Quotes About Eros (Things Called Love, 3)

--Eric Selinger

So:  the Eros tradition.  (I'd call it the "erotic" tradition, but that word has more purely sexual overtones now, and there's no reason to assume that there's any more sex involved in this tradition of love than in the companionate tradition.  In fact, arguably there's much less.  But I digress.)

Rather than try to compose my own longish, thoughtful post on the Eros tradition, I thought I'd assemble a bunch of quotes about it from various authors, limiting myself to a few at a time and posting several times on the topic.  That's an easier sort of blogpost to write, since I can steal a few minutes here and there to type things in when I'm too tired to think.  I hope it will be a useful sort of post for readers as well, since it will leave you with some handy passages to use and sources to follow up.

The locus classicus of thought about the Eros tradition, at least for me, is Anne Carson's aphoristic study of eros in love, in writing, and simply in thinking:  Eros the Bittersweet.  I encountered this book late in my dissertation writing, so there's not much in my own book from hers, but it's been very useful for me over the years in the classroom and in some work on popular romance fiction.  (My first PCA talk on romance, for example, was a piece on Emma Holly called "Holly the Bittersweet.")

"It was Sappho who first called eros 'bittersweet,'" Carson's book begins.  "No one who has been in love disputes her.  What does the word mean?" (3).

Now, the "word in question here is "bittersweet," not Eros--she's trying to get at why "a simultaneity of pleasure and pain is at issue" in the experience of Eros, which strikes Sappho in many poems as "an enemy" (4), since "love and hate converge within erotic desire" (9).  Still, a few pages into the book, as she moves into her explanation of this convergence, Carson does give us a handy definition:

The Greek word eros denotes 'want,' 'lack,' 'desire for that which is missing.'  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 n longer wanting.  This is more than wordplay.  [...]  Plato turns and returns to it.  Four of his dialogues explore what it means to say that desire can only be for what is lacking, not at hand, not at present, not in one's possession nor in one's being.... (10) 

As Carson goes on to point out, the Greek idea of eros doesn't simply apply to interhuman desires; rather, it also applies to the desire to learn, to know, to understand.  "There would seem to be some resemblance," she writes, "between the way Eros acts in the mind of a lover and the way knowing acts in the mind of a thinker" (70).

The American poet and polymath Guy Davenport, in a review of Carson's book, glosses these ideas very nicely.

What's bittersweet is Eros, the god of falling in love (being in love is another matter, involving other, wiser gods).  Gods and states of mind are contiguous in Greek thought; eros is the Greek for that giddy, happy, all too often frustrated conviction that another human being's returned affection and equal longing for you are all that's lacking to make life a perfect happiness. ("Eros, His Intelligence," in The Hunter Gracchus, 137)

 [...]

It is the kinetics of desire that creates the euphoria of loving and of learning, of being alive.  We are largely ignorant of satisfied desire as the ancient Greeks understood it.  [...]  Satisfied desire is a fulfillment of some kind and as a subject belongs to housekeeping, child rearing, reverie; that is, to the world of order.  Desire and learning are by their nature disorderly, disruptive, agonizing:  bittersweet. (140)

You can probably already see why these ideas were useful to me in thinking about the many forms of "eros" in Holly's erotic romance.  The ideas of lack, of falling in love, of coming to know, and of the deferral of satisfaction (since that would mean the end of eros) all have implications at once for characters in a story and for the experience of reading one.  (Did I mention that we have a Call for Papers on Erotic Romance over at JPRS?  Would love to see some philosophical approaches in the mix.) 


OK, that's all I have time for now.  The last word goes to William Blake, who probably knew a thing or two about Eros and love.

A Question Answered

What is it men in women do require?
The lineaments of Gratified Desire.
What is it women do in men require?
The lineaments of Gratified Desire.

Nice little commentary on the quatrain, by Robert Pinsky, here.

Traditions, Traditions (Things Called Love, 2)

--Eric Selinger

So...traditions of love.


There are several, even within what we lump together as "Western culture," and that multiplicity is a good first thing to recognize, not least so that we can see when authors are talking past each other, or counterpointing one tradition with another.  What are some of these various traditions?  


In the introduction to my first book, What Is It Then Between Us? Traditions of Love in American Poetry, I wrote the following:

Poets such as Sappho and Archilochos first defined the three-part structure of eros:  "lover, beloved, and that which comes between them" (Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet, 16).  Such love is essentially a mode of desire, in which the actual beloved is the occasion for and object of the lover's imagination.  For all that it may dream of perfect union--a thought we find in Plato, though not in the poets before him--this version of love demands a certain distance, dodging reciprocity.  It flowers in the fine, frustrated romances of Petrarchism, where the Lady and her poet never squander their attraction in the duties of domestic life or the brief commotion of actual sex.  And, as Freud understood, such love lives under the "law of ambivalence," in which "loved ones are on the one hand an inner possession, an ingredient of our personal ego, but on the other hand are partly strangers, even enemies," simply because of their continued exteriority.   

The poets I have chosen for this book are, by and large, uneasy with this first tradition of love.  They may still invoke it.  (Few traditions have a finer pedigree.)  But they are often drawn to a contrasting, companionate ideal.  This second ideal may date back to ancient times as well, as Jean Hagstrum argues in Esteem Enlivened by Desire: the Couple from Homer to Shakespeare.  It has flourished, however, both as theory and as art, mostly since the English Renaissance.  English Protestant preachers mocked the Petrarchan structure of idealizing, ever-unacted desire.  In its place they offered the delights and cares of marriage, where the lover joins "in conjugal fellowship a fit conversing soul."  So did English poets such as Spenser, Jonson, Shakespeare, and above all Milton, whose "Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce" I quoted a moment ago.  According to Anthony Low, Milton's hymns to wedded love in Paradise Lost have shaped "a substitute Petrarchism for our time"; and, indeed, modern writers on love often insist that it is, properly speaking, a mode of relationship between two people, married or otherwise, rather than a state of the lover's or poet's mind.  In this tradition of love, the free play of the erotic imagination must answer to the actual beloved in his or her fullest particularity.  The "Other than self / O inconceivable" must become an "O believeable" at last, and the lovers respond to each other with what Ortega y Gasset calls "warm corroboration." 

The split between these two traditions runs deep, and may be irreconcilable.  Proponents of the second form of love, from Milton to Simone de Beauvoir, see the first as idolatrous and inauthentic, a mask for narcissism.   The partisans of Eros, for their part, often see companionate love as a muted, mundane thing, hardly worthy of love's name.  "I'm talking about love, and you're talking about marriage," a colleague once sniffed.  And they say courtly love is dead.  

There's a lot that I've read and learned since then about traditions of love--erotic, companionate, and otherwise--and I'll post about it here.  There's also a whole second set of terms in the book that talks about "idealist" and "realist" traditions, which is actually a rather awkward structure, looking back.  I'll post about those, too.  But this distinction between Eros and Companionate traditions is useful, I think, especially since popular romance fiction tends to draw on both of them.  It will serve to start things off.