Eros the Bittersweet: Book Review
It’s the sort of literary criticism that expands a language, in some sense “rewrites” the text or group of texts under consideration. Reading and translating ancient texts for evidence of a specific experience, namely eros — erotic love, Carson discovers a possibly surprising coherence, excavating and animating the new “object” that is the book’s title.
Many of the textual sources for her study are well-known — e.g. Sappho’s Fragments, Plato’s Dialogues — as foundations of Western thought — in law, science, philosophy, and poetry. In these, as well as in comparatively obscure texts, across disciplinary edges and over centuries, she locates a very particular common ground, an acknowledgment of eros as something like an “engine” of the mind — never “pure” joy or pain, never just promise without threat, but always a kind of alternating current, an “electricity” powering turbulence, change. A close look at one fragment from Sappho serves as the starting point and touchstone, as Carson exposes a force a reader may well recognise as her own, a powerful, disruptive, delicious, irresistible force, bitter and sweet at once, in the shape of a triangle: lover, beloved, and the distance, or difference, between the two.
Carson is a classicist — professor, translator and poet — probably best-known as a poet — particularly admired as a writer who is continually crossing disciplinary boundaries, exposing without ever failing to acknowledge them. Readers, too, as if mirroring the sense of adventure, seem to arrive from surprising directions and distances. This, her first book of criticism, for example, is not new (1986). And yet it is still being “rediscovered,” not only by students of the classics or more broadly of literature, but among diverse general readers, including me, who gets quite absorbed in the everyday disparity between spoken and written language. I learned about Eros the Bittersweet from a recent memoire (2021) called Fifty Sounds, a wonderful, resonant story of an English speaker who learns Japanese. Barton, the author, quite deliberately built her text around the acoustic dimension of Japanese, the exceptionally prominent role of onomatopoeia. As a newcomer, she tends not to be in situations where the subtleties of sound take on meaning, and where it is possible to discuss them. Eros, the Bittersweet becomes a reference for her own experience of romantic love: powerful, life-changing, thrilling and threatening, it shapes the story she tells.
I just finished reading Eros yesterday, and already know I will read it again — it’s too tightly packed with insights and new perspectives to absorb all at once. For now, I’ll be content to point out the way Carson subtly, but insistently superimposes Eros’s potential for joy and pain, turbulence and confusion, probably most familiar in the form of a powerful sexual attraction, to a potentially infinite range of relationships, physical and abstract. Without appearing to have deliberately sought it out, for example, she shares evidence that such a love may develop between a writer and writing — a technology that binds one person to many readers, between people and ideas — for example specifically in the case of Socrates, between a human being, and the abstract concept of knowledge. And I’m still projecting a reader lodged between λόγος (logos — theory, or dconventional meaning) and what is not clear, not predictable, all that churns a reader’s thoughts, that may attract or repel but in any case will not lie still.
