Denis de RougemontLove in the WestHere's a clip from a book that is frankly critical of the "cult" of romantic love in modern Western literature.Love and death, a fatal love -- in these phrases is summed up, if not the whole of poetry, at least whatever is popular, whatever is universally moving in European literature, alike as regards the oldest legends and the sweetest songs. Happy love has no history. Romance only comes into existence where love is fatal, frowned upon and doomed by life itself. What stirs lyrical poets to their finest flights is neither the delight of the senses nor the fruitful contentment of the settled couple; not the satisfaction of love, but its passion. And passion means suffering. There we have the fundamental fact. Our eagerness for both novels and films with their identical type of plot; the idealized eroticism that pervades our culture and upbringing and provides the pictures that fill the background of our lives; our desire for "escape," which a mechanical boredom exacerbates -- everything within and about us glorifies passion. Hence the prospect of a passionate experience has come to seem the promise that we are about to live more fully and more intensely. . . . And yet actually passionate love is a misfortune. In this respect manners have undergone no change for centuries, and the community still drives passionate love in nine cases out of ten to take the form of adultery. . . . To assert that passionate love is actually tantamount to adultery is to insist upon a fact which our cult of love both conceals and distorts; it exposes what by the cult is dissimulated, repressed, and left unnamed . . . . In the reader's very objection to recognizing that passion and adultery are commonly indistinguishable in contemporary society, we have a first indication of the paradox that we now desire passion and unhappiness only on condition that we never admit wishing for them as such. -- Denis de Rougemont, Love in the Western World, trans. Montgomery Belgion (New York: Fawcett, 1966), 15, 17. |