Morning, Noon, and Night: Finding the Meaning of Life's Stages Through Books (18 page)

“Stony limits cannot hold love out,” Romeo declares, and the phrase has a carceral feel to it: walls cannot contain this newborn desire of ours, and much of the tragedy’s pathos has to do with those walls, which can indeed be glimpsed in the obstacles of the story: the feud between the Montagues and the Capulets, the curse even of name itself, as suggested by Juliet’s immortal lines “What’s in a name? that which we call a rose / By any other word would smell as sweet.” There is something quite modern in these two young lovers’ awareness of their entrapment in a nominal scheme that has nothing to do with the exalted feeling that courses through them, making them feel that love is, or should be, a territory of its own, free of the laws that otherwise govern our affairs. Romeo and Juliet’s courage in defying family prohibition is on the order of a declaration of independence.

Love remakes the young, recomposes them, gives them dimensions they did not have before. Juliet, though she is not yet fourteen, displays a sublime generosity along just these lines, telling us that her love for Romeo mocks all measures: “My bounty is as boundless as the sea, / My love as deep; the more I give to thee, / The more I have, for both are infinite.” If I had to single out a line from this play that spoke most perfectly the miracle of young love, it would be those words. Loss, gain, and the entire zero-sum logic of our finite dealings—I give you this, and I no longer have it—are cashiered in this beautiful utterance. Brave new world—a new physics, a new metaphysics. One cannot easily imagine older, more experienced lovers feeling quite this way.

But it is not to be. Their love will be consummated—at least they have that—but it will have no future. Why? Some have felt that the parents are fully to blame, and of course the feud is a crucial piece of the puzzle, not to mention old Capulet’s choleric rants. Others have said that society is at fault, and that too has its truth. And it has been claimed that they simply have rotten luck, also unarguable, for the final scene with Juliet waking up after Romeo has swallowed the poison, culminating in a double death because the postal service failed, well, that is hard to take.
If only
, we say to ourselves, thinking: Why must cousin Tybalt cross paths with Mercutio? Why must Romeo return just in time for avenging his death? Why must Romeo be unapprised of the Friar’s fake poison scheme? Why must Balthasar tell Romeo that Juliet is now dead? Above all: Why must poor Romeo arrive in the tomb exactly at the moment he does, since a mere few extra minutes would have cleared up all errors?
Then
, we think: love could have had a chance.

But perhaps Shakespeare is reaching deeper than all this in his severe plot. One of the most endearing aspects of the play (which makes it irresistible onstage) is the sheer exuberance and impatience of these two young people. One remembers the scene where the Nurse returns to Juliet out of breath and toying with her young charge before giving her the report she is so desperate to have: that Romeo is prepared to marry her at once. We identify with such scenes, even if we are old and gray, for love boiled in our veins long ago, and we can remember the urgency of it all. Out of breath the Nurse is, and we laugh; out of breath, permanently, both lovers will be, at play’s close, and we weep. This love story is indeed breathless, in a rush, urgent. But can time be bent to one’s ends? Can pulsing blood be a fault?

Even Juliet cautions her lover not to move so quickly: “It is too rash, too unadvised, too sudden, / Too like the lightning, which does cease to be / Ere one can say, ‘It lightens.’ ” Does lightning make durable light?
Son et lumière:
the sound of the thunder and the brilliance of the light, yes, these are the markers of ecstatic love, but can such a spectacle last? The Friar pronounces similar words to Romeo in an effort to slow him down: “These violent delights have violent ends / And in their triumph die like fire and powder, / Which as they kiss consume. The sweetest honey / Is loathsome in his own deliciousness, / And in the taste confounds the appetite. / Therefore love moderately, long love doth so; / Too swift arrives as tardy as too slow.” I think Shakespeare is not simply peddling the wisdom of graybeards but rather telling us something about the makeup and fate of desire itself, of ecstasy itself. The Friar’s figures are arresting: desire is destroyed by consummation, just as fire and powder end in explosion and quiescence. The sweetest things can be taken only in moderation, else they turn loathsome by excess. Is fiery young love sustainable?

Romeo and Juliet
is certainly not a cautionary fable. And both Romeo and Juliet grow and mature in front of our eyes, as they take the measure of their new selves and new responsibilities toward love, toward each other. But who can fail to see that its view of pleasure and delight is shadowed by death and destruction? Over and over, death is figured as the ultimate lover, the one destined for Juliet—she says it more than once, her mother and her father both say it, in heat but also in prophecy—the one we see at play’s end, when Romeo himself thinks her dead in the tomb and swears to stay with her, to prevent the “lean abhorrèd monster” from being her “paramour.” And even in the play’s vitals, in its evocation of vibrant physical love, in the very caresses between two young people infatuated with each other, we are invited to see something darker. I am thinking of the lovely initial encounter between Romeo and Juliet with its elaborate wordplay on pilgrims, praying, hands, and lips, closing with the young man twice pressing his lips to hers, invoking the language of religion and sweetly inverting it into that of love: “Sin from my lips? O trespass sweetly urged! / Give me my sin again.” How ominous all this looks at play’s end, when each of the lovers has experimented with poisons—Juliet’s temporary, Romeo’s permanent—and each, seeing the supine body of the loved one, proffers a final kiss. Listen to Juliet: “I will kiss thy lips, / Haply some poison yet doth hang on them, / To make me die with a restorative.” It does not work; Juliet dies by stabbing herself with a dagger.

But how can we not glimpse a grisly poetic truth here: that kissing is venomous as well as ecstatic, that it can transport us out of life entirely? This immortal story of impatient pure beautiful young love is saturated with duels and poisons—sword fights litter the stage with cadavers (Mercutio, Tybalt, Paris), Juliet’s mother wants nothing more than to have Romeo poisoned abroad; Juliet offers to give him the poison herself in a savage line of erotic violence, “To wreak the love I bore my cousin [Tybalt] / Upon his body [Romeo’s] that hath slaughtered him”—and we are obliged to ask if they are not, in the final analysis, versions of each other. There is nothing cynical or morbid in such a view; on the contrary, Shakespeare has remained true to this vision of ecstatic young love as an exit from all the precincts that formerly contained us. All of us have heard that the French call orgasm
“la petite mort”;
Shakespeare has wanted to celebrate the wonder and beauty of first love, capable of reordering the world and transcending all limits. Except death’s, which is of the party from curtain up to curtain down.

Romeo and Juliet may be star-crossed, but they are not class-crossed; Montagues and Capulets are equal, but we cannot imagine Romeo falling in love with a servant girl. The Chevalier des Grieux, the young, aristocratic, sensitive protagonist of Prévost’s novel of 1731, destined for a high rank in the Church, comes across the ravishing Manon, a girl of lower station being packed off to a convent as a curb to her love of pleasure, and he is altered forever. He runs the gamut of the coming-of-age tales I have outlined. He is innocent (hasn’t noticed the difference between the sexes up to now, he tells us) and will become dreadfully experienced (coping with the trials entailed by his tumultuous love affair with Manon). Hence he will be as transformed as Romeo and Juliet, but this time the “rebirth” brought on by love has a darker hue, for it wrecks all prior identity and hurtles the young lover into an outright war with the authorities of his time. This volatile yet tragic story of young love in the eighteenth century is prismatic: it instructs us about not only the intricacies of the human heart but also those of the
ancien régime
and the hustling Parisian culture, where sexual favors can be bought but class lines cannot be crossed. What I am terming “instruction” in the affairs of both heart and society comes across in the novel as a series of bewildering collisions, conferring on this story a sense of breathlessness and even trauma.

Smitten by her beauty, Des Grieux abandons his religious path, saves Manon from the convent, and the two of them elope. Burning with sexual hunger, they make love already in the carriage bringing them to Paris. Des Grieux is initiated into pleasure. But the little money he has cannot last long in the big city, and very soon he encounters the first betrayal: Manon seems melancholy at supper, there is a knock on the door, he is hauled off by three men whom he recognizes as his father’s lackeys, his older brother awaits him in a carriage, he is returned home to Father. Only there does he learn that Manon has acquired an older, wealthy suitor and that she was party to his abduction. His father chastises him for his simplicity, even offers to buy him a pretty woman, but the wound is too deep. The young man is angry, hurt, brokenhearted, but this quasi-penal stint at home for six months reorients him toward spiritual horizons, and after much diligence the great day comes when he is to make his public oration at the Sorbonne in recognition of his ecclesiastical gifts and vocation.

You know what has to happen. Manon has heard of the event, comes to hear him, and then asks to have a few words with him in private in the parlor of Saint-Sulpice.
Coup de foudre
. They are inflamed with each other, he again bolts from the Church, they launch again into their tempestuous love life, a life always doomed by the same recurring fate: when money is short, separation will occur. That is the very structure of the novel: the young man’s desperate efforts to keep his mistress with him, undone over and over, often enough by fate and bad luck, sometimes by the girl’s own machinations. The beautiful Manon always lands on her feet: both older and younger men covet her, bid for her favors, and she knows her market value. At one point, after leaving him for an older man, she assures Des Grieux in a letter that she loves him, that she will return to him, but says, “But don’t you see, my poor darling, that loyalty [
la fidélité
is Prévost’s term] is a silly virtue in the pass we are in? Do you really think we can love each other with nothing to eat?” It is, in a sense, the novel’s most revolutionary perception: matter trumps all. She seems born knowing this.

The wellborn Des Grieux cannot fathom such materialist logic. He repeatedly explodes with wrath, jealousy, and tears, so much so that others are often stunned by his performance. One sees a clear pattern: happiness, shortage of funds, betrayal, rage and misery, reunion. The young man’s affective fireworks constitute perhaps the novel’s most dramatic movements: the heart is a powder keg, a volcano, a transformative force that nothing else in life rivals. The very plot of the narrative, keyed to separation, ensures these eruptions at a regular clip. Young love is taking a beating, for it is under constant attack. And Des Grieux routinely casts oaths against the very heavens, claiming that love is the noblest feeling on Earth, that his father is an ogre for not allowing him to marry Manon, that the world is a corrupt place, and so on. But he never stops loving her.

I have taught this novel for more than four decades, and my students are always impatient with the poor Chevalier. Why doesn’t he get a job? they ask. He can’t, I reply, since his social station prevents it. (By the way, how does he get the funds he has? He learns to be a professional cardsharp, and he later justifies this to his father by claiming that many of the highest-born young people in France do the same thing.) Above all, my students are mystified that the Chevalier stays with his paramour. Given that she routinely cheats on him, why doesn’t he break off the relationship? “Addiction” is frequently the trope they invoke for understanding this tortured love affair; he is besotted with her, he has lost all judgment, he is sick, he is bent on self-destruction. I see with great clarity that undergraduates in the twenty-first century are not likely to emulate the Chevalier des Grieux when it comes to their love life. And I wonder what has happened to passionate young love, to the sort of tempestuous thing that sweeps Romeo, Juliet, and Des Grieux right off their feet and wrecks their lives.

Manon Lescaut
is a classic in French literature in part because it conveys with great power the turbulence, intensity, and life-altering character of love, of sexual passion. Prévost is unrivaled when it comes to writing the shock and vehemence of infatuation, when it comes to showing how feeble a thing willpower is when desire and irresistible pleasure are in the mix. Des Grieux is one of literature’s most mercurial figures: he waxes lyrical when he has Manon to himself, and he rages like a hurricane when she is taken from him. He himself senses that love may bring ecstatic feelings to you but that it also robs you of your core identity. Early on, in the seminary, when Manon came to him after months of separation, he realized that his life was no longer under his control; he puts it like this:

This is, I submit, the landscape of passionate first love: a place of abduction, an oneiric place akin to nightmare, where you have no bearings, no control, no freedom. You are a hostage. For all the sentimentality one may find in this tale, such passages announce something dark and unwelcome about the tyranny of feeling. It is, with its dreamscape, a kind of awful awakening, an initiation into a new regime. Addiction, my students say; “terrorism” would be just as apt a term. Volition has no place here, and I suspect that is one reason my students don’t like it.