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For all of you who thought we had gone under for good,
I am Robert Harrison back here in the studios of KZSU
with our star producer Vittoria Molle to tell you
that entitled "Pinnions is Alive and Well"
and that we have some new shows coming your way this spring
and no Domini no S3 2019.
As a teaser today we're posting my conversation with two Stanford undergraduates,
Sammy Potter and Evan Kanji who have started up a new,
highly entertaining podcast of their own called "Really Bro?"
which you can find on iTunes, Spotify and SoundCloud.
I read from their description, "Have you ever wondered why bros
don't talk about family issues, depression or heartbreak?
We did too, so we're gonna try something crazy."
Two bros talking about emotional issues where everyone can listen in.
I was recently invited on their show to talk on the topic "What is Love?"
Sound interesting, definitely.
In title opinions we'll be airing its first show of the new season
in a few days from now, but what you will hear in a minute,
if you stay tuned is my 20 minute conversation with Evan and Sammy,
edited by our own Vittori Amololo.
The title of that show is "I Would Go for a German Accent."
A direct quote from something I said during my conversation
with these fellow KZSU podcasters.
Enjoy the show.
[Music]
Alright, we are in the studio with a true legend,
Robert, Professor Robert Pogue Harrison.
Professor Harrison is the host of entitled opinions on KZSU,
a long running show. He's a romance scholar.
He's also the lead guitar for the rock band "Glass Away"
So thank you so much for being here, Professor.
Do you host a video show called "Intitled opinions?"
And I want to know who is entitled to an opinion and why?
Well, it's a play on the word "title" and originally it would be like the PhD.
If you have a PhD, it means your opinion is entitled,
because you have a title attached to your name.
But it was used ironically.
Everyone is entitled to an opinion.
So it's playing on that concept.
Got you.
So as we mentioned in the little intro,
you're a scholar of romance.
And I've studied works of Dante.
I know you're a professor of Italian literature and you teach a class here called "What Is Love?"
Which I think you're teaching next quarter, is that right?
That's right. It's a freshman thinking matters class.
Right on. We should have sent it for it.
Yeah.
We're both freshmen.
But really curious on your thoughts related to what you find about studying love and romance
that you think most people are kind of unaware of today.
Well, this traditional romance in Western culture, you know, goes back centuries,
back back to the 11th, 12th, 13th century.
And the southern France, especially where you had the beginning of Western lyric love poetry,
the troubadours, and it was basically what we know is courtly love.
So it was, the context was very specific to a certain class of people,
and we were dealing with the Middle Ages.
So most women, young women, girls would not enter the public sphere,
would hardly even be seen until essentially they were married.
And you had a love tradition which kind of presupposed.
Not adultery for say, because it's not clear that there was always a consummation in the love,
but at least this rhetoric of being completely devoted to a woman who was unattainable,
also because she was likely to be married to, you know, one of the August nobles of court.
And you had to be very discreet so you couldn't disclose her identity.
But it gave rise to the most beautiful, you know, romantic poetry in the West
and then set the standard and the model for all subsequent love poetry down through the ages.
What's so different about that notion of romance from our own is this notion of an obstacle,
and all the great love stories of the tradition, the Knights of the Arthurian romances and so forth.
It thrives on the notion that there is some obstruction that makes the idealization of the lover,
either idealization of him or of her possible because there's not this ready access, it's open access to each other.
If you don't mind, I'll read you a quote of the theorist who I think gives the most incisive psychological analysis of love.
I, let's with it, do you know who I'm going to refer to?
Shakespeare? No.
It's a guy named Dunidu Houshemal.
Yeah, I never would have guessed that.
Dunidu Houshemal was a Swiss guy writing in the mid-20th century early, but the 30s.
And he wrote this classic book called "Love in the Western World," and he's the real great theorist of obstacle love.
I'll give you a few quotes.
He says, "Most people do not bother about understanding or about self-awareness.
They merely go after the kind of love that promises the most feeling.
Even this has to be a love delayed in its happy fulfillment by some obstruction,
hence whether our desire is for the most self-conscious or simply the most intense love,
secretly we desire obstruction.
And this obstruction we are ready, if need be to invent or imagine."
And he goes on to say that this to me explains much of our psychological nature,
unless the course of love is hindered, there is no romance.
It is romance that we crave, that is to say, the self-consciousness, intensity, variations,
and delays of passion together with its claims rising to disaster, not its sudden flaring.
And you know, up until very modern times, up until the 20th century at least,
there were a great deal of obstacles in the way of two young lovers,
having a relationship, consummating that relationship outside of the boundaries of marriage.
Often it was a great risk and adultery, often it ended in death,
which death is like the sublime consummation of romantic love in the Western tradition.
And what do you think is the classic obstacles?
It was usually like class or was it, like what was the most common?
Well, the most common is that the woman was married, and that if they were discovered,
it would be adultery, and it would have serious consequences.
Wait, so how did marriage work then if you couldn't really, like,
if dating, like, as we noted, they didn't exist?
Like, how did marriage work before, like, today?
Well, there you go. So marriage in those days was a contract that had social obligations,
and it was arranged largely, you know, through families agreeing in advance.
And there were extensive debates in the Middle Ages about whether love, romantic love, was possible within the confines of marriage.
And almost invariably, everyone came down on the negative,
namely that love and marriage are incompatible.
Why? Because marriage is a contract.
It asks of the wife to be subordinate to her husband.
It has hierarchies, has obligations, it's a contract.
Love has to be free, has to be freely given, and it has to come from deep within the inner self-hood of the person,
and that is outside of the institutional domain.
Nowadays, we are naive enough to believe that the natural culmination of romantic love is marriage.
But, from the medieval point of view, that's a profound misunderstanding of the nature of love.
And in fact, the high divorce rates in the West ever since the divorce became possible,
is largely due to the fact that there's this inevitable disappointment or disenchantment that the great transcendent promise of romantic love just can't sustain itself in a situation of everyday cohabitation and being together.
In other words, we take the obstacles away, you're taking the possibility of romantic love away too.
Wow, that's incredible.
It's deeply beautiful that love can come from obstacles, but it's almost disturbing in some ways too, I feel like.
That is disturbing.
But yeah, that's a good transition, I think, to comparing obstacles in the Middle Ages today,
or in the Middle Ages today, where you can go on a date by swiping or by checking your phone or something like that.
And do you think that results, that extreme lack of obstacles, not just freedom to go find somebody or a lack of obstacles that exist before,
but a very, like, the literally opposite of obstacles existing.
Do you think that contributes to a lack of romance in society today?
Do you think that modern romance is a paradox, if you think modern romance exists?
Well, I think the modern day, easy accessibility to each other, the swiping and the dating, I don't even know if people age date anymore.
It's all culturally, everything has changed.
So, I think everything in our contemporary reality of love relations, conspires against the inner kind of idealizing drive of romantic love.
Romantic love still survives in our idea, because it's a myth that's not going to die, but the way we organize our relations to one another, do not help only hinder.
In fact, militate very aggressively against the possibility of romantic love.
Nowadays, the true romantic stories, if you want to be medieval about it, would have to have a certain impossibility, so it would probably be the human robot, that human android love.
That is one frontier where now there might be an obstacle.
No, we've already seen it.
Do you think that's possible?
Sorry, you saying just to clarify that it's more possible for actual love to exist if there's the obstacle of it being a human in a robot than it being too human.
Well, I think that the love stories that move us deeply, like the Romeo and Juliet, their Shakespeare had to create an obstacle.
She wasn't married, no, so it can't be that she was already married, so he created the family feud between the two families of Romeo and Juliet, and it ends up in their death, and the audience, the readers of the play, can allow themselves to be transported into this transcendent promise of romantic love.
If you want a good story, you're going to have to also create some kind of impossibility there, and between the human and the android, we already have movies along these lines, you know, her and ex-makina, and in the future the more humanoid the android's become, the more, I think it's not only going to be a matter of fiction and television and novels, it's going to be a reality where people are falling in love.
So, I think people are already in love with their Siri voice, you know?
Really? Yeah.
Wow, Siri does have a nice voice, I guess I see it.
It has a nice voice. It's very silly. It doesn't do much for me.
Have you ever tried changing it to an accent, like an accent, like an Australian accent or something?
The Canadian accent, sexy. I'm not gonna lie.
Okay, Evan, that's an alien. I'm not getting out of here.
I just know that. What kind of accent would you choose?
I don't know, I like... I can do it like Australian accents. I went to Sweden one time and I really like Swedish accents too, so I'm really... I'm like German accents, I think.
German? I would go for a German accent.
I like it.
I would go for a German accent.
That's awesome.
But you understand the point.
Yeah, absolutely.
Absolutely.
It's very hard to create obstacles, you know?
It used to be gay sex would be now, would be the obstacle, because it was still taboos, but even that now we're more or less beyond it.
So it's as much of a problem for us for you, because I'm beyond that age.
In your personal lives as it is for fiction writers and movie makers and so forth.
Of course, the lyrics of rock music and blues so forth, that's still very tradition.
It still tugs at our heart because we have this deep cultural memory of how difficult it was for two young people who loved each other in hostile social circumstances to actually fulfill that yearning and desire they had for sure.
You can't use in this phrase like "love in the Western world."
So how does the ideal between the West and I guess not the West sort of differ?
And I guess like, do you think love is like a finite thing or does it change across like cultures and societies and should it change across cultures and societies?
Well, you know, romantic love has precedence in Western society before the Middle Ages.
I can antiquity, but it's not nearly as it's not identical to the romantic love of later.
Other cultures, I think this love poetry that I was referring to in the South of France, which is the beginning of the Western lyric tradition had Arabic origins, because there was some very beautiful Arabic love poetry that preceded it.
And there still is, by the way, in the Arab world.
And there, of course, the mystification of the woman, who invariably was a male poet, writing love poems for a woman, but not only sometimes it was, but how it is with the veiled woman, the inaccessible.
There are cultures in the Islamic world which, you know, create exactly those kinds of obstacles that nourish the love sentiment, I think, in more fruitfully.
And there are love poetry bears all the traces of that.
I'm not all that familiar with India, for example, but I know that there is this, you know, very strong, erotic, co-romantic tradition of Indian love poetry as well.
Ancient Persian.
There's a family resemblance, I think, between all these cultures.
They're not identical.
Well, thank you so much for your time, we really appreciate it.
Hey, I think it's great that you have this podcast and congratulations, and don't give up on it too soon, just keep it going.
Staying powers everything, okay?
Thank you so much.
One last question, actually, do you have any last words for our listeners in particular some form of hot take?
You know, I have so many hot takes that almost every one of my shows on entitled opinions, and I've done over 170 of them, you know, contain them, because that's where I really let my opinions.
I'd better read.
That's where you fly.
Yeah.
Right on.
All right, well, listeners out there, be sure to tune into entitled opinions.
Thank you so much.
You guys, thanks.
Take care.
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