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Jacqueline Ho reviews Stuart Walton’s dive into the deepest human crucible.  

Stuart Walton, Sleepless Nights: The Faults and Failings of Love (Academica Press, 2023), 221pp. 

In Nietzsche’s concept of “eternal recurrence”, time is not perceived as linear, but as a circle where every instance exists in recurrence. There is no past or future, but only the present moment where life keeps repeating itself incessantly. This concept of life combines both an attachment to joyous moments, with acknowledgement that pain is inevitably codependent with joy. 

Stuart Walton is a writer preoccupied with this kind of recurrence. In Out of It: A Cultural History of Intoxication (2001), he explores the pleasures and sufferings connected to various forms of inebriation. With his latest work, Sleepless Nights (2023), it is apparent that he has never really got “out of it”. Haunted by this yet another intoxicant, Walton states that his aim is to discover our psyche’s faults in love, the structural flaws of our system, and lastly, what can be done better. Under these intentions, he structures his book with different themes of love, for instance, devotion, enslavement, desire, reciprocation, marriage, separations, and solitude. Stylistically dense, each section is a tapestry of eclectic literary and cultural references, woven into painstaking philosophical arguments. 

I observed a pattern of recursive historical account that penetrates the arguments. In a linear sense, the history of love recalled in this book begins with agape, the non-erotic love in Ancient Greece, and for medieval Christians, a devotional disposition between God and men. Until today, love prevails in dating apps where desire becomes ubiquitous. Yet with Walton’s narration, over time a philosophical dialectic of the different themes of love emerges. Unfolding the dialectic into layers of contradicting arguments therefore becomes a crucial step in appreciating Walton’s ideas. With this approach to love, Walton barely offers guidance to cope with its failings. There is a surrender element to how love has brutally wounded us in history, with his note “in its devotion to the aesthetic, to beauty and joy, it is wholly amoral” (190). Just like how we were lured into love repeatedly, reading the book relives the pain from our past, but the joy that comes together makes us endure the pain with full willingness.  

“Willing slavery” is a recurring image in the book. It is the posture of the unrequited lover of the Renaissance, itself descended from the medieval churchman’s relations with God. It is the romantic lover’s abnegation and unreciprocated steadfastness. The oxymoron between “willing” and “slavery”, precisely summarizes the psychological conflict in the lover’s “self”, the site where Walton applied extensive etymological references. To set off the dialectic, the Greek word eros, meaning romantic love, acts as the opening thesis. Eros denotes “lack” and “want” simultaneously with the straightforward logic that a lover “wants” what he “lacks”. Yet, the paradox is derived from reversing the logic, that when a lover attains what he lacks, there is no more wanting. Walton deploys Lacanian theory to shed light on this contradiction: as the sense of lack that drives our desire is a constitute part of our subjectivity, the innate nature of lack makes the object of desire never attainable. Lack and want sustain the lovers’ devotion and turn them into slaves. If “slavery” is contradictory to “willing”, a dream or fantasy is never meant to come true. Extending this doomed vision to love, Walton explains the paradoxes of today’s romantic trends, such as the misanthropic Japanese hikikomori (social withdrawers) and serial flingers, who are pessimistic in love enough to understand that “the moment it is true, it is no longer a dream” (142). Nevertheless, for Walton such postmodern pessimism is naïve and cowardly. Forsaking love surrends the complexities of human affect. Referencing Lauren Berlant’s extension of the Lacanian theory (Desire/Love, 2012), “love is always an outcome of fantasy”, the synthesis of love’s dialectic leads to the knowledge that despite its utopic nature, fantasy is a prerequisite for love. This is why the beloved in Ovid’s Amores, despite being mentally subjugated, still feels joyful living in the fantasy that sustains his willing slavery.  

The contradicting site of “self” is further complicated with psychological references. The devout lover is theoretically seen as “selfless”. Yet in a process called “limerence” such unrequited love paradoxically cultivates an augmented “self”. It is explicitly the lack of reciprocation from the beloved that makes the lover an enclosed system. On the other hand, the state of being-in-love gives an ecstatic annihilation of the “self”. This juxtaposition of pain/egoism and joy/unawareness recalls one of Graham Greene’s autobiographical novels, The End of the Affair (1951), where the writer, caught in fruitless love, reflects on the nature of narration: 

Pain is easy to write […] But what can one write about happiness? […] In misery we seem aware of our own existence, even though it may be in the form of a monstrous egotism: this pain of mine is individual, this nerve that winces belongs to me and to no other. But happiness annihilates us: we lose our identity. 

In response to limerence, Walton suggests that the practice of “self-love” emerges as a healing tool at the turn of the twenty-first century. However, Walton claims such self-love is futile in coping with romantic failure because what we really lack is collectivity and general benevolence from society. Here Walton returns to the Christian unconditional love, agape, reminding us of the importance of this cognate form of love. Universal love from God may be the antidote to our alienation; “self” should not be the site to return to because it is where pain establishes itself. In The End of the Affair, after realizing his humanly unrequited love is bonded with desire and egoism, the agony of the writer is transformed into a hopeless surrender to God. While the Catholic novel gives a more overt message that Christ’s love is above all earthy sentiments, Walton’s dialectic reflects on our self-justified way of loving. When selfless devotion is by nature self-augmentation, these contradicting parts nevertheless do not cancel out each other, again. Instead, the oppositions are mediated by looking to a more primeval and nobler form of selflessness. 

The social looms large in Walton’s field of view, and in this respect his gaze remains eclectic. Here the account turns to French troubadours who wrote about courtships in the twelfth century, pulling love down from the altar to a profane enjoyment. The courtship ritual, where men wooed women into marriage, secularized love into a materialistic transaction. Despite the chivalrous treatment that elite women received, ironically they remained the materially-deprived component of a society, reliant on marriage for resources. That is why in the twentieth-century feminist movement, marriage was seen as a tool for perpetuating the patriarchal social structure, or the status quo. Walton emphasizes the revolutionary force of women’s emancipation as the antithesis to gender inequality: women strived for a choice of non-marital life and economic independence from men. With the notion of gender balance implanted into post-1960s feminist literature, romantic partners were portrayed as covalent bonds who are symbiotic and equal. Again, Walton tactically aggravates our mental tribulation with a third layer of dialectic: given the extinguishment of a grander social political hope by the recent-years far-right movements, romantic love is now seen as a coping mechanism, a refuge or an Edenic idyll where the outside world cannot reach. Marriage solidifies patriarchy but there is not yet a better social institution to protect women. When people once called for the autonomy of love, romance has progressed technologically by the easily-accessible dating apps and speed dating. But marriage has regressed. In a dark twist within our consumerist culture, arranged love becomes a means of social control, and returns as a synthesizing force to the former gender struggles. 

From the dense dialectic, we see how contradiction structures both the human mind and social ideologies. But it is these conflicts that also drive history and sustain love. No matter how Walton frames and reframes love, history repeats itself with the same recurrence of pain and joy. Worse still, the pursuit of love often comes with a hidden cost where the pain does not pay off. Perhaps, a lesson to learn from its history is that love is older than any of us. It is beyond our reach to comprehend it. Ultimately, it is worth noting again that in this book of failings, the “what can be done better” part is strikingly small. If one hunts for a hint of joy among the tribulations of love, it might be universal love and benevolence – the sort of “make it a better place” sentiment of Michael Jackson’s Heal the World (1991). Jackson is an icon of corrupted promise, and the sentiment of universal love is somewhat noble, utopian, and somewhat clichéd – clichéd because we do not have a new way to speak of love.

 Jacqueline Ho is a research assistant in the Department of English in The Hang Seng University of Hong Kong. She is interested in utopianism, science fiction and postcolonial theory.