That experience “of pleasure and pain” that we all seek

BarcelonaIn 1986, Anne Carson, a young professor of ancient Greek at Princeton University, debuted as an essayist with Eros the Bittersweet, in which she developed a theory of erotic desire based on its contradictory nature. Four decades later, the Canadian author received the Nobel Prize in Literature “for having created a bold and inventive literature, which from the classical tradition has constructed new forms of contemporary literature” through books such as The Beauty of the Husband (2001) and Decreation (2005), both available in English via Vaso Roto.

“We take the sweetness of erotic desire for granted; its pleasant nature gives us an ear-to-ear smile –writes Anne Carson in Eros the Bittersweet, available in English thanks to the literary good taste of Veles i Vents and the translation by Núria Busquet Molist–. But the bitterness is less evident”. According to the poet Sappho of Lesbos, “eros was an experience of pleasure and pain, all at once”. Carson goes a little further: “Love and hate converge within erotic desire”, she states. Eros the Bittersweet sets out to argue the meaning of this statement based on an extensive list of authors, who despite focusing on the Greek classics –the author's academic field of study– also includes Francesco Petrarca, Virginia Woolf, W.H. Auden, Emily Dickinson and John Donne.

Wanting what you don't have

At the root of the word eros lies "need," "lack," and "desire for what is missing." "Whoever loves wants what they do not have –Carson continues–. By definition, it is impossible to have what one wants if, as soon as one has it, one stops wanting it." At this point, the author compares amorous desire to hunger, doing so by citing Gravity and Grace, by the philosopher Simone Weil: "All desires are as contradictory as the desire for food. I would like the one I love to love me. But if they surrender completely to me, they cease to exist and I cease to love them. And, as long as they do not surrender completely to me, they do not love me enough. Hunger and satiety."

Although, in Carson's conception of love, sweetness is as important as bitterness –and they occur simultaneously, not consecutively–, this does not prevent it from being an emotion yearned for, and even pursued, by the majority of mortals. At this point, the author recalls how in Plato’s Symposium the desire to achieve lost completion through interaction with the other is addressed. "Most people find that this image [...] of lovers as people split in half is hauntingly lucid and true –she admits–. All desire is for a part of oneself that has disappeared, or that is what the person in love feels." The danger of satisfying love is that it is accompanied by the dissatisfaction of having achieved what was coveted.