The Painful Pleasure of “Wretched Love”

Critics at Large | The New Yorker

The New Yorker

Society & Culture

4.4 • 679 Ratings

🗓️ 8 February 2024

⏱️ 48 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

As much as contemporary audiences relish a happily ever after, some of the greatest romances of all time are ones that have turned out badly. In this episode of Critics at Large, the staff writers Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz consider stories of “wretched love”—love that’s star-crossed, unfulfilled, or somehow doomed by the taboos of the day. First, they react to listeners’ favorite examples, from Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina” to “The Notebook” to the Joni Mitchell song “The Last Time I Saw Richard.” Then, the hosts discuss their own picks: the poet Frank Bidart’s collection “Desire”; James Baldwin’s novel “Giovanni’s Room”; and “A Girl’s Story,” by the Nobel Prize-winner Annie Ernaux. Why do we—and centuries’ worth of artists—gravitate toward tales of thwarted desire? Perhaps it’s because these moments unlock something that stays with us long after the sting of heartbreak has faded. “When you widen the lens, life goes on,” Schwartz says. Nevertheless, “there is a need for all of us to return to that moment because that was part of what made you who you were.”

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

“Annie Ernaux Turns Memory Into Art,” by Alexandra Schwartz (The New Yorker)

“Anna Karenina,” by Leo Tolstoy

“Conversations with Friends,” by Sally Rooney

“Desire,” by Frank Bidart

“Eugene Onegin” (1879)

“Giovanni’s Room,” by James Baldwin

“A Girl’s Story,” by Annie Ernaux

“Sense and Sensibility,” by Jane Austen

“Sense and Sensibility” (1995)

“Sylvia,” by Leonard Michaels

Joni Mitchell’s “The Last Time I Saw Richard”

“The Notebook” (2004)

“Wuthering Heights,” by Emily Brontë

“Wuthering Heights” (1939)

Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights”

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Critics at Large, a podcast from The New Yorker. I'm Vincent Cunningham. I'm Alex Schwartz. And I'm Nomi Fry. We're all staff writers at The New Yorker. And each week on this show, we make sense of what's happening in the culture right now and how we got here. Hi, everyone. Hello. Hey. Hello, how is everyone doing?
0:22.0	Doing great.
0:22.6	Good.
0:22.7	Good.
0:23.2	Okay, very well.
0:24.4	Love's in the air.
0:25.4	Love is in the air, Vincent.
0:26.9	That is so true because you know what's coming up.
0:29.8	Yes, my friends, it's Valentine's Day.
0:32.7	And today's show is surprisingly not about finding happiness and true love. No. We are here instead
0:44.5	to celebrate or commiserate about something that I think is arguably maybe even more universal.
0:51.6	And that, my friends, is wretched love. Alex, would you like to help me think about what
1:00.0	wretched love might mean? Yes, well, the full disclosure is that the phrase wretched love popped into my head.
1:07.3	Fully formed. Fully formed when we were thinking about what it might mean to do show around this time of year.
1:13.9	And I think one reason why is that we all know there are some good stories about true love, happy ending love.
1:21.8	Yes, there are.
1:23.1	But there are many more stories and many more interesting works of art, I think, about love that has gone awry or that in some way has been thwarted or that has been unfulfilled or that has, you know, driven the lovers absolutely mad with passion, desire, rage, confusion, whatever it might be.
1:43.5	And I just thought we could bundle all of them up
1:46.8	under the moniker, wretched love. Yeah, very true. Where would the culture be without you,
1:52.8	wretched love? That's what I want to know. Where would art be without you? Well, that's what I'm saying.
1:56.3	We would have no Romeo and Juliet. We would have no Petrarchan sonnets.
2:01.3	We would have, you know, come on, guys. Yeah, we wouldn't even have the inferno. Beatrice. Beattrice. Where would you be? Where would you be? Where would we be without Beatrice? Wow. That's a real question. That's a real question. That might be the title of this episode. Yeah. I mean, and who knows, maybe the next 45 minutes will be just that.
	...

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