The Myth of First Love

ELT : VOLUME 35:3 1992 Judith Ryan has provided us with a major survey of the impact of fin-de-siècle psychology exclusive of Freud but of equal importance to the development of Modernism. In its clarity, eloquence, and insight, Ryan's study achieves its aim admirably of uncovering "a new dimension of literary modernism." Karl Beckson ___________________ Brooklyn College, CUNY The Myth of First Love Maria DiBattista. First Love: The Affections of Modern Fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. xvi + 277 pp. $24.95 MARIA DIBATTISTA'S First Love is an elaborately conceived and elegantly written book. It is also, however, a profoundly disturbing work, for its many intellectual and stylistic flourishes mask a host of contradictions . DiBattista argues that "First Love is the invention of modern narration, designed to fill the emptiness left by the death or the desertion of the gods." Associating First Love (always capitalized in her text) with the action of the modern realistic novel and with the depiction of the male artist figure, she asserts that it offers the novelistic character of a post-religious age the potential to "[give] birth to the romance of reality" and to pursue "a direct and unmediated 'entry into experience'." This analysis does not ignore the perils of "First Love"; indeed, DiBattista's task is to trace the forms those perils take in the fictions of Hardy, Lawrence, Joyce, Beckett, and Nabokov. The dangers, however, tend to be seen merely as a version of those encountered in the traditional quest narrative: the story of "First Love" gone awry is the story of someone—like Clym Yeobright of The Return of the Native, Jude Fawley of Jude the Obscure, or Stephen Dedalus of A Portrait of the Artist—who is seen as pursuing the wrong course in his love-adventure. There is never any questioning, in other words, of the premises or the aim of the quest narrative itself. For DiBattista, First Love is a "spiritmanifesting event" offering the occasion for a deeply religious transcendence . "There is no way," she says, "to experience this apocalyptic feeling [of creation], to enter into this new and transfigured world, except through the grace of First Love" (170). What this means, quite simply, is that DiBattista is making First Love into a new transcendental signifier which, like the gods of earlier centuries, embodies the "first meanings" (146) of things. At many points, this argument is an interesting and fruitful one, for 364 BOOK REVIEWS there is no doubt that the experience of "First Love" is a common subject and structural focus in modern fiction. Where DiBattista's line of thinking becomes problematic, however, is in the contradictory position she takes about First Love as myth: on the one hand, she insists that it is the "invention" of modern fiction and that it is, therefore, a cultural construction; on the other hand, she herself—in her critical language and in her readings of texts—embraces the myth as a source of meaning. This becomes most clear in her last chapter, "A Defense of First Love," in which she argues that it "is a mythology whose idols, though now widely discredited by Nietzschean assaults on their validity, we might do well to honor, if not revere. We ought to respect them, as we should all vanishing relics and abandoned beliefs, because they attest to the visionary power of first things, primordial feelings" (235). DiBattista's emotional defense of idolatry and myth is made even more remarkable by her frequent use—and misuse—of theories that undermine her position. For example, though she praisingly quotes "the idolatrous Barthes" (50) as though he shared her celebration of idolatry, she does not see the shape of his entire argument and thus participates in the very "mystification" that he sees as transforming "petit-bourgeois culture into a universal nature" ("Preface to the 1970 edition," Mythologies , trans. Annette Lavers [London: Paladin, 1973], 9). DiBattista's use of psychoanalytic theory is equally incongruous. Though she often quotes Freud and Lacan, she bases her argument on an idea contradicting their theories: that psychic wholeness is possible. Her adaptation of Lacan's mirror stage, which she sees "reenacted in First Love...