Against Romance and Passion as Social and Literary Constructs

A Digression on the Mad Delusion of Inventionism

For years now I have followed the way literary theorists are recurrently drawn to the intellectually reductionist enterprise of “inventionism.”

The persistent argument is made that the language of love is what has actually created love, that love was an invention of love rhetoric, that the rhetoric precedes the romance. It’s astonishing how prevalent this reductive tactic of “inventionism” has become in the academic world. Indeed, it was an aspect of literary love-reductionism that changed my life. I’ve alluded to it in the past, but it has a special relevance to the origin of this book.

It happened at a seminar at Yale graduate school in the seventies. I had a graduate fellowship in English lit and was invited to a special seminar in which the graduate adjunct read a much buzzed-about paper on the subject of Chaucer’s “Parlement of Foules.” I know—probably not on your bedside table, a little difficult to get through the fourteenth-century Middle English, but once you do it’s an enchanting extended fantasia: a debate about the meaning of love, about the very questions I’ve raised, a debate conducted with great classical erudition among some very articulate creatures of the air (birds if you please). It was a kind of avian love contest; the version I read at Yale (with great difficulty) gains from the archaicism of the fourteenth-century Middle English.

But the author of the buzzed-about seminar paper sought to convince us that it was naïve to think that Chaucer’s poem was about love at all. No, no, no. It was really about “the making of poetry,” a then fashionable English department way of refashioning old texts into new doctoral dissertations.

At the close of this performance, I had the naïve temerity to ask what was clearly seen as a foolish question: What was Chaucer’s attitude toward his ostensible subject, love itself? Love actually?

I could sense the uneasiness of the other graduate students around me at this faux pas. I recall, the scholar hung his head sadly—why try, why try?—and lifted his countenance to treat me to a mildly pitying sneer, took a draw on his Gauloise, and gestured Gallicly to the air with nicotine-stained fingers. Exhaling with the dramatized existential exhaustion of enduring the concerns of the simpleminded, he said, “But love is so uninteresting compared to the making of poetry.”

Don’t get me wrong. I like the discussion of the making of poetry (or I recalled thinking it an ingenious complexification at the time. After all, I’m an English major nerd).

But the bored, reductive dismissal of love crystallized my feeling that I was not meant to be a graduate student whose only future was to drive love out of more texts. I was out of there. The “invention of love” trope had become the new guise of the denial of love.

Inventionism. Name a phenomenon one thought was part of human nature, and some academic will have found a specific century, even a specific decade, usually a specific little-known text, in which it was “invented.” Thus giving themselves credit for the invention of the invention. I devoted a chapter of my book on Shakespeare controversies to attempting to demystify and debunk the rank sophistry of Harold Bloom’s claim that “Shakespeare invented the human.” (Apparently something Sophocles and Homer neglected to do.) But however ludicrous, even as a hyperbolic metaphor, that the claim is, it has had a hardy vapidity that does discredit to Shakespeare’s authentic uniqueness (he did invent “an other nature” at the very moment Sir Philip Sidney coined the phrase).

Of course, there’s Michel Foucault and his cohorts who ignited a still ongoing controversy over whether both sex and gender were invented by language. And at this very moment as I was rewriting this passage and I was idly scrolling down the excellent 3 Quarks Daily website I came upon this: “How the Victorians Invented the Future.” From a book that made the claim that “before the Victorian age the future was rarely regarded as a different place from the present.” Oh, please. Yes, Jules Verne, sure, but what about Thomas More’s Utopia? Virtually all of Renaissance English literature (including Shakespeare) is about the contemplation of the Greek and Roman past, historical and poetical. And if there’s a past there’s a future: the present. A “different place.” But those useless doctoral dissertations don’t write themselves and love has not been spared this smug donnish game. Oh, no, love has been a prime target of the inventionists. With so many claimants for the alleged invention, there really ought to be a Patent Office of Love.

Not necessarily the first, but the first claim about the invention of love I encountered was in reading C.S. Lewis’s 1936 tome, The Allegory of Love. This book attempted to make the case that romantic love was an “invented” emotion, specifically an invention circa the thirteenth-century Provençal troubadour poets and their versified rulebook The Lays of Courtly Love. (“Lays,” I hope I need not remind you, is a somewhat antiquated word for verse tales. No sniggering in the back!)

Not that one should disregard the Provençal troubadour lyricists! No, their claim that the only true love was unconsummated adulterous love merits attention if not allegiance. But they didn’t “invent” love, even that variant.

And for the Christian believer C. S. Lewis’s Allegory of Love, this was a kind of bait and switch: Romantic love was just an “allegory” anyway, a figure of speech for that Higher Love, the Love of God all should aspire to. Terrestrial love was, as usual, something secondary, something one got past. If one was lucky, learning the limitations of earthly love was a step along the path to real love, spiritual love.

The C.S. Lewis claim of a thirteenth-century invention of love actually ascribes a rather late date in the inventionist pantheon. I found Tom Stoppard’s play The Invention of Love thrilling, all the more so because (though it often seems forgotten) I think the play regards “invention” ironically—yet paradoxically affirms love in all its uninvented, non-ironic nonbinary earnestness and comedy.

Stoppard’s protagonist (or éminence grise) in the play, the late-nineteenth-century poet and classics pedant A.E. Housman, claims in the play that love was really “invented” nearly a thousand years before C.S. Lewis’s Provençal troubadours. Housman argues, as if daringly, that love was invented by Catullus, the Latin lyric (and epic) poet who lived in the century before Christ. Yes, Catullus, that brilliant poet of the pain of love—“Odi et Amo” (“I hate and I love”). Catullus, Housman claimed, invented the love poem, which in turn “invented” love.

It’s a claim I would like to believe since I sacrificed many headachy hours translating Catullus’s elegantly twisted Latin syntax, whilst loving his anguished and acerbic obscenity. (“Irrumabo”!) But please: His “invention” was predated centuries before by the Song of Songs, that biblical text of eros, and by Sappho, and even Sappho (c. 500BC) was likely predated by Archilochus.

Ah, Archilochus (c. 650 BC), we hardly know ye, only fragments remain from later classical manuscripts (it was he to whom was attributed the aphorism concerning the hedgehog and the fox: “The fox knows many things, the hedgehog knows one big thing”). But he is deservedly legendary (well, among a few classicists) for having written such a bitter, wrenchingly bereft, lost-love poem, a poem so powerful it caused the woman who was denied him—and her father—both (!) to kill themselves. Or so the story goes.

Now, that’s a love poem. That’s a lost-love poem. That’s a poem that would have the wizards of Nashville weepers crying in their beer. The only country song fit to compete, I’d say, would be George Jones’s masterly portrait of a man’s grief for a woman who left him, decades ago: “He Stopped Loving Her Today.” (Stopped loving her today, because he died.) But even Archilochus did not “invent” love.

Still—let’s be serious, academics—did language and rhetoric really “invent” emotions such as love and romance? It sounds sophisticated to say it, but it may just be sophistry. And, needless to say, it’s popular among male academics to look down one’s nose at the idea that love has an independent, non-rhetorically induced existence. Because if romance were “real” in any meaningful sense, it might cause them to question the choice to spend their lives in dusty seminar rooms. Again, the enemies of love must reduce it to a secondary product, deny it independent ontology or esthetic, ecstatic primacy.

I’d almost forgotten that onetime staple of twentieth-century academic inventionism, Denis de Rougement’s Love in the Western World, which subscribes to the Provençal thesis, until I came across a posting on a Nabokov LISTSERV that recalled Lionel Trilling’s invocation of de Rougement.

Trilling, a mid-century literary critical demigod—who was wrestling somewhat obtusely with Nabokov’s attitude toward love in Lolita—wrote that the book’s subject matter “makes it unique in my experience of contemporary novels. If our fiction gives accurate testimony, love has disappeared from the western world, just as Denis de Rougement said it would. The contemporary novel can tell us about sex, and about sexual communion, and about mutuality, and about the strong fine relationships that grow up between men and women; and it can tell us about marriage. But about love, which was once one of its chief preoccupations, it can tell us nothing at all.” (And come to think of it, can it tell us much about “strong, fine, relationships” at all?) Does it not leave some (nonbinary) relationships out entirely?

Literature itself as an enemy of Love! And the totalizing belief that if love has disappeared from Western literature, it must mean that “Love has disappeared from the western world!” Can that be true? Already? If one subscribes to one or another form of inventionism, one must be prepared to believe that such a fragile construct, such a secondary downstream effect as Love, could disappear.

While I can’t help but agree with Trilling’s dismissal of de Rougement’s imperious prediction of the end of love after its brief Provençal flowering, there is certainly more to say on the question of love in the contemporary novel—and in the contemporary world.

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From In Defense of Love by Ron Rosenbaum. Copyright © 2024. Used with permission of the publisher, Melville House Publishing.