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.

Original Son.

DEDICATION

"... The souls for whom I sang my early songs
will never hear the songs that follow;
those many friends are all dispersed,
their first response, alas! is long since muted.
My tragic song will now be heard by strangers
whose very praise must cause my heart misgivings,
and those to whom my song gave pleasure,
if they still live, roam scattered everywhere.
I feel the spell of long-forgotten yearning
for that serene and solemn spirit realm,
and like an aeolian harp my murmuring song
lets its uncertain tones float through the air.
I feel a sense of dread, tear after tear is falling, 
my rigid heart is tenderly unmanned--
what I possess seems something far away
and what had disappeared proves real."

This is the second half of the dedicatory poem that opens Goethe's Faust. I find it particularly beautiful because I understand the yearnings of a solitary figure to be one of the more powerful precursors to an art form. But this is a broad generalization, so perhaps I should come down to my more specific, and slightly strange reading of these lines. My reading is concerned with the first-person figure in this poem. Possibly still in the shadow of my previous post, or in the the light of Goethe's stage, I am convinced that this is a poem that embodies both the divine and satanic figures of the play. In other words, what I want to argue is that the "I" of this poem is a struggle between God and Mephistopheles. They are the solitary figure, they are the abandoned lovers, they are the singers whose songs now go unheard: God alone in Heaven, and M. constantly seeking to reunite on earth. If they weep, it is not for figures like Faust and Job, but for the figure who has led them to battle-- Adam. If he went uncared for in Paradise Lost, in Faust, he is the reason why God and Mephistopheles flirt with the figure of Faust. He and others like him are the rebound. The lost son is their first, irreplaceable love.

The reason why I think this reading is a plausible one is because God, Satan, and the Fall have for too long been the subject in modern literature: Marlowe, Milton and now Goethe. By the time Goethe does Faust, they have become too human. So human that before the narrative of Faust, the casualty, starts, God desires the "serene" and rejects the "very praise" of the new.  What I'm arguing here, then, is that by the time we get to Faust in this sequence of plays, God is one of us. We have written him again and again, and he has played among us too many times. Adam, his "first" son, and Eve, his first daughter, have long since left the world he had created for them. What is in the play that Goethe writes is the play of a convenient union between God and man, a tired marriage with occasional tests for excitement. God, the passionate lover, is the figure of the dedication-- the figure who dreads, the figure whose existence now is unreal, the figure who is left with everything but what he wants.

If this is God, then it is the same for M. He too weeps, he too has lost his original prize in this new world where he wanders hungrily, praying for repetition but finding no satisfaction. The response to his song is now "muted," so far from the perpetual excitement of the Fall. It is now mundane no matter which it is-- always the same, not a chase, just a chore. 

These two very dialectical figures, I would say, then, are becoming one. The original son, the symbol of their difference is lost, and in this tragic ordinariness, God and Satan speak the same lines.

(Image: Le Damnation de Faust, Metropolitan Opera 2008-09/ Text: Faust I and II, translated by Stuart Atkins, Princeton University Press.)