What We Have Loved

What we have loved, others will love, and we will teach them how.

—William Wordsworth (1986)

Several years ago, Catherine O'Hara—of SCTV fame—spoke of her disappointment with the current fare on television. Though she became known two decades ago for her impersonations of "hard-to-mimic" celebrities such as Meryl Streep and Brooke Shields, she would not care to practice her craft today. "The stuff on TV parodies itself so much," she explained. "I can't imagine parodying it." All the entertainers on television are "commenting on themselves already. It's as if they're afraid someone's going to parody them, so they beat them to it" (Sragow 2000: n.p.).

O'Hara makes one exception, for David Letterman. She says his appeal "is that he is still kind of on the edge." Because he has "never quite conformed to TV," viewers can never be sure of what might come next on Letterman's show. "He might be mean to someone, or he might love somebody that you never thought he would love" (Sragow 2000: n.p.).

Parody and Letterman, I understand that theme. But Letterman and love, that is not a pairing I would have made. Yet the more I thought about Catherine O'Hara's comments, the more sense they made. For all his cynical dismissiveness and ironizing bluster, Letterman is a rare performer who, on occasion, expresses unfeigned affection for a person, performance, or idea.

If this is so unusual on television that it counts as a sign of being "on the edge," what would a similar avowal signify in a classroom or in a piece of scholarly prose? For the past several decades in the humanities, our discourse has been theory-rich, perhaps theory-saturated, and we have developed explanations for everything from the nuances of différance to the needs of the subaltern. But when have we thought about love?

I write these words somewhat hesitantly, because the language of love seems so foreign to our critical enterprises and teaching concerns. Having been trained in the hermeneutics of suspicion, we find the disciplines of affection unnatural, no doubt because of our wariness concerning the unnerving possibilities of ideological control. Schooled in the arts of parodic distancing, we take the act of affectionate imitation to be lacking in utility or power. Though skeptical of love, we remain passionate about resistance.

Yet matters have not always been this way. Socrates spoke and Plato wrote endlessly and eloquently of love, as did the apostle Paul. Saint Augustine dealt with love in every one of his major treatises, and he did so with particular acuity in On Christian Doctrine, a work Martin Heidegger called "the first 'hermeneutics' in the grand style" (quoted in Grondin 1994: 33). Love is the alpha and the omega of Dante's Divine Comedy, just as the discussion and experience of it fill the pages of Shakespeare's sonnets and plays. This is to say nothing of its central place as a subject of the novel and the modern lyric poem.

In literary criticism, the patterns have been largely similar, at least through the middle of the twentieth century. C. S. Lewis gave us The Allegory of Love, Denis de Rougemont Love in the Western World, and G. M. Trevelyan A Layman's Love of Letters. In 1960, Leslie Fiedler weighed in with the witty Love and Death in the American Novel, a provocative work whose trenchant ironies and deep affections remained nicely, albeit precariously, balanced.

That balance would be upset in the decade after Fiedler's book appeared, and the scales remain uneven to this day. Like many other things in an increasingly commodified culture, love became ironized in late twentieth-century academic discourse. The appearance of the word in the title of a book was more likely a sign of suspicion than a statement of admiration. Increasingly, criticism promoted itself as the art of unmasking, and teaching became a labor of liberation.

As a result, to think...