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.

Thoughts on The Cambridge Companion to Popular Fiction

Laura Vivanco

Although romance fiction (and Janice Radway's Reading the Romance) make repeated appearances in the recently published Cambridge Companion to Popular Fiction, romances receive little sustained attention. The same could be said of many other genres, however, for the Companion is attempting to cover a great many different forms of popular fiction (in a variety of media), over a period of more than 200 years and across a range of cultures (though the focus is on fictions from the UK and US) and also discusses readers and the act of reading.

The editors, David Glover and Scott McCracken, state that "In editing this Companion, one of our main aims has been to place the growth and development of contemporary popular fiction in historical perspective" (4-5). Erin A. Smith, for example, mentions that there was an "absence of international copyright before 1891" (143) and Nicola Humble notes that

The idea of reading as ideally something communal survives for a very long time: the image of the family huddled around the hearth listening to the next episode of an exciting story was a key component in the Victorian bourgeois fantasy of the ideal home. Even the reading group proper - the organised regular meeting of non-family members to share their reading or recount their reading experiences - has a much longer history than we might assume. Historians have uncovered evidence of groups of rural women in sixteenth-century France gathering in the evenings to read Le Roman de la Rose. (87-88)

In reading the volume, some of the changes already undergone by popular fiction recall current challenges faced by the publishing industry. For example, David Glover, in his chapter on "Publishing, history, genre," briefly outlines "the dominant role played by the private subscription libraries like Mudie's or W. H. Smith's in supplying what would otherwise be relatively high-priced new novels to the largest pool of regular readers of fiction" (16). Their business model was dependent on the " 'triple-decker' or three-volume format that had become the norm among publishers at the beginning of the nineteenth century" (16). Given the current allegations that

Mr. Shanks, the CEO of Penguin, twice chastised Random House for continuing to sell ebooks under the wholesale model and criticized RH for “not helping the group.” “Mr Shanks also encouraged a large print and e-book retailer to punish the other publisher for not joining Defendants’ conspiracy.  In March 2010, Mr. Shanks sent an email message to an executive of the retailer complaining that the publisher “has chosen to stay on their current model and allow retailers to sell at whatever price they wish.”  Mr. Shanks argued that “[s]ince Penguin is looking out for [your] welfare at what appears to be great costs to us, I would hope that [you] would be equally brutal to Publishers who have thrown in with your competition with obvious disdain for your welfare…I hope you make [the publisher] hurt like Amazon is doing to [the Publisher Defendants].  Likely this is referring to Barnes and Noble. (Dear Author)

it is interesting to note that

the world of the circulating libraries was far less stable than is often supposed. When Mudie's ran into financial difficulties in 1863, a group of publishers put up the lion's share of the money that kept it afloat as a limited liability company. (23)

Glover himself draws attention to the parallels between past and present events when he writes that

The tension between the ever-cheaper formats devised for reprints and the high fixed price of the triple-decker was finally resolved by the death of the latter. [...] Faced with a drop in the number of potential subscribers, Mudie's and Smith's [...] attempted to slow the rapidly diminishing shelf-life of their books and to reduce competition from increasingly affordable reprints by pressing publishers not to bring out cheap editions of any of the titles they had sold to the libraries for at least a year - a clash that parallels the twenty-first-century conflict between cinema chains and film companies over the appropriate time-lag between the first showing of a movie and its availability on DVD. But in 1894 the triple-decker was already living on borrowed time and by 1897 it was virtually extinct, a victim of long-term changes in the structure of the fiction market. (24)

Happier parallels between past and present can be detected in the opening paragraph of Nicholas Daly's chapter on "Fiction, theatre and early cinema." We're used to seeing tie-ins between print and film versions of fiction:

It was widely averred in the nineteenth century that the novel was the century's dominant form; indeed, at the end of this period critics spoke of the 'tyranny' of the novel. But this was only a partial truth, insofar as for much of this period the novel maintained complicated symbiotic relationships with other cultural forms, particularly drama: in this respect, popular plots, characters and settings were amphibious, gliding from novel to stage, and, more rarely, from stage to novel. (33)

The "amphibious" nature of popular culture was earlier highlighted in the introduction:

Popular forms such as romance have been remarkably adaptable across cultures and across media. For example, Latin American telenovelas are melodramatic, serialised television dramas with romantic themes that relate to novelas rosas, the Spanish equivalent of anglophone formula romance. While telenovelas have a clear origin and cultural base, starting in Mexico in the 1950s, with Brazil now the biggest producer, their audience now extends beyond the Hispanic population of the Americas to Eastern Europe, Asia and parts of the Middle East and Africa. Some have even been remade for different national audiences. The Colombian, Yo soy Betty la fea, became Ugly Betty in the United States, but there are also versions in at least fifteen other languages. (9)

Glover and McCracken raise a note of caution, however, lest it be assumed that a global market be assumed to imply a homogenous global audience:

As McCracken shows with the example of crime writer Walter Mosley, popular fiction circulates between local and global markets, taking on different meanings in different places. Yet there is relatively little known about the nuances of the different receptions of popular fictions in different places and contexts. If, as Humble makes clear, research into audiences and reading communities has become an indispensable element in the study of popular fiction, there is no shortage of questions in search of answers. (9)

One of those questions is raised, but left unanswered, in Kaye Mitchell's discussion of lesbian pulp fictions. She begins by quoting Diane Hamer, who stated that

What distinguishes [Ann] Bannon stories from conventional romance (apart from the gender of her characters is the fact that here, the nature of desire, restless and insatiable, works against this compulsory closure. Instead of the perhaps more comforting endings conventional romance offers its readers, Bannon has captured accurately the contradictory experience of sexuality and desire in her recognition that sexual desire (heterosexual or lesbian) often works against the stability of monogamous coupling. [...]

[...] I will leave open the question of whether popular fictions concerned with sexuality - whether straight or gay - are always marked, in their structural and ideological inconsistencies, by 'the nature of desire, restless and insatiable', or whether it is such fictions that are responsible for producing this particular understanding of desire as, necessarily, uncontainable, uncontrollable, liable to wander. This ultimate refusal of closure/satiation of desire (including readerly desire) always leaves open the possibility of another story and, therefore, of continuing consumption; this explains, in part, popular fiction's investment in seriality. (133)

-----
The Cambridge Companion to Popular Fiction. Ed. David Glover and Scott McCracken. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2012.

Contents:

• Introduction - David Glover and Scott McCracken
• Publishing, history, genre - David Glover
• Fiction, theatre and early cinema - Nicholas Daly
• Television and serial fictions - John Caughie
• The public sphere, popular culture and the true meaning of the zombie apocalypse - Roger Luckhurst
• The reader of popular fiction - Nicola Humble
• Reading time: popular fiction and the everyday - Scott McCracken
• Gender and sexuality in popular fiction - Kaye Mitchell
• Pulp sensations - Erin A. Smith
• Bestselling fiction: machinery, economy, excess - Fred Botting
• Comic books and graphic novels - Hillary Chute and Marianne Dekoven
• Popular fiction in the digital age - Brenda R. Silver

Eric on Love and Romance

Eric's at Romancing the Blog today. He's been in

conversation with a literary critic I’ve been trying to lure into studying popular romance. He’s a scholar of what he calls “literary erotic romance,” a genre that seems able to include poetry, fiction, and film [...] as long as it concerns what he calls “the impossibility of gratifying our desire.” We want too much, and are overwhelmed; we want the wrong things, and they destroy us; we want what we can’t have, and are left hungry; when we get what we want we don’t desire it anymore, or it leaves us behind. This, says he, is “the truth about love,” or at least the truth about eros.

Eric, however, sees things differently: "romance fiction also tells a 'truth about love': one that may not have the intellectual pedigree that his does, or the rhetorical grandeur, or the cachet, but that deserves a hearing nonetheless." And Eric's heartened by some recent scientific findings about love from Stony Brook University. Here's a description of them from one of the sources Eric read:

A team from Stony Brook University in New York scanned the brains of couples who had been together for 20 years and compared them with those of new lovers. They found that about one in 10 of the mature couples exhibited the same chemical reactions when shown photographs of their loved ones as people commonly do in the early stages of a relationship.

Previous research suggested that the first stages of romantic love, a rollercoaster ride of mood swings and obsessions that psychologists call limerence, start to fade within 15 months. After 10 years the chemical tide has ebbed away.

The scans of some of the long-term couples, however, revealed that elements of limerence mature, enabling them to enjoy what a new report calls “intensive companionship and sexual liveliness”.

The researchers nicknamed the couples “swans” because they have similar mental “love maps” to animals that mate for life such as swans, voles and grey foxes. (from The Times)¹

1 I wrote a post last year in which I mentioned this line of research into the science of love and I've also got a bit more there about the love lives of voles.

The photo is of a "Pair of black swans with their cygnets on the lake of the University of York, England," it was taken by RobertG, and came from Wikimedia Commons. Eric prefers the foxes to the swans, but I couldn't find a photo of two foxes. However, I did find a nice photo of just one grey fox, which looks like it's tracking down something (albeit probably not the truth about love).

A Guest Post: Classifying Works Containing Sexual Content

Laura Vivanco

In response to a previous post of mine AgTigress said that

I am most uncomfortable about a classification that distinguishes at a primary level between 'didactic love fiction' and 'erotic (love fiction)'. The first level of any typology has to employ definitions that cannot overlap, otherwise the whole framework totters. [...] clearly a novel about love or a human relationship may be both erotic (= dealing with the topic of sexual love) and didactic ( = aiming to teach some lesson or principle) - or it may be neither.

Leaving aside what is or isn't "didactic," the following is a guest post by AgTigress which explores the differences between "erotica" and "pornography." I think it complements Sarah's post "Erotica vs. Porn" and my "Romance Novels: Pornography or Literature?"

The links included in the text were added by me.

------

AgTigress

Censorship and expurgation have a long history which is interwoven with profound changes in society over the last few centuries, a history that still casts a shadow today. It is too complex to examine in detail here, but some background knowledge is helpful if we are to understand why the current classifications of novels containing explicit sex seem to give people a lot of trouble. We are dealing with the aftermath of a situation that existed from the early 19th century to the middle of the 20th century, in which open references to sexuality were believed to be wholly unfit for the ears and eyes of people whose innocence required protection, then defined as children and respectable adult women, or whose natural tendency towards licentious behaviour required restraint, namely the unsophisticated and uneducated members of the underprivileged classes. Most parents still exercise rights of censorship over their children’s reading, and most adults still do not wish to find practices they regard as intrinsically wrong, such as the sexual exploitation of children, casually featured and described in their leisure reading. We all recognise certain limits, and should be able to understand in principle the setting of boundaries, even though those boundaries vary enormously on an individual, generational and regional basis.¹

The difficulties with clear classifications and definitions of erotica, so-called ‘romantica’ (an etymologically regrettable word) and pornography arise because the situation is still fluid and changing today. Those who discuss current fiction genres sometimes know little of the paths that have been travelled within the last few decades. Attitudes to sexuality have altered particularly radically over the last 50 years, and this is reflected in all areas of life, including changes in the legal position regarding censorship, and ongoing debates on what, exactly, constitutes ‘obscenity’.

In the 1950s, a writer could not, in a mainstream English-language novel, describe any acts in which a respectable married couple might engage on their conjugal couch; the bedroom door had to be firmly closed on the reader. Only the most cautiously euphemistic circumlocutions might be employed to indicate that a couple were having a good time in bed. Between the late 18th century and the end of the 1950s, there was no possibility of classifying any widely available book as an ‘erotic novel’. Any fiction with overt sexual description was unquestioningly classed as pornographic, and was in breach of obscenity laws. No distinction was made between well-written works and semi-literate ones; between books with interesting plots or with none; between those with well-drawn characters and those with identikit ciphers recognisable, if at all, only by the size and capabilities of their genitals. If a book openly described sexual acts, it was pornographic, and that was that.²

In the 19th century there were real problems even in the publication of academic non-fiction that dealt with sexual topics. However, works dealing with medicine or with some of the more arcane aspects of art-history or anthropology were not popular, mass-market books: they were expensive volumes, written to inform rather than to entertain and titillate, and were written and read only by highly educated men. They were therefore not expected to pose any dangers to the morals of the man (or worse still, the woman) in the street, who had neither the education nor the leisure time and disposable income to acquire and read them. Sexually explicit fiction was, in fact, published in Victorian Britain, but the publishers ran considerable risks, for their activities were illegal. Their marketing strategies had to be devious and inventive, and their readership was almost exclusively wealthy and upper-class. There were other problems relating to the visual arts, but that is a different, though connected, story.

In the changing society of the post-Second World War world, attitudes shifted dramatically, and this was quite obvious and visible even to a reasonably socially aware teenager at the time. In the UK, better and more easily available education, including university education, facilitated greater social mobility, and many of the rigid puritanical certainties of earlier decades, still based on a Victorian view of class and morality, started to crumble.

A crucial legal test-case took place in 1960, when Penguin Books decided to test the brand-new Obscene Publications Act of 1959 by putting out Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover in paperback. The book had first been published in 1928, but was obtainable in unexpurgated form only on the Continent. Raunchy English-language novels were sometimes printed and published in France, Germany or other European countries, and were consequently available to the wealthier sections of society who habitually travelled abroad. Ordinary middle-class and working-class Britons did not do so in the first half of the 20th century. Their holidays, if any, were too short, as were their finances. It has always been assumed by the rich and privileged (as it is by campaigners for censorship), that they themselves are somehow immune from the corrupting effects of obscenity that they hold to be so dangerous to hoi polloi. A paperback at 3/6d placed Lawrence’s notorious novel within easy reach of the masses, and struck at the very heart of the status quo regarding ‘racy’ fiction. (Three shillings and sixpence, a typical price for a paperback novel at the time, is 17½ p. in today’s UK currency, equivalent to about 35 US cents).³

Social and class implications run right through this topic, in the visual arts as well as literature. The most famous quotation from the Lady Chatterley trial was the revealing question one of the prosecution barristers asked a witness – 'would you want your wife or your servant to read it?' (My italics). Those who have read the book will be well aware of its extreme social, as well as sexual, subversiveness in the context of its 1920s setting: not only does it describe sexual intercourse, but it describes it taking place, with enjoyment, between an upper-class woman and a working-class man. That question, posed in 1960, brought home to most who heard or read it just how much the world had changed. The idea that a man had any right to control his wife’s choice of reading-matter, and the mere mention of servants, seemed completely irrelevant and archaic to most of us in 1960. Penguin won their case, on the new legal grounds of ‘literary merit’ as a justification for explicit sexual content. The mere presence of sexual incidents in a book no longer defined it automatically as pornographic, obscene and illegal, and the Penguin edition went on to sell 3 million copies, many of them doubtless to people who had not previously heard of D.H. Lawrence. Definitions had to be changed, but this has happened informally and gradually, and the situation in other English-speaking countries may lack the clear 1960 turning-point identifiable in the UK.

But if we return to the basic definitions from the etymology of the words, which is always a good thing to do, obvious definitions almost write themselves. ‘Pornography’ means ‘writings about whores’ and ‘erotica’ means ‘matters pertaining to eros, that is, sexual love’.

Prostitutes engage professionally, for profit, in a series of sexual acts with individuals whom they do not know personally, and with whom they therefore cannot feel any emotional ties. In a parallel sense, writings that describe a series of sexual acts between people whom the reader never gets to know, or even to recognise and tell apart, and does not care about, are pornographic. However, the prostitute – and the actors in a pornographic text – may find the sex acts perfectly agreeable, and may be engaging in them voluntarily, or indeed with enthusiasm: the sex acts themselves need not be unusual and extreme, as long as there are plenty of them. Written pornography should thus consist of a sequence of descriptions or vignettes of sex acts, often barely connected with each other in terms of story and plot (and frequently set against an unrealistically theatrical or exotic backdrop), taking place between stock characters that are interchangeable ciphers. The aim is solely to arouse sexual excitement in the reader. Like any other fiction, pornography may be well written and enjoyable or badly written and ridiculous.

Erotic activities must, by definition, involve personal, emotional ties of some kind, because the definition includes love. Agape is spiritual love, eros physical, sexual love. If a reader is to feel anything emotional, as opposed to physical, from reading a book, characters have to be rounded; they have to evolve and develop; they have to be real and interesting people who relate to one another in memorable ways. This is why Cleland's 1749 classic is not pornography, but erotica. The Happy Ever After ending is irrelevant to whether a work is erotic or pornographic: that characteristic belongs to romance, erotic or otherwise, and as it happens, Fanny Hill is also a romance, with a strongly emphasised HEA ending.

Erotica should therefore follow the usual rules of novels in having a proper story, with a beginning, a middle and an end, and believable, well-drawn characters who grow and change during the course of the story. The reader may still find the action sexually stimulating, but will also enjoy a specific narrative, not simply a sequence of generic sexual acts. ‘Erotica’ should also indicate novels in which the principal theme is the sexual relationship of the leading characters; they are about the sexual relationship(s) above all else. This differentiates erotica from the many other novels, common today, though completely unthinkable and illegal in the past, in which the main story arc is about romance, suspense, mystery, family relationships – any one of a dozen genres – but in which sexual incidents, where they take place in the text, are described in an open, graphic and detailed fashion.

There seems to be a widespread view today that erotica must include descriptions of adventurous and inventive sexual practices rather than so-called ‘vanilla sex’. This assumption has probably arisen because we have come to regard it as normal that the description of everyday sexual acts is perfectly acceptable and is often included in quite unremarkable, mainstream books that are readily available to all. This may lead us to imagine that ‘erotica’ must be something different and less ordinary. The precise types of sexual practices described seem to me to constitute another and separate classificatory system that can cut right across the main genre typology; for example, homosexual pornography, erotica, erotic romance and non-erotic romance are all viable definitions. As it might be hard, though not impossible, to sustain a whole novel on the basis of one devoted couple repeatedly copulating in the missionary position with the lights out, erotic novels probably do tend to display some sexual variety, but orgies with casts of thousands, or unusual uses of household appliances, are certainly not necessary to qualify a work as erotic.

‘Pornography’ continues to be used loosely and, in my view, inaccurately, as a pejorative term, but it is much better classification to avoid such value-judgements and to confine the term to writings that simply describe series of sexual vignettes without much in the way of plot or character-development. Because of the wide range of personal taste in sexual matters, what is offensive to one reader may be perfectly acceptable or pleasing to another. I have heard people declare that pornography is only about ‘bad’ kinds of sex – rape, paedophilia, bestiality, genuine sadism and the like. But some people regard homosexuality or consensual bondage games as disgusting and perverse, while others regard them as perfectly normal. I have even seen people claim that badly-written sex should be defined as pornography. All these approaches define pornography as ‘sexual fiction which I, personally, find offensive’. Individual tastes are a totally unreliable and unscholarly basis for classification; no wonder people disagree on what ‘pornography’ is, when they venture into such subjective territory. A more detached and objective approach is necessary.

If we stay with the basic meanings, both pornography and erotica may be well-written or badly-written; both may deal with kinds of sexual activity that an individual reader finds either exhilarating or repellent or any point between: the big difference is that pornography is episodic and lacks the true story arc and distinctive characters that we expect to find in a fully evolved novel. It is aimed only at arousing physical sexual response in the reader. A simple test of pornography is that the average reader can easily lose track of exactly who is doing what to whom. Erotica, though focusing on sexual activity, should follow the conventional structure of novels in having a proper story and believable characters.

1 The history of literary censorship in Britain and North America up to the late 1960s is wittily and informatively told in Noel Perrin’s Dr. Bowdler’s Legacy (London, 1970).

2 The term ‘erotica’, along with ‘curiosa’, was used chiefly in relation to 18th-century or earlier books and art with sexual themes, privately produced, or produced at times and places with sexual and social mores unlike those of Victorian Britain.

3 [This is a footnote added by Laura] I suspect that AgTigress's conversion doesn't take into account inflation. You can use this currency converter to "Find out how yesterday's prices compares to today's prices." They're using the word "yesterday" extremely loosely, since their converter will convert UK (English) currency from 1270 to 2005. I'm really including this link because I think it might be interesting for everyone who enjoys reading (or writing) historical romances. If you then want to convert modern UK pounds into another currency, you could use the converter here.

[And one final note from me (Laura). The illustration is, of course, the cover of D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover from 1960, cover design by Stephen Russ. I found it at Wikipedia.]

Eros and Science

Laura Vivanco

Following on from Eric's post about eros and my own about medical metaphors and the science of love, I thought it might be interesting to take a closer look at the neurobiology of love because, although this topic is not directly related to the romance genre, both have something to tell us about how couples fall in love and form stable pair bonds.

Despite the fact that 'love has myriad variations [...] neuroscientists believe that the basic human emotions and motivations arise from distinct systems of neural activity, networks that derive from mammalian precursors' (Fisher 2006: 88). Fisher goes on to explain that she believes that romantic love is just one of

three discrete, interrelated emotion/motivation systems that all birds and mammals have evolved to direct courtship, mating, reproduction, and parenting. The other two are the sex drive and attachment [...] each interacts with the other two in myriad combinations to produce the range of emotions, motivations, and behaviors associated with all types of love. (2006: 89)

The 'three basic mating drives' (2006: 102) are as follows:

(1) 'The sex drive (libido or lust) is characterized by the craving for sexual gratification; it is often directed toward many partners' (2006: 89).*

(2) 'Attraction (the mammalian/avian counterpart to human romantic love) is characterized by increased energy, focused attention on a specific mate, obsessive following, affiliative gestures, possessive mate guarding, and motivation to win a preferred mating partner [...] In humans, the developed form of animal attraction is known as romantic love, obsessive love, passionate love, or being in love' (2006: 90). **

(3) 'Attachment is characterized in birds and mammals by mutual territory defense and/or nest-building, mutual feeding and grooming, maintenance of close proximity, separation anxiety, shared parental chores [...]. In humans, partner attachment is known as companionate love. Human attachment is associated with the above mammalian traits, as well as feelings of calm, security, social comfort and emotional union with a long-term mate' (2006: 90). ***

The three usually interact, though in differing proportions at different times and for different people, however I have the sense that 'eros', as discussed by Eric, broadly overlaps with what Fisher terms 'romantic love'.

Fisher suggests that 'romantic love is most likely highly addictive' (2006: 100) and she also mentions that 'People fall in love with individuals who are somewhat mysterious, perhaps in part because novelty elevates the activity of dopamine and norepinephrine (2006: 102). Novelty can also increase sexual activity because the 'Increasing dopamine associated with romantic love can stimulate a cascade of reactions, including the release of testosterone, the hormone of sexual desire [...] In fact, elevated activity of dopamine generally increases sex drive, sexual arousal, and sexual performance in humans' (Fisher 2006: 103).

Unfortunately for individuals who crave the feelings created by romantic love, while 'Romantic love can be sustained in a long-term romantic relationship [...] it generally becomes less intense' (Fisher 2006: 99-100). A while ago I quoted from Esther Perel who noticed the problems caused by diminishing romantic love in relationships and proposed a solution:

A fundamental conundrum is that we seek a steady, reliable anchor in our partner, at the same time we seek a transcendent experience that allows us to soar beyond our ordinary lives. The challenge, then, for couples and therapists, is to reconcile the need for what's safe and predictable with the wish to pursue what's exciting, mysterious, and awe-inspiring.
It's often assumed that intimacy and trust must exist before sex can be enjoyed, but for many women and men, intimacy -- more precisely, the familiarity inherent in intimacy -- actually sabotages sexual desire. When the loved one becomes a source of security and stability, he/she can become desexualized. (2003)

Her solution is to retain mystery within a marriage/committed relationship because:

There is in the experience of love an experience of security, of predictability, of safety, a kind of grounding and anchoring. And eroticism thrives on something very different. It thrives on the unknown and the mysterious, on the unexpected. It's not what you want in a long-term, secure relationship. [...] Fantasies are rarely egalitarian, I can tell you that. Friendship is a different story. Best friends share everything, talk about everything. And when you're lovers, you want mystery. I've never in my life called my husband my best friend. (Salon, page 1 and page 2)

I wonder if the erotic, however one defines it, is inextricably linked to the issue of identity. Traditionally, the erotic ‘object’ is ‘the Other’, a mystery. That mystery and sense of difference, based on lack of intimacy and knowledge of the other, automatically preserved the distance between the two lovers. If we think about courtly love, the woman was often adored from a distance, or was obliged by society to strive to maintain a distance, which would lead to her lover thinking of her as cruel, distant, elusive and yet despite this (or perhaps actually because of it) desirable.

It seems to me that for centuries many people have defined themselves by contrasting themselves with an ‘Other’. While the differences between sexual, class, racial and religious groups have been emphasised and exaggerated, in-group differences have tended be minimised. Men, for example, have been associated with ‘masculine’ characteristics and behaviours, while women have been associated with the opposing ones. This automatically builds in a sense of difference and distance, and preserves identity, and in the context of romance I took a quick look at race (including the appeal of sheiks in romance) a while ago.

Quite how 'other' the Other can be varies, but if a sense of otherness underlies what's erotic, if it's a case of 'opposites attract', it is easy to see why intimacy and ‘domestication’ might lead to a loss of eroticism. They make the distant, exciting ‘Other’ seem dull, mundane, perhaps rather similar to the self and certainly not mysterious.

It struck me that the preservation of mystery advocated by Perel is, in some ways, the emotional equivalent of high mimetic love scenes between a perfectly beautiful heroine and the dangerous, mysterious hero she must tame. Dramatic conflict, big actions and big differences do ramp up the emotion and approach Frye’s ‘high mimetic’, which ‘seems to be connected [...] with [...] myth’ (Frye 2000: 51). What Perel describes isn't, however, the emotional equivalent of the earthy realism Angel and I were discussing in the comments attached to my post about food in Joyce's The Veil of Night. There I quoted from a post at Lust Bites, written by Nikki Magennis, who argues that ideal beauty may in fact be less sexy than the intimacy and variety of flawed individuality:

Really, all Beauty is fit for is preserving behind glass. It’s dazzling, sure, and we shrink before it. [...] Sexy is about revealing our real self, gloriously flawed. It’s not about struggling to erase all the signs that show one is human in the pursuit of a mathematically perfect ideal.

What Magennis is doing perhaps, is redefining beauty so that it can include the beauty that differs from the ideal. Similarly Cristina Nehring agrees with Perel that difference is central to eroticism but suggests much less dramatic, striking solutions to preserving it:

We must be two before we can be one, said Ralph Waldo Emerson. To merge most passionately, we must first be defiantly distinct. The question becomes how to maintain such distinctness in a long-term relationship. [...] Too quickly we assume we understand the persons we love, and put them into categories. Because we know how they take their coffee or turn over in bed, we think we know their emotional or moral turbulences, their secret judgments, recurrent temptations. It is revelatory -- because re-estranging -- to encounter our closest companions in contexts unlike those in which we usually confer. The novelist Siri Hustvedt writes of the thrall that overcomes her when she sees her husband, Paul Auster, at a public ceremony. Many a tired husband is shocked when he suddenly sees his wife dance -- or flirt, or fight, or take command, or write a poem.
We all, as Walt Whitman said, contain multitudes. It is salutary to remember this, salutary to encourage this, salutary -- even -- to know this is encouraged, so that we remain unafraid to surprise.

This type of difference is one which is not destroyed by intimacy but may in fact even be enhanced by it. It’s perhaps about looking closely and seeing variety in the minutiae, glorious difference in the particular talents and abilities possessed by each individual. In recognising the difference which results from individuality, rather than from the contrast between archetypes, it perhaps becomes easier to find the erotic in the mundane, the small gestures, the tiny differences that persist even in intimacy.

• Fisher, Helen, 2006. ‘The Drive to Love: The Neural Mechanism for Mate Choice’, in The New Psychology of Love, 2nd edition, ed. Robert J. Sternberg & Karin Weis (New Haven: Yale University Press), pp. 87-115. A pdf of the paper (as well as pdfs of other papers by Helen Fisher) may be found at Helen Fisher's website.
• Frye, Northrop, 2000. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays, with a new forword by Harold Bloom (Princeton: Princeton University Press). First published in 1957.
• Perel, Esther, 2003. 'In Search of Erotic Intelligence: Reconciling Our Desire for Comfortable Domesticity and Hot Sex', Utne Reader.
  

* I watched the Eurovision 2007 entries and Poland's entry, by The Jet Set seems to focus on the libidinal aspects of human relationships.

** Successful romantic love finds its expression in the song by Greece's Sarbel, in which the singer believes that his beloved, Maria, is unique and supremely desirable. Given her name and the setting/choreography, I can't help but wonder if this song is paying tribute to West Side Story (though without the tragic outcome). Fisher also goes on to describe the devastating consequences for rejected romantic lovers, and this situation is the one sung about by Finland's Hanna Pakarinen. Rejected lovers often feel rage as well as suicidal urges.

*** Mary Wells, singing 'My Guy', seems to me to be describing the comfort and closeness of companionate love.

Seeing as I've mentioned so many other Eurovision entries, I'd like to mention just one more. Bulgaria's Elitsa Todorova & Stoyan Yankoulov performed a song which made me think of the vampires and fallen angels which seems so popular in romance at the moment.

The picture is by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, from Wikipedia.

Eros is Eros is Eros?

One of Robin's comments on Laura's last post--specifically, her observation that "most Romance is related to the process of domesticating the erotic in one way or another"--reminded me of the lively debate at the PCA convention earlier this month over the nature and definition--or, rather, the competing definitions--of "erotic romance." (Sarah's summary is here; scroll down, as it was the last paper; I have posted on related matters over at Romancing the Blog this morning.)

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?