Book Review: The Paradox of Love by Pascal Bruckner
Love remains forever that part of life we can never control. As Bruckner says, it continues to resist indoctrination and ideology. It does not yield to the inquiries of theory. The world has tried to bring it within the realm of reason and ethics, make it modern and progressive. Bruckner is here to tell us that there “there is no progress in love. It will always be a surprise.”
In France the bestseller status of The Paradox of Love owes much to Bruckner’s suave pensées. Comparing marriage with politics, for instance, he compacts half a dozen insights into a sentence: “The couple is a little principality that votes its own laws and is constantly in danger of falling into despotism or anarchy.”
In France the bestseller status of The Paradox of Love owes much to Bruckner’s suave pensées. Comparing marriage with politics, for instance, he compacts half a dozen insights into a sentence: “The couple is a little principality that votes its own laws and is constantly in danger of falling into despotism or anarchy.”
Bruckner sees experimental schools as one element in a more general movement; at the centre of it was the sexual revolution. Now 63, he says the 1960s and 1970s left those who lived through them with memories of immense generosity combined with silliness. It was a time of vaulting ambition, almost exactly the opposite of 2012. “We thought our potential was unlimited: no prohibition stood in our way.” He and his friends, like their equivalents in half a dozen other countries in the West, nourished the dream of an absolute break with the past. They wanted a grander, more elevated life. Sexual liberation was the most common way to reach this higher reality.
Their era’s achievements are now mostly built into the freedoms of the West, among them contraception, easier divorce and decriminalized abortion. The gigantic gains in the status of women and the new freedoms of gays both came out of similar instincts. On the other hand, attitudes to sex have not all loosened. They are worst, Bruckner thinks, in the English-speaking universities. There he sees a new Inquisition, exercising the “right to investigate the private life of its members and demand confession, repentance, and re-education. The Protestant world has readapted for its own ends some of the worst institutions of Catholicism.” But Bruckner’s central theme is the fallacy of free love. He considers it an oxymoron. “How can love, which attaches, be compatible with freedom, which separates?”
