Unmaking Love, Ashley Shelden

Unmaking Love THE CONTEMPORARY NOVEL AND THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF UNION

ASHLEY T. SHELDEN

Copyrighted Material

INTRODUCTION Unmaking Love

IN ACADEMIC INSTINCTS Marjorie Garber makes a claim that, at first, might

seem straightforward: “The job of the critic is to account for love.”1 Garber, of course, means that the critic’s task includes describing how and why one enjoys literature. However, if I willfully misread this passage, then I can hear in it a different sort of charge. This claim—“The job of the critic is to account for love”—suggests the task that contemporary writers put before us and the task that this book undertakes. In Unmaking Love I account for love: how modernists represent it and how contemporary writers both build on and depart from the modernists’ model. In particular, I account for the transformation wrought on love by the contemporary novel, because, indeed, love has changed. In contemporary literature the meanings of love can no longer be taken for granted; novelists now reimagine love in the negative, dissonant with what we typically take love to be.

Such a drastic alteration to the meanings of love informs the title of this book. What might it mean to “unmake” love? When contemporary novelists “unmake” the concept of love, they shatter the idea that is supposed to bind individuals through relations of affection or affinity. By “unmaking” love, the contemporary novel dismantles romantic idealism and exposes as impossible our collective fantasy that intimacy has the capacity to unite us. Dismantling this myth of amorous union does not destroy the concept of love so much as

shel17882.indb 1

10/25/16 11:29 AM

Copyrighted Material

reorient it. That is, where love is unmade, it is also redefined: the love that is supposed to unify and redeem becomes corrupted with negativity and division.

The negativity that contemporary novelists use to unmake love has an intimate relation to queerness. In his essay “Is the Rectum a Grave?” Leo Bersani opposes queer negativity to love, reading the former as having radical, subjectshattering potential and the latter as striving for the illusion of redemptive promise. Famously, Bersani identifies “the inestimable value of sex as . . . anticommunal, antiegalitarian, antinurturing, antiloving.”2 Against this opposition of love and the negative, I argue that the contemporary novel exposes the ways in which love is not opposed to queer negativity. Rather, love itself becomes “antiloving,” that is, imbued with all the corrosive force of the negative.

The contemporary novel rejects the idea of love as a coherence-producing force of redemption and, in so doing, suggests that a love inhabited by the negative is a queered love. Queerness, then, cannot be understood simply as shorthand for homosexual identity. Contemporary writers find queerness potentially anywhere: where expectations are thwarted, where organization becomes disarticulated, where multiplicity disturbs and makes impossible unity. Queer love does not name homosexual attachments; instead, it marks social forms that are de formed, affective bonds that do not bind, and social structures that threaten to come undone. In other words, queerness emerges when love fails: to unify, to make the couple cohere, to redeem and erase negativity.

The contemporary novels that I discuss in this book refuse to conceive of love as unity producing. In these novels, love appears, of course, as romantic attachment, companionate marriage, and erotics, but contemporary writers also extend their critique of love to amorous bonds that define ethical, familial, communal, and global relationality. These texts distinguish between different types of love, even as no particular type of love is safe from their critique. Before these more recent works, modernist writers attempted to imagine love in ways that resisted conservative, redemptive fantasies about attachment. However, modernists remained ambivalent about love: they rejected fusion and continued to strive for it at the same time. Contemporary writers rely on this history of modernist ambivalence and build on it in their concept of love. But, there are crucial differences between these two accounts of love. If modernists had the goal of questioning the validity of fusional love, then contemporary novelists’ aims are rather more ambitious. They do not just revise love so much 2

shel17882.indb 2

INTRODUCTION

10/25/16 11:29 AM

Copyrighted Material

as explode it, making love at times unrecognizable as love. No longer can we (literary or queer critics) simply think of as separate love (union, wholeness) and that which threatens it (negativity, division); rather, contemporary novelists require that we consider these two forces as intimately and inextricably connected. If the critic’s job is to account for love, then the contemporary novel makes it clear that we must not only focus on enjoyment, delight, or appreciation—words that Marjorie Garber associates with the critic’s task—but also, and most important, we must attend to love as the expression of discontent, aggression, and contempt.3

NEGATIVE, QUEER, LOVE Despite the fact that I use combinations of these terms throughout as modifying each other—“queer negativity, for instance—I understand these three terms, negative, queer, and love, as, if not synonymous, at least crucially overlapping with each other. Before turning to the literary component of Unmaking Love—the place where this negative, queer love unfolds—I need to examine some crucial theoretical debates to parse the relation between these three central terms. Psychoanalytic and deconstructive approaches to negativity inform my own approach to love in contemporary novels. In particular, Barbara Johnson’s conception of the “the difference within,” or “otherness,” echoes throughout the readings in this book.4 And my arguments build on Jacques Lacan’s account of love as a fantasy structure that obscures a negative void, which separates individuals from each other.

Also influential to my thinking are debates about negativity in queer theory.5 If negativity is central to a particular form of queer theorizing, love is less familiar to that same intellectual genealogy. As Lauren Berlant points out in “Love, a Queer Feeling,” negative, queer love has been undertheorized, but the reasons for this undertheorization make sense.6 Love doesn’t have the sexy ring of transgression; love doesn’t readily evoke erotic fantasy. Nor can love, as Roland Barthes points out in A Lover’s Discourse, make good on its revolutionary promise because the “pure New” that love gestures toward is “the most worn-down of stereotypes.”7 In Written on the Body Jeanette Winterson echoes Barthes’s concern when she compares love to “the saggy armchair of clichés.”8 She goes on: “It’s all right, millions of bottoms have sat here before me. The INTRODUCTION

shel17882.indb 3

3

10/25/16 11:29 AM

Copyrighted Material

springs are well worn, the fabric smelly and familiar.”9 Love: not too sexy, politically conservative, repetitive, domestic, and even a bit dowdy. Kaja Silverman puts the predicament of love in different though related terms: “It [love] has always seemed to lack respectability as an object of intellectual inquiry—to represent the very quintessence of kitsch.”10 Silverman here suggests that love lacks respectability as an object of intellectual inquiry because it registers as too ideologically respectable. After all, the rhetoric of love insistently underwrites the quest for gay respectability in the form of marriage equality through the mantra, “love is love.”11 Yet, when critics do discuss love in queer theory, it has a strange trajectory.

In the case of Leo Bersani’s “Is the Rectum a Grave?” love stands out as a paradigmatic case of antiqueer conservatism. For Lee Edelman, in No Future, love aims to conserve the integrity of the subject in the face of the death drive’s disarticulating force.12 Other queer theorists are seduced by love’s utopian promise. José Esteban Muñoz’s embrace of love correlates with his rejection of what he repeatedly calls in Cruising Utopia “the romance of the negative.”13 Muñoz does not explicitly link his project to love as such, even though the description on the back cover tellingly characterizes the book as “part manifesto, part loveletter.”14 Beyond this apt characterization, what closely links Muñoz’s suspicion of the negative to love is his avowed investment in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s conception of reparative reading.15 Along with Muñoz, a number of critics have recognized the potential for reparative reading. Michael D. Snediker separates destruction and reparation, desire and love: “I mean to distinguish love’s reparative, resuscitative energies from the oppositely and variously destructive, undoing energies of desire.”16 In a slightly different though related vein, Cindy Patton defines Sedgwick’s use of love in A Dialogue on Love: “it has the ring of intersubjectivity, of authenticity, the stems for a fundamental sameness across consciousnesses.”17 Though this passage is not a description of reparative reading, Patton’s gloss on Sedgwickian love is critical. Patton brings together latter-day reparative readers and makes explicit the values that accrue to the understanding of love informed by reparative reading. Reparative love creates unities, dissolves differences, replenishes lack, and aims to make the world a better place. Such accounts of the positive gains of critical practice are in line with what Sedgwick says about reparative reading. It is modeled on the possibility of “‘repair[ing]’ the murderous part 4

shel17882.indb 4

INTRODUCTION

10/25/16 11:29 AM

Copyrighted Material

object into something like a whole,” which then becomes “available both to be identified with and to offer one nourishment and comfort in turn.”18 I understand what some queer critics find enabling about reparative reading, even as I don’t share this position. The desire for reparation, for love to have healing power necessarily represses the fact that love is not univocally good; love does not, as Patton suggests, connect and unite us all through a common humanity. Indeed, love can be and is a force of corrosion, despair, division, and inequity.19 After all, you wouldn’t need to repair the object if you hadn’t already tried to murder it. Reparation, then, looks a bit like the room in James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room. The room, when David first arrives, is replete with detritus, dirt, and chaos: a “single brown and wrinkled potato in which even the sprouting eyes were rotten” lies among yellow newspaper and empty bottles, piles of boxes, a discarded violin.20 As the novel progresses, Giovanni wants to make the room better for David because he loves him. So Giovanni attempts to refurbish it, adding a built-in bookcase: “he chipped through the wall until he came to the brick and began pounding away at the brick” (114). It becomes clear that this act of love is also an act of destruction; Giovanni is trying to make this small room a better place for David, but the more he “improves” it, the more successfully he destroys it.

Unmaking Love is in conversation with those sentimentalizing definitions of love that view it as the basis of human experience, as the one thing we all can share. This position is perhaps best articulated in the film version of The Celluloid Closet when Tom Hanks speaks about what he thinks is the most important message of Philadelphia: “It is all the same. Love is spelled, you know, with the same four letters.”21 And my point in relation to Hanks’s statement is that the important thing, at least in contemporary novels, is not that love is spelled with the same four letters, but that all the letters in love are different letters every time. The contemporary novel shows us that love is neither unifying nor unified; it is the place of division, divorce, and fissure. We can be seduced by the promise of love’s power to make humanity cohere, but we will be disappointed by its failure to do so.22 The authors I discuss here ask that we rethink what we mean by the word love. It no longer simply means something beneficent, something that can repair and heal wounds.

Unmaking Love stakes its claims about love in stark distinction from both the definition of love as too respectable and the so-called reparative turn in INTRODUCTION

shel17882.indb 5

5

10/25/16 11:29 AM

Copyrighted Material

queer theory. As an alternative, I propose a love that builds on Barbara Johnson’s conception of “using people” as a model for queer love. Johnson paves the way for thinking love queerly, refusing the terms of either conventionality or reparation. Barbara Johnson’s deconstructive reading—and her emphasis on the value of encountering the “surprise of otherness”—provides not just exciting and provocative models for reading but also, crucially, a different, queer way of understanding love. Her essay, “Using People: Kant with Winnicott,” argues for the ethical importance and value of using people in our loving relations to others, “creating a space of play and risk that does not depend on maintaining intactness and separation.”23 The essay turns on Johnson’s reading of D. W. Winnicott’s idea of the transitional object. Even as Johnson discusses the seven features of this object, in many ways the essay dwells specifically on two related features of the transitional object: “2. The object is affectionately cuddled as well as excitedly loved and mutilated” and “4. It must survive instinctual loving, and also hating and, if it be a feature, pure aggression” (99). To “use people,” in other words, is to love and hate, to caress and mutilate, to feel affection and aggression.

In response to Johnson, one could attempt to alleviate the anxiety that this pairing might evoke by keeping the two terms radically separate.24 But Johnson’s reading of Winnicott shows us that nothing can provide the benign sense of love that one might desire. No matter how much one might want to eradicate destruction, mutilation, and hatred from love, these negativities define love. Johnson’s “Using People” offers an extended meditation on, as she puts it, “the whole scenario of destruction and excited love” (101). Taking her cue from Winnicott, Johnson is essentially working with a pair of terms that takes the form of a rhetorical figure, hendiadys, about which Johnson writes in A World of Difference: “This positing and erasing of difference, this fluctuation of two and one, could perhaps be called a hendiadys (a figure in which, for example, ‘Deconstruction and Criticism’ substitutes for ‘Deconstructive Criticism,’ as Geoffrey Hartman has suggested), the rhetorical figure that most aptly names such versions of the question of the chicken and the egg.”25 Johnson’s hendiadys in “Using People” works not unlike Hartman’s by oscillating between two and one. However, rather than fluctuating between a phrase that separates the two terms (destruction and love) and one that erases the difference between them (destructive love, for instance), in Johnson’s essay, one of the terms almost 6

shel17882.indb 6

INTRODUCTION

10/25/16 11:29 AM

Copyrighted Material

completely drops out of the discussion. After the passage I’ve quoted, where Johnson sets up “the whole scenario of destruction and excited love,” the rest of the essay focuses almost exclusively on destruction.26 Johnson’s hendiadys posits and erases difference, fluctuates between two and one by using one term, destruction, as the figural representative for the pair.

When Johnson does finally use the pair again, the collapse of the two terms that the hendiadic structure has established becomes explicit. Johnson writes: “The structure of address animates the object as a ‘you,’ a destroyed ‘you,’ a loved because destroyed ‘you.’”27 Love emerges not despite destruction but because of it. Thus the hendiadic fluctuation between two terms and one—between “destruction and excited love” and simply “destruction”—that Johnson weaves throughout “Using People” rhetorically enacts the intimate relationship between love and destruction. Love does not exist without such destruction; indeed, destruction defines love.

FANTASIZING UNION The importance of Johnson’s hendiadys lies not only in the specificity of the terms she employs but also in the way the “fluctuation of two and one” figurally enacts the question of love’s structure. Both modernist and contemporary writers fixate on these fundamental questions: Can love make two people into one?

Is one ever simply one, or does it contain (and repress) multiples? And these questions are as much psychoanalytic as deconstructive; the problem of love and number corresponds to the relation between love and fantasy, a relation on which each chapter in Unmaking Love depends. By fantasy I mean the scenario that creates the effect of seamless coherence or unity both within the subject and between individuals.28 For Jacques Lacan, love is always fantasmatic insofar as fantasy provides the framework for love, which strives to replace difference and discontinuity with the illusion of amorous union.

This coherence-producing love universalizes the fusion of two into one as the index of absolute amorous value. We can understand the fantasy of love with a sort of mathematical shorthand: 1 + 1 = 1. By making two into one, such a formula attempts to reduce intractable multiplicity into a single, manageable whole: “‘We are but one.’ Everyone knows, of course, that two have never become but one, but nevertheless ‘we are but one.’ The idea of love begins INTRODUCTION

shel17882.indb 7

7

10/25/16 11:29 AM

Copyrighted Material

with that. It is truly the crudest way of providing the sexual relationship, that term that manifestly slips away, with its signified.”29 Here Lacan theorizes love in its relation to his famous assertion about the failure at the heart of sexuality: there is no sexual relation. Love’s ability to create fantasmatically one out of two gives consistency and coherence to a reality in which “the sexual relationship” is impossible. Fantasy ensures that the lovers never have to encounter the insurmountable chasm that separates them from each other. The coherence that the fantasy of love provides, then, eliminates negativity, hiding it from view by presenting the illusion of union.

One way love produces this illusory oneness is to erase the specificity of the other. To the extent that the love Lacan describes is narcissistic and conserves the integrity of the self, “the other” is effectively obliterated. Lacan writes that “Love . . . never makes anyone leave himself behind. If that . . . is what Freud said by introducing the function of narcissistic love, everyone senses and sensed that the problem is how there can be love for an other. The One everyone talks about all the time is, first of all, a kind of mirage of the One you believe yourself to be.”30 This love is not for the other but for oneself. Love satisfies only insofar as it produces a “mirage” of the ideal ego. Offering an idealized image of the loving subject, love dissolves anxiety and puts “the One” of identity and synthesis in its place. Here love does away with the aggression, anxiety, and difference that can arise in response to an encounter with the other. Through fantasmatic love, the other becomes a repetition of the ego and an escape from negativity.

Even though fantasy aims for union, even though we can try to use love to make up for the impossibility of the sexual relationship, fantasy regularly fails to make good on its promise. Lauren Berlant’s nuanced account of fantasy is particularly instructive here: “But the scene of fantasy can also be said to reveal the fundamental non-coherence of the subject, to which violence is done by the demands of the identity form, and which may well play out a competition between the subject’s desire to be recognized by her object and her desire to destroy the object she desires.”31 As Berlant suggests, the fantasmatic construction of love can simply enact the impulse toward fusion, but, more interestingly, fantasy includes the negativity, violence, aggression, division, and divorce that render fusion impossible.32 Contemporary novelists imbue fantasy not with union but division, not with redemption but negativity, remaking amorous fantasy so that it includes 8

shel17882.indb 8

INTRODUCTION

10/25/16 11:29 AM

Copyrighted Material

and aggressively pursues those elements that make coherence and unity impossible. Love does not produce unity but troubles it. A strategy contemporary writers use to “unmake” love is to infuse the oneness for which amorous fantasy strives with multiplicity. Such multiplicity thwarts a redemptive notion of love. Thus, one plus one does not, in fact, equal one but, crucially, two. By recognizing the two, over and against the one, contemporary writers give up any pretense to totalization, give up on the possibility of union, completion, or coherence. The challenge that the contemporary novel takes up, then, is to resist the temptation to be seduced by the illusory promise that the two, or the three, or the six might slip back into the vaunted figure of amorous union, the one. In her brilliant analysis of Barbara Johnson’s Mother Tongues, Jane Gallop discusses this risk specifically in relation to the romantic couple. “The couple,” Gallop writes, “is supposed to be a place where two equals one.”33 Johnson’s project, Gallop suggests, is to make the one impossible, and part of the urgency of this project has do to with the tendency the two has “to slide into one” (78). For Gallop, Johnson sees this tendency toward slippage from the multiple to the singular in the figure of the heterosexual couple. Of this figure Gallop writes, “The perfect couple, perfect complementarity, perfect fit; the heterosexual ideal: the woman finds her male counterpart” (80). The two and the one, then, are radically different, but the two also risks merely repeating the ideological imperatives of the one. Therefore, the task that contemporary writers undertake might best be described by Gallop when she writes: “If we can make two more like two thousand, there will be less danger of it slipping into one” (78).

A BRIEF CRITICAL HISTORY OF LITERARY LOVE Needless to say, even as this study focuses on a particularly literary version of love, literature is certainly not the only place where love has been theorized.

Indeed, a quick survey of other discourses indicates the centrality of love to a number of different sites of inquiry. Speculators on love cross a variety of terrains: philosophy, theology, psychology, self-help, politics, and, with increasing explicitness, economics. In these disciplines love expresses a desire for unity, standing out as a positive force. By focusing in particular on the literary construction of love in the contemporary novel, I am able to explore an alternative INTRODUCTION

shel17882.indb 9

9

10/25/16 11:29 AM

Copyrighted Material

tradition in which writers resist the notion of love as positive, redemptive, and unifying. The contemporary novel offers a sharp counterpoint to this traditional conception of love, disturbing the possibility of redemption with which love is typically associated. I focus on literature and literary criticism because in literary study we can see both the repetition of this belief in the goodness of love and, crucially, the departure from this cliché.

I am certainly not alone in viewing literature—and particularly the novel— as uniquely situated in relation to love. Tony Tanner’s Adultery in the Novel: Contract and Transgression argues that the novel provides a special opportunity for writers to challenge the norms of bourgeois society. As such, the novel does not so much reflect the society’s values as expose “a series of discontinuities and instabilities that effectively gave the lie to the bourgeois’s image of his own society.”34 Tanner’s sense that the novel offers an opportunity to challenge existing social standards resonates with my own understanding of contemporary novelists’ challenge to the concept of love and their attention to the negative.35 Likewise, Leslie Fiedler’s account of the centrality of love to the novel inflects my own argument that the contemporary novel distinctively rewrites love: “the subject par excellence of the novel is love or, more precisely . . . love in one form or another has remained the novel’s central theme, as necessary and as expected as battle in Homer or revenge in the Renaissance drama.”36 Fiedler’s collocation of love, battle, and revenge as the proper stuff of different kinds of fiction suggests a possible equivalence between these terms at the levels of both structure and content. By drawing these terms in relation to each other, Fiedler indicates that love may have more in common with the two other negative social relations—battle and revenge—than we at first might want to believe.

But the revelation that love relates in some crucial way to the negative was not new in 1960 when Fiedler published his study; in 1939 Denis de Rougemont’s Love in the Western World altered the discussion of literary love and has guided it to this day.37 De Rougemont focuses specifically on courtly love as a model for understanding love more broadly. “The myth operates,” de Rougemont writes, “wherever passion is dreamed of as an ideal instead of being feared like a malignant fever; wherever its fatal character is welcomed, invoked, or imagined as a magnificent and desirable disaster instead of as simply a disaster” (24). As de Rougemont sees it, courtly lovers need “obstruction,” because absence rather than presence forms the object of courtly love (37, 42). But for de 10

shel17882.indb 10

INTRODUCTION

10/25/16 11:29 AM

Copyrighted Material

Rougemont the obstructions that courtly lovers put in the way of their being with each other is itself an obstruction insofar their love conceals a desire for death (46).

However, de Rougemont’s analysis of courtly love has been influential less for its content than for its structure. By elaborating courtly love as a passion for obstruction that conceals the lovers’ fundamental desire for death, he produces a notion of love structured by fantasy. The concealing, obscuring function of fantasy clearly emerges in de Rougemont’s analyses of courtly love, in particular, through the language of concealment, deception, and disguise that he repeatedly invokes to describe the relationship between love and death. In a moment of dramatic disclosure, he notes: “The love of love itself has concealed a far more awful passion . . . the desire for death!” (46). After this moment de Rougemont returns over and over again to this fantasmatic logic of concealment. He characterizes the lovers as “unawares, and passionately deceiving themselves” (46; my emphasis). Using the self-deceiving lovers as a model for all love, he asserts, “The tremendous success of the Tristan Romance shows, whether we like it or not, that we have a secret preference for what is unhappy” (51; my emphasis). And elsewhere, the courtly lovers’ “secret quest of obstruction” turns out to be “only the disguise of a love for obstruction” (54; my emphasis). For de Rougemont, love disguises, conceals, and secrets away the negativity of death, which is the “true” object of desire for the courtly lovers. He persuasively suggests that “happy love has no history,” but, as compelling as this claim is, it isn’t quite accurate (15). There may be no history of happy love, but the history of love focuses throughout on the attempt to attain happiness: tenuous and obstructed though this happiness might be. And the fantasmatic elaboration of love—the idea that this structure disguises or conceals the negativity that threatens to break it—aids in the history of unhappy but crucially aspirational loves. Love might fail to produce happiness because of the negativity it cannot eliminate, but, inevitably, we find in literature thwarted attempts to achieve amorous happiness everywhere we look.

After de Rougemont, critics who write about literary love tend to understand love (whether implicitly or explicitly) as the fantasmatic structure that allows for the erasure of the negative. Importantly, this fantasmatic structure keeps love and the negative, redemption and destruction, separate. Another way of putting this might be: by casting love as that which conceals negativity, INTRODUCTION

shel17882.indb 11

11

10/25/16 11:29 AM

Copyrighted Material

love can retain a positive cultural value. Returning to Leslie Fielder’s important 1960 study on love and death, we find one excellent example of such a phenomenon.38 In a chapter on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Fiedler argues, “we are left with a disturbing paradox . . . that love may conceal a destructive impulse and work for ill, while hatred may be a disguised form of love and eventuate in good.”39 Fiedler returns love to its proper redemptive place after suggesting that it might not be all that redemptive. Love, disguising destruction, might actually “work for ill,” but fear not: if hatred manages to disguise love, then such love “might eventuate in good.” According to Fiedler, it seems that there are bad loves and good loves, and the two types can easily be distinguished from each other on the basis of their effects, “ill” or “good.”

Understanding love as a fantasy structure that can successfully conceal negativity thus promises the possibility of redemption. Such a redemptive conception of love relies on what Fiedler characterizes as the “sentimental love” of the eighteenth century, which develops with the emergence of the novel: Certainly, there is no one in our world to whom the phrase “They lived happily ever after” is meaningless or unclear; for us the “happy ending” is defined once and for all: after many trials, the sacred marriage! Our secure sense of what happiness means in this context has nothing to do with what we know about divorce statistics or the possibilities of successful adjustment in marriage; it is something we believe or pretend to believe, or more precisely perhaps accept at a level below belief and disbelief; it is a mythological rather than a factual statement.40

Fiedler describes an eighteenth-century ideal of amorous redemption that he suggests lives on in the present. While there is, no doubt, historical specificity to the possibility of the happy ending in love, this eighteenth-century conception of love also informs other, later critical interventions into this discussion.41 In criticism on literature of the nineteenth century, the focus on amorous redemption shifts from the sentimental to the social, but the possibility of fantasmatic coherence remains intact. Tony Tanner suggests the ways in which the fantasmatic understanding of the relation between love and negativity shapes social relations. Marriage functions, Tanner suggests, not to unite lovers with each other but to produce social coherence: “Marriage . . . is a means by which 12

shel17882.indb 12

INTRODUCTION

10/25/16 11:29 AM

Copyrighted Material

society attempts to bring into harmonious alignment patterns of passion and patterns of property.”42 Marriage is not, he clarifies, “a paradigm for the resolution of problems of bringing unity out of difference, harmony out of opposition, identity out of separation, concord out of discord” (15). The latter version of love coincides with the sentimental ideal whereby love redeems the couple by eliminating difference, opposition, separation, and discord, in short, by ridding the world of the negative. Tanner’s social conception of marriage, harmoniously aligning passions and property, however, does not completely depart from the structural imperative of sentimental love. Nineteenth-century love still strives for fantasmatic union; this love unites not individuals but larger institutions, attempting to ensure that society maintains coherence. For Tanner, the version of negativity that such fantasmatic social union strives to erase is adultery, which “introduces bad multiplicity within the requisite unities of social roles” (13). The social order thus attempts to contain and disarm the negative threat that adultery poses by producing, through marriage, fantasmatic coherence.43

BEYOND THE ONE: MODERNIST AMBIVALENCE The love depicted in modernist literature seems neither redemptive and unifying nor negative and threatening; for modernists, love is both simultaneously.

Whether modernists are for or against love, it seems apparent that they are (ambivalently) obsessed with it.44 Skeptical of the oneness that love is supposed to produce, modernists attempt to multiply love’s forms, laying the groundwork for the unmaking of love that the contemporary novel undertakes. However, as skeptical of amorous union as modernist writers are, they nonetheless evince desire for oneness. Perhaps the best example of this ambivalence is Virginia Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse (1927).45 Lily Briscoe asks the most important question in the novel: “Could loving, as people called it, make her and Mrs. Ramsay one?” (51). To the Lighthouse is, in part, an attempt to answer this question, and Woolf returns to the problem of oneness repeatedly throughout the novel.

Romantic love provides occasions for Woolf to dilate on the obstacles to oneness. In response to the formation of a new couple, Mrs. Ramsay feels “as if two emotions were called up in her, one profound—for what could be more serious than the love of man for woman, what more commanding, more impressive, INTRODUCTION

shel17882.indb 13

13

10/25/16 11:29 AM

Copyrighted Material

bearing in its bosom the seeds of death; at the same time these lovers, these people entering into illusion glittering eyed, must be danced round with mockery, decorated with garlands” (100). Mrs. Ramsay’s response to love cleaves in two equally powerful directions, and, by simultaneously celebrating and denigrating love, Woolf demonstrates her skepticism of unity. Mrs. Ramsay’s nonunified reaction directly relates to the possibility (and impossibility) of unity in love. Later in the novel, Lily Briscoe echoes Mrs. Ramsay’s dividedness: “from the dawn of time odes have been sung to love; wreaths heaped and roses; and if you asked nine out of ten they would say they wanted nothing but this—love; while the women . . . would all the time be feeling, This is not what we want; there is nothing more tedious, puerile, and inhumane than this; yet it is also beautiful and necessary” (103).

Briscoe and Mrs. Ramsay’s accounts of love are particularly important in considering how Woolf ’s novel approaches the concept of amorous union.

Both passages touch on the horror of love. For Mrs. Ramsay, love “bear[s] in its bosom the seeds of death,” and for Briscoe “there is nothing more tedious, puerile, and inhumane than” love. But, crucially, both passages include a desire for it. Immediately after Briscoe questions whether love can “make her and Mrs. Ramsay one,” Woolf writes, “for it was not knowledge but unity she desired” (51). To the Lighthouse perfectly exemplifies the modernist ambivalence toward amorous union; Woolf may style love as deadly, puerile, tedious, inhumane, but she also articulates a desire for it, perhaps above all else.

Mrs. Ramsay repeatedly strives for the union—in romance and in other interpersonal relations—that won’t come. At the dinner party she laments: “Nothing seemed to have merged. They all sat separate. And the whole effort of merging and flowing and creating rested on her” (83). Mrs. Ramsay feels like the responsibility for merger depends on her insofar as elsewhere in the novel she expresses the desire for not just social but subjective unity: “It was odd, she thought, how if one was alone, one leant to inanimate things; trees, streams, flowers; felt they expressed one; felt they became one; felt they knew one, in a sense were one; felt an irrational tenderness thus (she looked at that long steady light) as for oneself ” (64). Seeking understanding of herself through her connection to “inanimate things,” Mrs. Ramsay feels that she becomes “one” with them. Of course, in the passage where she becomes one, Woolf repeats the word one seven times. Woolf suggests through this repetition that oneness 14

shel17882.indb 14

INTRODUCTION

10/25/16 11:29 AM

Copyrighted Material

is impossible even as Mrs. Ramsay insistently desires unity, if only with herself.

The tension between the impossibility of oneness and the desire for it must inform James’s observation toward the end of the novel that “nothing was simply one thing” (83). This passage reiterates the skepticism about amorous fantasy we encounter earlier in the novel, but it also laments the impossibility of the union for which To the Lighthouse asymptotically strives.

The ambivalence evident in Woolf ’s novel translates into the critical tradition on modernism and love.46 Critics have been divided on the subject of love in modernism. Some read love as conservative and as antithetical to the modernist project. For instance, Joseph Allen Boone argues that modernist representations of love—insofar as they involve love—are fundamentally conservative: “traces of the love-plot format, along with its themes and ideological values, have continued to inhabit (and inhibit) the genre to the present day.”47 Though marriage is no longer the telos of modern narrative, its normative ideology persists: “the (hetero)sexual relation has come to occupy a symbolic role analogous to that formerly fulfilled by romantic wedlock.”48 Boone’s account of modernism maintains that love illusorily persuades us to believe in the complementarity of the sexes and the possibility of the (hetero)sexual relationship. Similarly, Catherine Belsey suggests, “Love dissolves the anxiety of division in the subject, and replaces it with a utopian wholeness.”49 In other words, love produces the illusion of unity and turns out to be antithetical to and capable of alleviating any anxiety created by a modernist aesthetic of fragmentation.

However, just as reliably, other critics interpret love as a radical force that serves the political aims of modernist aesthetics. Maria DiBattista argues that love and modernism are far from opposed. Her book focuses on “radical narratives of First Love,” which she suggests “attest to a deep perturbation, a ‘shock’ administered to the self ” and record something “capable of revolutionizing the old.”50 Love in its “first” manifestation works not to alleviate anxiety, or to preserve what DiBattista calls “surface tranquilities,” but rather to create anxiety by shattering the uninterrupted continuity of the subject (4). Love describes “modern consciousness” for DiBattista, making “First Love” central to the anxiety of subjective disarticulation produced by, and represented in, modernist literary artifacts (15). Love is not contrary to what she posits as the “radical,” “revolutionary” force of modernism; they are part and parcel of each other.

INTRODUCTION

shel17882.indb 15

15

10/25/16 11:29 AM

Copyrighted Material

CONTEMPORARY LOVES Whereas quite a bit has been written (albeit contradictorily) about the status of love in modernism, much less has been written about love in contemporary literature.51 In “Romance, Trauma, and Repetition: Testing the Limits of Love,” Lynne Pearce reads in contemporary literature the assessment of “something bleakly irredeemable and deeply traumatic in the nature of romantic love.”52 Pearce’s take has quite a lot in common with modernist ambivalence. In Sarah Waters’s Night Watch, Pearce finds irredeemable loves alongside “the only relationship in the novel that holds out any hope for the future” (85). In other words, like a good modernist, Pearce has it both ways: contemporary love as irredeemable and hopeful for redemption. She perceptively comments that contemporary British fiction tends to read “successive, futile attempts to repeat, or resurrect, love as symptomatic of a faltering belief in what Emmanuel Levinas characterized as ‘responsibility for the other’” (86–87). Pearce’s account of contemporary love differs from my own where she tempers her assessment of love’s irredeemability with the “hope for the future” that she finds in Waters’s novel. Waters’s “hope” echoes in Pearce’s later attempt to redeem the seemingly irredeemable ethics she discusses by turning to what she calls de Rougemont’s “tragic-redemptive” love as the horizon, once again, of “hope” (87). Pearce asserts of de Rougemont’s love, “we must hope that it nevertheless survives as an intellectual, emotional and moral limit-point” (87). Must we hope for redemptive love as a moral touchstone?

The temptation to read contemporary literature as seamlessly continuous with modernism, as Pearce does, is strong. However, contemporary novelists revisit modernist ambivalence in order to experiment with it, rewrite it, and, ultimately, reimagine love as different. In the first novel of the Patrick Melrose series, Never Mind (1992), Edward St. Aubyn rewrites Virginia Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse and depicts the corroded relationships of his characters.53 But he goes even further: by rewriting Woolf ’s novel, he asks us to use Never Mind as a lens through which we might reread To the Lighthouse. Doing so, St. Aubyn suggests that Woolf ’s seemingly more optimistic account of human relationships is much closer to St. Aubyn’s pessimistic vision than we might have thought. At the levels of both style and content, St. Aubyn’s acid take on elite society reads as a contemporary interpretation of Virginia Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse. Specif16

shel17882.indb 16

INTRODUCTION

10/25/16 11:29 AM

Copyrighted Material

ically, St. Aubyn’s story closely resembles the first section of To the Lighthouse, entitled “The Window.” Both texts detail the coming together of a family—in Woolf the Ramsays and in St. Aubyn the Melroses—at a holiday house with friends for the enactment of a variety of domestic tasks: oedipal aggression, an awkward dinner party, and masculinist, intellectual competition. Indeed, at times Never Mind seems to be a parody of Woolf ’s text.54 However, to read Never Mind as simply a parody of To the Lighthouse would be to miss what is most important about St. Aubyn’s revision. St. Aubyn’s novel takes the concerns—about oneness, love, and connection—Woolf expresses in To the Lighthouse and raises the volume exponentially. Whereas Woolf ’s text is bifurcated with regard to oneness—maintaining both desire for and skepticism about it—St. Aubyn’s novel destroys completely the possibility of inter- or intrapersonal fusion. Moreover, whatever relational difficulties Woolf ’s characters experience St. Aubyn depicts hyperbolically, shedding new light retroactively on the earlier novel. Playing on Mrs. Ramsay’s desire for “merging” over the dinner table, Eleanor, also over the dinner table, has completely abandoned any hope for oneness. Instead, she finds her guests, and, importantly, herself, hopelessly divided: “When David reminded someone of their weaknesses and failures she was torn between a desire to save the victim, whose feelings she adopted as her own, and an equally strong desire not to be accused of spoiling a game” (114). Eleanor’s response to David’s sadism is divided, and neither response helps to create the union around the dinner table that Mrs. Ramsay desires. Either Eleanor unites with her husband or her husband’s victim; in both cases she achieves union by being pitted against, and divided from, someone else.

But perhaps the most explicit reinterpretation of Woolf ’s novel appears in the figure of Patrick Melrose, the five-year-old son of David and Eleanor, who functions as the author surrogate for Edward St. Aubyn and as the contemporary translation of James Ramsay. David’s attitude toward his son sounds strikingly similar to Mr. Ramsay’s toward James: “David’s methods of education rested on the claim that childhood was a romantic myth which he was too clear sighted to encourage” (62). Replace the word David with Mr. Ramsay in this sentence and you get a very succinct explanation of the reason why Mr. Ramsay would not concede his position on not going to the lighthouse because of bad weather. Of course, the brilliance of St. Aubyn’s account of the relation INTRODUCTION

shel17882.indb 17

17

10/25/16 11:29 AM

Copyrighted Material

between father and son is that he raises the relatively benign antagonism between Mr. Ramsay and James to a fever pitch in Never Mind. Instead of simply foreclosing on a day trip to the lighthouse, David Melrose destroys the possibility of joy, security, and psychological health both in Patrick’s present and future through sexual, physical, and psychological abuse. While the relationship between David and Patrick is considerably more terrible than James and Mr. Ramsay’s, both James and Patrick have the same response: murderous rage. When Mr. Ramsay contradicts Mrs. Ramsay’s promise that the weather the next day will be good enough to allow them to venture to the lighthouse, Woolf writes: “Had there been an axe handy, or a poker, any weapon that would have gashed a hole in his father’s breast there and then, James would have seized it” (4). In a very similar fantasy, Patrick imagines killing his father as well: “He looked at the painting hanging on the stairs and imagined its frame hurtling through the air and embedding its sharp corner in his father’s chest; and another painting whistling down the corridor and chopping Nicholas’s head off ” (93).

James and Mr. Ramsay, though locked in an aggressive struggle at the outset of the novel, come, by the end, to have a more sympathetic relationship.

Their bond grows, changes, and, importantly, is not beset by the abuses that define Patrick and David Melrose’s relationship. The Melrose father and son do not get a chance to grow or change or get better. Their relationship is never redeemed. But St. Aubyn makes clear that both types of relationship—the relationship that can improve and the one that never will—are informed by the same sort of desire for aggressive negation. In this way, St. Aubyn does not just parody To the Lighthouse, does not just exacerbate the relational difficulties we see in the modernist precursor to Never Mind but also retroactively reveals that the latter is implicit in the former. This contemporary rewriting of love allows us to return to modernist texts and read them anew as St. Aubyn does here by suggesting that, whether a text strives for redemption through union or forecloses it, both types of love rely on murderous rage.

St. Aubyn’s novel exemplifies the way the contemporary novels that I discuss in Unmaking Love—including Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000), Hanif Kureishi’s Intimacy (1998), Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty (2004), and Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled (1995)—have much in common with Caren Irr’s sense that “twenty-first-century writers have returned to received genres and begun to overhaul them.”55 Instead of received genres, contemporary nov18

shel17882.indb 18

INTRODUCTION

10/25/16 11:29 AM

Copyrighted Material

elists return to received ideas about love and oneness as well as to the modernist critique of such ideas to produce a new account of love. But the category of the new in the contemporary novel gestures toward the ways in which the contemporary novel itself is not all that new. Indeed, this might remind us of Fredric Jameson’s analysis of Jean-François Lyotard’s “embarrassment” that the postmodern depends on “what remain essentially modernist categories of the new, which cannot be fully eradicated from the ‘new’ dispensation, whatever its rhetoric.”56 Indeed, the connection between modernism and what comes after it is important to understanding contemporary love.

In her essay “Periodizing Modernism” Susan Stanford Friedman challenges critics to refuse the conception of modernism as monolithic by looking for “plural periods of modernism.”57 The possibility of many modernisms relies on the idea of continuity, which runs counter to the tradition of associating modernism with the new: “buried within the radical ruptures with the past are hidden continuities.”58 David James takes up this notion of continuity in The Legacies of Modernism where he “examines what it might mean to reread the politics and aesthetics of later twentieth- and twenty-first-century fiction by deliberately foregrounding the reciprocities between writers today and their modernist predecessors.”59 And elsewhere James expands on this notion of reciprocity where he seeks to complicate the concept of rupture that designates how we think of modernist literary production.60 The idea that modernism might be continuous not just with what follows it but also with what precedes it reframes the status of modernism in literary history.

But continuity is not synonymous with sameness. Just as important as the similarities between modernist and contemporary loves are the differences between them. If modernist love is characterized by ambivalence, then the contemporary novel distinguishes its representation of love by rejecting such ambivalence.61 The novels I discuss in this book build on modernist love by departing from its ambivalent legacy. Ambivalence suggests a bifurcated structure such as the one diagnosed by Lynn Pearce: bleak, irredeemable, while hopeful for redemption. Contemporary writers learn from modernism how to critique the possibility of oneness in amorous fantasy, questioning the relation between redemption and love. However, the contemporary novels I discuss produce distinctly different answers than their modernist predecessors. For these contemporary writers, gone is the hope for amorous redemption; gone is the INTRODUCTION

shel17882.indb 19

19

10/25/16 11:29 AM

Copyrighted Material

possibility of any kind of wholeness or unity in love; gone is the notion that fantasy knits together individuals and collectivities. Modernist ambivalence becomes amorous negativity, stripping love of the potential to make the world a better place. In this way, my readings gather energy from David PalumboLiu’s analysis of ethics in contemporary global literature in The Deliverance of Others.62 Palumbo-Liu’s work can be understood as a response to the idea that literature teaches empathy, the logic to which some recent defenders of the humanities defer: “great works of literature deliver difference, otherness, that which is nonsimilar to us, all with the effect of making us better, richer, more moral, more tolerant, more sensitive to the world and the lives it contains” (12).

Palumbo-Liu suggestively points out that while difference and otherness can inspire empathy, encountering such unknown quantities—whether in literature or in the world—also provoke “disdain, even contempt” (13).

HISTORY, TIME, AND LOVE Of course, the interplay between continuity and rupture brings to the fore the question of history. Because the contemporary novel changes love, contemporary novelists are invested in historicity. But the concept of history in this context is by no means straightforward. In part, this is due to the fact that in the relation between modernist and contemporary loves we find not simply difference or similarity, rupture or continuity, but both at the same time. In this sense, contemporary literature participates in historical discourse while also troubling the idea of literary historical periodization. Thus there is a tension between the historical claims of this book and the challenge posed to history and time by the contemporary novels I discuss in it. Rather than let this tension derail one or the other of these aspects of Unmaking Love, I want to preserve this tension as a source of productive complexity. The novels I discuss here may challenge linear temporality and historical periodization, but it remains the case that the question of love seems always in contemporary literature to be a question of time. After all, love depends upon narrative, the most basic element of which is temporal movement. Without challenging temporality, contemporary writers would not be able to articulate their historically distinct conception of love, distorted, nonredemptive, and deidealized as it is. The imbrication

20

shel17882.indb 20

INTRODUCTION

10/25/16 11:29 AM

Copyrighted Material

of love and time, therefore, is a central concern throughout Unmaking Love. In the first two chapters I implicitly inquire into the time of love, and in chapter 3 I explicitly treat the question of love’s temporality in Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty.

Love and time cannot be disentangled from each other, which Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach (2007) illustrates by simultaneously distorting traditional conceptions of love and time. In this novel he explores a a romantic commonplace familiar to conventional love stories: lovers repeatedly return to the early scenes of their courtship.63 McEwan’s newlyweds lovingly mythologize the beginnings of their relationship, the first moment they saw each other, and, even before they met, all the times they were in the same place but did not encounter each other. This romantic ritual of reliving the beginnings of love makes apparent a cleavage in time that underlies passionate attachment. Love in the present takes recourse to love in the past, so that love depends upon the coincidence of both temporalities simultaneously. McEwan lays bare this structure in order to bring to the fore the amorous discontinuities that are figured by temporal discontinuities.

Gesturing toward the progressive teleo-logic of the love plot, McEwan styles Florence and Edward’s perceptions of their relationship as participating in and effecting forward movement. Celebrating their marriage, “Almost strangers, they stood, strangely together, on a new pinnacle of existence, gleeful that their new status promised to promote them out of their endless youth—Edward and Florence free at last!” (7). Getting married propels Edward and Florence into the future; they graduate from youth into adulthood. The marriage they celebrate as inaugurating progress from one time of life to another stands out as part of a much longer timeline that Edward uses to track his progress toward sexual congress with Florence. McEwan stages Edward’s slow advance to his goal in a diaristic structure: “The day in October he first saw her naked breasts long preceded the day he could touch them—December 19. He kissed them in February, though not her nipples, which he grazed with his lips once, in May” (27).

The meticulous calendrical reporting on any minor or major physical contact orients the enactment of desire along a traditional, linear chronological axis.

This moment might remind one of Dowell’s abortive attempt in The Good Soldier to subdue his narrative by constraining it with a linear diaristic structure.64

INTRODUCTION

shel17882.indb 21

21

10/25/16 11:29 AM

Copyrighted Material

He succeeds in this task for only one paragraph, which trails off with an ellipsis and returns the reader to the nonlinear narration that dominates the text.

Just as Dowell fails to tell the story of his Florence and Edward in a linear, progressive sequence, so too does McEwan’s narrator abandon the fiction of linearity to dwell on the temporal splitting that determines the newlyweds’ relationship. McEwan writes: “The conversation had returned again to those moments, by now enriched by a private mythology, when they first set eyes on each other” (71). In this passage the lovers use their “private mythology” of first meeting to enhance their experience of enjoyment in the present. In a different affective register, later in the novel, now lamenting the disharmony that seeps into the new marriage, McEwan narrates Edward’s memory “of one of the exquisite moments of their early love, when they went slowly, arm in arm, back up the glorious avenue, walking in the center lane to take full possession” (157).

This passage at first seems to be transparently nostalgic, desirous of an earlier, perfect time. But what becomes clear is that interpreting these trips into the past only in terms of nostalgia gives an incomplete picture of how love’s divided temporality works in this text.

Still reminiscing about their first meeting, Florence recognizes, “In the stone-floored echoing hall with the heavy low beams, her problems with Edward were already present in those first few seconds, in their first exchange of looks” (76). The mythology Edward and Florence construct around their first encounter cannot hold back the realization Florence here experiences: that the past to which they constantly return reflects back to them the division at the heart of their relationship in the present. They divide time, bringing the past into the present in order to find not the unification of their bond but rather its fragmentation. Nevertheless, Edward attempts to capture wholeness through memory: “He conjured these memories from last year . . . not from a sentimental desire to compound or indulge his sorrow but to dispel it, and feel himself in love, and to hold back . . . the beginnings of a darkening mood, a darker reckoning, a trace of poison that was branching through his being” (161–62). That Edward fails in this task—to find the antidote to these feelings that “poison” his love—can be no surprise. Indeed, the “poison” and the “darkening mood” are there in the past as well as in the present: “Even in their happiest moments, there was always the accusing shadow, the barely hidden gloom of his unfulfillment” (178). The distorted time of love in On Chesil Beach functions to denatu22

shel17882.indb 22

INTRODUCTION

10/25/16 11:29 AM

Copyrighted Material

ralize heterosexual union and the fiction of complementarity that supports it.

And temporal disturbance corresponds to myriad forms of sexual disturbance in the novel, which McEwan signals when Edward thematizes his anxiety about sex in a temporal metaphor: “His specific worry, based on one unfortunate experience, was of overexcitement, of what he had heard someone describe as ‘arriving too soon’” (8).

McEwan plays with narrative structure and temporality in order to deform the concept of love. The classic love story is structured by progress through time and posits loving union as the telos of narrative movement. Clearly, as Virginia Woolf suggests with To the Lighthouse, modernists are invested in temporal distortion. And McEwan’s novel builds on this modernist investment in chronological deformation in order to expose the narrative machinery at work in the construction of love. McEwan does not just distort amorous temporality but also uses this distortion specifically to elaborate the negativity that makes fantasmatic union impossible. The return to and reworking of modernist temporal disruptions in order to investigate the concept of love is crucial for my argument about contemporary novels. Love and time are intractably tangled with each other such that as time breaks down, love does too. But the obverse is also true: the disarticulation of love creates temporal disruption. Just as temporal distortions call into question the teleological progress toward union in the love plot, love cannot be understood as progressively breaking down, beginning a narrative with, for instance, a successful marriage and ending with marital failure. This would simply reverse rather than significantly rework the conventional marriage plot. Instead, contemporary writers suggest that the logic of temporal progress cannot adequately represent love; they make an argument for understanding love synchronically rather than diachronically. Implicit in marriage is divorce; coextensive with the One is the many that it obscures; inextricably linked to fantasmatic union is its fragmentation and failure.

DISARTICULATING FANTASY In order to produce a full picture of how contemporary novelists unmake love, in the chapters that follow I offer readings of both modernist and contemporary novels. This comparative study of modernist and contemporary loves elaborates the resonances and continuities among these distinctive aesthetic INTRODUCTION

shel17882.indb 23

23

10/25/16 11:29 AM

Copyrighted Material

and historical categories as well as marking out the crucial points of divergence between the modernist and contemporary treatments of love. The structure of the book therefore progresses from considering resonances and continuities in chapters 1 and 2 to suggesting how the contemporary novel departs from modernism in chapters 3 and 4. The first chapter, “Lesbian Fantasy,” delves more deeply into psychoanalytic theories of love. The structure of amorous fantasy as that which obscures disunity and division by producing the illusion of fusion and merger is central to this chapter. I show that psychoanalysis overwhelmingly associates the figure of the lesbian with the conservative, unity-producing structure of fantasmatic love. The argument of this chapter introduces the concept of fantasy to which my subsequent readings of love return. The chapter also locates the basis for contemporary rewritings of amorous fantasy in modernism. My readings of the lesbian in psychoanalysis inform an analysis of Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood (1936), which complicates the simple equation of love and the lesbian. Djuna Barnes’s picture of lesbian love resonates with contemporary revisions of love in general and lesbian love more specifically.

Contemporary revisions of love, I argue, exploit the contradictions of modernist love that Barnes brings to the fore so as to corrode the conception of love as redemptive and unifying. At the end of this chapter I briefly consider two contemporary rewritings of lesbian fantasy in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000) and Eleanor Catton’s The Rehearsal (2008).65 Smith and Catton return to the notion of the lesbian-in-love, infusing fantasy with forms of negativity that relate, in Smith’s text, to histories of racism and colonial aggression and, in Catton’s text, to loss and pain. Such contemporary experiments with lesbian love—which is to say, love as such—gesture toward the other queered, negative loves that I discuss in later chapters.

Explicitly taking up the relation between modernist love and contemporary revisions of it, chapter 2 dwells on the relation between modernist ambivalence in the “Penelope” chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and the contemporary return to and revision of such ambivalence in Hanif Kureishi’s Intimacy (1998).

This chapter engages with the possibility of amorous redemption as articulated in the continuities and differences between modernist and contemporary representations of love. I begin the chapter by offering a reading of the affirmation of love in a modernist text: specifically, Molly Bloom’s “yes” in the final chapter of Ulysses. Drawing on the work of Barbara Johnson, I argue that Molly’s af24

shel17882.indb 24

INTRODUCTION

10/25/16 11:29 AM

Copyrighted Material

firmation is undercut by an implicit and simultaneous “no.” In order to read Molly’s “yes,” I suggest we must suspend the law of noncontradiction, hearing in it affirmation and negation simultaneously. The “yes” both confirms and denies the possibility of amorous redemption.

Kureishi’s Intimacy takes seriously this modernist suspension of the law of noncontradiction. This contemporary revision of modernism magnifies the problem of love, “unmaking” love in perhaps the most corrosive way of all the contemporary texts I explore. Intimacy tells the story of the end of the narrator’s marriage, but the novel still clearly exemplifies what its title announces.

Kureishi proposes not just that love is contradictory—affirmative and negative at the same time—but also, as important, that love ends even as it begins. Kureishi’s novel achieves this goal by challenging us to consider why and how one might continue to believe in the possibility of amorous redemption. Kureishi allows us to see that all love is fueled by a passion for negativity that enables and dissolves the redemption that love seems to offer.

Building on Kureishi’s emphasis on the negative as well as the structure of amorous fantasy that chapter 1 lays bare, chapter 3, “Amorous Time,” investigates the temporality of love in Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty (2004).

I assert that love relies on a fundamentally nostalgic temporal structure. In order to make this argument, I include brief readings of additional contemporary and modernist texts that exemplify the way in which love typically relies on a nostalgic idea of perfection that exists only in a nonexistent past: D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), E. M. Forster’s Maurice (1971), and Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body (1994). Nostalgia’s conservative desire for the preservation of the old is evident in the novels I discuss. However, my reading of Hollinghurst’s novel turns on the fact that The Line of Beauty crucially reveals that the nostalgic desire for perfection in the past is always tainted by an awareness of negativity in the present. Even as nostalgia seeks pure love, Hollinghurst makes clear that it is impurity as much as purity that creates the nostalgic desire for the past. This chapter thus develops the concept of “amorous time,” which I differentiate from both “modernist time” and “queer time.”

Amorous time is a resolutely contemporary creation; it shows that love partakes of nostalgia while also revealing the disjunctive machinery that subtends nostalgic love. In this way the temporality of contemporary love, as in McEwan’s On Chesil Beach, is divided against itself.

INTRODUCTION

shel17882.indb 25

25

10/25/16 11:29 AM

Copyrighted Material

Chapter 4, “Cosmopolitan Love,” the final chapter of Unmaking Love, extends its argument to the global context of contemporary literature. Whereas the preceding chapters focus on “local” types of love—between individuals— this one inquires into the “global” function of love. Indeed, this global, cosmopolitan love stands out as the most distinctively contemporary revision of love in this book. For this reason, I focus only on contemporary novels: Hari Kunzru’s Transmission (2005) and Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled (1995).66 This chapter addresses the question of whether love can bring together a global collectivity. Kunzru depicts the world of Transmission as being united and divided through the force of globalization, the most salient figure for which being a computer virus. I argue that Kunzru insistently presents this computer virus as a figure not just for globalization but also for love. And Ishiguro’s novel plays on the possibility of being connected and disconnected simultaneously in the cosmopolitan world of his novel. Both works attend to the problem of difference as an unbridgeable gap that keeps individuals and collectivities from uniting. In this chapter I ultimately argue that if love is universal, if it unites the world, then it does so only to the extent that it universalizes the experience of not-being-united. No matter how many groups use love as the battle cry of liberation; no matter how many claims are made for the “common ground” of love, for love as the most human of conditions; no matter how many political causes rest on the idea that love makes all people in all times the same, love is the site of negativity and difference.

LOVE IS NOT LOVE The slogan for marriage equality, “love is love,” has widely circulated the mathematical equation whereby two ones add up to only one. Such a tautology, to be sure, demands equality, but in so doing disavows difference, ignores negativity, and obliterates the gaps that divide individuals from each other and, what is as important, from themselves. Unmaking Love can be understood as an extended argument against this naive tautology; it asserts that love is not love.

By redefining love as negative, the contemporary novel rejects completely the idea that love can produce loving merger, that 1 + 1 = 1. One, in contemporary fiction, is never just one. And just as one is not one, so, too, love is not love. Or to put this idea another way, misquoting Virginia Woolf, “nothing, 26

shel17882.indb 26

INTRODUCTION

10/25/16 11:29 AM

Copyrighted Material

not even love, is simply one thing.� Such a transformation of the concept of love in the contemporary novel has literary and political consequences. Amorous negativity as presented in these contemporary novels allows us to imagine new ways to engage with literary texts and opens up other avenues for literary critics invested in examining sexual, affective, global, and historical relations of affiliation. But, if we follow these avenues opened up by amorous negativity, we may not be happy with what we find. Indeed, these contemporary writers suggest that love may be utterly unrecognizable as love: violent, jealous, divisive, destructive, and possibly untenable. But even the untenable alternative is better than the constraining ideology of oneness. The fundamental premise from which the following chapters proceed is that love—whether local or global, here or there, straight or gay, male or female—is no longer the same, however much we might want it to be.

INTRODUCTION

shel17882.indb 27

27

10/25/16 11:29 AM