.

  To be fair, post-medieval writers breathed an atmosphere still saturated with notions now dispelled, and de Rougemont, in the revised edition, meets manfully the scholarly objections to his principal hypothesis. The nagging implausibility of the book has less to do with its details of evidence than with its ground of assumptions. De Rougemont seems captivated by a rather Thomistic faith in the apparatus of cause-and-effect, and he religiously insists on the supremacy of mind over matter:

  The time has come for us to be arbitrary in this way and to decide the question in favor of the mental—that is to say, in favor of the primacy of the mind. Whether arbitrary ante or post rem—and in this case there is no real difference—the decision can nevertheless be justified by arguments. In the first place, it seems to me that the language of passion can be accounted for on the view that mind comes before matter because it expresses, not the triumph of nature over mind, but an encroachment of mind over instinct.

  But might not this “encroachment of mind over instinct” be an instinctive response to the encroachments of matter, in the form of practical social law, upon the lawless libido? In relating, as cause to effect, the sophia aeterna of Dualist mysticism to the idealized woman to whom the troubadours addressed their songs, and in deriving modern man’s romantic malaise from the ubiquitous popularizations of the love-myth stemming from these songs, the author has possibly confused the fruit with the branch. Of course, literature and life interact, but de Rougemont, in his zeal to equate the doctrines of Rome with the decrees of Nature, seems to mislocate the point de départ of the interaction. In the French fashion, he claims too much for literature. His thesis at bottom grants “myths” a ghostly vitality independent of the men who create them, and ascribes to the mirror a magical shaping power.

  Love Declared: Essays on the Myths of Love is a somewhat unified collection of essays in which de Rougemont elaborates and clarifies his theory of “myths.” The book, titled in French Comme Toi-Même, begins with a long introductory chapter reframing the argument of Love in the Western World. Gnosticism is an attempt to make the “transition from Eros to the Spirit” without passing through the paradox of the Incarnation. Eroticism is “a lyrical or reflective transcendence of biological sexuality.” Love is “linked more than any other behavior, impulse, sentiment, or ambition to its literary, musical, or plastic expression; that is, to language in general, but in those forms most richly endowed with popular and suggestive turns, clichés, metaphors, and accepted symbols.” There exists an “eternal debate between a passionate Gnosticism and the moderating wisdom of the Church, between the personal adventure and the collective orthodoxy, which the rising tide of Eros is now renewing among us.” The theatre of this debate is neither the mind nor the body but the third human constituent, which animates them both and which de Rougemont calls “the soul.” “The soul is the realm of the impulses that transcend the demands of instinct and conflict with the decrees of society … which counteract the ‘programs’ of physiological life recorded by our chains of chromosomes, which contradict the anticipations of economy and disturb our systems of rational and spiritual communications, in the manner of solar explosions.” These solar storms that ravage the hypothetical ether between mind and body are, of course, myths. “Between the sciences of the body and of the mind, between biology and theology, beyond the necessities of the species but this side of good and evil, without laws or dogmas, but not without symbols governing our emotive life, mythology performs its function—which is a function of the soul.” De Rougemont proposes to himself, then, a “mythanalysis of culture,” which will “make explicit religious elements generally repressed or quite simply unrealized.” The method, he states, is “exactly the inverse of Freud’s, but thereby comparable to his”; the myths are compared to the forces of Nature, which man can control only by understanding.

  After handing the reader so grand a menu, de Rougemont serves up seven consecutive snacks: (1) An examination of three modern novels—Nabokov’s Lolita, Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, and Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago—as latter-day variants on the Tristan myth in which the necessary complication of passion has been intensified beyond mere adultery, (2) an ingenious comparison of Hamlet and Kierkegaard in which the two Danes are described as struggling with the cruel demands of “vocation,” (3) an abrupt indictment of Don Juan and Nietzsche as “cheats,” (4) a four-cornered “meditation” on Kierkegaard, Don Juan, Tristan, and Nietzsche, (5) a memoir of André Gide, who schizophrenically disassociated the Tristan and Don Juan within him, (6) a contrasting of Western and Eastern mysticism and eroticism, centering upon a somewhat elusive concept of “the person,” (7) five beautiful pages of natural theology lyrically evoking Man’s cosmic position in a Void that is “colorful, accessible, dense, and stable” and made actual by Love.

  The fare is delicious but not filling. Freud extracted from the testimony of anonymous patients psychic principles of general application; it is not clear what application to our lives the “mythanalysis” of a few singular thinkers and artists possesses. Further, in de Rougemont’s culture-laden mind, myths and men seem to have whimsically equal status: Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Denmark’s Kierkegaard are put on the same plane, and Casanova and Don Giovanni appear interchangeable. The effect is less to make myths real than to make men unreal. While Kierkegaard’s rejection of Regine Olsen is aptly described as a form of Tristanian “possession by loss” and while this characterization can be extended to Kierkegaard’s religious thought, the fact remains that in all his voluminous work, which includes hundreds of pages on Don Juan, Tristan is never mentioned. Conversely, to make of Nietzsche a “Don Juan of knowledge” who “wanted to violate the secret of each idea, of each belief, of each value” is to confuse a metaphor with an influence.

  These essays, for all their cunning, do not make “myths” palpable; we remember chiefly, after this excursion through so many intellectual terrains, the incidents of wit and insight. In a hilarious footnote, General de Gaulle is revealed as the Tristanian politician:

  His Iseult is France.… For years he loved her from afar, in his exile. He restored her to her legitimate Husband, represented by the Legality of the State, after having delivered her in battle from the giant who held her captive and who demanded his tribute of young men (Minotaur-Morholt-Hitler). Then he was obliged to withdraw again, disgusted by the plotting of the felonious barons.

  And on the same page, discussing Don Juan’s “nomadism,” de Rougemont suddenly plunges into the European subconscious:

  To the question of a woman whom he is trying to seduce: “Ah, Heaven! Man, who art thou?” Tirso de Molina’s Don Juan answers “Who am I? A man without a name.” This man without a name, without a past, without a future, is one of the riders from the times when the nomad hordes suddenly appeared on the lands of the first settlers, pillaged, raped their women, taught them pleasure in the keenness of dread, and galloped back to their wasteland. And he is also the priest or the divine hero in the ancient primitive religions: the man who is holy or strong enough to dare to assume the supposed dangers of the act of defloration—perils of the soul, loss of mana.

  Such an aside (the one phrase “taught them pleasure in the keenness of dread” compresses volumes of female psychology) h
as the kind of concreteness and resonance that the book as a whole lacks. Since Love in the Western World, the theory of “myths,” in being expanded, has lost seriousness. Tristan is spoken of rather indulgently, as the personification of a possible erotic style, whereas in the earlier book he was given the dignity of a Luciferian heretic, guilty of the supreme blasphemy of preferring death to life. Don Juan, originally considered an inverse illusion projected by the momentary eclipse (in the eighteenth century) of Tristan, now emerges as a full-fledged rival entitled to equal time on the airways of myth. Both are degraded from active thought forms to passive name tags. Oedipus does not become a myth by having a complex named after him. Tristan and Don Juan, as their semblances are sought in this philosophy and that life history, become mere descriptive terms, puppets in the play of ingenuity.

  De Rougemont reminds me of another international European, the Spaniard Salvador de Madariaga, who has written with such suspect brilliance and fluency (in Englishmen, Frenchmen, Spaniards and Portrait of Europe) about national characters.* The two men have the same debonairly borne learning, the same acute worldly wisdom, the same poetic weakness for heightened parallels, the same agility at painting their way out of awkward corners. I can envision a collaboration between them that would enchantingly show Tristan and Don Juan, Faust and Don Quixote to be the national myths of, respectively, France, Italy, Germany, and Spain. I can even glimpse the possibility that each myth represents the bad conscience of its nation, the defect of the national psyche magnified and propelled forward into a logical doom—Spain confessing its insanity and passing into apathy, Germany industriously draining swamps after its holiday on the Witches’ Mountain, Italy operatically descending into a Hell in which it does not believe, France repining to its death in love of an Ideal from which it is perpetually exiled. England has no comparable myth because England does not have a bad conscience—unless Hamlet is taken to personify that historical moment when medieval Albion wavered before embarking upon the course of dynamic pragmatism that has ever since determined its national character.

  Certainly Tristan is more specifically French than de Rougemont seems to realize. Not only the legend itself but the parent troubadours and the preponderant majority of the literary descendants that de Rougemont cites—Le Roman de la Rose, L’Évangile des femmes, L’Astrée, La Princesse de Clèves, La Place royale, Phèdre, La Nouvelle Héloïse, Le Lys dans la vallée, Les Fleurs du mal, Madame Bovary, La Porte étroite, Un Amour de Swann—are French; de Rougemont’s analysis of Western culture is virtually a supplemented discussion of French literature. Might it not be that the French are especially prone to Tristanian renunciation? Nancy Mitford, an Englishwoman who has long lived in Paris, states in the introduction to her translation of La Princesse de Clèves:

  Indeed the whole book is intensely French, in atmosphere, in point of view, and in the virtues and vices of the characters. Specially so is the curious shrinking from happiness of Madame de Clèves herself. [Italics mine.]

  The reasons Mme. de Clèves gives, at the end of this classic tale of obstructed love, for not marrying the man she loves and who loves her are twofold. On the one hand, there is a scruple of honor: the Duc de Nemours has unwittingly caused the death of her husband. But, she confesses, “the duty I owe to M. de Clèves’s memory would, in itself, be too weak, were it not reinforced by considerations of my own peace of mind.” These considerations steal strength from her very love of the man she renounces:

  It is quite possible that the reasons for what seems to be my duty would not be so insuperable were it not that I do so distinguish you. That is what makes me feel that loving you can only end in unhappiness for me.… The fact is that I dare not expose myself to the misery of seeing your love grow cold. It is sure to happen, it seems to me the most terrible of fates, and, since it is not my duty to risk it, I feel that I cannot do so.… In these eternal relationships does any man preserve his original passion? Can I expect a miracle in my case? And dare I put myself in a position whence I shall be obliged to witness the death of a love in which lies all my joy? There was perhaps one man and one man only capable of being in love with his wife, and that was M. de Clèves. It was my bad luck that this brought me no happiness—possibly this passion of his would not have continued so strong if I had requited it, but I cannot use that means for keeping yours. Then I have an idea that it was the obstacles which kept you so true to me; there were enough of them to rouse your mettle, while my involuntary actions and the various things you found out by chance gave you the necessary amount of hope to sustain you.†

  No italics are needed to emphasize how perfectly this practical reasoning illustrates the mystical motifs de Rougemont discovers in the legend of Tristan and Iseult. Though the Duc de Nemours cries out, “You have put yourself between me and my happiness, inventing a law which neither virtue nor sense would have imposed upon you,” the Princesse enters a nunnery, and as for the Duc: “At last, after the passage of whole years, his love and his grief became less acute.”

  It fell to the French—that strange race neither northern nor southern, both sensual and ascetic, the epitome in turn of chivalry and the bourgeoisie—it fell to the French to invent what “neither virtue nor sense would have imposed,” the Tristanian technique of containing Man’s biological rage. The body’s chronic appetites can be satisfied by repetition, but, merged with the mind’s quest for new knowledge, they become insatiable. Fickleness is the price we pay for individualizing one another. Don Juan and Tristan are alternate answers to the question the Princesse de Clèves poses: “In these eternal relationships does any man preserve his original passion?” Don Juan loves Woman under the guise of many women, exhaustingly. To seduce a thousand and three women in Spain alone!—this is not a diversion but a consuming career, a career, furthermore, for which Society does not thank him, because its effects are all disruptive. Whereas to love Woman under the guise of one woman who repeatedly escapes leaves the social fabric intact, conserves physical energy, and induces a possibly creative private pain.

  De Rougemont, in his haste to deplore a heresy, does not sufficiently admire the practical advantages of Tristanism—though he does notice the tormented West’s unique material accomplishments as against the technological torpor of the sexually sane East. Tristanism is in effect an economy of the person, an economy prodigal Nature compels. A Tristan (the Tristan, of course, is an impure case, as athletic on occasion as Don Juan) enjoys the exquisite and fructifying sensations of love without external inconvenience. On the most meagre diet of echoes and glimpses he nourishes his passion. In the image of Iseult he has supplied himself with a focus for the efforts of his sublimated energy. In addition, he has obtained an honorable exemption from the distracting claims of accessible women. Clinchingly, Don Juans are born and not made, whereas any man can elect to be a Tristan. The puzzling quality—a basic indifference?—that makes a few men inexhaustibly seductive is a gift as arbitrary in its bestowal as an artistic talent. And, as with a possessed artist, Don Juan is as much to be pitied as envied. It is his heroic fate to project into the treacherous realm of the actual the fantasies that most of us suffer in safety. The sanctioned joys of commerce and domesticity, work and play are forbidden him. Envy, rather, the busy bourgeois Tristan who inwardly nurtures a chivalrous secret—he eats of this world while tasting the next.

  Yes, but … But what of that thunderous congestion in the chest, that suffusion of emotion as harsh as a blow, which Tristan endures at the sight of the Unattainable Lady, or even at the mention of her name? It would seem that, however arguable the construction he has put upon it, de Rougemont is dreadfully right in asserting that love in the Western world has by some means acquired a force far out of proportion to its presumed procreative aim. Do we need a heresy, or even a myth, to explain it? Might it not simply be that sex has become involved in the Promethean protest forced upon Man by his paradoxical position in the Universe as a self-conscious animal? Our fundamental anxiety is that we do not ex
ist—or will cease to exist. Only in being loved do we find external corroboration of the supremely high valuation each ego secretly assigns itself. This exalted arena, then, is above all others the one where men and women will insist upon their freedom to choose—to choose that other being in whose existence their own existence is confirmed and amplified. Against the claims of this mighty self-assertion, the arguments embodied in law and stricture for self-preservation appear trivial and base. The virtus of the choice is diminished if others would also have chosen it for us. The heart prefers to move against the grain of circumstance; perversity is the soul’s very life. Therefore the enforced and approved bonds of marriage, restricting freedom, weaken love. Since de Rougemont derives our erotic attitudes from the religion of courtly love, it is just to let a Court of Love have the last word. The favorite question proposed in those courts was “Can true love exist between married people?” (“Utrum inter conjugatos amor possit habere locum?”) Here is the verdict delivered by the Comtesse de Champagne in 1174:

  We state and affirm, by the tenor of these presents, that love cannot extend its rights over two married persons. For indeed lovers grant each other all, mutually and freely, without being constrained by any motive of necessity, whereas husband and wife are holden, by their duty, to submit their wills to each other and to refuse each other nothing.