What is it that makes these remarriages possible? Cavell underlines the reawakened capacity in these couples to notice one another, to remember that if familiar, they are nonetheless strangers. They may be the same, but they are also different, together as a we, but also two distinct ‘I’s.
The philosopher of ethics Emmanuel Levinas, in a somewhat different register, deepens this understanding of love. He posits love as a uniquely ambiguous relation, at once possessive and deferential, between the self and the beloved. Though motivated by desire and need, love comes into authentic being only when a reciprocity is set up in the other: there is a simultaneous sense of needing without being able to bring the other into possession, the sense of being needed, but without surrendering to exploitation of one’s self. One could say that freedom and bondage here coexist. ‘Love remains a relation with the Other that turns into need, [a] need [that] still presupposes the total, transcendent exteriority of the Other, of the Beloved.’
In Cavell’s understanding, an erotic remarriage is underpinned by the ability to experience dailiness as a comedy–a festive sense that human beings are complicated, neither angels nor beasts, neither heroes nor villains, but creatures prone to weakness and fragility. Playfulness is a plus, an antidote to the earnestness and idealizations of romantic passion. The constant conversation, the tender or rebarbative exchange between couples, flirtation, keeps the flow of desire and togetherness alive, keeps them connected and devoted one to the other. Jane Austen would have concurred, as would Charlotte Brontë, whose Jane in her last words emphasizes the constant talk that fills her and Rochester’s days.
The romance of domesticity, with all its upheavals and occasional ruptures, its mingling of dream and dailiness, can triumph outside those luminous Hollywood comedies as well. Children, those intruding strangers, can sometimes help, at least at first. Sometimes, though it feels criminal to say it, so can affairs–the advent of a third party who makes us confront what we value most in love. At other times, in these days of wished-for fidelity, a therapist often enough provides that third party–the other with whom we can fall into ‘transferential’ love, emotionally re-enact our ways of loving and hating, and through whose triangulating presence we can realign our separateness and our togetherness.
In Netherland, his fine post-9/11 novel, Joseph O’Neill offers amongst much else a subtle portrait of a modern (re)marriage–one lived out in the generalized anxiety of the modern world and in the din of an advice culture which makes the trajectory of love banal, as chewed over as a second-hand sock.
Hans van den Broek, Dutch by origin, deeply introspective, is a high-flying New York-based oil analyst married to Rachel, a successful English lawyer. With their small son Jake they live in a loft in Tribeca until the destruction of the Twin Towers forces them to take up temporary residence at the Chelsea Hotel. Here they remain in a kind of paralysis until Rachel announces that she can’t face the insecurity of New York any longer. She wants to take their son home to London. She has realized, too, that she no longer enjoys a pace of work that takes her away from her child. Other things become clear as well, to both of them. A tiredness has taken over their coupled life, a malign weariness which is both part of and more than the apocalyptic moment. The narrative of their union to the exclusion of all others just isn’t right any more. It is Hans, not terror, that Rachel is fleeing: they have grown alone together. Love has turned into loss.
A separation ensues. Every two weeks or so, Hans flies to London to see his son. But without his family, he feels his life to be meaningless. He has no friends, no pastimes. A dullness which had already set in has become general. Only in one area does he find a rekindling of liveliness: cricket. The game allows him to revisit his childhood, and in a metaphoric way to come to terms with his mother’s death, part of the background of his inner paralysis. Cricket also sparks the important and unlikely friendship with Chuck Ramkissoon, a Trinidadian Gatsby who dreams the big dream while engaging in small-time racketeering. Chuck is both friend and in some respects a replacement father figure for the one Hans never had. Larger than life, traditional in his views of women, Chuck has both a good wife and a mistress. His gambling reminds Hans of his mother’s sometime lover. Through the friendship and the inner journey it allows Hans to undertake, he gradually comes back to life, though the coming back is to a new place, a subtly altered self.
The ongoing relationship with Rachel plays into the change. She has not been standing still either. On one of his visits to London, Hans realizes, through something his son says, that she has now engaged in a serious affair. He is angry, jealous. He sleeps with other women and eventually, after he has moved to London to be closer to his son, even enjoys it. Time, that proverbial healer, passes, and just when it seems that Hans has really at last left Rachel, that he can take his marriage or leave it, she announces that she has broken up with her lover.
‘He’s fucking someone else,’ Rachel said.
‘Good,’ I said. ‘That means I can fuck you.’
They do–with the ‘minimum of variety and history: our old bag of tricks belonged to those other lovers and those other bodies’. They are new to each other, separated out from their old melded skins. They only kiss after two months–and in mid-kiss Rachel suggests, ‘We should see a marriage counsellor.’ They move into a house together as well.
When the marriage counsellor asks Rachel why she had stayed married to Hans, she doesn’t answer as Hans fears she will–that she had tragically decided to settle for a reliable man, or as he hopes, that he bowled her over–but rather because ‘she felt a responsibility to see me through life and the responsibility felt like a happy one’. Hans is overwhelmed by her response. It puts into words and into reality exactly how he feels, though with a subtle difference. ‘Rachel saw our reunion as a continuation. I felt differently: that she and I had gone our separate ways and subsequently had fallen for third parties to whom fortunately we were already married.’
In O’Neill’s version of the contemporary comedy of remarriage, love is a kind of omnibus. You can get on, then off. Fortunately, you can also get on again, though you’ll have to have walked for a while along that road of life which is always full of blunderings and detours.
As for happiness, though we carry on seeking it in marriage and elsewhere, it is not what people do best. Yet if we didn’t have its opposite, we wouldn’t know how to gauge or recognize it. And marriage or long-term cohabitation–once we have learned to live generously with our own and the other’s limitations, once we have acceded to the frustrations life and age inevitably bring–may be our best shot at it.
In his fine poem ‘An Arundel Tomb’, Philip Larkin examines an effigy of a noble couple and sees with ‘a sharp tender shock’ that the recumbent figures have their hands entwined. With the dispassionate gaze of a modern, he expresses our unwilling, sceptical, yet ‘almost true’ hopes of love.
The stone fidelity
They hardly meant has come to be
Their final blazon, and to prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.
PART FOUR
Love in Triangles
A woman we love rarely satisfies all our needs, and we deceive her with a woman whom we do not love.
Marcel Proust
The laws of love are… stronger than human laws.
Honoré de Balzac
Adulterous Passions
In the annals of love, adultery has ever played a raucous part. Being crazy about the ‘you’ who belongs to someone else unleashes a havoc that can reverberate through the generations.
Paris, in bedding and stealing away Helen, Queen of Sparta and wife to Menelaus, begets the destruction of Troy and brings down mass carnage on the victorious Greeks. Clytemnestra, lost to lust for her lover Aegisthus and maddened by her husband Agamemnon’s earlier sacrifice of their daughter, murders him in the bath on his return from Troy. She is in turn murdered by her son, urged on by h
is sister’s fury.
Born of passion and the irrational, adultery breeds more of the same, engendering, in its antique heroic mode, death and devastation which catapult through the generations. Eros and Thanatos are close kin, the Greeks tell us, well before Freud linked desire and the death-wish. Death, the dark side of oblivion, haunts passion untamed by the social constraints, the contractual arrangements and the daily habits of marriage. Making one out of two, possessing the other, is an annihilating business, all the more so if rules are being broken. La petite mort, as the French nickname orgasm and its temporary oblivion, can catapult into the larger one.
The Ten Commandments enshrine adultery as a major prohibition. Number seven of the Decalogue states: ‘You shall not commit adultery’, while number ten echoes it, doubling its force by moving inward from the realm of action to that of desire: ‘You shall not covet your neighbour’s wife.’ The New Testament, always alert to the importance of policing thoughts, further elaborates: ‘That whosever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart’ (Matthew 5.28). The strength of the prohibition against adultery, the severe punishment for the act which all the major religions pronounce, is a certain sign that the transgression was widespread–as, of course, it continues to be.
One might disingenuously ask why such a common human act is conceived as so fundamentally transgressive? The answer is simple enough. If marriage constitutes our primary social and legal bond, creating that unit, the home, through which society regenerates itself, then a breach of that bond is a ‘criminal’ act which challenges both social order and social cohesion. Adultery is both revolutionary and treacherous. Aeschylus in Agamemnon pinpoints the treachery by underlining that Paris violates not only Helen but the crucial rules of hospitality, a form of love that functions as a bringing together rather than a tearing apart. Paris is, after all, a guest, a stranger in Menelaus’ house: that social love, which hospitality is, welcomes strangers, but in welcoming them incurs a debt of honourable behaviour, not theft.
This was Paris: he came
To the house of the sons of Atreus,
Stole the woman away, and shamed
The guest’s right of the board shared. (Chorus, lines 399–402)
Having transgressed, having turned hospitality into hostility, Paris takes to Troy not only Helen, but a dowry which includes war and death.
Adulterous passion may be ecstatic, but it is also deadly, particularly for women. Guardians of hearth and home, their person long their husband’s possession, women’s passionate transgression is ever greater than the male’s. It brings with it the danger of miscegenation, a bastard in the familial nest, poised like a cuckoo to endanger the hereditary line. The Greeks permitted concubinage. Up to a point, so did the Abrahamic religions. But wives were severely punished for even presumed infidelity. In Western literature, male adulterers fare far better than their female equivalents. Adultery, after all, doesn’t mean ‘sex for adults’ as the worldly quip would have it, but takes its meaning from ‘adulterate’, to pollute or contaminate, by mixing the wrong combination of things together. ‘If society depends for its existence on certain rules, governing what may be combined and what should be kept separate,’ Tony Tanner writes, ‘then adultery, by bringing the wrong things together in the wrong places (or the wrong people in the wrong beds), offers an attack on those rules, revealing them to be arbitrary rather than absolute.’
In our own Western, post-patriarchal and largely secular times, in which rules are looser and a certain hybridity championed, punishment is not quite so harsh. We draw the boundaries of the permissible differently. Yet some kind of punishment persists, particularly where public figures in the Anglo-American world are concerned. President Clinton and a variety of other American and British politicians have been persecuted for their affairs by the media and by opposition politicians, however forgiving their wives may have been. Persecuted, too, despite the evidence of rampant hypocrisy, given that so-called upholders of family values were often soon themselves outed as adulterers. Tiger Woods strayed and lost his sponsors, if not immediately his wife, and made a mind-numbingly long public apology. England football captain John Terry was stripped of his captaincy for allegedly bedding the wife of a team-mate: private pain was augmented by public humiliation, and social order was only partly restored by the intervention of the coach, Fabio Capello. And the tabloids could then blame England’s poor performance in the World Cup of 2010 on their former captain’s adultery! The personal transparency demanded of our public figures, full confessions of where they stray and betray, together with the public clamour scapegoating their acts, may be evidence of our own unease. We demand retribution all the more vocally when betrayals mirror, or are projections of, our own transgressive desires.
In the midst of the eighties backlash against single professional women, the film Fatal Attraction (1987) acted as a moral warning of the havoc adultery can breed. It turned a casual weekend infidelity between the married attorney, Daniel (Michael Douglas), and the publisher, Alex (Glenn Close), into a nightmare of bloody proportions. An increasingly deranged Alex stalks the straying Daniel, kidnaps his daughter and tries to murder his wife, only to be shot by her in a grotesque finale. The family must be kept intact against all odds, the film loudly proclaims, all the while underlining the sexual danger of voracious single women.
Despite early promiscuity, despite the prevalence of prior relationships before the moment of commitment, despite serial unions, no-fault divorce and remarriage, we continue to believe or wish to believe in sexual exclusivity and punish infidelity and adultery. A conviction seemingly born out of inner choice and idealization, rather than strict convention, arguably calls for greater blame–as well as guilt and self-and-other flagellation–when a partner strays.
But why are we prostrated by a partner’s betrayal, when we know the act is so common?
Betrayal calls upon our deepest feelings. It involves, the Oxford English Dictionary states, ‘A violation of trust or confidence, an abandonment’ as well as ‘A treacherous giving up to an enemy’. Deceit, cheating, perfidy, violation of faith, misleading, seducing–all fall into the purview of betrayal. The philosopher Judith Shklar includes it amongst her ‘ordinary vices’, reflecting that there is ‘an irreducible experience in betrayal: desertion. This brings into play the greatest of childhood anxieties, the fear of abandonment. In quitting a bonded group, an equally primeval fear is stirred: of the failure to distinguish kin and stranger.’ Betrayal at the level of the couple, our primary social bond, is tantamount to treason in state terms. Yet, as Shklar also points out, people invite betrayals. ‘If one idolizes or imposes excessive moral demands… one may well be betrayed unintentionally by the overburdened person… It is not the idol’s fault that he has feet of clay.’
Thorny contradictions rumble through our ideals of coupledom. Our marriages are based on a romantic notion of passionate merger for ever, an intimacy in which our inner lives are shared. Betrayal brings with it the spectre of the dissolution not only of the couple, but of the betrayed partner’s very being. Losing the other becomes losing oneself, as if we were all babes at the breast and had grown no thicker skin or survival skills since. Simultaneously, we live under a cultural order that tells us we’re entitled to develop our own individuality and can continue to fulfil our unmet needs, those lacks left over from early childhood, for the entirety of our lives. What more common way of developing our individuality than falling in love or in lust? Would it not be self-betrayal to renounce the passion that promises transformation in the name of a deadening or warring coupledom? In this thicket of inconsistencies, the perils of adultery loom, all the while giving off a sulphurous glow.
While people suffer and harm for their adulteries, they also continue to commit them and ‘adulterate’ their marriages. Perhaps because we grow up in triangles, we go on to recreate them, sometimes over and over again. Even our earliest blissful oneness with Mummy, first site
of our romantic possessiveness, was, after all, shared–with Daddy or those other siblings in the wings. Third parties shadow our coupled lives in a variety of ways: old lovers or partners hover in the anterooms of our minds; women or men spied on streets or on Internet sites intrude into our minds and into our togetherness. In Monogamy Adam Phillips notes, ‘The couple is a resistance to the intrusion of the third, but in order for it to last it is indispensable to have enemies. That is why the monogamous can’t live without them. When we are two, we are together. In order to be a couple, we need to be three.’
The Way of All Marriage
In older worldly times, dominated by aristocratic patterns of marriage based largely on property, adultery was often conceived in a sardonic vein, whatever religious, moral or political edicts might (hypocritically) demand. Adultery was simply the way of all marriages that could afford it.
Balzac’s Physiology of Marriage, a kind of guide to the wedded state written under the heady influence of Rabelais and Sterne, was begun when Balzac was only twenty-six. Here he plumbs, sometimes in cool, sometimes in hyperbolic, vein the secrets of both the male and the female mind to satirize the hypocrisies and expose the conventions which attended the institution. Still a seething, ambitious and relatively innocent provincial poised to take on le tout Paris, Balzac was granted insight into the feminine psyche by his generous mistress, Madame de Bernay, who at the age of forty-eight and after nine children took the young genius on as her lover. It was her last passion and his first. It’s worth noting here that in the paradigm of love between a married older woman and a young man, which takes in all the romantic and courtly tropes, the affair acts as a civilizing experience for the man, a kind of finishing school in life. In Balzac’s case, in the writing of his book, a second and younger woman about town also revealed her secrets to him. As for men, he knew their ways only too well and had merely to look around him.
All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion Page 25