Liebestod

LOVE IN THE WESTERN WORLD --Denis de Rougemonf--Harcourf, Brace ($3).

Swiss Philosopher de Rougemont's ambitious thesis is that Europe and the Western Hemisphere owe their desperate plight to their over-susceptibility to passionate love. Ancient Greeks and Romans, says he, regarded love as a mental aberration, an unqualified misfortune; Orientals so regard it today. Only in the Western world has it taken a hold in the mores, been accorded respect. Taking Tristan and Iseult as the archetypes of passion, he hangs on their necks more weight than Freud ever hung on Oedipus.

Immediate ancestors of the Tristan myth were the troubadours of Provence. They were Albigensians, heretics, and their songs, their protocols of courtly love, were simply the elaborate double-talk of a theology driven underground. With them, in the 12th Century, passion took root in Europe. Thence sprang the whole of European literature, the whole shape and vocabulary of European mysticism, the whole ferocious timbre of European war fare, the whole possibility of such megalomaniacs as Hitler, the whole suffering wreckage of European love and marriage. De Rougemont believes there is an almost universal schizophrenia, a tide rip created in millions of individuals between two hopelessly incompatible systems: the socially responsible, Christian type of love ingrained by Family, Church and State; and the anarchic, unappeasable passion which is literature's (and the cinema's) degraded heritage from the troubadours. An unattainable "happiness" has replaced an unattainable divinity. Under such cir cumstances it is inconceivable that any human marriage can survive.

Thus having spoken, De Rougemont flogs the daylights out of contemporary conceptions of marriage, of happiness, of romantic love. In a last chapter whose eloquence becomes all but desperate, he expounds his personal solution : a marriage in which fidelity is observed neither for love, money nor hope of inner reward but "by virtue of the absurd," that is, by virtue alone of having taken oath to it. Right or raving, De Rougemont's reasoning is often ingenious, always arresting, fascinating in detail.

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