An Irishman called William Hazlitt, who at the age of 52, died in Soho, which is in London, England, once got himself into a bit of a fix for following the ancient tradition of offering a woman money in exchange for sex. Unfortunately William had propositioned a rather well situated young lady, who took offence to his assumption that she was a harlot and made a point of telling the multitude that she was not for sale. A good friend of Hazlitt, a poet called Coleridge, offered the opinion that Hazlitt was always in love with someone, and he went on to add that his friend was "addicted to women as objects of sexual indulgence." These days it could be called a Compulsory Sexual Behavior Disorder, but Hazlitt himself preferred to explore his obsession in terms of the fascinating relationship between love and lust. He wrote a book called Liber Amoris, The Book of Love, which was a touch on the graphic side and sold very well, earned William a reputation for being an obscene little man, his face marked by smallpox, who deserved nothing but ridicule and disgrace. As the years turned, especially after his death in 1830, William Hazlitt became renowned for his essays, his literary criticism, a long list of achievements that for some of his modern day admirers puts him up there with Samuel Johnson and even George Orwell. Here worth recalling that Samuel Johnson, a perfect gentleman who died in 1784, thought love a poor foundation for a lasting marriage and he saw lust as selfish and disruptive. Orwell on the other hand saw Love and Lust as intricate to his understanding of political power, individual liberty and human nature. Orwell went further, he saw personal relationships driven by love and lust as a central form of rebellion against totalitarianism. Why did Orwell think this? Because in his writing he notes that love and lust as a sexual relationship produced a private world which was outside The Party's control. Hazlitt, who was alive in the early days of Kant's domination of the Enlightenment was one who didn't think human motivation, human nature, was entirely selfish. He stood with the Romantic Poets, Coleridge, Byron and Wordsworth against the utilitarians, the Adam Smith/Bentham invisible hand liberals on question of human nature being more robust and less amenable to the simplistic and axiomatic understandings the utilitarians wanted to believe. William rather sweetly suggested "the love of liberty is the love of others, the love of power is the love of self." Then in Orwell's 1984 the lovers are captured and tortured, forced to betray each other and, no longer living as reinforcements for each other's love and lust, they were forced to return to The Party, become one with the loves and lusts of The Party. In Orwell's story, the lowest social class of Proles, their lives humdrum and ordinary, they were unimportant but necessary for the Party's survival, they granted a sense of unity and purpose for purer Party Members who were define by what they weren't, they weren't Proles. But as Orwell suggested the Proles retained more of their humanity, they enjoyed their own private loyalties, their secrets and their own humors, than the poor saps who were Party Members.
No comments:
Post a Comment