The Nature of Desire

Archetype of Desire

Okay, not a terribly geeky subject, but even geeks have longings, right? Actually, what inspired this post is a book I just read by young adult writer and gay novelist David Levithan. Or perhaps I should say, novelist David Levithan, who writes mainly for young adults and happens to be gay. Thus his book combines two realms of the geek world I inhabit: young adult fiction and science fiction. So where does desire come into the picture? Well, I suppose there is always the perennial geek question: Why does no one desire me? But that risks sounding whiny and self-pitying, so we move on to the more interesting and universal questions:  Whence comes desire? And how is desire related to love?

David Levithan

 Levithan's first novel, Boy Meets Boy (2003), took the standard teen love story and gave it a gay twist. Perhaps his most well-known book, a collaboration with Rachel Cohn, was Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist (2006), which was made into a mildly popular indie movie of the same name in 2008, starring Michael Cera and Kat Dennings as the eponymous leads. The book I just read, every day (2012), is science fiction, of a sort.

In every day, the protagonist, A, is a being who inhabits a different person's body every day, for exactly 24 hours, then moves on to another body without any control of where he/she/it will end up (this problem with pronouns is a major crux of the book, but more on that later). No explanation is given for A's condition, and A her/himself is ignorant of her/his parentage and origins.

The only rules governing A's condition seem to be:

1. A will end up within a certain geographical radius–no more than a four-hour drive–of the last body.

2. A will land in a body that approximates A's actual age; so, for instance, when A was an infant, (s)he ended up in infant bodies; now that (s)he's a teen, in teenage bodies.

3. The body inhabited by A will only vaguely remember the events of the missing day, and A can control what those memories will be to some extent.

4. A can access memories of the current body (s)he is inhabiting, as well as her/his own memories, and A possesses to a limited extent all the skills and knowledge of the body (s)he is inhabiting.

5. A is helpless to prevent the change of bodies, or to direct where (s)he'll next end up.

So, interesting premise, right? It's actually quite bewildering for the reader; A helps us out by titling each chapter with the number of the day in her/his life, and by introducing us to the body for the day, complete with physical description and personality traits.

Still, that's not what's interesting about the book. The trouble starts when A falls in love, and has to convince the object of her/his love, a teenage girl named Rhiannon, that (s)he is the same person with each new encounter. Now, I don't want to give too much away, so I'll break away from the plot of every day and talk about the problem in the abstract.

When we fall in love, we fall in love with both a personality and a body, with both soul and physicality. It is generally accepted that the shallower among us fall in love with appearance only, the deeper with their beloved's essence. Yet can we separate those so readily? Many tales recount the story of how a young woman has to look beyond her lover's hideous exterior to discover the beautiful soul within: Beaumont's "Beauty and the Beast," the Grimms' "The Frog Prince," or the Greek myth of Psyche, where she believes herself to be visited at night by a hideous serpent to whom she's been given as wife, when in reality it is the god of love himself, Eros.

There are also the stories of the monstrous or ugly men who cannot find love, despite their kind and virtuous natures: Quasimodo of Victor Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein's monster, Edmond Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac.

Sir Gawain and the Loathly Lady

There are some stories with the roles reversed, though fewer: Geoffrey Chaucer's "Wife of Bath's Tale," with the knight of King Arthur's court promising to marry the hag, the "loathly lady" who helps him solve the riddle that will save his life; the closely related 15th-century poem,  "The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle," with a similar story; and a modern version, Stephen Sondheim's "Passion," with its sickly, homely heroine Fosca who with the force of her relentless love finally convinces the handsome soldier Giorgio to fall in love with her before literally dying of her passion.

What is the point of these stories? That the protagonists learn to see the inner beauty of their mate and thus learn to appreciate true love? No. In a few cases, they do indeed come to love their hideous partner; in others, they merely go through the motions of devotion (sharing food, a kiss, lying in the same bed together, going through with a marriage ceremony), but then the spell is broken (or, in the case of Eros, the truth revealed), and they are rewarded with the transformation of their partner into a beautiful form. In the less fantastical stories, the ugly guy doesn't get the girl (poor Quasimodo only gets to clasp Esmeralda in his arms after she's been hanged; Cyrano hears Roxane's avowal of love just before dying of blunt force trauma).The point seems to be that, while we shouldn't be quick to judge by outer appearance, the true reward for such selflessness is what we all secretly desire: beauty.

Innate desire or choice?

When we add sexuality into the mix, it gets far more complicated. Why do some of us gravitate toward one gender and not the other? The complicated answer seems to be that it's not completely genetic, and it's not completely choice. I won't go into the reams of research that have been done in the field of human sexuality, but reliable experts agree that homosexuality is not aberrant, as originally thought, but part of a natural spectrum of human desire, with approximately ten percent of the population at one end defining themselves as completely homosexual, the rest either as completely heterosexual or bisexual, though this last term is often what conflicted homosexuals use to describe themselves in order to avoid categorizing themselves as gay. Dr. Loren Olson, a blogger for Psychology Today, gives a much more nuanced picture of bisexuality than I can within this post. But there do seem to be people who can fall in love with a person's essence, regardless of gender or physical form.

So A's problem–or, actually, Rhiannon's problem–is how to keep love constant when the object of one's desire keeps changing bodies, from average to gorgeous to gangly to homely, from petite to huge, from Caucasian to African to Asian, from male to female to transgender. Rhiannon's primary struggle seems to be trying to figure out a gender for A, and she frustrates A by spending so much time fretting about it. For A, who has no body and thus no gender, it seems like a trivial concern; for Rhiannon, it's huge. She can bring herself to kiss or hold hands when A is an attractive or even average-looking teenage boy, but she has trouble when A is a sexy African-American girl. She loves A, but she can't always bring herself to desire the body that A is currently inhabiting.

If A has no body, can A even exist as the object of desire (okay, within the bounds of this novel, clearly, yes)? Doesn't the noun "object" imply physicality? Can one be physically attracted to an essence? If so, is this attraction to essence what we call romantic love? Or is love just the high-sounding name we give to desire, not possible without a physical entity to attach it to?

This novel made me ponder how much what I personally am attracted to depends on the body that houses it, and how much doesn't. So far, I haven't reached any profound conclusions, but the answer seems to be that it's far more tied to the physical package than the ideal me would like to admit. Can I transcend my human, evolutionary instinct to be drawn to physical beauty? Can I transcend my preference for the opposite sex? If I were to meet my own version of A, how would I react? Would I be able to feel romantic love independent of physical desire? It's a fascinating thought experiment, one that Levithan encourages us to perform.