Love, and other (performance-enhancing) drugs

"From that day forward, they wrote to one another regularly every evening. Emma would take her letter to the end of the garden near the river, leaving it in a crack in the wall, Rodolphe would come to collect it, leaving a letter of his own, and always she complained that his were too short.

One morning, when Charles had gone off before dawn, she was taken with the notion that she must see Rodolphe immediately. She could reach La Huchette quickly, stay there an hour, and be back in Yonville again while everyone was still asleep. The thought of it left her gasping with desire; soon she found herself half-way across the meadow, walking rapidly, without a backward glance." (Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, edited and translated by Geoffrey Wall)

There's no better text to resume after a terribly long hiatus than the most beloved of them all--Flaubert's Madame Bovary. Instead of digressing with a speech about qualifying exams, and dissertating, and the mind-numbingness of the prospectus, I might as well use the text for illusion, a favorite motif for Flaubert. I was looking through old entries and realized that I had never written about Madame Bovary, and despite having written my longer Princeton JP, as well as my junior seminar paper on this incredible novel, I had delayed making it a part of my blog. Flaubert, for all of his strangeness, was the reason I chose comparative literature; Madame Bovary, for my nineteen-year old, wide-eyed, hum-sequencing self, was the greatest prose I had ever read. Still true, but there is more to be said here.

I didn't choose Madame Bovary today because I wanted to write about the novel in particular, but rather because it floated in front of my eyes when I was thinking about a conversation I had a couple of days back: love, a relationship, romance, commitment (and other such human connections) make for a productive individual. I tried to think of characters, particularly women, from the nineteenth-century novel and earlier, who are transformed into makers, inventors, writers, artists upon falling in love. That is to say, I wanted character who become productive in a very literal sense of the word. Elizabeth Bennett didn't fit the mark; Augustine and Dante did but this is all about the earthly; and for some reason, Emma kept pestering me. Let's just say she forces the discussion elsewhere.

Reading, more than writing--consuming more than producing--this was Emma till Rodolphe, her adulterous lover entered her life. If the maps of Paris, Balzac, George Sand, furniture in Eugene Sue represent consumption through the text, then Emma's prolific letter writing, her acting out of the much-storied affair, can be read as a kind of production, in the economy of fiction and reality. I was fascinated, of course, by the second paragraph of the passage I've chosen--Emma's exercising briskly, without knowing what she's doing, in order to feed her desire: once again, consumption and innovation come head to head with each other through this relationship. It seems quite simple here, Emma is transformed through her "love" for Rodolphe, going from a vapid dreamer to a dynamic lover, an improv actress, and an increasingly better, liar, or inventor of fictions.

The end of the affair, unfortunately, also means destruction: Emma's first great collapse, though it must be noted that love itself never kills her--it's the economy. But there's more: Emma's recovery from the "illness" that follows the rejection leads, temporarily, at least, in her dedicating herself to "lavish works of charity," recycling the same words she used for her ex-lover on her "Lord." Here is a new kind of productivity, emerging from a new relationship. Her temporary fetish for Catholicism, in a kind of self and social economy, is perhaps even more productive than the one that emerged from her affair. The poor benefit; she attempts teaching Berthe, her young daughter, to read; her otherwise questioning mother-in-law is appeased. And then, her fascination with the Lord too, ends, and Leon, her new lover enters her life.

I'm going to stop here because this post could go on forever, but the point, I think, that has emerged from my ramblings is that the "love" economy is a volatile one. This isn't the most mind-blowing conclusion but what is interesting about it is precisely its volatility: it infuses and revives for short periods, ensuring its permanence, or its replication through the moment it supplies. In other words, the spectacular crash promises a new high.