Robert Waxler, whose paper began the discussion, comes at the topic with a sense of "the erotic "that goes back to the Greek idea of Eros. Eros is, simply by definition, desire for what you do not have. It means lack, or absence, it depends on a triangular structure comprised, on some fundamental level, of the desirer, the one who is desired, and that which stands between them. As Anne Carson puts it in Eros the Bittersweet, that third term “connects and separates, marking that two are not one, irradiating the absence whose presence is demanded by eros” (16). For what we might think of as companionate love, there are other terms, other gods.
The experience of Eros is always paradoxical, writes Carson, or at least oxymoronic--it's the simultaneous experience of pleasure and pain, love and hate. It's all about ambivalence, including moral ambivalence: our moral sense shatters at the impact of eros, she writes, paraphrasing Sappho (among others). Hence, in part, the reason why literature about eros returns again and again to morally touchy actions and impulses, from the "forced seduction" fantasies we've been discussing here recently to scenes and fantasies of murder or murder / suicide (cue Wagner, baby; it's time for our big liebestod duet). Eros is, therefore, an “issue of boundaries”: fundamentally the “boundary of flesh and self between you and me. And it is only, suddenly, at the moment when I would dissolve that boundary, I realize I never can” (30).
In the literary versions of "erotic romance" that Bob studies, this realization leads, more often than not, to tragedy. The effort to "dissolve that boundary"--to say "I am Heathcliff," and make it stick--drives the hero to all sorts of nasty behavior. In the erotic romance that emerges from the romance genre, however, it seems to me that things tend to turn out much more happily. Not just because of the HEA requirement of the genre, but also because the genre isn't really about this sort of metaphysical "eros" at all, except on rare occasions. (Emma Holly's Hunting Midnight may be one of them.) Rather, it's about sex, about libido as a many-splendored thing, in the characters and in the reader. But their libido romps or frisks or sulks or revives in a context--at first or eventually--of friendship, mutuality, and companionship. Those don't show up at all in Carson's account of Eros, and I have a hunch that any theory of love that derives primarily from that particular source will be unable to say much of interest or use about the popular versions of the genre.
In an email after the conference, Bob told me that he could not think of a text "that gives us a full vision of both soul and body (flesh--not bones) being resurrected and unified (even in the Gospels)" and no "significant" text that
gives us a sense of what it would mean to be a "total individual" (the full package) and a total social (if not Divine) being. There is always "a gap" (even with the Platonic ladder of love)--and there is never equality in this context--usually some hint of a sado-masochistic relationship, and a sense of incompletion (the mortal wound).Now, to be honest, I'm not entirely sure what some of these terms mean, especially the ones having to do with totality. Nor am I sure that equality and SM, at least in real life, are necessarily at odds. But I can think of some pretty significant texts of happy love, love comprised not simply of classical eros, but of some lively mix of libido, friendship, tenderness, and mutual esteem. ("Perfect esteem enlivened by desire," as James Thomson puts it in "Spring," from The Seasons, 1728) Let's see: there's the Song of Songs, Donne's "Good Morrow" and "The Sun Rising" and "The Ecstasy," and maybe even (with some bittersweetness) Paradise Lost as well. Pride and Prejudice? Persuasion? A flock of Victorians, I'd wager. And perhaps there are "texts" in other genres: paintings, music, etc? Says C. S. Lewis at one point, after all, "We are under no obligation at all to sing all our love-duets in the throbbing, world-without-end, heart-breaking manner of Tristan and Isolde; let us often sing like Papageno and Papagena instead" (The Four Loves).
Let's help a fellow RomanceScholar find his moorings! Who would be some of the authors and texts he should consider as he sails in search of other, less fraught, more "romance-novel-ready" traditions of love?
Eros is, therefore, an “issue of boundaries”: fundamentally the “boundary of flesh and self between you and me. And it is only, suddenly, at the moment when I would dissolve that boundary, I realize I never can” (30). [...]
ReplyDeleteWho would be some of the authors and texts he should consider as he sails in search of other, less fraught, more "romance-novel-ready" traditions of love?
I think Plato might have something about this. At any rate, I've found some of his ideas about love to be a useful starting point in the past (e.g. here and here). I don't know which word is used in the original Greek, but to go back to the Symposium, here's Aristophanes' story about how, long ago, humans were split in two:
After the division the two parts of man, each desiring his other half, came together, and throwing their arms about one another, entwined in mutual embraces, longing to grow into one, they were on the point of dying from hunger and self-neglect, because they did not like to do anything apart; and when one of the halves died and the other survived, the survivor sought another mate, man or woman as we call them,—being the sections of entire men or women,—and clung to that. They were being destroyed, when Zeus in pity of them invented a new plan: he turned the parts of generation round to the front, for this had not been always their position, and they sowed the seed no longer as hitherto like grasshoppers in the ground, but in one another; and after the transposition the male generated in the female in order that by the mutual embraces of man and woman they might breed, and the race might continue; or if man came to man they might be satisfied, and rest, and go their ways to the business of life: so ancient is the desire of one another which is implanted in us, reuniting our original nature, making one of two, and healing the state of man. Each of us when separated, having one side only, like a flat fish, is but the indenture of a man, and he is always looking for his other half. [...] And when one of them meets with his other half, the actual half of himself, whether he be a lover of youth or a lover of another sort, the pair are lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy, and one will not be out of the other’s sight, as I may say, even for a moment: these are the people who pass their whole lives together; yet they could not explain what they desire of one another. For the intense yearning which each of them has towards the other does not appear to be the desire of lover’s intercourse, but of something else which the soul of either evidently desires and cannot tell, and of which she has only a dark and doubtful presentiment. Suppose Hephaestus, with his instruments, to come to the pair who are lying side by side and to say to them, ‘What do you people want of one another?’ they would be unable to explain. And suppose further, that when he saw their perplexity he said: ‘Do you desire to be wholly one; always day and night to be in one another’s company? for if this is what you desire, I am ready to melt you into one and let you grow together, so that being two you shall become one, and while you live live a common life as if you were a single man, and after your death in the world below still be one departed soul instead of two—I ask whether this is what you lovingly desire, and whether you are satisfied to attain this?’—there is not a man of them who when he heard the proposal would deny or would not acknowledge that this meeting and melting into one another, this becoming one instead of two, was the very expression of his ancient need. And the reason is that human nature was originally one and we were a whole, and the desire and pursuit of the whole is called love.
Sorry, that was a very, very long quotation, but it's about the self, the other, and the possibility of an intense, long-term, loving relationship. I wonder if this bridging of the difference between the lovers, the merging of self and other, is what's being explored in some love stories involving telepathy? I know there are some, though I can't think of any examples right now.
I'm sure you're right about the telepathy topos, Laura. Like so much else in paranormal romance, it plays out as a literal plot device a deeper, more elusive wish. I've always wondered whether the Plato passage needed to be taken with a grain of salt, or at least a beaker of retsina. After all, the Original Androgynes were not, themselves, content in their wholeness. They wanted to be like gods, too--evidence of the infinitude, or at least extravagance, of eros in Plato, and its link to a transformation in the self as much as to the longing to be part of an enduring couple.
ReplyDeleteI've always wondered whether the Plato passage needed to be taken with a grain of salt, or at least a beaker of retsina.
ReplyDeleteTrue, but the description of 'the people who pass their whole lives together; yet they could not explain what they desire of one another. For the intense yearning which each of them has towards the other does not appear to be the desire of lover’s intercourse, but of something else' isn't just about the myth. Their yearning my be intense and inexplicable, but the situation here isn't a tragic one.
I also wonder if there are any other forms of the myth/if it occurs anywhere else? In other words, was it invented for this text, or did it exist prior to its inclusion here?
Am reading around in this topic now as my next hero is a classicist/archeologist at the time of Lord Elgin (a cool nerdy way for a romance hero to get his hands dirty, imo). So I want to recommend Erotikon: Essays on Eros, Ancient and Modern, edited by Shadi Bartsch and Thomas Bartscherer, particularly the poem of that name by Susan Mitchell and the essay commenting on it by J. M. Coetzee (it was included in Elizabeth Costello as well).
ReplyDeleteNot having read Anne Carson's book, I cannot make a guess about what she says regarding the myth of Eros and Psyche. However, it does occur to me that the very problem of boundary between body and soul is dealt with in that myth since Eros being not just a god of love but the god of carnal love and Psyche being the soul, play out those boundaries in the course of the story. The marriage, separation, and eventual reunion of Eros and Psyche in that myth, I believe solves the problem of boundaries not, though, in a singularity but in a paradox. I would also argue that the very fact that this paradoxical gap exits is what engenders love in the first place. If there is no other, there can be no love. If everything becomes myself then any love felt is reduced to a sort of narcissism.
ReplyDeleteSo in regards to Mr. Waxler's statement that there is no text that gives us a vision of the "total individual" I would say, yes, I think that is true. But is love really about the creation of a "total individual" or a person who has achieved perfection, completion? To me the tragedy of love stems from the desire to eradicate the gap between other and self. In tragedy, there is always a sense that one or the other wishes to disolve him/herself or disolve the other. In HEA or love stories of a comedic love, the lovers take joy in the gap. They do not suffer because of the paradox but rather realize that it is the paradox that enables them to recognize each other as both other (object) and self (subject).
Having said all that, I think many of Shakespeare's pairings, whether in tragedy or comedy, play out those different approaches. Often, by the end of the play, you see who has "a marriage of true minds" and who doesn't.