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This week, we commemorate a holiday associated with Saint Valentine, traditionally considered the patron saint of lovers. In honor of St. Valentine's Day, I have a question for you about love as represented in (you guessed it!) literature. Who could put such a question better than Shakespeare? So I'll take a break and let him ask you for me. In A Midsummer Night's Dream, Theseus argues that the impulse to fall in love is like the impulse to create poetry--both are a form of madness:
Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover, and the poet
Are of imagination all compact.
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold:
That is the madman. The lover, all as frantic,
See Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt.
The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven,
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
Such tricks hath strong imagination
That, if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy.
Or in the night, imagining some fear,
How easy is a bush supposed a bear! (5.1.2-20)
Love and literature are created by the excesses of our imagination, and both are no more reasonable than a lunatic's ravings. They invent out of nothingness "a local habitation and a name" (one of my favorite lines from Shakespeare) and pretend it's a real place they've discovered. What do you think--does Theseus have a point here? (On a different note, what about his nasty disparagement of Egyptians? The sentiment contrasts provocatively with one of Shakespeare’s famous Dark Lady sonnets (130), "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun.")
Compare Theseus' argument with Plato's Symposium, which lauds the potential for love to carry our imaginations beyond the ordinary givens of everyday life: here, love is valuable precisely because it provides an intimation of the transcendent--an intimation of "the forms of things unknown," to borrow Shakespeare's phrase. In this regard, it's interesting that we often forget that Valentine's Day is named after a saint, since our culture generally makes an unofficial religion of romantic love (for evidence, just listen to any "top 40" radio station for an hour and figure the percentage of songs that portray romantic love as the end-all-be-all, the alpha and omega, in life). Popularly, we often seem to side strongly with Plato's Symposium: love gives a kind of "religious" meaning to life in that it suggests we are connected to a reality more meaningful than that of ordinary, everyday existence (to relate this back to Shakespeare, one might describe such ordinary existence as "sublunary"--does being "moonstruck," then, make us lunatics or prophets?).
This is one of the most ancient debates: what is the nature of love? I invite you to join the debate, using literature as your vehicle. Try to find a literary representation of love that best articulates your own personal view of the question. Are you a moonie? Or do you prefer to keep your feet on the ground? (By Theseus' argument, does being an English major mean you must be a moonie?) You will find this debate everywhere in the literature around you (whether in class, on the radio, on t.v., or elsewhere). Perhaps the English Club will start a thread on our blog so we can compare our choices of literary representations of love. Or perhaps we'll keep to ourselves, and some of us will wonder quietly whether there are others, too, who will choose one view this Tuesday, another on St. Valentine's holiday (a holy day?) itself, and then a third the day after when those little heart-shaped chocolates are all gone.
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