Love Is A Catastrophe

By LANCE MORROW

Octavio Paz, the Nobel-prizewinning author who died last week, wrote a masterpiece years ago called The Labyrinth of Solitude. The book contained, among other things, a treatise on the dynamics of passionate love: "To realize itself, love must violate the rules of our world. It is scandalous and disorderly, a transgression committed by two stars that break out of their predestined orbits and rush together in the midst of space. The romantic conception of love, which implies a breaking away and a catastrophe, is the only one we know today because everything in our society prevents love from being a free choice... [I]f women attempt a free choice, it must be a kind of jailbreak."

Paz was writing about the constrictions of the Mexican society of 50 years ago. The scriptwriters of Titanic (favorite movie of Vili Fualaau and Mary Letourneau) composed a variation on the theme of impetuous breakaway. In 1936, just as the world was preparing to blow itself apart, England's King Edward VIII and Wallis Warfield Simpson enacted their drama of self-absorbed abdication. The basic story changes little, only the details: the personalities, the stakes they play for, the icebergs waiting in the dark, and as we now see, the ages of the lovers.

We recognize in ourselves the temptation that Paz meant--the liberating flash of decision, the mad, giddy flight. The spectacle of such love is bracing, even when scandalous and self-destructive--or perhaps because of that. In Emma Bovary's case, Flaubert pursued the story past the giddy dash to a sadder place down the road (dead end, suicide).

Mary Letourneau's jailbreak--out of the gulag of troubled suburban marriage, out of her grownup's work as 37-year-old wife and mother, out of her moral and professional responsibilities, out of the Ozzie-and-Harriet zone altogether--landed her in the Washington Corrections Center for Women. No matter. Jail is freedom to outlaw love. Tra la.

At first we were inclined to think of the tale of the teacher and her sixth-grade lover as mere daytime-television trash in the flesh--the teacher-pupil angle slipping a ghost of incest into the narrative, and no doubt a touch of mental illness. On the other hand, we have gone pretty far in exhausting the categories of the forbidden. The love that dare not speak its name has become public, ordinary and settled into domestic life, as wholesome as Fred MacMurray in a cardigan. The President's penis and its recreations are routinely discussed in public without much sense anymore of the sheer weirdness of that fact. We are harder to shock or impress. It has been years since the woman called Madonna simulated masturbation on stage with a crucifix.

But oddly, scandal and trash may sometimes be transformed upward. Mere sleaze may blossom into art. Greek tragedy told stories more lurid than afternoon television does. (Next Jerry Springer: "Guys who murdered their fathers and married their mothers.") The tale of Mary Letourneau and the boy Vili even begins to touch us now with a certain screwball Romeo-and-Juliet poignancy. There's an interesting humanity in the tale, an aberrance with something almost sweet about it.

America is a great country for stories these days, a circus with more attractions (fakirs, fire walkers, Oprahs, snake charmers, holy men, Geraldos) than Kipling's Grand Trunk Road of Hindustan. Life is a funny old raccoon. The raccoon works for the tabloids now but hopes to be a literary genius later on.