There is a variety of love more powerful and lasting than that union with the other which beguiles us with its sensual pleasure, and more powerful and lasting than that platonic variety in which we contemplate the mystery of the other and thus become ourselves; mistresses grow old or pass beyond us; the flesh weakens; friends die, and the children fulfill, and thus betray, that potentiality in which we first beheld them. It is a variety of low in which you…have found yourself for much of your life, and it is one in which our poets were happiest; it is the love of the scholar for his text, the philosopher for his idea, the poet for his word. Thus Ovid is not alone in his northern exile at Tomis, nor are you alone in your far Damascus, where you have chosen to devote your remaining years to your books. No living object is necessary for such pure love; and thus it is universally agreed that this is the highest form of love, since it is for an object that approaches the absolute.
And yet in some ways it may be the basest form of love. For if we strip away the high rhetoric that so often surround this notion, it is revealed simply as a love of power…It is the power that the philosopher has over the disembodied mind of his reader, the power that the poet has over the living mind and heart of his listener. And if the minds and hearts and spirits of those who under the spell of that appointed power are lifted, that is an accident which is not essential to the love, or even its purpose.
I have begun to see that it is this kind of love that has impelled me through the years, thought it has been necessary for me to conceal the fact from myself as well as from others. "Augustus to Nicolaus of Damascus"--John Williams Augustus: A Novel (306)
In the face of death and delirium (when one can be "more reasonable than most men"), there are, we are told, three kinds of love:
- One consequent the pleasure of, let's say, body-coupling. (This is fleeting.)
- One (Platonic) consequent our intellectual awareness of our lack of knowledge about our intimates—a form of unstable, self-knowledge that is revealed to be an imprisonment.
-
An enduring love that the scholar-craftsman feels for one's necessary creations, which – upon further reflection – is revealed as love of power.*
It is no surprise that an emperor would identify his own ruling passion with a love of power; nor surprising that a novelist would have him say so. It is a bit more surprising that at the end of this novel about the art of ruling, which is simultaneously about the art of parenting, the novelist would allow his reader to entertain the thought that her immersion in the written text is a form of subjugation to the author's craft.
So, we are back in familiar terrain of the modern novel: the novelist as prosecutor of his own craft. We might say that the main defense of the novelist is that he acts from "necessity" ((305) or "destiny" (295)). While the propagandist's utility for the novel can be aimed at directly (recall), if there is genuine utility to the novel – elevating minds toward greatness (recall this post on Grunberg/Coetzee) – it is an unintentional byproduct of the love of power. (This is the secondary defense.) Williams lets us enjoy the irony that the emperor is wiser on the novel's possibility, and takes it more seriously, than his poet-propagandist (recall Maecenas here and here). But this very possibility is also destabilizing psychologically and politically; for the novel leaves no doubt about the dissatisfaction that follows from wise rule. Our excellence is revealed under duress (privation), not in prosperity.
This writer's necessity is not opposed to freedom (although there seems little room for the readers's/subjects' freedom--John Williams's sudden popularity offers a window on our limited aspirations). On the contrary, Augustus is recorded as claiming:
I suspect that I have admired the poets they seemed to me the freest and therefore the most affectionate of men of men, and I have felt a closeness to them because I have seen in the tasks they set for themselves a certain similarity to the task that long ago I set for myself.
The poet contemplates the chaos of experience, the confusion of accident, and the incomprehensible realms of possibility—which to say the world in which we all so intimately live that few of us take the trouble to examine it. The fruits of that contemplation are the discovery, or the invention, of some small principle of harmony and order that may be isolated from the disorder which obscures it, and the subjection of that discovery to those poetic laws which last make it possible. (295)
So, the love of power expresses itself in the creative act of ordering, or re-ordering, of that which is ultimately disorderly and in that order isolates some principle (of harmony). Williams leaves no doubt that this is as true for the poet as the philosopher as the legislator--a most Deleuzian thought (Williams and Deleuze both read their Seneca). With this difference that that the legislator is doomed to discover that the "world is not poem; and the laws" accomplish only "unintended" purposes. A further difference is hinted at, but not stated: that the poet-philosopher can know that she has love of power (and, thus, echoing Hume, attain philosophical wisdom), while the would be legislator-ruler may have to hide this fact about himself.
Let's briefly return to Stoner on love. Recall:
In his forty-third year William Stoner learned what others, much younger, had learned before him: that the person one loves at first is not the person one loves at last, and that love is not an end but a process through which one person attempts to know another.― John Edward Williams, Stoner
This I ended up analyzing as:
- The person one loves at first is not the person one loves at last.
- That love is not an end but a process through which one person attempts to know another and unintentionally learns more about oneself as reflected in the insights and actions of the other.
So, romantic, bourgeois love is revealed as a blending of the first and second kinds of love in our (Augustan) taxonomy, that is, fleeting. Even so, it is the form of love that facilitates, perhaps, the best possibility of self-knowledge.
One might think that Augustus's taxonomy is incomplete (even by the novel's lights). There is also parental love. To be clear parental love, needs to be distinguished from love for "a child," which is treated as the "purest form" of the (Platonic) "mystery of one that" one "can never be, of selves that" one "has never been." For "within the child are potentialities that he can hardly imagine, that self which is the furthest remove from the observer." (305)
The completion of Augustus's taxonomy is to be found in the idea that,
4. Parental love is that which survives betrayal. (307)
In fact, the most chilling – and, perhaps, most uplifting – thought of Williams's sober (political) philosophy is that such betrayal is inevitable. We might, then, say that John Williams's novel is a re-telling of the Oedipus myth from the perspective of a possible King Laius, who -- on the authority of some poets -- was willing to sacrifice his son to preserve his city, but in this version escapes his meeting with destiny.
*Joining Vico and Nietzsche.
Comments