Freud, love and chapter 13 and 14
Posted by Kate on October 29, 1997 at 22:30:24:
In response to The End of the Novel of Love, written by Cassia on October 29, 1997 at 19:06:22
I sometimes envy anyone who lived before Freud. I envy that everything was not discussed and dissected and catagorised to death in their world. That it was possible to go to a lover new; without having seen everything there is to see time and again in snippets of film. I envy their sense of wonder at their bodies and the discovery of the bed. I envy that things between two people could be kept between two people. I envy their privacy. I envy that they never had to doubt that they had hearts, minds and souls as well as bodies and that these things mattered.
] How could love become to weak an element to drive a novel? Does this mean that our hearts no longer matter? That we are what we eat, buy, own? Is there no more room for the sublime emotions in the world?
Maud and Roland have this EXACT discussion in Chapters 13 and 14
Chapter 13:
Roland talks about how the metaphor of sex takes over everything (he's been reading Leonora on feminie descriptions of landscape) "all those gloves, a minute ago, we were playing a professional game of hooks and eyes - medieval gloves, giants gloves, Blanche Glover, Balzac's gloves, the sea-anemone's ovaries - and it all reduced like boiling jam to - human sexuality..."
Roland: "We are so knowing.... And we paint everything with this metaphor (ie sex)
Maud: "...We live in the truth of what Freud discovered. Whether or not we like it..."
Chapter 14:
Maud: "...about our generation and sex. We see it everywhere. As you say. We are very knowing. ...We know we are driven by desire, but we can't see as they did, can we? We never say the word Love, do we - we know it's a suspect ideological construct - especially Romantic Love - so we have to make a real effort of imagination to know what it felt like to be them here, believing in those things - Love - themselves - that what they did mattered"
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