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Review of Love's Body, by Norman O. Brown Love's Body is an unsettling book. When it first came out I glanced through it, read a paragraph here and there, and put it away, disturbed. It was two years later, in the spring of 1968, that I read it on the plane corning home from the East Coast. It made me dizzy, intoxicated; it made me change. I am still living with the book, teaching with it, absorbing it. This review must be a personal response to one of the most personal books of the century. It is also one of the most important books, both for what it does and for what it signals; I must try to find words to say why. The aphoristic form has many predecessors—Marshall McLuhan, Nietzsche, Johann Hamann, Blaise Pascal—but Brown uses it for his own purposes. It allows him to combine range and concentration. In less than 300 pages he rolls through sixteen chapters: Liberty, Nature, Trinity, Unity, Person, Representative, Head, Boundary, Food, Fire, Fraction, Resurrection, Fulfillment, Judgment, Freedom, and Nothing. Each paragraph of each chapter is a monad, complete in itself yet related to every other. The book is about almost everything : politics, education, society, personality, epistemology, symbolism , religion, and time, but it proceeds in a nonlinear way, beginning everything at once and finishing nothing. It moves by endless free association—primary process—like the process of actual thinking , like life itself. Yet it is the expression of a cultured and controlled intelligence—artful, playful, witty. It is uniquely personal, yet it cites or quotes "authorities" in every paragraph. It is as far from the form of the linear academic treatise (in which Life Against Death, Brown's celebrated 1959 volume, was still cast) as one could get; it is an outcry against most of what passes for college teaching; This review was written in April 1969. 14 and yet it could only have been written by a teacher in an American university in the later twentieth century. Among the many things it signals is the aching need to embrace the whole, to break down the walls of academic specialization, to reunite the separated. And its very form is a means to and expression of that reunion. In this book, where so much is going on, one cannot assert the finality of any one interpretation. The book is, among other things, a protest against literalism, and the quotation from Blake with which Brown ended his famous article "Apocalypse" could almost serve as a motto for Love's Body: Twofold always. May God us keep From single vision and Newton's sleep. Any prose reading of such a book is bound to be one-sided, determined as much by the reader's problems as by Brown's. With this proviso in mind let me develop a few of the themes of the book that have been especially illuminating to me. First is the very richness of texture itself, in large part brought on by the simultaneous use of several very different vocabularies. The two most extensively used vocabularies are derived from Christianity and psychoanalysis. A variety of other vocabularies—political, religious, and poetic—emerge from time to time, of which the most important, perhaps, are the Buddhist and the Marxist. What is most important about these simultaneous vocabularies is that no one of them provides an ultimate standard to which all the others are reduced . All have a certain validity. Any one vocabulary can crosscut another, break into it, force it to yield new meanings. The constant recombination of diverse vocabularies to render unexpected meanings is one of the central devices of the book. But if all languages have a certain equivalency, it is clear that for Brown some languages are more central, more controlling, than others. I will risk oversimplification in arguing that it is Christian language that provides the most basic framework within which the book works. Creation, fall, incarnation , sacrifice, resurrection, judgment, transfiguration—these are terms that provide a kind of ground plan. The language of psychoanalysis , particularly that of Ferenczi, Roheim, and Melanie Klein, as well as Freud himself, might at first glance appear to be even more central, because if anything more frequent, than the Christian terminology . But one of the major functions of the psychoanalytic language , especially the insistent sexual language of penis, vagina, 231 REVIEW OF "LOVE'S BODY," BY NORMAN O. BROWN [3.138.175.180] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 10...

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