Erich Fromm's Theory of Love in relation to Milan Kundera’s "The Hitchhiking Game" and Raymond Carver’s "What We Tall About When We Talk About Love"
Love gets repeatedly confused with the thought of losing oneself to something, which gets deemed as being larger than life, greater than the self or total of one’s parts (Fromm 7). From the desire for human connection arises a desire of fusing with another person, so that the two can become one; to know each other as wholly and as deeply as one understands oneself. Therefore, this essay tends to look at how The Art of Loving by Erich Fromm brings out this aspect of immature and symbiotic love in relation to Milan Kundera’s The Hitchhiking Game and Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk.
According to Erich Fromm as described in his book The Art of Loving, love that is immature and symbiotic is not only transitory, but also illusory. As a result, it is impossible to compare this love to the mature form whereby union gets obtained through retaining the individual self instead of loss by means of symbiosis (Fromm 15). Therefore, mature love, along with the resulting knowledge of the other person gets attained only through the act of love, instead of the illusory state, which is immature love (Fromm 27).
The theory of symbiotic union by Erich Fromm is applicable to Milan Kundera’s The Hitchhiking Game as we observe an instance of his model in action. In this story, the unnamed young couple seems to have a symbiotic union whereby the girl happens to be the passive partner and the young man being the active (O'Brien 21). The couple plays the hitchhiking game whereby the young man and girl act as if they are strangers. Initially, this game is exciting to them thereby giving the couple the opportunity of re-experiencing the original attraction, desire, as well as the excitement of falling in love. According to Fromm, this is an indication of being intimate with a stranger while confusing sudden familiarity with the act of loving (Fromm 38). Therefore, the game acts as a way for each one of them letting go of the positions nurtured in their relationship and the professed notions of each other. Furthermore, confessing their own beings and exploring their own senses of self. However, the resulting effect happens to be more than a concise shedding of roles, but rather a discovery of a pathological dynamic symbiosis (O'Brien 31).
In the beginning, the story sets the girl as an illustration of passive symbiosis, with the persona of the young man, which is actively symbiotic not getting explored deeply. On the second part of the story, whereby the game gets played, the initial scene turns out to be a startling reversal. In this case, the girl breaks away from this role thereby playing the part of the hitchhiker whereby she says, does and feels whatever she likes, while the young man responds by being extremely sadistic (O'Brien 44). The girl step away from the personality of a passive partner that is from being the pure, as well as an innocent person, the persona that the young man has professed, and whom he envisages he loves. The hitchhiking game reveals to couple the truth that they are not closer compared to the roles of strangers, which they have put on for the night, yet possible with this spanking awareness, they are capable of learning to love, to really understand each other in a manner that will rise above symbiosis and immature love, paving the way for the paradox of being one yet continue to be two, of truly knowing, as well as not knowing one another, except in the name of love (O'Brien 61).
According to Fromm, the deepest, most critical desire of mankind is overcoming a sense of loneliness, together with separation (Fromm 49). As human beings, we have the distinctive trait of self-awareness. Self-awareness signifies that every individual has a comprehension of him or herself as a specifically detached entity from the bigger group be it society, family or community (Fromm 62). Fromm consents that individual separatism is a necessary feature in comprehending the human experience, and one that is the root of much loneliness, as well as existential angst (Fromm 68). It is only possible to transcend to the prison of aloneness through a sense of union, in association with the other, whether an individual or a group. Although there are various forms of love like brotherly or familial love, in most cases, the drive of achieving a sense of union reveals itself in the form of romance (Fromm 79).
In Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk, Mel suffers from self-certitude, the belief that he is right, which happens to be a drug clouding his reasoning powers, as well as his capability of seeing the reality (Carver 31). As a result of his love for listening to the sound of his bloviating voice, together with the certitude, which his voice offers him; Mel assumes that he is aware of the higher truth about love. Contrary, he happens to be delusional in his perception toward love, not only in his ideas, but also in his actions. In fact, this story describes Mel’s delusion of love, as an oversimplification grounded in idealism, with the realism of love, being a messy tangle of intricacies and paradox, which rebel against Mel’s unvarnished truisms and aphorisms concerning love (Carver 39).
Mel trusts in idealized love that ironically happens to be a standard of love, which he fails miserably (Carver 43). However, the story reveals that there are numerous kinds of love that disregard easy classification; these include platonic love chimera love, infatuation love, self love, obsessed love and Mel’s self love that is narcissism. The ultimate delusion of Mel is that he gets obsessed in love, as a matter of fact he disregards love thereby preferring his self to all else (Carver 52). Unfortunately, Mel convinces himself that he gets engrossed in love when the reality is that his real fascination is erecting a superior understanding of love, which he can use for rubbing others' noses in (Carver 55).
No one wishes to be alone or lonely; as a result, every human being has a profound desire of rising above any feelings of loneliness. This leads to mankind searching for a way of establishing a relationship that will fulfill this inbuilt desire by connection with another person (Fromm 49). Considering that human beings have the capability of understanding themselves, as well as what they desire, it then becomes easier for them to understand each other. However, there are instances whereby the new-found relationship might not work due to different desires from the two people who come together as a couple. In this case, the couple opts for separation only when they have exhausted every remedy of avoiding separation (Fromm 52). This is clearly illustrated in Fromm's hypothesis of immature love while getting revealed in both The Hitchhiking Game and What We Talk About When We Talk.
Work Cited:
Carver, Raymond. What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. California: Vintage books, 2009.
Fromm, Erich. The Art of Loving. New York: HarperCollins, 2006.
O'Brien, John. Intersections, Milan Kundera and Feminism: Dangerous. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1995.
