Love and Friendship. - book review

Public Interest, Wntr, 1994 by Diana Schaub

IN THE FINAL LINES of Love and Friendship,(*) Allan Bloom tells the story of a lecture at which students unveiled a banner declaring "Great Sex is better than Great Books." Bloom's response: "Sure, but you can't have one without the other." To be humanly satisfying, the intercourse of bodies depends on the activity of the mind or soul or imagination.

The adjective which usually accompanies sex today, especially on college campuses, is "safe" not "great." While the counselors mean "safe" to be taken in a physical sense, Bloom is more struck by the preoccupation with psychic safety. Condom or not, modern couplings are self-protective: the very casualness of it all is indicative of timidity and an unwillingness to hazard serious engagement. Longing, devotion, sacrifice, danger have disappeared and with them has gone amplitude of soul, the full sweep that connects the depths of our being with the heights.

With the natural lines of communication between the low and the high severed (by debunkers like Freud and Nietzsche), eros undergoes a kind of detumescence. The lower end of the erotic experience has become "sex," a physical act stripped of its emotional meaning, and thereby rendered thin and flat and scientific (alternatively, sex may be livened up by brutality to become "screwing"). The upper end of the erotic experience is no longer recognized as such. The great books are read either as unconscious manifestations of their authors' neuroses or as power plays by dead white European males. There is now no point of contact between the real concerns of individuals (who in their untutored way continue still to seek human connection) and the academic theories foisted upon them. It is this "fall of eros" which Bloom addresses. If The Closing of the American Mind diagnosed the problem, Love and Friendship delivers the cure. It is not an institutional cure--not, for instance, a proposal for a Great Books curriculum. It is instead a very personal witness of the place a few select books assumed in Bloom's own life and self-understanding. There are long essays on Rousseau's Emile and Plato's Symposium, with shorter essays on Stendhal's The Red and the Black, Austen's Pride and Prejudice, Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, Montaigne's "Of Friendship," and five Shakespeare plays (Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra, Measure for Measure, Troilus and Cressida, and The Winter's Tale). Bloom conveys very palpably the excitement these books can offer, the kinds of questions they raise, the insights they prompt. While Bloom's involvement with these books is intense and long-standing, it is not exclusive; he invites the reader to a menage a trois. The sentimental education one experiences is a refutation of all the fiddlers and debasers. This is not to say that Bloom's interpretations are always persuasive. Despite his penetrating criticisms of Romanticism, and the psychological acuity he demonstrates in uncovering romantic illusions, there is, in Bloom, an irrepressible, almost swooning self-identification with figures like Julien Sorel and Emma Bovary. Moreover, he believes that their creators identified with them as well: "Julien seems to represent the fantasy life of Stendhal, what this unprepossessing writer would like to have been like"; "Emma and Flaubert are full of longing for ideals that cannot be.... They share defeat." However, even taking the full measure of the artist's hatred for the bourgeoisie, why must that lead either artist or audience to embrace the defective, alienated beings that the bourgeoisie extrudes? Indeed, one objection against the bourgeoisie might be that all it produces in reaction is the anemic and febrile Emma. Alternatively, one might, like Bloom, acknowledge the essential identity of Flaubert and Emma, but, unlike Bloom, see it as grounds for aesthetic and moral criticism. Henry James is a reliable guide here. Our complaint is that Emma Bovary, in spite of the nature of her consciousness and in spite of her reflecting so much that of her creator, is really too small an affair.... |Flaubert's~ "gift" was of the greatest, a force in itself, in virtue of which he is a consummate writer; and yet there are whole sides of life to which it was never addressed and which it apparently quite failed to suspect as a field of exercise. If he never approached the complicated character in man or woman--Emma Bovary is not the least little bit complicated--or the really furnished, the finely civilized, was this because, surprisingly, he could not? L'ame francaise at all events shows in him but ill.... This touches on the strange weakness of his mind, his puerile dread of the grocer, the bourgeois, the sentiment that in his generation and the preceding ... sterilized a whole province of French literature. That worthy citizen ought never to have kept a poet from dreaming.

Stendhal, Austen, Flaubert, and Tolstoy are all read in the rather broad wake of Rousseau. None of them, with the exception of Tolstoy, is held to be an unadulterated Rousseauan, but Rousseau's influence, even when his ideas are being rejected or corrected, is insisted upon. Bloom's familiarity with Rousseau is intimate and immensely fruitful. The most absorbing of the short essays in Part I covers perhaps the least likely of Rousseauans, Jane Austen.