All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion

by Lisa Appignanesi

  Children are the innocent pawns in the trials of love and death that adultery can produce. The Greeks have them enact savage and unconscious revenge: Oedipus slays the father who tried to murder but only succeeded in banishing him, then marries his mother. Orestes and Electra murder their adulterous mother and her lover in revenge for having murdered their father. In jealous rage, Medea murders her betraying husband’s next bride-to-be, and also the four children she herself has borne him.

  At best, we moderns usually–though not always, given the incidence of domestic murders–live out our passions internally, in fantasy, but they take their toll on us and through the generations, nonetheless.

  Amongst the many configurations that our emotions can take, it is clear that some lovers need triangulation, an imagined adultery (or third presence), a suspicion of betrayal, for passion to exist. Indeed, for them, echoing Saint Augustine’s much cited ‘He that is not jealous is not in love’, passion can be born only in jealousy. In Proust’s great novel it takes only a missed appointment, an absence when presence was anticipated, a chance remark opening the gates to a host of imagined other lovers of whatever sex, for a moderately tedious relationship to be transformed into an obsessive passion. ‘There is no doubt that a person’s charms are a less frequent cause of love than a remark such as, “No. This evening I shan’t be free”,’ Proust writes.

  The pattern of jealous love that Marcel, his narrator-hero, enacts is deeply rooted in childhood emotions and rituals. The peace, the sensuous beneficence–one might say the post-orgasmic calm–that he can obtain only from his mother’s kiss, and then only briefly since she partly belongs to another (his rivalrous, also loved, but frightening, father, who won’t let her stay long), never materializes when there are guests present in the childhood home. But little Marcel is explicitly aroused by that ‘hostile, inexplicable atmosphere… that used to float up to my bedroom at Combray, from the dining room in which I could hear, talking and laughing with strangers amid the clatter of knives and forks, Mamma who would not be coming upstairs to say goodnight to me’.

  The world of strangers stimulates desire, which in Proust’s world is always pan-sexual–roving freely across nostalgic memories, hawthorn flowers, men, women, even children–and able to find its object, though only temporary satisfaction, in each and any. The underlying dynamic is the same whether the object choice is hetero-or homosexual, narcissistic or perverse. ‘Envy, suspicion, rivalry, nostalgia’, as Malcolm Bowie points out, ‘these are the elements which, in varying combinations, give any sexual life whatsoever its characteristic grain and coloration.’

  Marcel’s relationship with Albertine, subject of The Captive and The Fugitive, begins as a mere summer infatuation with a band of adolescent girls met on holiday. But when Albertine, whom he is about to give up, mentions that she has been friends with the two women the boy Marcel had spied in a transgressive lesbian scene, passion springs into being. Albertine suddenly develops a past in which she was loved by others and a future in which others will also play parts. She becomes an undiscovered country that the narrator must possess in every detail. He takes her home to Paris with him, promises marriage, monitors all her activities, effectively imprisons her, and yet she continually eludes him. Time, with its shifting kaleidoscope, the new it brings in each moment of its passing, is simply not on his side. He knows that total possession, total knowledge of the other is impossible, all the more so here because what Albertine experiences in her lesbian loves is not available to him as a man. Yet the desire to know persists.

  For Proust, love and knowledge are ever entwined. The obsessive detective work and the rampant fantasies that jealousy brings into being, the need to know and possess everything about the other, past and present, is akin to the voracious curiosity of the child faced by the mystery of adult sexuality. It also parallels the curiosity of those other searchers after knowledge, the philosopher and the scientist. The Proustian lover is a taxonomist of desire.

  Amongst the structures of love he designates, one harks back, albeit in a different register, to Plato’s Socrates in his pursuit of Diotima. The love Marcel initially feels for Albertine is less about her specificity as a person than for that occult force of which she is an emanation and with which she puts him in touch.

  …the mistresses whom I have loved most passionately have never coincided with my love for them. That love was genuine, since I subordinated everything else to seeing them, keeping them for myself alone, and would weep aloud if, one evening, I had waited for them in vain. But it was more because they had the faculty of arousing that love, of raising it to a paroxysm, than because they were its image… I am inclined to believe that in these relationships… beneath the outward appearance of the woman, it is to those invisible forces with which she is incidentally accompanied that we address ourselves as to obscure deities… The woman herself, during our assignation with her, does little more than put us in touch with these goddesses.

  But as soon as the woman is imagined as desiring another, everything shifts. Jealousy imbues her with an unknown specificity and reawakens a lost part of himself. She is now both inside and outside himself. This new Albertine ‘penetrates to the depths of my lacerated heart’: she generates both suffering and an imperative need for discovery.

  For Proust it is the desire and pursuit of the fleeting beloved in her (suspected and imagined) relations with others that constitute love. This is the erotic force that drives all other pursuits. The woman made desirable by the imagined love or attention of others arouses the jealous suffering, that possessive passion which gives meaning to everything in an otherwise dormant universe. Fantasy, pleasure and pain, under the aegis of jealousy, become inextricably linked and follow their object beyond death. For Proust, as for La Rochefoucauld, ‘Jealousy is always born with love, but does not die with it’ (Maxims, no. 361).

  Proust’s narrator, as Malcolm Bowie has so aptly put it, is ‘one of European literature’s most engaging monsters–a protagonist who is by turns a Lothario and a spoiled child, a visionary and a pathological case, a hero of the speculative intellect and a paragon of self-defeating folly’. But the elaborately analysed arc of desire and jealousy, pleasure and pain, which Proust describes, touches on many ordinary lives. Morbidly vigilant Marcel may be, but he makes crystal-clear the voyeuristic core of passionate jealousy. His jealous love for Albertine leaps into being when she mentions Montjouvain: it was here that the young Marcel spied on a forbidden sexual scene. This included the desecration of a father’s image by its lesbian protagonists. The very mention of the place name evokes the scene vividly. And his pursuit of Albertine is characterized by the same graphic imaginings. Like a child, he remains fundamentally passive in his jealousy, preyed on by images which consume him.

  The images are important. The leap of jealousy–like passion itself, and like trauma and its replay in memory–happens in a part of us where language, reflection, indeed the passage of time, seem to have only a secondary force. Describing a bout of jealousy he experienced when he was eighteen, while acting in American repertory theatre and in love with a young actress, the journalist Alex Linklater underlines how jealousy made him prey to recurring images of her enlaced with his rival:

  of all animal emotions, jealousy is the purest excruciation. It is watching as someone else enjoys what you most desire on earth. The watching is important, whether real or imagined, because jealousy works its cleverest tricks with visual distortions… In the time that immediately followed this introduction to a world of conspiracy, shame and consuming jealousy, something peculiar happened to my eyesight. I would get on stage or go for a walk and my vision would flicker in black-and-white. It was like watching a movie with sections filmed intermittently in negative. Briefly, the curiosity of this delusion would take my mind off what was actually happening.

  The therapist-hero in HBO’s engrossing television series In Treatment erupts into jealousy when his wife tells him she has been sleeping with someone else, alt
hough his interest in her has long been quiescent. He insists on knowing, on eliciting graphic detail of every aspect of her sexual encounters with her lover, even though that knowledge contributes to his pain. With that sexual curiosity so common to the experience of jealousy, he then confabulates, expands and elaborates on what his wife has barely hinted at, so that his vilified rival can render him more abject. The intensity of his jealousy and abjection is made greater because he hasn’t yet permitted himself to engage in an affair with a patient who lubricates his fantasies and claims she is in love with him. This relationship has lasted as long as his wife’s affair, along with the inevitable unconscious guilts.

  Obsessive jealousy needs no more than a hint to erupt and engender pain that can feel far more powerful than love itself. Timing is important here. The art critic Catherine Millet, in the second of her autobiographical narratives, Jealousy, records the inferno she was cast into on the discovery of her husband’s affairs. Her pain was all the odder and more mysterious because, as a self-styled ‘suffragette in the cause of libertarianism’, she and her husband had an open marriage in which it was agreed that both could and did conduct affairs. Love at home, she has said, was what freed her from having to find it in her other sexual pursuits.

  Millet had had a long history of partitioning her life–indeed, even her understanding of her body–into split-off parts, each living its own existence with little accountability to the others. The promiscuous body occupies a zone akin to dream: fantasies intersect it and are occasionally spied upon. Then there is a married, loving body, a body in the social world. Her life, pleasurable and productive, takes shape as ‘a series of layers, as densely packed as the earth’s crust, and likewise permeable’. Yet, when she finds in her husband’s study a nude photograph and a diary entry suggestive of desire, jealousy leaps and stabs: the various permeable layers of the self are sharply penetrated. She succumbs emphatically to ‘the timeless and universal malady’ that jealousy is.

  In the background to this sudden onslaught of jealousy, one might speculate, is a recourse to an age-old childhood configuration, akin to the one Proust brings into play, though, of course, specific to her own life. Parental ghosts haunt, and leave a residue in, all our passions.

  Catherine’s mother has recently committed a violent suicide, thrusting her daughter back, as all parental deaths do, to infancy, that time when we were helpless dependants–but now she is also orphaned. A childhood sexual curiosity, it could be said, now comes into play, turning her into an obsessed detective of her husband’s/parents’ secrets: and all the more violently because her parents’ coupled lives already included other lovers–those intruders on the home front. Her husband, adult keeper of the stable home, now becomes unstable, mysterious. The world has turned topsy-turvy. She is racked by physical pain, finds herself like a child, on the floor, a powerless creature, unattended, no longer the centre of attention. She can’t breathe, her heart and mind race, she is reduced to a pair of snooping eyes, an ignominious detective of the other’s life. Creeping around on all fours, reading letters and diaries, her imagination is overwhelmed with an obsessive need to know.

  At the core of obsessive jealousy is a kind of childlike murderous impotence, turned, depending on the person, against the rival, the betrayer and their progeny, or against the self–often enough all three at once or in sequence. Language can rarely encompass the pain of betrayal and the loss or distortion of the ‘us’ that was invested in the lover. Such primal emotions propel us into a world where images come first. This is perhaps why, as in Millet’s case, writing, talking therapy, articulation, as well as time itself, help the passage towards a new state where jealousy has passed. Her marriage stays intact.

  Other jealous lovers, of course, lash out. Violence is enacted: for a long time the legal systems of France and other countries maintained a special category for the crime passionnel: murder either of the loved one or of the displacing rival. In the USA a crime of passion could constitute a defence of ‘temporary insanity’. Passionately jealous, we are less than responsible beings.

  Jasper, an interviewee we met before, recounted a not untypical configuration of the jealous passion and its timing. Not particularly a philanderer–a character whose greed, or call it ‘love of women’, needs voraciously to be fed and who finds it difficult to combine love and sexuality in one site–he sought out other women when his marriage, and he himself, felt dead. And these were serious liaisons, not the casual one-night stands which so often attend work trips or conferences far from home, for both men and women. Each adultery was precipitated by an atmosphere of internal crisis or shift–a mid-life crisis, one might say, though the timing of these crises is postponed as people grow younger, and they often enough recur.

  His first affair, in his forties, coincided with his adolescent son’s first forays with women and his daughter’s early-teen rebellion. We could speculate about a background rumble of mild unconscious rivalry with his son and a sense of growing disappointment that he was no longer the predominant male in his daughter’s life. If there was any jealousy here, it was of the mild kind directed at his children. As they moved out of the family group, so did he. At work, he had begun to grow bored with his lot. So when an admiring businesswoman strayed across his path, he took the leap. The affair was short-lived: his wife’s unexpected jealousy helped to rejuvenate the marriage.

  The second affair came after a bout of illness that frightened him, and brought thoughts of death close, not least because his father had recently died and his wife was embroiled in her own menopausal difficulties. She had lost interest in him. Clocks were ticking. Carpe diem: a sense that the day had to be seized became imperative. Just then, as timing would have it, Jude entered his world. (How he had loved the Beatles song! And now he wanted to take the advice and let this female Jude under his skin.)

  Jude was a much younger lawyer who had joined his firm some years back. Amongst her many attributes that Jasper spoke of, the one that had his eyes gleaming was her sexuality. It was simply supremely uninhibited, in talk and fact, and Jasper found himself feeling not only rejuvenated, but young in a way he had never been young before. He was riding high. He moved out of the family home into a rented loft, bore his wife’s storms, even his children’s cold sneers, and happily gave over the house. All he wanted was Jude; and Jude, miraculously, it seemed, wanted only him–though they were moving into the cohabiting life slowly, spending only part of the week together for the time being.

  A text message he happened to see on her phone changed everything. He discovered that there was another man in Jude’s life, had been since soon after they had started their affair. At first he couldn’t quite believe it. When he realized that he knew the other man, a barrister of high repute who at university had been an admired acquaintance, jealousy forked through his life with a savage vengeance. Passion had already made him labile, by turn omnipotent and vulnerable, and his jealousy took on a primal, untempered force: he was no longer his recognizable self. The threatened loss of Jude, on top of the loss of his stable home life, was tantamount to a loss of himself. He had never experienced anything like it.

  Jude told him she was extricating herself from the other man, but he could no longer allow himself to trust her. He was overwhelmed by suspicion. Everything she had ever said to him, everything he had felt, was now in doubt. He retraced every moment of their love. He started to spy on her, to snoop on his rival as well, trawling the Net for references to him, for photos. The activity debased him. He felt alternately suicidal and murderous–occasionally felt, too, that Jude had preferred him when he was solidly married and something of a parental figure.

  Jude’s loving provided only momentary solace. His rampant fantasies of her and her other lover together plagued him. They had so taken over his mind that the real woman was a mere, often hated, chorus to that solitary activity, though he continued to want her with a boundless passion, wanted explicit detail of what she and the other man got up to. One day,
he waited for the hated barrister to come out of his chambers. He accosted him with murderous rage, just hidden beneath a veneer of icy coldness. The man paid him little heed. He said he was due in court and rushed off before Jasper could land the punch he so much wanted to deliver. Jasper pursued him again, but his one-time friend refused to meet him.

  Unable to concentrate on work, unable to sleep, eat, or talk to his wife who was his oldest and best friend, Jasper felt he was cracking up. His skin felt thin, his body shorn of defences. His children seemed to hate him. With that incipient paranoia which so often gains strength from the labile condition of jealousy, he sensed that his colleagues had turned against him. They had all grown critical. He felt humiliated, and chastised himself mercilessly. He arranged to take a long break and throw himself amidst strangers by signing up for a sailing expedition. He had to extricate himself from the arms of Circe, he said, or he might wake up not only a pig, but dead; but he kept delaying the moment of departure.

  Jasper’s dismantled state is hardly an unusual one in times such as ours, which value sexuality and the ‘happiness’ that is meant to reside there above loyalty, and the measure of stoicism that tolerates the downs of ongoing partnerships and the ageing process itself. The tide of cross-generational unions has, it would seem, risen, though I would wager that it may not be all that much greater than in epochs when women died young as a result of complications in childbirth. The difference is that our culture seems to give permission to ageing men to enact not only their sexual, but their marriage-breaking, urges far more than, say, the fifties did. The sense of permission comes in part from the workings of envy as much as from copycat mimicry based on media stories: if X–and there are so many Xs in our media–can engage in cross-generational passions, that is my due, too. What is less often recounted is how, in the crucible of our passions, envy and jealousy feed into each other and fly off in a variety of directions. If Jasper’s story is anything to go by–and there is much anecdotal evidence from other cases of ageing men and young brides–the plague of jealousy, the split loyalties, the suffering of former partners and the possible vengefulness of children may seldom make for a greater harvest of happiness.