I didn't really "give this up," but rather became distracted with other things. I don't have much left in it...I don't know why I don't finish it... ( )

I didn't really "give this up," but rather became distracted with other things. I don't have much left in it...I don't know why I don't finish it... ( )

Not an easy read, but well worth it. She is so wicked, wicked smart. ( )

Eros the Bittersweet

Sometimes, for example in mystery novels, a discovery is made in the form of a startling and unexpected connection between two seemingly unrelated things. Then, against this newly-configured background, something simple shines out in all its clarity. At other times, say in solving a Zen koan, discovery is made by looking not at things (plural), but at one thing, even a very ordinary thing; and in closely attending to the ordinary, one is suddenly dazzled. Then everything else swings into a new configuration around it, prompting a bold thesis to articulate new understanding. Which one of these descriptions suits Anne Carson’s “Eros the Bittersweet”? Certainly she is fearless in the associations she makes: it’s quite an arc she traces across millennia, tugging loose the ragged end of love. The first word of the preface is “Kafka”; the first sentence of Chapter One invokes Sappho; by the end of Chapter Two, we’ve heard from Plato, Simone Weil, and Emily Dickinson. Bold connections. But on the other hand, what that makes plausible this hook-&-eye linkup between ancient and modern is Carson’s close attention to a universal human experience. It’s the wholly ordinary upheaval that either has happened to everyone, or, more tragically, has not: the moment when you realize that another person has, by their mere being, irrevocably changed your own; the moment we call Falling in Love.

To be sure, Love is not just “an” event, but is itself a connection-- and a disconnection too: linking two people, you to another; but uncoupling who you were before from who you will be hereafter. When it happens, it’s nothing that registers on litmus paper, but you know it. Subtle and unmistakable as the trickling-in of a fever, or as thunderous as the crash of that cliché tree in the empty forest. And it is generative of cliché: “at first sight,” “star-crossed,” “blind,” Cupid’s-arrow, moon-June. From without, it is banal, bathetic; from within, it will not be ignored. The clichés are of course the shreds or shells of dead poetry, and Eros is *the* privileged poetic experience from the days of the ancient lyrics, whether Chinese, Indian, Persian, or Greek. It is primarily the Greeks, still the ancestors of the West, whose conceptions of Eros Anne Carson makes new for us in this book; but she reframes them by bringing them into dialogue with their many and unruly descendants.

This is no mere “literary history” of ideas about love, but a profound meditation on love “itself;” and while one of its effects is to problematize this self-identity of love, the effect stems not from following a fashionable or trendy deconstructive fashion, but by virtue of Carson's closely following her ancient models, especially Sappho and Socrates. Nor is the book a neutral depiction of Eros, but an account of Eros as “bittersweet”-- “glukopikron,” sweet-bitter-- an oxymoron invented by Sappho, which sums up the paradox that the rest of the book unfolds. Dealing these paradoxes out like cards, razor-edged and winged, Carson shows herself a ferociously gifted writer. A classicist and translator of keen and fresh perception, and a brazenly original poet, she brings to this universal and prickly human phenomenon a humane and uncompromising intelligence, presenting a series of brilliant readings, any one of which could have been expanded into a conventional academic paper by a thinker less guided by music and intuition. Fragments from Archilochos and Sappho, almost-forgotten (except by specialists) Greek novels of the 3rd and 4th centuries, Virginia Woolf’s “The Waves,” and especially Plato’s “Phaedrus,” episode by episode: each is deftly transcribed, translated, telescoped. Following her light touch, one starts to see them, hear them-- perhaps anew, perhaps for the first time.

Under Carson’s coaxing, they turn out to have quite a lot to say, not just to her or to us, but to each other. One of her all-too-accurate figures for Eros is triangulation between three points: lover, beloved, and what comes between. Another way of putting this is that the line of love is always interrupted, even in “happy” love: for the line traces back to a person who both is and is not the same as the one it left. This same shape is triangulated among and within texts, until even the outlines of the letters of the alphabet become ciphers for desire. And the texts fully merit and repay her attention.

One writer Carson treats is the third-century novelist Heliodorus, from whose “Aethiopica” she unpacks effects that might have come from “Love in the Time of Cholera.” This tangle of nested narratives relates the fortunes of a pair of lovers, Theagenes and Chariclea, from birth to eventual happy union. One framed story is related by a letter written on the woven cloth in which the infant Chariclea was found wrapped. The Ethiopian queen explains how Chariclea, her daughter, came to be born not black like her parents, but white: while the royal couple were making love, the queen was transfixed by desire looking at a representation of marble-skinned Andromeda being rescued by Perseus. (Hence her decision to abandon Chariclea in this unusual wrapper, rather than arouse the king’s suspicions.) From this surprising theory of genetic influence, Carson derives a cunning reading. Chariclea has been presented as a paragon of faithfulness, her fidelity to Theagenes reiterated; and her pure white skin is plausibly interpreted, within the semiotic landscape of the novel, as an emblem of this singleness of heart. But in the narrative, this whiteness turns out to derive from a momentary moment of “infidelity” in the mind of her mother, at the very moment of Chariclea’s conception. Or *is* it infidelity? Can one really be unfaithful in ones mind by looking at a work of art? Since the question is posed within a work of art, the answer is already suspended; but the art in question was taken very seriously. According to a the ecclesiastical historian Socrates Scholasticus, Heliodorus wrote the novel as a pagan in his youth; later, a convert to Christianity, he ascended the Church hierarchy, eventually being appointed bishop of Tricca. When scandal over the novel’s paganism created pressure on Heliodorus to disavow his literary production, he chose, instead, to resign his bishopric. Later scholars have tended to conclude that Scholasticus was confusing two different people named Heliodorus (just as one might confuse Socrates Scholasticus with the hero of Plato’s dialogues); but the anecdote, which Carson doesn't mention, signals the high fascination, prestige and gravity, in late antiquity, of matters of love and stories about them.

And hasn’t this always been the case? Unobtrusive among the book’s many virtues is that it shows not just how pertinent, but how perennial, are the classics’ concerns in any age. Not only do they speak to us still-- they have never stopped. The“Aethiopica” had a strong influence upon Tasso, Racine and Cervantes, and via Tasso’s poem “Gerusalem Liberata,” indirectly on Goethe and Freud. Carson does not foreground these genealogies but moves among them; she assumes the echoes are there, and takes for granted that they can teach us something (Echo herself, unhappy lover of Narcissus, being a figure of triangulation, the delayed voice returning to its starting place). Pindar, Augustine, Donne, Stendahl: for all their differences, each of them can open up any of the others if you take the trouble. Beyond Carson’s piercing insights, it’s her practice that inspires; not something she asserts, but simply something she *does*. She doesn’t just tell you what she thinks the texts say; she demonstrates a whole way of reading-- of listening.

Her relationship with her texts, if one can put it this way, is itself erotic. This is one reason why it’s clear, moreover, that when Carson writes about Eros that she knows what she’s doing and what she’s talking about. In both her materials and her subject, she is in her element. Both classicist and poet (her book "Glass, Irony & God" contains poems which have moved me as much as any I have ever read), she brings to her subject a scholar's intellect and a poet's sense of line, crossed-- or triangulated-- with an intuition honed by actually having loved, deeply, painfully. Carson communicates this without dropping a single autobiographical crumb. She notes that numerous writers (the more recent, the more numerous) pour out enthusiasm for the lover’s state, the feeling out-of-control, rejoicing in the sense of being compelled, swept away by something larger than oneself. “The Greeks do not so rejoice,” is he own terse comment. This is the unfakeable voice of experience, and not just experience reading classics. Anne Carson's is an educated heart and a mind with a full pulse; and the poles of thinking and feeling are powerfully, subtly at play here, prying open the whole word, the whole self.

Love, the “one thing” on which Carson’s meditations focus, turns out to maybe not be “one” thing. But if it is plural, it’s not in the postmodern sense of shifting over time with no definable essence, but inherently, in itself plural, because it starts making a dialogue not only between but within lovers. In the end, one can see her project as one of skipping a stone on the surface of literature, touching down first here and then there; or else, of looking long and hard into the depths of a universal human experience. Which you choose may be beside the point, and *that* may be *precisely* the point: Eros itself has always unsettled our conclusions about the one and the many. Socrates himself--Plato’s Socrates-- insisted over and over again he knew nothing, nothing at all. Except, he granted, about love. Was he contradicting himself? The whole of western literature ever since could be read as a prolonged attempt to decide. Carson’s work is a beautiful invitation into the question. Read her and you may find you’ve opened not just a book, but a 2,500-year-long conversation. You may even fall in love. ( )

One of the best non-fiction books I have read in a long time. It is a series of interlinked essays that talk about the concept of Eros in classical Greek poetry and prose, especially Sappho's, and connect this with the onset of literacy which led to the shift from the oral to the written tradition. ( )