Disclaimer: This post was originally written in Chinese and translated into English by GPT-5.2.
Psychoanalysts believe that civilization and instinct are like the two poles of a magnet—forever mutually exclusive, forever in contention. To this end, they created a set of theoretical terms, such as ego, id, superego; the pleasure principle, the moral principle, the reality principle, and so on. A person’s whole life is then lived under the conflicts among so many “selves” and so many “principles,” surviving in repression, anxiety, and difficulty. Confucius did not dare to boast until he was seventy that he could “follow what his heart desired without overstepping the bounds,” let alone the likes of us. And the “finding comfort in one’s own comfort” that Zhuangzi spoke of—how easy is that to talk about?
Love and marriage are the eternal themes of literature. This may be because love represents humanity’s most primal instinctual desire, whereas marriage, as an ethical product, typically manifests the civilized world’s repression or restraint of that instinct. So long as this contradictory relationship exists, literature will not lose its interest in exploring the relationship between love and marriage. From another angle, so long as this contradictory relationship exists, the repression, anxiety, and inner conflict of human society will forever have to be reenacted again and again like a cycle of history—don’t forget, whether it imitates the world or expresses the world, literature, in the final analysis, is a kind of reflection of the world. Hu Shi, whose style was highly admired by the old school, held that “the price of love is pain; the only way of love is to endure pain,” but the practice of theory is not the theorist’s responsibility, and we also do not know how many times in his life this new-style practitioner of romance—mocked by Jiang Yongzhen as “only practicing, not speaking”—endured pain by going off the rails.
Carver’s Call Me If You Need Me shows us the process by which a pair of American middle-class spouses, after each has had an affair, attempt to eliminate their marital crisis by traveling, an attempt they self-mockingly call a “second honeymoon.” This “second honeymoon” does not proceed as smoothly as intended; it is always halfhearted and stumbling, and in the end they discover that they can never go back again. At the end of the novel, just as the second honeymoon is about to be declared bankrupt, there appears a group of runaway white horses symbolizing the pursuit of freedom and the release of desire. This brings them positive psychological suggestion and final liberation of the soul; they decide not to interfere with each other and to carry on as before, maintaining the original marital relationship while tacitly permitting each other’s extramarital lives. Not violating, in form, the ethical system under their cultural background, while inwardly obtaining the pleasure and reconciliation of following the heart’s desire—this is where the theme of this story lies.
The deep structure of love is libido; in essence it is a wild instinct that seeks only pleasure and nothing else. The purpose of love is pure pleasure. Therefore, although love may perhaps inevitably involve pain, the only method of love is to avoid pain; a love that endures pain is not love, just as a love with eyes, overly rational, does not seem like love. The pain of love is unbearable; in order to achieve an inner dynamic balance, this pain always forces us to avoid it until we find a corresponding solution for dissolution. Thus there is the “Lady Chatterley–style” one-sided affair, seeking bodily pleasure; there is the “Sartre–Beauvoir–style” legendary lifelong sexual partnership, not binding both parties with a hellish marriage; there is the “Young Werther–style” one-sided disillusionment, suicide to dissolve the pain; there is Watanabe Jun’ichi’s “Paradise Lost–style” mutual death for love—before irresistible worldly pressure arrives, using an ecstatic union that makes one feel both immortal and dead to complete an immortal-style death. Of course there are also some so-called honest people who pass their whole lives with an extremely ascetic method, but what does love have to do with them? We cannot forget literary works from ancient to modern times—for instance, Boccaccio’s The Decameron and its depiction of the licentious lives of monks and clerics: even those who claim to be outside the world, those who cannot enjoy joyful love, all without exception avoid the pain of absent desire and pursue bodily carnival. Asceticism is a paradox: it is using a method of avoiding desire to soothe the repression and anxiety of lacking desire, as if self-deceiving—forcing oneself to believe what one does not believe.
The ideal love is of the “climb-the-mountain, climb-the-mountain love” kind. So-called “climb-the-mountain, climb-the-mountain love” is Li Ao’s conception of love, originating from his novel of the same name. He believes that love is like mountain climbing: there can only be the action of going up the mountain; once love reaches the summit, before going down one should part peacefully and never linger. Because love is the externalization of instinctual desire, the climax of love is the complete indulgence of instinct, seeking nothing but pleasure; yet, as many philosophers have revealed, pleasure is always fickle and tired of the old, so the climax of love is the prelude to love’s end or its fall into a low valley. To avoid unhappiness and pursue happiness, it is better to stop at the highest good and dissolve peacefully at the moment of climax. The love of “climb-the-mountain, climb-the-mountain love” is a simplified ideal theory of love based on human nature; once constraints such as society, institutions, and cultural ethics are introduced, human instinctual impulses and fickleness are even more intense than imagined. From this point of view, the spouses’ respective affairs in the story, in fact, already existed at the level of ideas before the action—that is, the emergence of the marital crisis is such that consciousness precedes action; and in the end the marital crisis, in a manner that is superficially “outwardly compliant but inwardly defiant,” yet in fact “tacitly understood,” is actually a reconciliatory equilibrium (equilibrium) obtained through a complex game between desire and ethics. Everything is as if manipulated by many invisible hands.
The foundation of a love that can “follow the heart’s desire without overstepping the bounds” is mutual understanding and tolerance, and under the current social ideology this is not something socially recognized or easily achieved. Xu Zhaoshou, in his essays on sexual culture, predicts that the monogamous marriage system will eventually exit the stage of history, to be replaced by the so-called “multi-wife multi-husband system,” which from the opposite side reflects the profound crisis between desire and ethics at present; whether it can be alleviated, especially in an era when people are treated merely as “mouths to feed and hands to work,” we do not know. Korea has a novel titled My Wife Is Getting Married, a title full of tension, which was a bestseller for a time; the film of the same name also swept through for a while. But from observations on all sides, love that can reach reconciliation under desire and ethics is only local and individual. That is to say, Carver’s story is still avant-garde to this day, and it will continue to exist.
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