Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay (Princeton Classics)

by Anne Carson

The story is about the delight we take in metaphor. A meaning spins, remaining upright on an axis of normalcy aligned with the conventions of connotation and denotation, and yet: to spin is not normal, and to dissemble normal uprightness by means of this fantastic motion is impertinent. What is the relation of impertinence to the hope of understanding? To delight?

The story concerns the reason why we love to fall in love. Beauty spins and the mind moves. To catch beauty would be to understand how that impertinent stability in vertigo is possible. But no, delight need not reach so far. To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.

Suppression of impertinence is not the lover’s aim. Nor can I believe this philosopher really runs after understanding. Rather, he has become a philosopher (that is, one whose profession is to delight in understanding) in or...

Poets have sorted the matter out in different ways. Sappho’s own formulation is a good place to begin tracing the possibilities. The relevant fragment runs: ’Έρος δηὖτέ μ’ ὀ λυσιμέλης δόνɛι, γλνκύπικρον ἀμάχανον ὄρπɛτον Eros once again limb-loosener whirls me sweetbitter, impossible to fight off, creature stealing up (LP, fr. 130)

She is not recording the history of a love affair but the instant of desire.

Emphasis is thrown upon the problematic other side of the phenomenon, whose attributes advance in a hail of soft consonants (line 2). Eros moves or creeps upon its victim from somewhere outside her: orpeton. No battle avails to fight off that advance: amachanon. Desire, then, is neither inhabitant nor ally of the desirer. Foreign to her will, it forces itself irresistibly upon her from without.

Eros is an enemy. Its bitterness must be the taste of enmity. That would be hate.

“And hate begins where love leaves off …” whispers Anna Karenina, as she heads for Moscow Station and an end to the dilemma of desire.

I hate and I love. Why? you might ask. I don’t know. But I feel it happening and I hurt.

“Sweetbitter eros” is what hits the raw film of the lover’s mind. Paradox is what takes shape on the sensitized plate of the poem, a negative image from which positive pictures can be created.

Whether apprehended as a dilemma of sensation, action or value, eros prints as the same contradictory fact: love and hate converge within erotic desire.

The lover wants what he does not have. It is by definition impossible for him to have what he wants if, as soon as it is had, it is no longer wanting.

Four of his dialogues explore what it means to say that desire can only be for what is lacking, not at hand, not present, not in one’s possession nor in one’s being: eros entails endeia. As Diotima puts it in the Symposium, Eros is a bastard got by Wealth on Poverty and ever at home in a life of want (203 b-e).

So I found that hunger was a way of persons outside windows that entering takes away.

Sartre has less patience with the contradictory ideal of desire, this “dupery.” He sees in erotic relations a system of infinite reflections, a deceiving mirror-game that carries within itself its own frustration (1956, 444-45).

For Simone de Beauvoir the game is torture: “The knight departing for new adventures offends his lady yet she has nothing but contempt for him if he remains at her feet. This is the torture of impossible love …” (1953, 619).

“Desire … evokes lack of being under the three figures of the nothing that constitutes the basis of the demand for love, of the hate that even denies the other’s being, and of the unspeakable elemen...

All human desire is poised on an axis of paradox, absence and presence its poles, love and hate its motive energies.

Who ever desires what is not gone? No one. The Greeks were clear on this. They invented eros to express it.

It is not a poem about the three of them as individuals, but about the geometrical figure formed by their perception of one another, and the gaps in that perception. It is an image of the distances between them.

The word ‘jealousy’ comes from Greek zēlos meaning ‘zeal’ or ‘fervent pursuit.’ It is a hot and corrosive spiritual motion arising in fear and fed on resentment.

The jealous lover covets a particular place in the beloved’s affection and is full of anxiety that another will take it.

Jealousy may be implicit in the symptoms of love whenever they occur, but jealousy does not explain the geometry of this poem.

Praise and normal erotic responses are things that occur in the real world: this poem does not. Sappho tells us twice, emphatically, the real location of her poem: “He seems to me.… I seem to me.” This is a disquisition on seeming and it takes place entirely within her own mind.

Jealousy is beside the point; the normal world of erotic responses is beside the point; praise is beside the point. It is a poem about the lover’s mind in the act of constructing desire for itself. Sappho’s subject is eros as it appears to her; she makes no claim beyond that.

The difference between what is and what could be is visible.

The man sits like a god, the poet almost dies: two poles of response within the same desiring mind. Triangulation makes both present at once by a shift of distance, replacing erotic action with a ruse of heart and language.

For in this dance the people do not move. Desire move...

The verbs pheugein (‘to flee’) and diōkein (‘to pursue’) are a fixed item in the technical erotic vocabulary of the poets, several of whom admit that they prefer pursuit to capture.

The phrase poikilos nomos sums up the problem of erotic ambivalence. Nomos means ‘law,’ ‘custom,’ or ‘convention’ and refers to the code of conduct for Athenian lovers and their boys in aristocratic circles of the time. Poikilos is an adjective applicable to anything variegated, complex or shifting, for example, a ‘dappled’ fawn, a ‘spangled’ wing, an ‘intricately wrought’ metal, a ‘complicated’ labyrinth, an ‘abstruse’ mind, a ‘subtle’ lie, a ‘devious’ double-entendre. Nomos implies something fixed firm in conventional sentiment and behavior; poikilos refers to what scintillates with change and ambiguity.

Even more blatant was the legitimation given erotic ambivalence by Cretan society with its peculiar custom of harpagmos, a ritual homosexual rape of boys by their lovers. The rape began with a conventional gift-exchange and ended with the rapist carrying off his beloved on horseback for a two-month sojourn in hiding. As the couple rode away, the boy’s family and friends would stand around uttering token cries of distress: “If the man is equal to or superior to the boy, people follow and resist the rape only enough to satisfy the law but are really glad …” confides the fourth-century historian Ephoros (FGrH F148).

Mock abduction of the bride formed the central action of the Spartan wedding ceremony and a similar rite may have been practiced at Lokri and other Greek states, including Athens (Sirvinou-Inwood 1973, 12-21). Painters who depict such rites on vases make clear by iconographic details of posture, gesture and facial expression that a scene of resistance and tension is being represented, not a happy and harmonious elopement.

It should be emphasized that these paintings, although evocative of mythical prototypes like the rape of Persephone, are not in themselves to be interpreted as mythical scenes but as ideal representations of normal wedding rites, bristling with ambiguities as such rituals do in many cultures. Anthropologists explain the ambiguities from many different angles, for marriage finds analogies in war, initiation, death or a combination of these in various societies.

Correption is a licence permitted to dactylic hexameter whereby a long vowel or diphthong is shortened but allowed to remain in hiatus before a following vowel.

Elision is a brusquer approach to the metrical problem of hiatus; it simply expels the first vowel.

Both correption and elision may be regarded as tactics to restrain a unit of sound from reaching beyond its proper position in the rhythm.

(Or one might think of correption as a sort of metrical décolletage, in contrast to elision, which bundles the too tempting vowel quite out of sight.)

The reach of desire is defined in action: beautiful (in its object), foiled (in its attempt), endless (in time).

If we follow the trajectory of eros we consistently find it tracing out this same route: it moves out from the lover toward the beloved, then ricochets back to the lover himself and the hole in him, unnoticed before. Who is the real subject of most love poems? Not the beloved. It is that hole.

When I desire you a part of me is gone: my want of you partakes of me.

The locus classicus for this view of desire is the speech of Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium. Here Aristophanes accounts for the nature of human eros by means of a fantastic anthropology (189d-93d). Human beings were originally round organisms, each composed of two people joined together as one perfect sphere. These rolled about everywhere and were exceedingly happy. But the spherical creatures grew overambitious, thinking to roll right up to Olympus, so Zeus chopped each of them in two. As a result everyone must now go through life in search of the one and only other person who can round him out again. “Sliced in two like a flatfish,” says Aristophanes, “each of us is perpetually hunting for the matching half of himself” (191d).

You perceive homophony and at the same time see the semantic space that separates the two words. Sameness is projected onto difference in a kind of stereoscopy. There is something irresistible in that.

Within a pun you see the possibility of grasping a better truth, a truer meaning, than is available from the separate senses of either word. But the glimpse of that enhanced meaning, which flashes past in a pun, is a painful thing. For it is inseparable from your conviction of its impossibility. Words do have edges. So do you.

There is something uniquely convincing about the perceptions that occur to you when you are in love. They seem truer than other perceptions, and more truly your own, won from reality at personal cost. Greatest certainty is felt about the beloved as necessary complement to you. Your powers of imagination connive at this vision, calling up possibilities from beyond the actual. All at once a self never known before, which now strikes you as the true one, is coming into focus. A gust of godlikeness may pass through you and for an instant a great many things look knowable, possible and present. Then the edge asserts itself. You are not a god. You are not that enlarged self. Indeed, you are not even a whole self, as you now see. Your new knowledge of possibilities is also a knowledge of what is lacking in the actual.

“I become not myself but Neville mixed with somebody.” The piece of himself that goes out to Bernard makes Bernard immediately familiar “even before I see who it is.” As Sokrates would say, it makes Bernard oikeios. Even so, Neville goes on to appraise the experience as an ambivalent one, both “useful” and “painful.” As in the Greek poets, its pain arises at that edge where the self is adulterated and bitter verges alarmingly on sweet. Eros’ ambivalence unfolds directly from this power to ‘mix up’ the self. The lover helplessly admits that it feels both good and bad to be mixed up, but is then driven back upon the question ‘Once I have been mixed up in this way, who am I?’ Desire changes the lover. “How curiously”: he feels the change happen but has no ready categories to assess it. The change gives him a glimpse of a self he never knew before. Some such glimpse may be the mechanism that originally shapes a notion of ‘self’ in each of us, according to some analyses. Freudian theory traces this notion to a fundamental decision of love and hate, somewhat like the ambivalent condition of the lover, that splits our souls and forms our personality. There is at the beginning of life, in the Freudian view, no awareness of objects as distinct from one’s own body. The distinction between self and not-self is made by the decision to claim all that the ego likes as ‘mine’ and to reject all that the ego dislikes as ‘not mine.’ Divided, we learn where our selves end and the world begin...

Extreme sensual tension between the self and its environment is the poets’ focus, and a particular image of that tension predominates.

Reading and writing change people and change societies. It is not always easy to see how nor to trace out the subtle map of cause and effect that links such changes to their context. But we should make an effort to do so. There is an important, unanswerable question here. Is it a matter of coincidence that the poets who invented Eros, making of him a divinity and a literary obsession, were also the first authors in our tradition to leave us their poems in written form? To put the question more pungently, what is erotic about alphabetization?

Selves are crucial to writers.

An individual who lives in an oral culture uses his senses differently than one who lives in a literate culture, and with that different sensual deployment comes a different way of conceiving his own relations with his environment, a different conception of his body and a different conception of his self.

As an individual reads and writes he gradually learns to close or inhibit the input of his senses, to inhibit or control the responses of his body, so as to train energy and thought upon the written words. He resists the environment outside him by distinguishing and controlling the one inside him. This constitutes at first a laborious and painful effort for the individual, psychologists and sociologists tell us. In making the effort he becomes aware of the interior self as an entity separable from the environment and its input, controllable by his own mental action. The recognition that such controlling action is possible, and perhaps necessary, marks an important stage in ontogenetic as in phylogenetic development, a stage at which the individual personality gathers itself to resist disintegration.