Carson - Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay

EROS THE BITTERSWEET

Published for the Center for Hellenic Studies

Anne Carson

EROS

THE BITTERSWEET

An Essay

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright 1986 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Guildford, Surrey

All Rights Reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data will be found on the last printed page of this book

First Princeton Paperback printing, 1988

Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

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Printed in the United States of America by Princeton University Press Princeton, New Jersey

DESIGNED BY LAURY A. EGAN

Abbreviations

Preface

Kafkas The Top is a story about a philosopher who spends his spare time around children so he can grab their tops in spin. To catch a top still spinning makes him happy for a moment in his belief that the understanding of any detail, that of a spinning top for instance, was sufficient for the understanding of all things. Disgust follows delight almost at once and he throws down the top, walks away. Yet hope of understanding continues to fill him each time top-spinning preparations begin among the children: as soon as the top began to spin and he was running breathlessly after it, the hope would turn to certainty but when he held the silly piece of wood in his hand he felt nauseated.

The story is about the delight we take in metaphor. A meaning spins, remaining upright on an axis of normalcy aligned with the conventions of connotation and denotation, and yet: to spin is not normal, and to dissemble normal uprightness by means of this fantastic motion is impertinent. What is the relation of impertinence to the hope of understanding? To delight?

The story concerns the reason why we love to fall in love. Beauty spins and the mind moves. To catch beauty would be to understand how that impertinent stability in vertigo is possible. But no, delight need not reach so far. To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.

Suppression of impertinence is not the lovers aim. Nor can I believe this philosopher really runs after understanding. Rather, he has become a philosopher (that is, one whose profession is to delight in understanding) in order to furnish himself with pretexts for running after tops.

Princeton, New Jersey
August 1985

EROS THE BITTERSWEET

Bittersweet

It was Sappho who first called eros bittersweet. No one who has been in love disputes her. What does the word mean?

Eros seemed to Sappho at once an experience of pleasure and pain. Here is contradiction and perhaps paradox. To perceive this eros can split the mind in two. Why? The components of the contradiction may seem, at first glance, obvious. We take for granted, as did Sappho, the sweetness of erotic desire; its pleasurability smiles out at us. But the bitterness is less obvious. There might be several reasons why what is sweet should also be bitter. There may be various relations between the two savors. Poets have sorted the matter out in different ways. Sapphos own formulation is a good place to begin tracing the possibilities. The relevant fragment runs: