Seeing, Improvising, and Self-Love

Love’s confusions are legion. We promise to love, but we cannot love at will. Love God, we’re commanded, but we cannot love on command. And given the vicissitudes of self-love, even if we could love our neighbors as we love ourselves, would it be a good thing to do so? These are a few of the paradoxes that typically lead philosophers to oversimplify love — and that draw C. D. C. Reeve to explore it in all its complexity, searching for the lessons to be found within love’s confusions. In Love’s Confusions, C. D. C. Reeve brings the vast resources of Western literature and philosophy to bear on the question of love. Here is a brief excerpt.

According to Jean-Paul Sartre, “The lover does not desire to possess the beloved as one possesses a thing; he demands a special sort of appropriation. He wants to possess a freedom as freedom . . . but demands that this freedom as freedom should no longer be free. He wishes that the Other’s freedom should determine itself to become love — and this not only at the beginning of the affair but at each instant — and at the same time he wants this same freedom to be captured by itself, to turn back upon itself, as in madness, as in a dream, so as to will its own captivity.” Though characteristically extreme, Sartre is surely on to something. What lover hasn’t found himself with some such impossible wish? Yet, on reflection, the characterization seems to fit better one of love’s common liabilities — jealous possessiveness — than love itself.

No surprise, therefore, to find that Sartre cites Proust’s Marcel (he means the narrator of Remembrance of Things Past) as if in corroboration of his account. For Marcel is often presented as a paradigm case of possessive jealousy. Indeed, he seems to present himself as such: “Jealousy is a demon that cannot be exorcised, but constantly appears in new incarnations. Even if we could succeed in exterminating them all, in keeping the beloved for ever, the Spirit of Evil would then adopt another form, more pathetic still, despair at having obtained fidelity only by force, despair at not being loved.” Yet in Marcel’s view the very unexorcisability of his jealousy — its inability, in the face of the beloved’s freedom, to achieve its goal — is a good thing from the erotic point of view: “For just as in the beginning it is formed by desire, so afterwards love is kept in existence only by painful anxiety: I felt that part of Albertine’s life eluded me. Love, in the pain of anxiety as in the bliss of desire, is a demand for a whole. It is born, and it survives, only if some part remains for it to conquer. We love only what we do not wholly possess.” Jealousy keeps Marcel’s love alive, therefore, even if in the process that love becomes “reciprocal torture.”

Reciprocal torture may sound simply pathological, but that should not blind us to Marcel’s insight. Erotic desire is inextricably bound up with excitement; excitement with tantalization. Yet tantalization is a kind of torture — an “enlivening torture,” as Adam Phillips calls it, that rekindles and refreshes desire, and so sustains it. Since flirtation, as a kind of tantalization, requires an answer- ing jealousy, jealousy, too, can function to keep desire alive.

In one of her poems, Eavan Boland speaks of “the code marriage makes of passion — duty, dailiness, routine.” Flirtation and jealousy disrupt this code. They reveal the threat to repetition that is always there, even if disguised by routine. More interestingly, they reveal the correlative threat of repetition — of boredom, complacency, indifference, in- sensitivity, blindness. They help to open up a space in which the aims and goals of a relationship, instead of being given by the very idea of marriage, intimacy, or sexuality, are to be worked out, made up, improvised.

Though jealousy can enliven desire, its association with possessiveness may seem to constitute a liability too great to be outweighed even by so large a potential benefit. To the extent that flirtation needs jealousy, it too may seem to suffer guilt by association — jealousy seeking to keep what flirtation threatens with loss. What this critique overlooks is that while jealousy can be “greediness stimulated by fear,” it can also be “emulation sharpened by fear.” The greedy lover seeks to keep all of his lover for himself; the emulous one to keep his relationship with her in excellent condition. The former is led by a rival to tighten his grip; the latter to love better. A flirt who seeks to incite greed implicitly seeks to be more thoroughly possessed, and so is party to his lover’s possessiveness. One who incites emulation, on the other hand, seeks what emulation seeks — a better, more alive relationship. The loss that emulous jealousy fears, therefore, isn’t the loss of a person who, as free, cannot be possessed, but the loss — through neglect — of the loving relationship itself.

A lover’s presence in our life is pervasive. Without her, the plot of ourselves, the sense we make, threatens to un- ravel: “The beloved for the lover empties the world of hope (the world that doesn’t include her).” When a rival for her affections appears, therefore, proleptic mourning occurs in us for her (she will be dead to us . . .) and also for ourselves (. . . and so we will be as if dead). At the same time, we imagine her presence in the rival’s life — “Someone else feeling her breasts and cunt, / Someone else drowned in that lash-wide stare.” We feel anger to- ward the rival for the harm he threatens; envy at the success that may be his. We feel anger at ourselves for our own contribution to our potential loss; anger at our lover for her contribution. It is a potent cocktail of feelings. The risk involved in galvanizing it, even in order to en- liven desire, is consequently great. The risk of finding that love has died for want of enlivening is equally life- threatening, of course, though the continued presence of the lover tends to make it seem less so.

When we think about the risks and rewards of jealousy, we are forced to think about its role in different psychological styles. In Marcel, for example, it proves so destructive of his relationship with Albertine, that love — as something felt for another person — is abandoned as too painful. “My love was not so much a love for her,” he tells us when she is gone, “as a love in myself,” with “no real connexion” to anyone else.8 What once promised to link Marcel to something outside himself now links him solely to the contents of his own mind — contents for which other people have become “merely showcases.” In a different style, that would be no more than a record of descent into narcissistic solipsism. In Marcel — in Proust — it has a very different outcome. Precisely because nothing can relieve his jealousy of Albertine, it can keep revealing “layer after layer” of the stuff of which he is made — a revelation that becomes Remembrance of Things Past itself.9 “Proust could afford to find human relationships insufficient — or at any rate he could make Marcel do so — be- cause he knew he was to find an answer in his writing.” The jealousy Maggie Verver feels toward Charlotte Stant, in Henry James’s Golden Bowl, is a component of a very different psychological style and has very different consequences. By making Maggie doubt “the wonderful little world” of her wealth and privilege, it makes her realize that though Amerigo is her husband, “all the while she really hasn’t had him.” The realization is disagreeable, naturally. But, as Fanny Assingham sees, it “had to be disagreeable” in order to show Maggie “a little where she is . . . to make her sit up . . . to make her decide to live.” The decision to live, to “risk the cracks,” whether in golden bowls, in princely husbands, or in life itself, transforms Maggie’s jealousy into a “painful rite of passage to the difficult reconstitution of herself in loving.” Whereas Marcel’s jealousy causes him to see only Albertine’s real or imagined betrayal, Maggie’s causes her to see her own defects as partly responsible for Amerigo’s threatened loss. Loving, she comes to realize, isn’t a matter of possession, of storing away in a vault, but of a dynamic engagement fraught with pain and risk.

In Maggie, jealousy acts as a force of erotic development: she loves Amerigo better by being able to work through it. In Marcel, it destroys love — at any rate as an interpersonal relationship. Depending on the resources available to the person in whom it occurs, jealousy can be an erotic disaster or an erotic boon. This may not be only a matter of individual psychology, however. It may also depend on history. The Victorians, according to Steven Kern, “viewed jealousy as a disease to be avoided.” In response to it, “they typically chose denial, flight, self-pity, or, in extreme instances, the retribution of murder or the ‘satisfaction’ of dueling.” In each case, the response “projected the source of the grievance onto either the ‘unfaithful’ beloved or the ‘third party’ and therefore avoided reflecting on any sources of the grievance” within the jealous person himself. There is a sense, then, in which the Victorian understanding of jealousy puts a Marcel-like or Maggie-like response beyond the pale. For jealousy to be seen as “not so much an affliction or an evil” but more as “an unavoidable and important challenge, essential to retrieving oneself as a self and to tempering love as non-possessive and free,” profound social changes — as well as profound psychological ones — had to take place.