Drawing on Scheler and Merleau-Ponty among others, I develop a framework for interpreting certain themes in Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past.  This philosophical novel explores the way love shapes our comportment towards the world of others, and raises the question of whether love is blind or potentially truth-disclosing. Using this literary example, I argue that without the dispositional affects of love, care, or concern — the emotional a priori — nothing in the world around us would be more conspicuous than anything else.  In this case we would be faced with a flat, neutral mass of information, without a sense that any of it matters.  Thus, for a comprehensively unloving human being, everything would seem empty of meaning.  It does not follow, however, that the affective constitution of the world is best viewed as a kind of distortion.

September 2022: Rick Anthony Furtak is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Colorado College, where he has taught for over fifteen years.  His most recent books are Knowing Emotions: Truthfulness and Recognition in Affective Experience (2018, paperback 2020) and The Sonnets of Rainer Maria Rilke (2022).

John Fowles's novel presents romantic love as a force that strips away cant and propriety, revealing a self unmasked. If heeded, this unmasking can function as a catalyst for existential investigation, for it reveals the self to be not a stable preformed entity but, rather, a continually evolving creative project. At the same time, the novel tests the limits of conscious intervention in the governance of this project. While its narrator celebrates the advantages of having "existentialist philosophy at our disposal," analysis of the novel suggests that Fowles finds philosophy inadequately equipped to tackle either the primary impetus of love or its impact. Instead, the novel articulates an understanding that anticipates very recent findings in cognitive science and neuropsychology. Current developments in the sciences provide retroactive support for Fowles's intuitive claims and shed further light upon the novel's implications regarding choice and decision-making in love.

Amitav Ghosh puts the history of the individualist love ethic of the western novel into dialogue with the "oceanic" sense of identity and love in Indian cultural traditions, pitting the idea of character against that of "life-force" and the idea of individual happiness against that of communal energy. When romantic lovers embrace in this contemporary novel set in India in 1838 - at a turning point in the history of the English Empire of opium which is being forced on a China that has outlawed the poppy, we hear echoes of the great Victorian fictions: the storm of love remakes identities as it choreographs collisions across cultural, social, and class boundaries that undermine stable social arrangements. The potential for cross-over encounters inheres in the heteroglossia created in the novel. The "chutnification of language" echoes the love jumble, as it invites a rethinking of the past, of culture, and identities, reframing the boundaries of the language of fiction in the exploration of literary form. Are we in a dialectical or a dialogical discourse? What is the figure and what the ground in this exploration of love within cultural multiplicity?

The paper reads Jane Austen's Persuasion in light of Stanley Cavell's Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage, focusing on three main links between Cavell's analysis of seven Hollywood films and Persuasion: the concept of remarriage itself, the social agenda and the cultural/feminist vision. In addition to applying the Cavellian idea of remarriage as "a reconciliation of a genuine forgiveness" to the renewed romance between Anne Elliot and Captain Wentworth, the paper borrows the term "co-creation" from the business world and, associating it with the idea of the "analytic third" in contemporary psychoanalytic theory, defines Anne's and Wentworth's evolving rediscovery of each other as a "knowing again" or a co-creation, assisted by the novel's temporality, in which the fictional present consists of a mutual evolving relationship intertwined with the events of the past, which must be faced and worked through. In Persuasion, the newly created mutuality between Anne and Wentworth also signals social change in which the old, stagnant aristocratic way of life must give way to the energy of the middle class, here represented by the navy. For Cavell, the comedies of remarriage reflect a hidden agenda of culture in which the previous generation's feminist gains are worked through in the private sphere. The paper claims that Persuasion, and more specifically its heroine, Anne Elliott, also reflect a phase in the struggle of gender equality in which the radical feminist notions go "underground" and are worked through in the private domain, to serve as building blocks for the public feminist struggle of the late nineteenth century. 

Sampling Coleridge's "suspension of disbelief" in her 1995 novel So I Am Glad, A. L. Kennedy invites us to read this "disbelief" as skepsis not about some supernatural set-up or other but about the other-than-natural fictions humans live by - pre-eminently the fictions of love. Niklas Luhmann's ambitious historico-sociological account of the reconfiguration of intimacy in modernity as a "normal improbability" offers a helpful frame for an articulation of the critical thrust of Kennedy's re-invention of love. By matching her twentieth-century mindblind protagonist with the seventeenth-century libertine Savinien de Cyrano de Bergerac, Kennedy increases the unlikelihood of love and grants us an experience of the unreadability of the other not as a pious trope but as a fact that we must preserve even as we learn to disbelieve it through the material neurotechnics of mindreading. Resisting the privatization of sentiment diagnozed by Luhmann, So I Am Glad also seeks to release love as care for the world, but realizes that such release requires suspending the disbelief in death that bodies in love are blessed with against their better knowledge.

This article argues that the representation of love in Anthony Trollope's Marion Fay (1882) is informed by the conceptualization of tact in Matthew Arnold's essays. According to David Russell, Arnold conceives of tact as a certain reserve that allows one to find a middle ground between conflicting opinions. Tact thus differs from fixed rules of interpretation such as those of physiognomy or etiquette, since these produce distance rather than proximity. Trollope satirizes such fixed rules by means of his novel's setting in the suburbs. Conversely, his depiction of love serves to promote a sociability that is intimate, even tactile. Touching plays a crucial role in the recognition of love: it forges an unconscious connection. Trollope highlights this motif by contrasting tact with the taboo and the sublime. This contrast reveals that whereas the taboo and the sublime are structurally dependent on inequality, love can only exist on the basis of equality. This sets up a relation that is always in danger of tipping over into possessiveness and that, as such, must leave lovers dissatisfied. Trollope's thematic exploration of love as tact is mirrored in the novel's style: Marion Fay achieves a measure of reserve by framing love within moments that abruptly descend from the exalted to the banal. 

One of the most distinctive features of Victorian dialogue is the speakers' tendency to take up and develop one another's metaphors. This practice, which appears as frequently in actual recorded conversations as in fictional ones, is common in all sorts of situations, but it takes on a particular significance when the interlocutors are potential marriage partners. According to a widespread understanding, enshrined in the Book of Common Prayer, marriage itself is a metaphor. Literary theorists, meanwhile, particularly in the early nineteenth century, frequently describe metaphor as a type of marriage - a joining together of diverse but complementary concepts. Hence it is worth attending when an unmarried man and woman share in the creation of a single metaphor. Focusing on two representative Victorian novels, Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre and George Meredith's The Egoist, this essay suggests two major ways in which the trope is significant. First, it reflects an important shift in the conception of matrimony in England over the course of the Victorian period, from an ideal of marriage as total merging towards an increasing recognition of distinction-within-union. Second, the practice of sharing metaphor can serve in a novel, not just as a marker, but as a microcosm of conjugal compatibility; even in novels that end as soon as the lovers marry, these dialogues permit the reader to witness, in essence, a marital relationship. 

Survey of the directions taken by the papers of the forum "The Novel and Theories of Love": explorations of love across cultural, social, ethnic, and ontological boundaries; analyses of love as a discursive phenomenon; representations of narratives of love as tests of theory. 

Leona Toker, editor of Partial Answers, is Professor Emerita in the English Department of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is the author of Nabokov: The Mystery of Literary Structures (1989), Eloquent Reticence: Withholding Information in Fictional Narrative (1993), Return from the Archipelago: Narratives of Gulag Survivors (2000), and numerous articles on English, American, and Russian writers. She is the editor of Commitment in Reflection: Essays in Literature and Moral Philosophy (1994) and co-editor of Rereading Texts / Rethinking Critical Presuppositions: Essays in Honour of H.M. Daleski (1996) as well as of Knowledge and Pain (2012). Her book Gulag Literature and the Literature of Nazi Camps: An Inter-Contextual Reading is forthcoming in the fall of 2019.