Were you disappointed by the ending to the series Lost? What follows is a story with as intricate a mythology as Lost’s but with an important difference: in the end it is all explained mechanistically, without resort to mysticism or religion. At the conclusion of the novel, the following summary of the core mystery, taken from the opening chapter, will be perfectly sensible: The Oopsah told a story, a majestic, exalted, beatific story of the coming of the end times and the rise of the Controller.
He learned how the world would end, who would destroy it, and how he, Zranga, could prevent it. He learned that he had been appointed by destiny – by the Controller himself – to carry out this mission. But above all he learned of the existence of a perfect being, the demigod Celeste, trapped beyond time in a cycle of eternal death. Only Zranga could rescue her, and to do this he had to place a giant door on the bottom of the Silent Sea, and kill the Great Man. Read on to found out how far Ivy Morven will go to stop Tobor Zranga from realizing his destiny, and how this alternative universe is bizarrely structured so that the most rational acts are the most extreme.
The Cube is well-written, ingeniously crafted and has great character development. Although clearly a science fiction narrative, The Cube also transcends its genre, to attract a broad audience. It tells the Romeo and Juliet story of a young couple from adjacent sides of a cubic planet who meet at an edge and develop a relationship in the midst of a war that threatens to destroy the planet. The story is unique in creating an alternative universe from first principles: all matter is oriented in one of the six Euclidian directions.
This simple deviation from our own universe leads to the creation of cubic celestial bodies and allows a reimagination of transportation, power generation, warfare, architecture, and lovemaking, among other things. As an example, the political conflict leading to war is that both inhabited sides of the planet generate hydroelectric power by draining a large body of water on one side through edge sluices, a cheap and easy source of energy that will ultimately destroy the planet if the water is drained too far.
What drives this story is the relationship of the two main characters, a girl escaping from a classified weapons facility with terrible secrets she refuses to share, and a rural boy who literally catches her when she leaps over the edge and soon learns he is the target of international espionage. The novel is organized around a series of revelations of the girl’s secrets culminating with an answer to the ultimate question – who is Celeste?
As you can probably tell even from my brief description, The Cube is a multidimensional narrative (pun intended!) that could simultaneously described as a science fiction novel as well as a moving love story and a dystopic utopia fiction, similar to George Orwell’s 1984. You can discover this alternative universe, governed by different laws of physics but similar political motivations and machinations for power as in our world, on the links below:
There’s no easy or standard way in which human beings cope with loss. The process of mourning can pull families together or tear them apart. David K. Israel’s and Jennifer Byrne’s new novel, Trivial Pursuits?, reveals how two families deal with one of the most difficult and non-trivial aspects of life: the death of their loved ones. Although written in a realist style, with three-dimensional characters that readers can easily relate to, the structure of the novel has some postmodern, Robbe-Grillet, elements to it in the way it intertwines, in an almost accidental meeting, the two distinct strands of the plot.
One strand traces the life of Fareed, an endearing fifteen year old Druze boy from Israel, whose mother died tragically of breast cancer. He spends his life in an R.V. touring L.A. with his father, memorizing trivia in the hopes of landing a spot on the popular show Jeopardy! Teen-tour.
Incidentally, for the history buffs out there, the novel offers a fascinating depiction of the Druzes, people of Arab origin (perhaps with Jewish roots, some experts claim) that remain loyal to every country they live in. For this reason, as young Fareed explains, the Israeli Druzes are the only Arabs who enroll in the army to defend the state of Israel. This is a very interesting choice of narrator: one that crosses ethnic, religious and cultural boundaries in unexpected ways, especially given that the political situation in the Middle East is such a polarizing topic.
The second strand of the novel follows the lives of Amy and Greg, a couple who live a few miles away, in the Valley. Their marriage initially faces the challenge of not being able to have a baby (naturally) together, then the sudden death of their adopted child, P.J. To cope with their loss, both families undergo a difficult process of mourning. The only question is: will this pull them together or push them apart?
While Amy finds temporary solace in a casual but torrid lesbian affair with Lynette, Fareed experiences his first true love with an older girl named Eos. Their paths cross as Eos meets Amy and Lynette, but eventually the two sets of lives move in different directions. You can read this intricately woven and moving novel about loss and regeneration online, by purchasing it on Amazon.com Kindle Edition or by sampling select chapters on Neatorama’s Bitlit, on the link below:
Advance Praise for my new novel about psychopathic seduction, The Seducer:
Like the best, most delicious novels, Claudia Moscovici’s psychological thriller, The Seducer, grips you in its opening pages and holds you in its addictive clutches straight through to its dramatic, remarkable conclusion. This is a fascinating novel, on every page of which Moscovici’s intimate understanding of the psychology of psychopaths and their victims gleams with a laser’s concentrated brilliance. The result is a narrative that builds with a patient, yet propulsive, force; a narrative whose intensity and suspense, in tandem, leave the reader eager to know, at every step of the way, what happens next? I encourage the reader to start this novel with a full set of nails, because it’s a nail biter in the most literal sense.
Steve Becker, MSW, LCSW LoveFraud.com feature columnist, Expert/Consultant on Narcissism and Psychopathy
What is love in this seductive new novel? Hypnotic attraction or deadly trap? A dream come true or a world filled with obsessions in the absence of genuine feelings? The Seducer probes the chilling depths of alienation and selfishness as the heroine, Ana, is caught in the spider’s web of her narcissistic lover, Michael. No magic, just cruelty. Claudia Moscovici wrote a powerful novel about an unfortunate reality many women face: the unraveling of their romantic dreams as love turns into a cold and calculated game of chess.
Carmen Firan, author of Words and Flesh
The Seducer offers a thrilling look at the most dangerous men out there, that every woman is warned about and many encounter: the psychopathic predator. We’ve seen these men featured in the news for their gruesome crimes. But few would expect them to be the charming, debonair, romantic seducers that love stories are made of. When the heroine of the novel, Ana, met Michael, she was in for the roller-coaster ride of her life. In her exciting second novel, The Seducer, Claudia Moscovici depicts with talent and psychological accuracy the spellbinding power of these charming yet dangerous Don Juans.
D. R. Popa, author of Lady V and Other Stories (Spuyten Duyvil, 2007)
Claudia Moscovici’s new psychological thriller, The Seducer, reminds us of classics like Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary, but with a contemporary twist. The new seducer is a psychopath, a dangerous predator without genuine emotion. And yet, we remain fascinated as he charms two women: one of them utterly dependent, the other seduced but autonomous. The reader’s outrage toward the reprehensible Michael may feel neutralized by the author’s meticulous studies of the psychopath in action and by what I call “ethical irony,” an often hidden moral perspective. Moscovici’s epic of betrayal and self-deception draws the reader into the convoluted mind of sexual predators and their victims. The narrative is bold, vivid and lucid.
I have just published my second novel, The Seducer, a psychological thriller about dangerous love and psychopathic seduction. Please find below a more detailed description of The Seducer:
My native country, Romania, is best known for a fictional character, Dracula, which is only loosely based on a historical fact: the infamous legend of Vlad Tepes. Novels that draw upon this legend—ranging from Anne Rice’s genre fiction, to the popular Twilight series, to Elizabeth Kostova’s erudite The Historian–continue to be best sellers. Yet, ultimately, no matter how much they may thrill us, the “undead” vampires we encounter in novels are harmless fictional characters that play upon our fascination with evil. However, real-life vampires, or individuals who relish destroying the lives of others, do exist. We see them constantly featured in the news and, if we don’t know how to recognize them, sometimes we even welcome them into our lives.
What do O. J. Simpson, Scott Peterson, Neil Entwistle and the timeless seducers of literature epitomized by the figures of Don Juan and Casanova have in common? They are charming, charismatic, glib and seductive men who also embody some of the most dangerous human qualities: a breathtaking callousness, shallowness of emotion and the fundamental incapacity to love. To such men, other people, including their own family members, friends and lovers, are mere objects or pawns to be used for their own gratification and sometimes quite literally discarded when no longer useful and exciting. In other words, these men are psychopaths.
My novel, The Seducer, shows both the hypnotic appeal and the deadly danger of psychopathic seduction. It traces the downfall of a married woman, Ana, who, feeling alienated from her husband and trapped in a lackluster marriage, has a torrid affair with Michael, a man who initially seems to be caring, passionate and charismatic; her soul mate and her dream come true. Although initially torn between love for her family and her passion for Michael, Ana eventually gives in to her lover’s pressure and asks her husband for divorce. That’s when Michael’s “mask of sanity” unpeels to reveal the monstrously selfish psychopath underneath, transforming what seemed to be the perfect love story into a psychological nightmare. Ana discovers that whatever seemed good about her lover was only a facade intended to attract her, win her trust and foster her dependency. His love was nothing more than lust for power, fueled by an incurable sex addiction. His declarations of love were nothing but a fraud; a string of empty phrases borrowed from the genuine feelings of others. Fidelity turned out to be a one-way street, as Michael secretly prowled around for innumerable other sexual conquests.
To her dismay, Ana finds that building a romantic relationship with a psychopathic partner is like building a house on a foundation of quicksand. Everything shifts and sinks in a relatively short period of time. Seemingly caring, and often flattering, attention gradually turns into jealousy, domination and control. Enjoying time together becomes isolation from others. Romantic gifts are replaced with requests, then with demands. Apparent selflessness and other-regarding gestures turn into the most brutal selfishness one can possibly imagine. Confidential exchanges and apparent honesty turn out to be filled with lies about everything: the past, the present, as well as the invariably hollow promises for the future. The niceness that initially seemed to be a part of the seducer’s character is exposed as strategic and manipulative, conditional upon acts of submission to his will. Tenderness diminishes and is eventually displaced by perversion that hints at an underlying, and menacing, sadism. Mutuality, equality and respect—everything she thought the relationship was founded upon—become gradually replaced with hierarchies and double standards in his favor. As the relationship with the psychopath unfolds, Dr. Jekyll morphs into Mr. Hyde.
The Seducer relies upon the insights of modern psychology and sensational media stories to demystify the theme of seduction we find in classic literary fiction. In its plot and structure, my novel deliberately echoes elements of the nineteenth-century classic, Anna Karenina. In its style and content, it fits in with contemporary mainstream psychological fiction such as Anna Quindlen’s Black and Blue and Wally Lamb’s I know this much is true. As much a cautionary tale as a story about the value of real caring, forgiveness and redemption, The Seducer shows that true love can be found in our ordinary lives and relationships rather than in flimsy fantasies masquerading as great passions.
From my novel, Velvet Totalitarianism (amazon.com, univpress.com)
Chapter 1: Is She a Spy?
Radu looked at his new Swiss watch—aluminum band, clear dial, red cross emblem, precision timing—which he had bought almost a year before with his first paycheck. It was 5:51 p.m. Time to go home and prepare for his date with Ioana. He should have been happy to have such a beautiful girlfriend. Yet, due to the latest turn of events, Radu was plagued by doubts. Just when his life was starting to improve, he became entangled in a web of contradictions from which he didn’t know how to extricate himself. His job and his girlfriend, his main sources of pleasure, had suddenly turned into causes for fear and suspicion. How much his attitude had changed since he came to France last spring, Radu mused. Back then, he was filled to the brim with hope. And who could blame him? At only twenty he got a scholarship to the Sorbonne and managed to defect to France, which, as far as Romanians were concerned, was the second most sophisticated country in the world (the first being Romania, of course). Then, based strictly upon his merit—aided only by a few well-placed connections—he landed a dream job as Assistant Correspondent on Romania at Radio Freedom Europe. RFE! The only station Romanians huddled in front of their illegal shortwave radios in the middle of the night to find out what the CIA said was going on in their country and the rest of the world. Which wasn’t all that surprising since, after all, in Romania news consisted solely of propaganda. Time for a little truth and sanity, Radu told himself when he took the part-time job at Radio Freedom Europe. And that’s what he did his best to deliver in his political commentaries, with a cracked voice and a beating heart, since his major was chemistry, not politics or journalism. He was still a neophyte, working on a trial basis and anxious to impress everyone at the radio station and move up the ladder, all the way to the sky if possible—say, production manager–although he wasn’t thinking that far ahead just yet. At the very least, his boss, Alexei Pavlovich, a Russian dissident, would have to grant him this: the young Romanian spoke with enthusiasm.
After his talk, on the way back to his dorm room, Radu tried to reassure himself that, ethically speaking, he was doing the right thing. But he still felt uneasy about his decision. Maybe he wasn’t helping anyone after all. Least of all his family. Nothing seemed clear-cut or simple anymore. At the root of the problem was Ioana, the young woman with whom he had fallen in love.
Radu imagined her as he first saw her, in the Parc Montsouris, a little park next to his dormitory, at the Cité Universitaire. She walked towards him like a beautiful vision, her curvy body wrapped loosely in a long blue dress spotted by the uneven, kaleidoscopic shadows of the trees. Her soft, lean curves undulated underneath that flowing fabric. He was so startled by Ioana’s beauty that he stopped in his tracks, and, not exactly tactfully, just stood there and stared at her. As the young woman approached, Radu noticed that she had raven hair, of medium length, frizzed slightly by what might have been an overgrown perm. Far from making her seem unkempt, it gave her a casual, sexy look which he much preferred to a carefully groomed appearance. Although, generally speaking, Radu wasn’t particularly observant, he noticed that the young woman wore bright, plum red lipstick. The lip color went well with her olive complexion and deep brown eyes, which were so dark that even when she got quite close he could barely distinguish iris from pupil. Her nose was a little too large for her delicate oval face. Otherwise, he justified in retrospect her minor imperfections, she might have been unapproachably beautiful. It was she who initiated their conversation. “Buna ziua,” she greeted him “Hello” in Romanian. “Why is this French woman speaking to me in Romanian?” Radu wondered, at first so caught off guard that he didn’t reply. She noticed his surprise and smiled, showing two rows of even white teeth.
“My name is Ioana Marinescu,” the young woman graciously extended her hand.
“Nice to meet you,” Radu answered. He clasped her slim fingers with an uncertain, nervous touch. By way of contrast, her grip was strong and confident.
“I noticed you at the Cité before,” she told him. “I live there too. I’m originally from Iasi. And you?”
“From Bucuresti,” Radu answered, with a tinge of disappointment. He would have preferred that Ioana be French. One could never be too careful with fellow Romanians when one worked at Radio Freedom Europe…
“I’m kind of lonely here, so I was glad to hear a fellow Romanian voice,” she said.
Touched by her friendliness, Radu felt somewhat embarrassed about his misgivings. They returned, however, after only a moment’s consideration. He couldn’t figure out how, even before he had spoken, Ioana knew that he was Romanian.
She read his mind, which, given his distrustful expression, must have been quite transparent. “I heard you talking in Romanian to another student in the cafeteria…”
“Who? Diaconescu?”
“I don’t know his name,” Ioana replied. “Nor yours, for that matter,” she added, since Radu hadn’t introduced himself yet.
“Sorry. I’m Radu Schwarz.”
“Nice to meet you. Did you come here with your family?” Ioana asked, attempting to make polite conversation.
“No, by myself.”
“Me too. My parents are still in Iasi.”
It occurred to Radu that Ioana didn’t have a Moldavian accent, the strongest and most distinctive in Romania, as people from Iasi generally did. He proceeded with caution. “How come you don’t have an accent?”
Ioana shrugged. “Mine was never that strong to begin with, and besides, whatever country bumpkin accent I might have had, I lost it in Bucharest during my first year of university studies. I didn’t want to seem provincial.”
“Do you plan to go back to Romania?” the young man inquired, since if she didn’t, perhaps he could trust her a little more.
“We’ll see. I’m here on a two-year fellowship. I don’t want to make my parents’ situation even worse, so I’ll probably go back.”
“I plan to stay here for good. I mean, I already defected,” Radu heard himself declare, to his own surprise.
“How about your family? Do they want to join you here?”
Radu thought about his parents and little sister, eight year old Irina, whom he hoped to bring to France. The young man planned to use his radio show to persuade French officials to apply pressure on the Romanian government to allow his family to immigrate to France. But he couldn’t divulge this information to a total stranger. Especially not to a fellow Romanian.
“I don’t know,” he replied.
They strolled together around the circular path of the Lac Montsouris, discussing other subjects. They commiserated about the Cité Universitaire dorm rooms, which were too small and had dilapidated, straw wallpaper. “They’re perfect–if you’re a cat!” Ioana quipped. They both approved, however, of the cafeteria food at the Cité. Ioana claimed that since arriving in Paris she had put on five kilos; Radu looked with disbelief at her slim athletic figure, wondering where she was hiding the extra weight. Then they sat down on a bench in front of the lake. Ioana unsnapped the magnetic clasp of her purse and took out a chunk of baguette neatly wrapped in a white napkin. A group of ducks swam rapidly towards her.
“I save my bread for the ducks,” she explained, breaking off a little piece of baguette and tossing it towards the smallest of the ducks first, being careful to be fair to all, feeding them one at a time. The birds, however, didn’t quite grasp the principle of equality, much less of taking one’s turn. They seemed more familiar with the concept of “every duck for himself,” as they precipitated all at once towards each crumb. Two ducks, with grayish bodies and green throats, were more aggressive than the rest. They rushed to gobble up the bits of bread no matter how hard the young woman tried to feed their companions.
“Those are the male ones,” Radu said with slight embarrassment, as if apologizing for his sex.
“They must be from the Secret Police,” Ioana joked. This reference made the young man’s face cloud with concern.
“Just kidding! Geesh!” Ioana poked him playfully with her elbow. “I doubt these ducks have microphones hidden under their wings,” she continued teasing him. Then, abruptly, she changed her light-hearted attitude: “Actually, I’m usually just as nervous as you are,” she whispered, attentively scrutinizing Radu’s expression.
“About what?” he asked, still evasive.
“You know…”
“You mean the Secret Police?”
Ioana nodded, looked past Radu, then behind her, to make sure they weren’t being observed. “My father, who’s an aerospace engineer, refused to sign the papers before going to a conference in Japan,” she said in a low, confidential tone.
Radu proceeded with caution: “What papers?”
“You know. The ones for the industry.”
“I don’t understand,” Radu said, even though he did.
The young woman gave him a skeptical and half-reproachful look, as if she wasn’t fooled by his professed ignorance. Out of politeness, she offered an explanation nonetheless: “You know Petrescu’s policy: any Romanian scientist or diplomat going abroad has to double as an informant or tech spy. Otherwise, it’s a waste of the country’s resources, right? At least, that’s the official party line,” she said matter-of-factly, as if she were merely stating the obvious.
Since his father, a scientist at the Atomic Physics Institute of Romania, had also gone through this pleasant experience, Radu understood perfectly well what Ioana was talking about. However, by force of habit, the young man preferred to avoid having such conversations out in the open, even when on safer, Western ground. Now it was his turn to look around, pretending to admire the scenery, to see if anyone might be watching them. The young couple necking on the bench next to theirs and the elderly woman walking her dog seemed innocuous enough.
Unexpectedly, Ioana began to cry. Radu’s own mood shifted from suspicion to surprise and then to concern. He didn’t know how to respond to this sudden display of emotion. With a mixture of chivalry and compassion, the young man removed a plaid handkerchief from his shirt pocket and graciously offered it to Ioana. Unfortunately, the handkerchief happened to have already been used during his frequent spells of spring allergies, so she politely refused it.
“Is anything wrong?” he asked, absurdly.
“Yes,” Ioana sniffled. “I mean no,” she changed her mind and laughed a little, as if embarrassed by her own capriciousness. She put both hands in front of her face, covering the bridge of her nose. She seemed to be considering something, then suddenly decided: “I suppose that I’m taking a leap of faith. But we can trust each other, yes?”
“Of course,” Radu agreed, although he wasn’t quite sure yet.
“When my father refused to sign the papers he was beaten up by the authorities and thrown in prison. Eventually they let him go, but since then, our lives haven’t been the same…”
Radu nodded in sympathy. “I’m afraid this sort of thing could happen to my parents too,” he confessed.
Ioana seemed interested: “Why? Did your parents also refuse to sign the documents?”
“My father did,” Radu answered, looking at the girl’s pretty oval face, encouraging himself to trust her.
“Is your father an engineer too?” she asked.
He shook his head: “A physicist.”
“Do you mind if we walked around a little?” Ioana proposed.
“Not at all,” Radu responded. After all, spending time with such a nice girl was worth skipping his afternoon classes. They got up and she gently slipped her arm around his elbow, a gesture of intimacy , which took him by surprise. That’s how relatives or familiar friends tended to stroll together in Romania, elbows hooked. Feeling somewhat discombobulated by the young woman’s proximity and touch, Radu looked down in embarrassment, but that offered no solace, since he became even more flustered once he noticed Ioana’s high heeled sandals and her lean, long muscular legs flexing under the flowing dress as she walked. Once again, as during the first moment he saw her, Radu became aware of a feminine magnetism that overpowered him. “So what if she’s Romanian? Does every Romanian girl in Paris have to be a spy?” he asked himself, attempting to dispel the state of warranted paranoia cultivated by years of living under a totalitarian dictatorship.
During their tour of the park, they talked about their classes, about books, about their love of French literature, especially Flaubert. Radu adored reading novels; Ioana was a French literature major. As it turns out, their favorite novel was Madame Bovary. Granted, they weren’t exactly the first people on Earth to believe that Flaubert had some merit; nevertheless, each point in common helped overcome, little by little, Radu’s reservations.
Only hours later, when they were having dinner together in a private corner of a table at the Cité Universitaire cafeteria, did the couple return to the touchy subject of their families and their political situations.
“So why did your dad refuse to sign?” Ioana asked.
Following hours of conversational intimacy, Radu’s tongue had loosened up. This time he didn’t hesitate to tell her: “He had nothing to spy on. I mean, what’s he going to steal? Equations about how the Big Bang got started and how the universe contracts or expands? Petrescu isn’t interested in the universe. He only cares about his little fief.”
“Does your father work for Silvia Petrescu?” Ioana asked, obviously aware of the fact that the dictator’s daughter, herself a physicist, was the Director of the Atomic Physics Institute of Romania.
“Yes,” Radu replied. “Actually, they’re friends. Otherwise…let’s just say … life would have been a lot harder for my family.”
“Why so?” Ioana took a sip of water, keeping her eyes fixed on Radu.
“It’s the same story as with your father,” he answered. “Except maybe for the fact that we’re Jewish–on my father’s side–which kind of complicates things. A few years ago my dad got this fellowship to the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Before he left, he was asked to sign a paper that he’ll be a tech spy. He refused, and then, as soon as he returned, the Romanian government accused him of being an Israeli agent. Can you imagine? What twisted logic! If it weren’t for Silvia, he might have ended up in prison or some labor camp.”
“Did Silvia herself ask him to spy?” Ioana asked.
“I don’t think so. I believe the orders came from above,” Radu indicated, pointing up with his index finger.
Ioana took a bite of her quiche. She chewed slowly, contemplating Radu’s comment. “So what happened when your dad refused?” she asked, after the savory forkful had melted in her mouth.
Radu was trying to find a graceful way to cut the meat off his chicken drumstick, but eventually gave up, held it with his bare hands and took a big bite. “The usual stuff. He was harassed,” he answered after having chewed his mouthful. Since coming to France, he was not used to having substantive conversations while he ate, preferring instead to concentrate each ounce of energy on the food, which he was still afraid would somehow disappear from his plate if he didn’t promptly wolf it down.
“Phone, car and radiator bugs, being shadowed by the Secret Police, interrogations, debriefings, that sort of thing, right?” Ioana prompted him.
“Yup,” Radu answered matter-of-factly, as if these experiences were so commonplace, they were hardly worth mentioning. He eyed with envy Ioana’s orange—a rarity in Romania, usually sold only at Craciun, around Christmas.
She noticed his gaze and offered him her orange. “You can have it. I prefer to stick to my diet anyway,” she said, attacking the rich créme brûlée. She then added, as an afterthought, “The exact same thing happened to us. So did the harassment eventually stop?”
“Not completely,” Radu answered. “In fact, I only made things worse for them.”
“How so?”
“Because…”
The girl patiently waited for his response, twirling a spoon in her cup of coffee.
“You see, I work for Radio Freedom Europe,” Radu leaned forward and confessed with difficulty in a whisper, feeling like he had just undergone a grueling debriefing session.
Instead of being flattered by his trust, however, Ioana was amused by his reticence. “You’re so silly,” she said, reaching over across the table and affectionately patting Radu’s hand.
“What makes you say that?”
“You treat me as if I were from the Secret Police,” she replied, lightly brushing his leg with her bare foot under the table. Not used to such overt flirtation, Radu peeked under the table to see what had tickled him and noticed that the young woman had taken off her right shoe. “Such a silly garçonnet…” Radu didn’t know how to react to this unexpected onslaught of sensual affection.
“You and I are in the same boat, Raducu,” Ioana kept stroking his foot reassuringly, using the Romanian diminutive of his name. Her knee touched his under the table. “Besides,” she smiled at him indulgently, “do you really think the fact you’re a speaker on Radio Freedom Europe is such a big secret? I listened to your show already … Isn’t that the whole point of international broadcasting? To reach as many people as possible? So why all this secrecy, hmmm, Mr. Bond?”
“So this means…” Radu, still under the young woman’s spell, struggled to reach a logical conclusion.
“… that I know perfectly well where you work and what you think about Petrescu’s regime,” Ioana completed his sentence. “And of course I agree! Who in his right mind wouldn’t?”
“Agree with what?”
“With the fact that Nicolae Petrescu is a megalomaniac tyrant who oppresses Romanians and sacrifices the good of the country to his personality cult, what else?” the young woman summarized succinctly the message of Radu’s fifteen hours of broadcast to date.
When Radu returned to his dorm room after that first meeting with Ioana, he threw himself on the bed, placing his hands behind his head, his eyes fixed dreamily upon the ceiling. He weighed the pros and cons of their encounter. Undoubtedly, he thought, there was a slight disadvantage to becoming friends with Ioana: she might be a Secret Police agent and kill me. Out of a million attractive French women in Paris, why did I have to fall in love with a fellow Romanian? On the other hand, the pros were at least as compelling: the girl was strikingly beautiful, sweet and charming. Besides, Radu attempted to reassure himself, who said anything about love?
The first time I read Elliot Perlman’s Seven Types of Ambiguity I was very impressed by the fact that the same story could be recounted by several different narrators without a dull moment, cover to cover. This novel gives new meaning to the concept of “repetition with a difference.” Perlman was also very effective in the art of subtlety: showing how a relatively insignificant event could assume enormous proportions, affecting the lives of the main characters. Seven Types of Ambiguity is, above all, a psychological thriller. It tells the story of Simon’s obsessive love for his former college girlfriend, Anna, who left him ten years earlier. But the novel’s strength in creating dramatic tension out of a relatively small psychological event also turned out to be a stumbling block the second time I read it. Because, ultimately, Simon was not a compelling character. In fact, none of the main characters were. This novel is an absolute masterpiece in layering its narration in concentric circles around a main event through radically different points of view with distinct personalities and voices. Yet, in my estimation, Seven Types of Ambiguity wasn’t as strong in creating three-dimensional characters. For a novel built upon psychological suspense and the strength of its characterizations, this is a weakness that can’t be completely overlooked.
In 1837, Victor Hugo wrote to his friend, Juliette Drouet, “A letter is a kiss sent by mail.” Hugo’s brief phrase captures the essence of the rich tradition of epistolary novels in France. Although referring to real letters as opposed to novels, Hugo’s definition underscores the expressive powers of letters to convey through language a sense of intimacy and immediacy of communication that rivals, and sometimes even exceeds, direct contact. For Hugo, as for the epistolary novelists, passionate love is the privileged subject of letters. Only because of the special status of this subject can Hugo compare a letter to a kiss sent by mail.
Using Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse as a significant example of the tradition of French epistolary novels, I wish to examine how this novel is able to represent Romantic passion in a modern way that comes close to how we understand it today: namely, as a complex, compelling, at once emotional, cognitive and ethical force that is at the very center of our lives. Rousseau’s representation of passion is all the more important because it contributes to displacing reductive or dismissive views of the concept. La Nouvelle Héloïse illustrates that passion cannot be regarded simply as the opposite of either morality or reason; which is to say, as a blind and uncontrollable drive that threatens human societies. Because of the close connection established by Rousseau between passion and morality, in Enlightenment and Pathology, Anne Vila aptly classifies Rousseau’s novels as contributing to the Enlightenment morale sensitive, placing them alongside the writings of the naturalist Tissot. She maintains that both authors attempted to preserve natural virtue by using the healthy aspects of sensibility to perform a moral cleansing of the sources of social corruption and of the uncontrollable elements of emotion itself.
Perhaps due in part to the complexities of its literary form, however, Rousseau’s vision of love exceeds the boundaries of its own moralism. While the author describes passion as sometimes uncontrollable, forceful and emotive, he also relates it to human values, cognition, sense of purpose and processes of reasoning. As Martha Nussbaum puts it in Upheavals of Thought, “Emotions are not just the fuel that powers the psychological mechanism of a reasoning creature, they are parts, highly complex and messy parts, of this creature’s reasoning itself. Thus a theoretical account of emotions is not only that: it has large consequences for the theory of practical reason, for normative ethics and for the relationship between ethics and aesthetics” (3). Rousseau’s early Romantic vision of passion does, indeed, provide us with such a complex and messy ethical model of human emotion, one which is inextricably tied to its literary form.
The Epistolary Novel
La Nouvelle Héloïse does not convey, however, a universal philosophy of love. Rather, this novel captures in a literary manner a historical moment whose effects we continue to experience today. I wish to explore here Rousseau’s depiction of passion and its connections to other human faculties and concepts—such as virtue, honor, reason and jealousy—by pursuing some of the ethical, aesthetic and social questions raised by this novel. Why, for instance, does the author choose, as did so many others before him, the epistolary form as the optimal literary medium for the expression of passion? How do letters come to acquire the privileged status assumed by Hugo as conduits of human sentiment? Similarly, in the end, what model of the family does Rousseau endorse in depicting the effects of passionate love?
Nancy Armstrong shows in Desire and Domestic Fiction that the tradition of the epistolary novel in England, Germany and France contributed to the formation of a modern understanding of desire and love that could fit the social and emotional needs of the new nuclear family. While certainly participating in this cultural process, Rousseau’s novel at the same time poses an obstacle for it. As the abundant criticism on the subject reveals, the conclusion of La Nouvelle Héloïse is puzzling: not so much in its tragic resolution, but rather in its implicit critique of all of the models of love and of the family it represents. In other words, the complex logic of passion both creates and undoes Rousseau’s proposed system of moral values.
To begin examining this problem, let me first briefly situate Rousseau’s novel with respect to the tradition of epistolary literature and expressive theories of art. While novels contained letters before the eighteenth-century, it was during this period that the epistolary novel became most popular. One of the most famous seventeenth-century novels of letters, Guilleragues’ Lettres portugaises, already foreshadowed the tension among uncontrollable passion, individual moral limitations and social constraints as the major theme of the epistolary genre. During the eighteenth-century, this type of novel became so popular in France that it branched out into several sub-genres. We could characterize, for example, Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes (1721) and Madame de Graffigny’s Lettres d’une péruvienne (1747) as travel narratives or as novels of ideas; while Crébillon’s Lettres de la marquise de… au comte de R…(1742) and Laclos’ Les Liaisons Dangereuses (1782) fit into the category of libertine novels. This tradition of literature gained prevalence between the years 1750 and 1820, and, as J. Herman indicates in Le mensonge romanesque, reached the peak of its popularity in 1780, when 450 letter-novels were published in France, a third of which were translations of British fiction.
Not surprisingly, the rise in popularity of epistolary fiction more or less coincided with the birth of Romanticism and expressive theories of art. The main principles of Romantic literature seem particularly well-suited to the epistolary form. In The Mirror and the Lamp, M. H. Abrams illustrates that Romantic literature presents art as a special kind of expression of feeling. Taking Wordsworth as his principal example, Abrams finds in the latter’s definition of poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” a more general characteristic of Romantic literature, even that which, like Rousseau’s novel, predates British Romanticism.
We can see how the epistolary novel would lend itself to the Romantic understanding of emotion. The letter form easily mimics real letters and builds upon the seventeenth-century tradition of letter writing popularized by Mme de Sévigné. The use of the first-person singular in letters conveys the impression of a transparent self pouring out his or her real feelings to a reader prepared for emotional identification. At the same time, as J. Herman points out in his study of the genre, the epistolary novel’s use of several correspondents and of a variety of situations and points of view allows for complexity of expression, creating what Bakhtin has called a “polyphonic” or multiple-voiced text. This genre also permits the cohesion and organization of ideas, themes and tropes, since epistolary novels are often presented by an editor who clarifies what is happening, makes value judgments and provides readers with additional information in prefaces and footnotes.
The Novel’s Plot and Sources
Rousseau wrote La Nouvelle Héloïse at Monmorency. This novel was in part inspired by his love for Sophie d’Houdetot, who was in turn in love with the poet St.-Lambert. Published in 1761, La Nouvelle Héloïse became an instant bestseller. Expressive, poignant and emotive, the novel had special appeal for its readers as many of them thought it was not a work of fiction, but the exchange of real love letters. Once literary expression could be linked to authenticity of feeling, the gap between reality and representation appeared to diminish, if not altogether disappear. The scene is set on the shores of Lake Geneva, but the plot harks back in time to the relationship between Peter Abelard and his pupil and mistress, Heloise.
As in the medieval relationship, the heroine, Julie, the daughter of the Baron d’Etange, falls in love with her middle-class tutor, Saint-Preux. Since Julie’s father hopes to find a suitable aristocratic match for his daughter, he strongly opposes her marriage to the tutor. Upset by the tension in her family, Julie’s mother dies of sorrow. Although Saint-Preux is obliged to leave Julie and travels around the world, the lovers remain closely in touch through their letters. When he returns, Julie is already married to Wolmar, an aristocrat who nonetheless seems to represent Rousseau’s middle-class ideals of masculinity. Frugal, virtuous, practical and rational, the husband complements the wife’s sensitive and emotive femininity. The tutor eventually joins the couple and their family without reigniting his affair with Julie and thus violating their sense of honor. Yet the fragile equilibrium among the three friends breaks once Julie sacrifices her life to save a child from drowning.
Significantly, one of Saint-Preux’s first gestures is to establish both rhetorically and sentimentally the modernity of his relationship to Julie by distinguishing himself from Abelard. As is well known, Peter Abelard (1079-1142), one of the foremost logicians and philosophers of his times. He’s arguably even more famous, however, because of his tumultuous personal life: most notably, the fact that he fell in love, had a child with and secretly married Heloise, the aristocratic girl he tutored. To punish Abelard for dishonoring his niece, Heloise’s uncle hired a group of thugs to attack and castrate the young man. Both Abelard and Heloise subsequently retreated into monasteries. Following their separation, Abelard did not show the same intensity and loyalty of feelings to Heloise that she maintained for him and that Saint-Preux wishes to show his beloved. The difference between medieval and modern romance, Rousseau suggests, lies not so much in the behavior of the woman as in that of the man.
As Saint-Preux writes to Julie just after their first kiss and overt avowals of love, “I’ve always felt sorry for Héloïse; she had a heart made for love; but Abélard never seemed anything but a sad man who deserved his fate, since he knew as little about love as about virtue” (Première partie, Lettre XXIV, Flammarion, 61, my translation). Embittered by his punishment and true to the religious values of his times, Abelard proved incapable of perceiving erotic love as at the same time sublime and transcendental. He ultimately chose the love of God over passion for his beloved. Saint-Preux wishes to do the opposite. He gives voice to the early Romantic conception of human love as (at least in part) transcendental.
For him, Romantic love entails the elevation in esteem of a human being who comes to represent ideal moral and aesthetic qualities: beauty, virtue, goodness. These qualities had been associated with the divine by previous models of love, including the Platonic and the Christian, which, as Martha Nussbaum points out in Upheavals of Thought, had represented love as an ascending ladder from the contingent (or ephemeral, accidental and carnal desire) to the transcendental (or everlasting feelings motivated by universal or religious values). Yet, one may ask, why the need to attribute transcendental value to earthly love? And how is this possible to achieve when speaking of relationships between contingent, vulnerable and imperfect human beings? These questions lie at the center of a novel that represents the tension between the fragility of human life and feelings and the search for absolute meaning—a tension that would become the chief characteristic of Romantic literature, art and philosophy.
Human Flourishing and Romantic Passion
At first glance, in La Nouvelle Héloïse love is sensual. The famous bosquet scene, where Julie, Saint-Preux and Claire share their first kisses, captures the enchantment but also the dangers inherent in erotic desire. Saint-Preux surprises the two best friends and cousins, Julie and Claire, hiding and whispering in a bush:
“Upon entering, I saw with surprise your cousin approach me, and, with a pleasantly suppliant air, ask me for a kiss. Without comprehending this mystery, I kissed this charming friend; and, likable and appealing as she is, I never knew that sensations are that which the heart makes them to be. But what do I become a moment after when I felt … my hand trembles… a sweet shiver… your mouth like a rose…Julie’s mouth…placed, pressed upon mine…and my body pressed close to yours.” (34, Première Partie, Lettre XVI à Julie)
For a picture of the first kiss of the Romantic couple, this scene is so tantalizingly triangular that we’re tempted to ask what logic requires the presence of Claire. I would argue that this triadic scene allows passionate love to emerge (as it will end) in the context of moral ambiguity. For if the author wishes to situate sensual pleasure in the midst of innocence, what could create a more appropriate situation than two timid school girls whispering to each other, hiding and blushing once they notice the young man they are talking about approach them?
Moreover, what better way to proclaim the involuntary nature of erotic passion, than to initiate it playfully, not by the heroine—who cannot be represented as a libertine or seductress—but by her less eroticized foil? Finally, what better way to describe the difference between harmless desire and tumultuous passion than through the dramatic contrast between Saint-Preux’s responses to the two girls’ kisses? While Claire’s kiss barely registers, Julie’s unleashes the fury of passion, marking its moral ambivalence as both key to virtue and path to destruction: “No, the fire of the sky is not more lively nor more swift than the one that overcame me the minute we kissed.” (34, Première Partie, Lettre XVI à Julie).
Ambivalence also manifests itself in contradictory bodily and psychological reactions. On the one hand, passion gives cohesion to the scattered self, focusing mind and body upon the intensity of feeling and pleasure. This movement towards unity and coherence, however, is countered by a simultaneous and greater movement towards dispersion and self-destruction. Julie takes Saint-Preux’s description of the force of passion as a moral indictment. She too feels overwhelmed by her feelings and sensations:
“I had foreseen all too well, the time of happiness passed like lightning; the one of disgrace begins, without anything telling us when it will end. Everything alarms and discourages me; a fatal languor overcomes my soul; without having any reason to cry, involuntary tears escape from my eyes…” (Première Partie, Lettre XXV de Julie, 52)
Passion thus assumes the signs that we still commonly associate with it and have made generations of Romantic and Postromantic writers describe it as a force akin to madness: loss of coherence of the sense of identity; loss of control over one’s emotions and actions; depression and loss of vital energy; despair; a sense of detachment from the world and loss of meaning. As the mind gives in to this irrational drive, the body becomes animalized by its own sensuality. When the author focuses upon Saint-Preux’s agitation after the kiss, however, he saves the hero from his drives only by depicting his acute self-awareness:
“In the violent transports that move me, I wouldn’t know how to stay in place; I run, I climb with ardor; I throw myself upon rocks; I roam about with big steps and find everywhere in the objects that surround me the same horror that reigns inside of me.” (54)
To off-set the effect of the centrifugal movement towards the body and immanence, Saint-Preux evokes centripetal, cohesive images of unity and transcendence. Like Goethe’s Werther, Saint-Preux looks into himself to find a world. The inner world of memories, visual images, and fantasies supplants the dangerous effects of tangible reality. Moving upward on the classical ladder of love, the hero transforms the comic vision of androgyny depicted by the character of Aristophanes in the Symposium into a tragic Romantic union of two complementary beings:
“Come, oh my soul! In your friend’s arms let us unite the two halves of our being; come before the sky, guide of our flight and witness to our vows, swear to live and die for one another.” ( Premiere Partie, Lettre xxvi à Julie, 53)
Yet the tension between such literary and philosophical elements would remain abstract without the concreteness of social rules and assumptions to give them a specific meaning. Saint-Preux invokes codes of honor to assure Julie that she has no reason to despair. If their act of love had any moral ambiguity, that could be easily corrected by conforming to social and moral conventions and marrying each other. In his advice, Saint-Preux both relies upon and shifts codes of conduct. It had long been the case that marrying the woman one made love to would save her from dishonor. Yet at the same time, the alliance-based model of the family poses an obstacle to such an easy solution. The problem is, of course, that Julie’s family planned to marry her to a man of the same social class and would prohibit her marriage to the middle-class tutor. To overcome this barrier would mean nothing less than succeeding in persuading Julie’s parents that a new model of the nuclear family, based on mutual love and class mobility, should supplant the dominant one they believed in. Perceiving this obstacle as insurmountable, Julie accuses her lover of disingenuous naiveté:
“There was a time, my sweet friend, when our letters were light and charming; the sentiment that dictated them flowed with elegant simplicity; it didn’t need either art or color, and its purity was its only decoration… A pure and sacred fire burned in our hearts; abandoned to the ways of the senses, we are now nothing more than vulgar lovers.” ( Lettre XXXII, 63-64)
In her accusation, Julie does more than suggest that her lover underestimates the power and value of social prescriptions. She also does more than demand a Romantic understanding of love as an unmediated and undistorted expression of true feelings. Julie proposes a complex model of sentiment, which we can call, following Martha Nussbaum’s Aristotelian description, as the eudaimonic model of love. Such a model regards the beloved as supremely important to one’s happiness and well-being, or what Aristotle called human “flourishing”. This importance is not abstract, but rather related to practical circumstances and possibilities. It depends upon issues such as: does the beloved deserve this valorization; does the love have a future; can the lovers actualize in practical life their union and prove how important they are to one another?
Julie sees love as inextricably tied to three aspects of human experience: 1) her appraisal of the importance of the lovers to one another; 2) her appraisal of their moral distinction (do they act in a sufficiently ethical and dignified way not only toward each other, but also toward others they care about, to be deserving of profound sentiments?), and 3) her appraisal of practical facts and possibilities (can they live out their love and in what manner?). If Julie remains unconvinced by Saint-Preux’s easy moral solution to their problems, it’s because she can’t answer firmly and positively two out of these three questions. Although it’s clear to her that St-Preux is fundamentally important to her happiness and that she is to his, that’s not sufficient to make their love dignified and happy. For instance, Julie is not convinced that their behavior was ethical toward each other both because it risked degrading feelings of friendship to desire and because it does not take into consideration the feelings of other people they care deeply about, most notably Julie’s parents. She’s even less convinced that their love has any practical possibilities, given her father’s desire to marry her to an aristocrat.
What kind of human flourishing is made possible by Romantic passion? Rather than a more strictly Aristotelian one tied to practical possibilities, ethics and external circumstances, Rousseau offers us an internal, psychological model of human flourishing. Romantic passion is nothing less than a conflagration of the senses and emotions ignited by the object of desire as well as by various psychological reactions. Since love is above all a shared emotional state, the author illustrates the importance of jealousy, possession, ambiguity and doubt in fanning the movements of passion. Saint-Preux and Julie constantly provoke and alleviate each other’s jealousy in a partly conscious effort to preserve excitement and desire. St-Preux, for instance, deliberately mentions to Julie his attraction to a beautiful young woman, only to reassure her in a subsequent letter:
“How I should love, this pretty Mme Belon, for the pleasure she has given me! Pardon me, divine Julie, I dared enjoy for a moment your tender tears, and it was one of the sweetest moments of my life… What was your delighted lover doing? Was he conversing with Mme Belon? Ah! My Julie, can you believe that? No, no, incomparable girl, he was better occupied! With what charm his heart followed the movements of yours!” (Lettre XXXIV, de St Preux, Première partie, 66)
Giving oneself to another, the author suggests, can exist only in the space of intersubjectivity. Two lovers cannot devote themselves to one another in an imaginary world made only for two, as though they lived on a desert island. To give oneself meaningfully to another, one needs to have the sense of choice and freedom. Passion implies the existence of alternatives and the sacrifice of the multiplicity of desire to the strength of one dominant sentiment. When we claim to love we say: among all possible and desirable partners, I give myself to you. But the sacrifice is meaningful, in the sense of not being merely arbitrary, only if there is a qualitative difference of desire and emotion for the beloved as opposed to the impersonal desire for all others. That is to say, love renders the object of affection unique and the nature of desire more intense and rich in feeling—and thus the threat posed by jealousy unreal.
So then, we are led to ask, what is the role of jealousy in passionate love? To create affective movements. The interplay between multiple objects of desire and the choice for the most compelling one. The interplay between freedom and possession. The homage of sacrificing other attractions for one person. The titillation of possibly losing privileged status in the eyes of the one we love. The security of having it, and deservedly, for the moment. In describing the modern self, Rousseau renders jealousy more than just an isolated emotion by tying it to will, freedom of choice, sacrifice, sentiment and moral obligation. When founded, jealousy potentially undoes all of these elements. When unfounded, it makes each dimension of love richer and more poignant.
Julie’s reply, as usual, nuances the picture of the role played by emotions such as jealousy in passion. She responds more cautiously:
“It’s not that I don’t know that your heart is made for mine and not another. But we can fool ourselves, mistake a passing fancy for passion, and do as many things by whim as we would have done for love… Swear to me, then, my sweet friend, not by love, a sermon that we only give when it’s superfluous, but by the sacred word of honor; that if respected by you, I will never cease being the confidante of your heart, and that no change will take place of which I’m not first informed.” (Première Partie Lettre XXXV, 69)
Julie, however, is only partly satisfied with her lover’s account of jealousy. She believes that his conception of love carries inherent risks. When love is so emotional and sensual, and moreover, when it’s so dependent upon the efforts of one’s imagination to idealize the beloved and render her unique, what distinguishes the manifestations of real passion from a mere coup de foudre; from a strong and impulsive desire? While the durability of passion, the history and friendship of the lovers, the mutual respect based on known rather than merely supposed psychological qualities all render the difference between passion and desire palpable when the two are contemplated calmly and from a distance, they resemble each other in the heat of the moment.
Moreover, Julie observes, with the proper attention and focus, the more superficial form of attraction can develop into love. Knowing that jealousy is based, quite legitimately, on the slippery and often sudden progression from desire to love, Julie asks her lover to warn her of the early symptoms of this transition. She proposes a modern model of faithfulness in love, which she calls “honor,” but which is actually more psychological than social in nature. Fidelity demands the exercise of judgment and caution, the avoidance of potentially dangerous situations which can heat up the senses and create the illusion of true love, and above all, the avoidance of obsessive focus upon other objects of desire that enhances their qualities and renders them special.
First and foremost, therefore, Julie asks Saint-Preux to regard the difference between desire and love ontologically. While the other women he desires are substitutable, she needs to remain a unique and privileged being in his eyes. Second, this distinction must also occur on an epistemological level: for while desire may be involuntary, our consciousness of it is not. Julie thus requires her lover’s mental self-awareness to fortify his moral restraint: as soon as he observes in himself the enhancement and focus upon another woman he desires, she should be the first other person to know about it. In so doing, she claims to appeal to Saint-Preux’s sense of honor, not his love.
What could she mean by this distinction? Given the fact that strong desire and passion can share the same symptoms—if not the same causes—as we all know, love does not guarantee fidelity. Nor does moral obligation, since immediate desires can exceed it, or, to put it more simply, the flesh is weak. What emerges from Julie’s response is thus a more nuanced vision of the ethics of Romantic love. Faithlessness, she implies, has its warning signs. Human beings don’t act upon their desires, like animals, without some psychological preparation: focusing upon desirable persons and their attributes, mentally enhancing their qualities in their imaginations, and perhaps even seeking their company in ambiguous circumstances. Before this chain of symptoms is irreversibly unleashed, Julie demands to be forewarned of the process that transforms attraction into passion so that, together with her lover, they can help one another to remain faithful.
Having transformed the notion of passionate love, Rousseau does the same for that of moral duty. By means of Julie’s reflections on jealousy, he suggests that honor is neither, strictly speaking, the observance of universal moral principles nor that of social prescriptions. Far from opposing morality to convention and principle to desire, Rousseau makes us aware of the intimate links among principle, emotion and desire. Morality begins with the awareness of these connections. For it is above all an epistemological act of self-awareness which makes possible the control of destructive desires, meaning those that hurt oneself, the beloved and society by and large. Only after taking such precautions does Julie agree with Saint-Preux that—when unfounded—jealousy is delightful:
“What pleasure I taste in taking useless precautions; in preventing the appearance of a change which I sense to be impossible! What charm to talk of jealousy with such a faithful lover!” (70)
Julie is acutely interested in everything Saint-Preux has to say not only about other women, but also about nature, society and culture. She responds thoughtfully to his observations about how French society corrupts the difference between men and women—including his classically Rousseauistic conviction that women need to remain women and men men and that in order to stay properly gendered the sexes should live separately and fulfill different social roles. Jealousy thus serves a point of departure to show not only the potential dangers of being permeable to other human beings, but also its merit in opening us up by our awakening interest in that which is greater than the individual and the couple. By talking about others to Julie, Saint-Preux may excite her jealousy sometimes, but above all he stimulates her interest in broader social phenomena. In this way, the relationship itself remains open to other human beings and to the outside world, encouraging sympathy and civic virtue as well as reinforcing the couple’s love through close communication.
This permeability to one another and sensibility to the world, however, also leads to instability. Perhaps because of its charged and fluid emotional states, passionate love, Rousseau suggests, cannot exist without a sense of doubt: without, that is, the possibility not only of its diminution, but also its dissolution. As worrisome as the tumultuous movements of passion seemed to the lovers, what troubles them much more is a sense of tranquility and complacency. Alarmed by his own calmness, St-Preux declares:
“What calm in all my senses! What pure, continuous, universal voluptuousness! The charm of ecstasy was in the soul; it will never leave it; it will last forever. What a difference between the furors of love and such a peaceful situation!” (Lettre LV a Julie, 97-98)
Rousseau would like to illustrate that intense passion can be calm and sublimated; that love, once its erotic and emotive elements have been stabilized, grows stronger, more virtuous and deeper. Yet his characters spectacularly contradict such a model of passion. To them, the presence of tranquility only indicates the absence of strong feelings. The doubts awakened by the apparent calmness—raising questions such as, are my feelings as strong, do I still love her, what does that imply about the passionate and loving person I thought I was—only reawaken the movements of emotion. These doubts provoke a sense of despair about the nature of sentiment and identity which arouse Romantic feelings once again with renewed intensity.
The calmness of passionate love is thus only the eye of the tornado; an apparent stillness that’s surrounded by agitation. Passion does not lead to a Stoic or Epicurean understanding of happiness defined negatively, as the tranquility that results from the lack of physical and psychological pain about events outside of one’s control. Rather, passion is a key component in a Romantic understanding of happiness which is more positive than negative. Romantic fulfillment signifies not the absence of pain but the presence of heightened sensations and emotions, especially those provoked by a person who reciprocates and deserves them. Passionate love is shared rather than solipsistic and intense rather than calm.
Rousseau suggests that a genuinely tranquil love—one in which happiness is understood as the lack of pain—requires the absence of strong erotic and emotional attraction. Wolmar’s relationship to Julie illustrates such a relationship. Yet is this calmer model of love and, more generally, of fulfillment more promising than the one offered by passion? Julie and Saint-Preux had frequently discussed the necessary complementarity between men and women. Saint-Preux had often criticized in his letters to Julie the masculinity of French aristocratic women who were as educated as men, surrounded by them in their roles as salonnières, and even behaved like men in devoting their lives to politics and intellectual pursuits. Nonetheless, Julie and Saint-Preux are hardly the complimentary beings implied by their own model of gender. If anything, the two characters are strikingly similar. Both lovers are sensual, sensitive, emotive, observant, obsessive, expressive and analytical. Their actions and rhetoric are at times undifferentiable (although Saint-Preux is at times more heated in his words and reckless in his behavior). By way of contrast to Saint-Preux, Wolmar represents a true masculine foil to Julie and makes her appear more feminine by comparison. What kind of interaction does such gender complementarity yield? In depicting her husband, Julie describes their relationship as follows:
“I never saw him either happy or sad, but always content; he never talks to me about himself, rarely about me; he doesn’t seek me, but he’s not upset when I seek him, and leaves me unwillingly. He doesn’t laugh; is serious without making others want to be as well; on the contrary, his serenity seems to invite my play… In a word, he wants me to be happy; he doesn’t say it, but I see it; and wanting the happiness of one’s wife, isn’t that obtaining it?” (101)
Being cold and reserved, Wolmar’s love is not impelled by strong emotions or desires, but by a sense of respect, like, and familiarity which Julie calls “attachment.” This attitude is stable and lasting because the reasons behind it are: if Julie was worthy enough of Wolmar’s affection and respect before marriage, provided that she behaves appropriately, she will continue to deserve them. As Anne Vila points out, Julie describes Wolmar as a man who combines a classically Stoic attitude—of apatheia, or absence of feeling in the face of external forces beyond one’s control—with a modern protestant capitalist ethic of frugality and moral health. (see Enlightenment and Pathology, 211). The complementarity between man and woman, in this case, is obvious, but does it lead to love and, perhaps more importantly, to a sense of human flourishing? Julie wishes to persuade Saint-Preux that she considers the former less essential than the latter. Abandoning the idea that passion is necessary for happiness, she writes to her ex-lover:
“What misled me for a long time, and what may still mislead you, is the idea that love is necessary for a happy marriage. My friend, that’s a mistake…” (Lettre XX de Julie , 274).
Julie claims to share her husband’s understanding of love as a form of mutual respect and friendship. More fundamentally, she accepts his Stoic conception of happiness as the lack of moral and physical pain. She also wishes to emphasize that this model of human relationships, which is calm and self-sufficient, is not by extension also selfish or even amoral. Wolmar may not seek pleasure in life, but he encourages his more fun-loving wife to laugh, enjoy herself and feel happy. Moreover, despite his self-sufficiency, he places value upon her and their children, showing normal fatherly concern when one of them appears to be in danger. Much as he has given us a modern and thus transformed understanding of passionate love by depicting the relationship between the lovers, Rousseau proceeds to present a modernized notion of Stoic virtue in marriage. Does the author set one form of love and happiness above the other? Which one does he ultimately endorse as a role model in his representations of the interaction between men and women and of the nuclear family? As I suggested in the beginning, it appears that both and neither. For just as passionate love could not lead to moral and social stability, love without passion precludes communication and intimacy. Not fooled by Julie’s consistent praise of her husband, St-Preux writes quite critically of the marriage:
“You know Julie, you who know how much this expansive soul loves to share; imagine what she would suffer in this reserved atmosphere, when she would have nothing but this sad communication between those who should have everything in common.” (Cinquième partie, Lettre V à Milord Eduard, p 448)
If intense passion rendered the lovers too similar and volatile to form a stable and lasting union, complementarity renders husband and wife too different to communicate meaningfully. In her last letter, before her death, Julie confirms Saint-Preux’s evaluation of her marriage by declaring that it’s only with him that she seeks eternal union: “The virtue that will separate us on earth will unite us in our eternal resting place.” (Sixth Part, Lettre XII de Julie, 566).
Let’s pause for a moment to reflect about some of the reasons why both models of Romantic love—the passionate and the conjugal—are doomed to failure in Rousseau’s Romantic vision of human emotion. It seems that in the first part of the novel, the author elevated the notion of passionate love to critique the old, alliance model of the family. This model assumed that marriages were made to unite the economic and social interests of two families rather than two beings who loved each other.
The rest of the novel, however, relies upon an ambivalent representation of passion to elevate a model of marriage that strikingly resembles the one previously critiqued. Wolmar marries Julie in part because they’re both aristocrats. Such a marriage clearly serves mutual economic and social interests. Rousseau suggests that to be moral love must be intimately connected to social virtue, as Wolmar’s and Julie’s relationship certainly is and St-Preux’s and Julie’s illicit affair is not, or at least much less obviously. At the same time, the author presents passion as a necessary link between personal and civic virtue. Without passion, in other words, it’s very difficult to be moral.
At the conclusion of the novel, Julie must be sacrificed precisely because the conjugal friendship she has established with her husband leads to a conventional and arid form of virtue rather than to the heart-felt and authentic one endorsed by the novel. What can this paradoxical scenario—where the unpredictability and fire of passionate love overwhelm civic virtue while the tranquility of conjugal friendship render moral behavior a mere convention or abstraction—tell us about Rousseau’s early Romantic conception of passion? Most obviously, it suggests that passion is both necessary and problematic to the individual and to society. Yet even more interesting than the contradictions of Rousseauistic passion is the model of eudaimonia sketched by the novel. For it seems that although La Nouvelle Héloïse sets passion in partial opposition to moral and civic duties, it also depicts it as necessary to human flourishing.
Rousseau’s representation of passion as a foil to conjugal love, in its very tensions and impasses, traces the ethical and emotional boundaries of what we continue to view as the truest and most meaningful form of love today. While passionate love may often violate civic duties and moral principles, it also preserves some of the most fundamental aspects of social ethics. In loving passionately, we step outside our egocentric boundaries to value and even sacrifice our desires for another human being. We also acknowledge the permeability and vulnerability of the self, our dependency upon others, particularly upon those we care about deeply. Finally, individuated love may lead to social sympathy, or to forms of identification with people we do not know well or love, cementing in a real rather than solely abstract manner the concept of civic virtue. Through his Romantic conception of passionate love, Rousseau suggests that although love may sometimes obfuscate the path to civic virtue, such virtue cannot exist without the emotive responses, appreciation of other human beings and modes of identification that only passion excites.
My first novel, Velvet Totalitarianism, took me about ten years to write. It took me so long partly because I wrote this book while also teaching literature and philosophy, writing scholarly books and raising a family. It took me a long time to write it also because I had to do a lot of historical research for it. When one works for so long on one book, the interrelated questions of motivation and intended audience become all the more relevant. As I was writing Velvet Totalitarianism, I asked myself often: why write historical fiction about the Cold War, an era which is now relegated mostly to history books? Why is the history of Romanian communism so important to me and whom do I hope to touch in writing fiction about it? An anecdote brought these questions into sharper focus.
Friends of my parents, who have a son who’s not much younger than myself, told us that their son recalls only one thing about life under the Ceausescu regime in the mid 1980’s, when he was not yet a teenager. Now in his thirties, the young man remembers that as a child he frequently had to go to bed wearing his hat and coat during the winter, because there was no heat or hot water in their apartment. But he can’t recall much else about the hardships the Romanian people endured during the Ceausescu dictatorship. He knows only indirectly, from older family members and from history books, the childhood memories which I can still recall quite vividly, and which I wanted to depict for others in my writing. Conditions in Romania during the so-called “Epoch of Light” were notoriously miserable. People had to wait in long lines for meager supplies of food, clothing and household goods. There was limited heat and hot water. By the late 1970’s, the Secret Police had installed microphones in virtually every home and apartment. The whole population lived in fear. As a Romanian citizen said to a French journalist following the fall of the Ceausescu regime, “It was a system that didn’t destroy people physically — not many were actually killed; but it was a system that condemned us to a fight for the lowest possible level of physical and spiritual nourishment. Under Ceausescu, some people died violently, but an entire population was dying.” Although Velvet Totalitarianism focuses mostly on Romania, hundreds of millions of Eastern Europeans led similar lives to the ones I describe, struggling daily against poverty, hunger, state indoctrination, surveillance, censorship and oppression in post-Stalinist communist regimes. In actuality, “velvet” totalitarianism was insidious rather than soft and gentle, killing your spirit even when it spared your life.
It’s one thing to read about the institutions and events that characterized life in totalitarian Romania and quite another to have lived through them. For my family and I, the events I describe in this novel are real. Like everyone else, we were subject to constant state indoctrination. Like practically everyone else except for the very privileged, we waited in long lines for meager supplies of food and consumer goods. Since my father traveled abroad, our apartment was bugged — we discovered hidden microphones underneath his desk and inside the heating units — and the Securitate followed my parents’ movements. My father worked at the Mathematics Institute. His boss was Nicolae Ceausescu’s daughter, Zoe Ceausescu, who actually went against some of her father’s policies by allowing him to go to scholarly conferences abroad. This rare privilege was essential to a mathematician’s — or, for that matter, any intellectual’s — career. Nobody can thrive intellectually without a free exchange of information and an awareness of the latest international discoveries in one’s field. In spite of Zoe Ceausescu’s umbrage, however, my father was accused by the Securitate of being an Israeli spy upon his return from a conference in Jerusalem. He was told that he’d no longer be allowed out of the country.
No doubt this individual decision was not really personal. It coincided with Ceausescu’s national policy of closing the Iron Curtain, to further isolate and control the Romanian people. Fortunately, my father obtained permission to attend one last conference, at the Princeton Institute of Advanced Studies. He decided to take a chance and defect to the United States. Since my mother and I were still in Romania, my family struggled to reunite in the United States for nearly two years. Although there were precedents for similar immigrations, we lived under the rational fear that we might never see each other again. My mother was subject to demoralizing Securitate interrogations similar to the ones I describe in Velvet Totalitarianism. Yet, as I also depict in the novel, we never gave up or lost hope. Several congressmen and human rights organizations intervened on our behalf. When I was a few weeks shy of my twelfth birthday, we finally joined my father in the United States. “Velvet totalitarianism” is a term that has been used to describe the constraints imposed upon the expression of liberal values in the Canadian and American academia. Just as, conversely, the term “political correctness” has been used to indicate that there’s no real freedom of expression of conservative values in the academia.
Indeed, whether or not America has turned out to be the country of plentitude and freedom that I dreamed about as a child back in Romania is another story. But what remains clear to me is that the systematic state repression we lived through in Romania makes whatever’s being criticized in Western institutions today, by both the right and the left, pale by comparison. The United States certainly lacks the absolute freedom that some of its ideologues may rhapsodize about, but what Romanians experienced was an absolute lack of freedom, which is far worse.
In Velvet Totalitarianism I wanted to leave a trace of the scale of comparison, of the difference I experienced between the lack of absolute freedom here and the lack of any freedom there. As the narrator of my novel states at the end, I’m hoping that this description of daily life in Romania under the Ceausescu regime will convey to my children and to my children’s children — as well as all readers interested in this subject — the lost traces of an era in which ordinary people were forced to lead extraordinary lives.
The anecdote my parents told me about the young Romanian who couldn’t recall much about the Ceausescu era helped convince me that these traces could, indeed, be lost. Due to the (largely positive) political and economic developments during the past 20 years in Eastern Europe and the internationalization of American pop culture, today’s children and young adults in Romania and other former East Bloc countries probably have more in common with their Western counterparts than they do with the family members who endured the hardships of communist regimes. Many of them know more about Facebook and Lady Gaga than about the Ceausescu era or the infamous Romanian orphanages. In writing about the communist epoch in Eastern Europe, both historians and writers of historical fiction are therefore helping preserve cultural memory for future generations of Eastern Europeans as well as for Western readers, both of whom are relatively detached from these experiences. They have not lived through them. They have no recollections that emotionally bond them to this difficult past. In many respects, the stark reality of Communist totalitarianism is as foreign to new generations of Eastern Europeans as it is to most Westerners.
To offer one noteworthy example, if one looks at what’s being published and read about Romania in the U.S., one is immediately struck by the fact that it’s Vlad Tepes’s reign and the horrid yet tantalizing legend of Dracula that readers find most intriguing. Few Americans have heard of Nicolae Ceausescu and yet fewer know about Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej. Yet there’s hardly a teenager in America who hasn’t heard of the Twilight series; there’s hardly a bookstore in the country that doesn’t sell Anne Rice’s vampire novels or Elizabeth Kostova’s erudite rendition of the Dracula myth, the international best-seller The Historian. Why the Dracula legend has far more international appeal in the West than practically anything else related to Romania is a complex enough question to warrant numerous Ph.D. students, plus the Romanian tourism industry, working on it. Whatever the answers to this question might be, what’s become clear to me is this: for any author who writes about any OTHER aspect of Romanian history than the Vlad Tepes/Dracula legend, the challenge becomes, above all, how to make them matter to those who haven’t lived through those historical events and thus who have no a priori emotional investment in them.
To begin addressing the question of relevance, I’d like to turn first to the nonfiction book that has inspired my novel most: Vladimir Tismaneanu’s Stalinism for All Seasons. For anyone interested in Romania’s political history during the twentieth-century, Professor Tismaneanu’s book is the seminal work on the subject. Clearly written, solidly researched, informative and engaging, Stalinism For All Seasons can be included among the best works of political history, alongside Richard Pipes’ works on Lenin, Robert Conquest’s books on Stalin and Allan Bullock’s studies of Hitler. It covers the evolution of Romanian communism from the early twentieth-century, through Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej’s Stalinist dictatorship and the latter’s strategic detachment from Moscow following Stalin’s death, to the dreary Ceausescu years of dynastic communism. Without this book, and others like it, younger generations of Romanians would grow increasingly disconnected from the past that deeply affected their families’ lives, and therefore, indirectly, their lives as well.
To write about the history of totalitarianism, be it through nonfiction or fiction, means to undertake the task of preserving for future generations a cultural memory of social change, of trials and tribulations and of unspeakable human suffering. It means to take on the challenge of bringing this past to the attention of those who may not have lived through it, and who will not find it automatically relevant to their lives. It means to somehow make this strange and alien past matter to them, at least enough to awaken their curiosity and open their hearts. It means to pay homage to those who sacrificed, or were sacrificed, by the totalitarian machine. Writing the history of totalitarianism is therefore simultaneously a discovery of the suppressed truth; a eulogy to a difficult cultural past and its countless victims; an homage to the people who endured it and to those who had the courage to fight against it and a cautionary tale to all those who never want to experience it, or to live through it again. In this respect, political history and historical fiction serve similar goals and face similar challenges. They induce people to care about something that is either already behind them and that they may prefer to forget, or about something that they’ve never lived through at all.
By way of contrast to political history, however, historical fiction isn’t as closely bound to accuracy or to any kind of objectivity. Of course, to write my book I consulted literally dozens of scholarly sources. But Velvet totalitarianism is also, above all, a work of mainstream literary fiction, to use one of the labels publishers rely on in this country. By this I mean that, by way of contrast to pulp fiction, the narrative style and the characterizations are as important as the plot and other structural elements of the novel. To make the main characters more multi-dimensional and believable, I relied for inspiration upon memories of my childhood and people in my life, especially my parents. But all the real-life elements of the novel served the function of enhancing and anchoring the fiction. The fictional elements, in my mind, were always primary.
As a work of fiction rather than historiography, Velvet Totalitarianism also faces the principal challenge of entertaining potential readers. When I was writing this novel, I kept in mind the problem of how to present such dreary and disheartening historical information in a way that is informative without becoming didactic, and entertaining without trivializing the difficult past I’m trying to describe. I relied in part upon a literary precedent, a contemporary American novel I love: Jeffrey’s Eugenides’ Middlesex. Eugenides called his novel “a comic epic” (of his Greek-American cultural heritage). He went far beyond (and deeper than) ethnic humor, since his novel relies upon social and historical research, a traditional Aristotelian plot with tragic tension and an interesting twist, and characterizations that are plausible, endearing and humorous (also inspired in part by his family members). That’s what I tried to do in Velvet Totalitarianism as well, only for my Romanian-American heritage, of course.
My novel has been described by critics as historical fiction, a spy thriller and a love story. All three descriptions apply equally well, but if I had to choose only one label, I’d say that Velvet Totalitarianism is a triple love story. First of all, love for two countries: Romania, my country of origin and its people, who have suffered a series of terrible governments and are struggling to emerge from them and establish a tradition of democracy. Simultaneously, love for my host country, the United States, the proverbial melting pot with a distinct identity that offers so many generations of immigrants the opportunity to flourish. Second, love for family, which gives the main characters the resourcefulness and strength to survive totalitarian repression. Third, the romantic love stories of fallible yet endearing characters who show that it’s our combination of faults, neuroses and loyalty to those important to us that make us fully human and enable us to enjoy the beauty of life, to survive its hardships and to overcome its challenges.
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