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Eros the Bittersweet
A book about love as seen by the ancients, Eros is Anne Carson's exploration of the concept of "eros" in both classical philosophy and literature. Beginning with: "It was Sappho who first called eros 'bittersweet.' No one who has been in love disputes her. What does the word mean?", Carson examines her subject from numerous points of view and styles, transcending the constraints of the scholarly exercise for an evocative and lyrical meditation in the tradition of William Carlos William's Spring and All and William H. Gass's On Being Blue.
190 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1986
About the author
Anne Carson
84 books4,331 followersAnne Carson is a Canadian poet, essayist, translator and professor of Classics. Carson lived in Montreal for several years and taught at McGill University, the University of Michigan, and at Princeton University from 1980 to 1987. She was a 1998 Guggenheim Fellow, and in 2000 she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. She has also won a Lannan Literary Award.
Carson (with background in classical languages, comparative literature, anthropology, history, and commercial art) blends ideas and themes from many fields in her writing. She frequently references, modernizes, and translates Ancient Greek literature. She has published eighteen books as of 2013, all of which blend the forms of poetry, essay, prose, criticism, translation, dramatic dialogue, fiction, and non-fiction. She is an internationally acclaimed writer. Her books include Antigonick, Nox, Decreation, The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos, winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry; Economy of the Unlost; Autobiography of Red, shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the T.S. Eliot Prize, Plainwater: Essays and Poetry, and Glass, Irony and God, shortlisted for the Forward Prize. Carson is also a classics scholar, the translator of If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho, and the author of Eros the Bittersweet. Her awards and honors include the Lannan Award, the Pushcart Prize, the Griffin Trust Award for Excellence in Poetry, a Guggenheim fellowship, and a MacArthur Fellowship. Her latest book, Red Doc>, was shortlisted for the 2013 T.S. Elliot Prize.
Carson (with background in classical languages, comparative literature, anthropology, history, and commercial art) blends ideas and themes from many fields in her writing. She frequently references, modernizes, and translates Ancient Greek literature. She has published eighteen books as of 2013, all of which blend the forms of poetry, essay, prose, criticism, translation, dramatic dialogue, fiction, and non-fiction. She is an internationally acclaimed writer. Her books include Antigonick, Nox, Decreation, The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos, winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry; Economy of the Unlost; Autobiography of Red, shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the T.S. Eliot Prize, Plainwater: Essays and Poetry, and Glass, Irony and God, shortlisted for the Forward Prize. Carson is also a classics scholar, the translator of If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho, and the author of Eros the Bittersweet. Her awards and honors include the Lannan Award, the Pushcart Prize, the Griffin Trust Award for Excellence in Poetry, a Guggenheim fellowship, and a MacArthur Fellowship. Her latest book, Red Doc>, was shortlisted for the 2013 T.S. Elliot Prize.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 660 reviews
October 3, 2007
If something terrible happens to me one day, and all that's left is my body, and if, around the same time, something terrible should happen to Anne Carson and all that's left is her brain, I would hope that somehow medical science and luck would combine, and allow these terrible accidents to be resolved through a relatively happy solution, by which one of us (not Ms. Carson) would be greatly improved.
June 17, 2024
In one of her chapters Anne Carson writes, "Imagine a city where there is no desire. Supposing for the moment that the inhabitants of the city continue to eat, drink and procreate in some mechanical way; still, their life looks flat. They do not theorize or spin tops or speak figuratively. Few think to shun pain; none give gifts. They bury their dead and forget where [ . . . ]. A city without desire is, in sum, a city of no imagination."
Carson's elucidation of this idea - that desire is what moves the mind to imagine - is beautiful and compelling. Through the course of her exploration of "eros," Carson offers fascinating cultural details on the ancient Greeks and analyzes small poetry fragments that I've never read before. One of my favorites is from Archilochos who wrote what "it feels like to be violated” by Eros:
Such a longing for love, rolling itself up under
my heart,
poured down much mist over my eyes,
filching out of my chest the soft lungs--
Carson's analysis of this fragment is mind-opening for those readers who appreciate close reading. She does the same for Sappho, as well as others, but keeps her focus narrowed on the question of why we love to fall in love. By the time I was done reading, I became convinced it is because our minds take the deepest joy in the beauty of metaphor - of the heart's palpitating excitement over the difference in two unlike things. The space between them is the ache of desire. Bittersweet indeed.
Carson's elucidation of this idea - that desire is what moves the mind to imagine - is beautiful and compelling. Through the course of her exploration of "eros," Carson offers fascinating cultural details on the ancient Greeks and analyzes small poetry fragments that I've never read before. One of my favorites is from Archilochos who wrote what "it feels like to be violated” by Eros:
Such a longing for love, rolling itself up under
my heart,
poured down much mist over my eyes,
filching out of my chest the soft lungs--
Carson's analysis of this fragment is mind-opening for those readers who appreciate close reading. She does the same for Sappho, as well as others, but keeps her focus narrowed on the question of why we love to fall in love. By the time I was done reading, I became convinced it is because our minds take the deepest joy in the beauty of metaphor - of the heart's palpitating excitement over the difference in two unlike things. The space between them is the ache of desire. Bittersweet indeed.
September 11, 2020
Anne Carson is brilliant!! This book about eros, and literature, reading, words, imagination, love, desire, is a pleasure to read.
February 26, 2024
Uno de los libros que estudié para escribir mi ensayo.
July 8, 2013
There are no words for how perfect this book is. A gorgeous exploration of the edges of personhood, letters, desire. Endlessly fascinating and utterly engrossing. I couldn't put it down. I want to fall in love.
A sample from a favorite passage:
"The English word 'symbol' is the Greek word symbolon which means, in the ancient world, one half of a knucklebone carried as a token of identity to someone who has the other half. Together the two halves compose one meaning. A metaphor is a species of symbol. So is a lover. ...
Every hunting, hungering lover is half a knucklebone, wooer of a meaning that is inseparable from its absence. The moment when we understand these things - when we see what we are projected on a screen of what we could be - is invariably a moment of wrench and arrest. We love that moment, and we hate it. We have to keep going back to it, after all, if we wish to maintain contact with the possible. ...
Sappho drew this conception together and called Eros glukupikron [bittersweet]."
A sample from a favorite passage:
"The English word 'symbol' is the Greek word symbolon which means, in the ancient world, one half of a knucklebone carried as a token of identity to someone who has the other half. Together the two halves compose one meaning. A metaphor is a species of symbol. So is a lover. ...
Every hunting, hungering lover is half a knucklebone, wooer of a meaning that is inseparable from its absence. The moment when we understand these things - when we see what we are projected on a screen of what we could be - is invariably a moment of wrench and arrest. We love that moment, and we hate it. We have to keep going back to it, after all, if we wish to maintain contact with the possible. ...
Sappho drew this conception together and called Eros glukupikron [bittersweet]."
June 5, 2014
Anne Carson’s debut book is certainly an impressive piece of scholarship, which, for this particular reader, made this both a pleasure and a burden to trudge through. Summoning her impressive knowledge of Greek drama, prose (both philosophic and fictional) and poetry, Carson conjures a daring argument about the symbiotic and triangular connections between words on a page, their writer and their reader, with the notion of “desire” as the Spanish Fly that keeps all the sweaty limbs and soiled sheets intertwined and sticky.
Organized in a series of short chapters, Carson makes her slow way from the poetic fragments of Sappho to her final destination of a long dissembling of one of Plato’s dialogues featuring Socrates schooling a young upstart named Phaedrus on topics such as desire, man and boy love, and writing—and all of this the elaborate and belabored groundwork for her argument that serious readers and writers are nothing but a bunch of sex-crazed degenerates…or something like that. As much of a rousing celebration this book is for the love of Literature, too much of her prose is dry and bloated with jargon and rhetoric for this particular, not-smart-enough reader. Don’t get the wrong idea, this is definitely a well-rounded feast for thought but I look forward to dipping my finger into Glass Irony and God for a taste of her poetry.
Organized in a series of short chapters, Carson makes her slow way from the poetic fragments of Sappho to her final destination of a long dissembling of one of Plato’s dialogues featuring Socrates schooling a young upstart named Phaedrus on topics such as desire, man and boy love, and writing—and all of this the elaborate and belabored groundwork for her argument that serious readers and writers are nothing but a bunch of sex-crazed degenerates…or something like that. As much of a rousing celebration this book is for the love of Literature, too much of her prose is dry and bloated with jargon and rhetoric for this particular, not-smart-enough reader. Don’t get the wrong idea, this is definitely a well-rounded feast for thought but I look forward to dipping my finger into Glass Irony and God for a taste of her poetry.
February 20, 2017
"Both the experience of desire and the experience of reading have something to teach us about edges. We have endeavored to see what that is by consulting ancient literature, lyric and romantic, for its exposition of eros. We have watched how archaic poets shape love poems (as triangles) and how ancient novelists construct novels (as a sustained experience of paradox). We caught sight of a similar outline, even in Homer, where the phenomenon of reading and writing resurfaces in Bellerophon's story. We speculated about writers' purposes (to seduce readers?) and we are finally led to suspect that what the reader wants from reading and what the lover wants from love are experiences of very similar design. It is a necessarily triangular design, and it embodies a reach for the unknown." (109)This was my first experience reading Carson, and it was beautiful.
April 17, 2018
Carson always perches her work in the most precarious positions. One wonders what exactly they are holding in their hand: is it scholarship? A novel? An art book? A translation? A sequel? A reimagining?
Such questions are certainly important, but ultimately feel somewhat beside the point insofar as the response always seems to be a quiet but unapologetic "it is, and—." I found it curious yet unsurprising that Eros, Carson's first published text, is so preoccupied with paradox and "in-between" spaces in general: now some thirty+ years on it's clear that is exactly the place where she has situated her own work. Carson seems to implicitly pose every one of her texts as a hypothesis, mere points of departure for exploration and experimentation. This approach that has admittedly lead to a somewhat uneven oeuvre, encompassing works as indisputably minor as major.
I sense that there are simplifications and scholarly holes in Eros that those of us not intimately familiar with the Classics or the syntactical construction of ancient Greek—which I assume comprises the majority of her readership—are not able to spot, so dazzled are we by such a virtuosic yet elegant rhetorical performance. But that's exactly what makes Carson so singular. If I wanted a scholarly analysis of Sappho, of The Phaedrus, Greek culture, or any other of the countless topics Carson alights upon throughout Eros I'm sure I could find one, two, or many more more carefully researched, argued, and meticulously footnoted.
But I'm also quiet sure that they likely wouldn't be able to help me grasp or begin negotiating this sweetbitter experience of eros in which I currently find myself painfully suspended.
Such questions are certainly important, but ultimately feel somewhat beside the point insofar as the response always seems to be a quiet but unapologetic "it is, and—." I found it curious yet unsurprising that Eros, Carson's first published text, is so preoccupied with paradox and "in-between" spaces in general: now some thirty+ years on it's clear that is exactly the place where she has situated her own work. Carson seems to implicitly pose every one of her texts as a hypothesis, mere points of departure for exploration and experimentation. This approach that has admittedly lead to a somewhat uneven oeuvre, encompassing works as indisputably minor as major.
I sense that there are simplifications and scholarly holes in Eros that those of us not intimately familiar with the Classics or the syntactical construction of ancient Greek—which I assume comprises the majority of her readership—are not able to spot, so dazzled are we by such a virtuosic yet elegant rhetorical performance. But that's exactly what makes Carson so singular. If I wanted a scholarly analysis of Sappho, of The Phaedrus, Greek culture, or any other of the countless topics Carson alights upon throughout Eros I'm sure I could find one, two, or many more more carefully researched, argued, and meticulously footnoted.
But I'm also quiet sure that they likely wouldn't be able to help me grasp or begin negotiating this sweetbitter experience of eros in which I currently find myself painfully suspended.
Read
October 3, 2019"För att hon har återuppväckt Sapfo från de döda och införlivat henne i modern tid"
- Svenska Akademiens nobelmotivering till Anne Carson, en inte alltför avlägsen framtid (?).
- Svenska Akademiens nobelmotivering till Anne Carson, en inte alltför avlägsen framtid (?).
April 1, 2023
this one is kind of difficult to review bcs it is at once iconic (both carson's argument and her style are at turns evocative, punchy and seductive) and a bit laboured (in that the humanities student in me wanted to pick apart the way she builds her thesis and point at the examples/explanations that seem a bit far fetched). there's also the fact that i hadn't read any theory in almost a year, so carson's prose, fun and full of flair as it was, did end up being a bit of a challenge.
the three-week-long read notwithstanding, i'm really glad i finished this one, it gave me a lot of food for thought about my own perception of eros. also it reminded me of both gideon the ninth and this is how you lose the time war, and i ended up finishing it on the same day i listened to boygenius's the record, so in conclusion...let's go lesbians?!!
the three-week-long read notwithstanding, i'm really glad i finished this one, it gave me a lot of food for thought about my own perception of eros. also it reminded me of both gideon the ninth and this is how you lose the time war, and i ended up finishing it on the same day i listened to boygenius's the record, so in conclusion...let's go lesbians?!!
August 31, 2020
Ένα εξαιρετικά ενδιαφέρον δοκίμιο που τιμά τον Έρωτα, μέσα από τη διασύνδεση φιλοσοφίας και ποίησης!!! Ένα μεγάλο ρισπεκτ στην κυρία Κάρσον για αυτό της το δημιούργημα!!!
November 4, 2023
Poucos livros me questionaram intelectualmente como estes ensaios de Anne Carson sobre a construção cultural e filosófica do erotismo. Texto denso que é também uma instigante reflexão sobre a leitura e a escrita na época clássica.
Estamos perante um misto de ensaio literário/cultural e filosofia. Foi por isso um texto que me custou e que sinto me escapou em parte. Mas que aconselho vivamente a sua descoberta.
Mais comentário aqui: https://www.instagram.com/p/CzOncPEM2...
Estamos perante um misto de ensaio literário/cultural e filosofia. Foi por isso um texto que me custou e que sinto me escapou em parte. Mas que aconselho vivamente a sua descoberta.
Mais comentário aqui: https://www.instagram.com/p/CzOncPEM2...
February 6, 2016
Anne Carson, following Sappho, argues that Eros is a lack, a wound, a gesture toward a wholeness that's only possibility exists in our total self-annihilation. This sort of also describes my relationship to this book. I can only read it as a void, a gaping hole in myself, knowing that I will never make something so perfect.
August 31, 2023
This essay is a masterpiece. The "erotic attitudes" of Sappho, Socrates, and Lysias; the intricate dance of time's control, its dynamics and dangers; and the interplay between lover, beloved, and the subtle distinctions that set them apart.
November 6, 2021
“So I found
that hunger was a way
of persons outside windows
that entering takes away. –Emily Dickinson, I Had Been Hungry
that hunger was a way
of persons outside windows
that entering takes away. –Emily Dickinson, I Had Been Hungry
July 31, 2022
un libro lindísimo sobre el deseo, el amor, y la escritura 💗💗💗 he disfrutado muchísimo leyendo
April 8, 2015
It's all coming back to me now, why I dislike this kind of theoretical, transhistorical argument grounded in a series of close readings. The author appears to believe that she has stumbled upon a deep psychological, even ontological, truth which transcends all context and time, as well as any counter-examples. This is an enormous claim, and it would take something verging on religious faith to countenance it based on what it presented here. My own personal experience is an important counter-example, yet I feel sure the author would without hesitation dismiss my ability to access my own subjective experience as quickly as she dismisses Hephaistos and Aristophanes as uncredible witnesses. And yet they are making the same type of universal claim. Apparently the one thing everyone can agree upon is that a large claim is always better than a small, precise, specific claim.
Everyone except me.
The evidence for this kind of thing is never sufficient to support the vastness of the claim being made. And yet somehow we are meant to admire it as a kind of performance in itself, and to set aside our doubts and to believe based on the facility of that performance, evidence becoming and old-fashioned and largely irrelevant afterthought. Aside from everything else, the narcissism of this approach makes me livid.
Lurking here is also the unargued and by no means self-evident premise that is "culture". In these arguments, culture is a homogenous and monolithic THING, to which we have access via all and each of its productions, rather than a tension of similarity and difference, including its own variants and disputes, which needs much more care and information to be described accurately. In this sense, even the claims about the Greeks are too broad. They resemble, too, current simplistic constructions of identity and culture in the form of identity politics in which group trumps all. No wonder such facile constructions flourish in the humanities departments of universities: their inhabitants have never practiced any other type of thinking. It is deeply unfortunate that thinkers such as these have the care of the intellectual development of our young.
Oh, and let us not forget argument from authority, the appeal to performances past. What Freud says may be interesting, and indeed it may even be true, but if true, it is not so because he was the one who said it. This book has flashed me back to a career in a set of disciplines that would accept virtually any theory, provided that it was discredited in its original and proper disciplinary home. Something is terribly wrong with a community who will accept as valid the formulation, "well, Freud said".
I love literary study, and feel it should be taken seriously. And yet I find that those who dismiss it as pseudo-scientific, metaphysical woo-woo with no real value in any kind of rational or scientific community need not look far for examples of what they mean. What I would not give for better allies.
---------------
Special moments in the ridiculousness hall of fame:
The Iliad Book 3: she mischaracterizes the nature of Aphrodite's threat. Either this is deliberate, in an effort to force a piece of evidence that does not fit into her schema, or she has actually come to see it this way because of her presuppositions. Either way, the evidence comes after the conclusion, and the author is not to be trusted.
The Uncertainty Principle: at a BASIC level, she does not understand that this principle describes the reality of quantum systems, and not an epistemological problem or the inside of the human mind. Being an expert on one thing does not make you an expert on everything.
Everyone except me.
The evidence for this kind of thing is never sufficient to support the vastness of the claim being made. And yet somehow we are meant to admire it as a kind of performance in itself, and to set aside our doubts and to believe based on the facility of that performance, evidence becoming and old-fashioned and largely irrelevant afterthought. Aside from everything else, the narcissism of this approach makes me livid.
Lurking here is also the unargued and by no means self-evident premise that is "culture". In these arguments, culture is a homogenous and monolithic THING, to which we have access via all and each of its productions, rather than a tension of similarity and difference, including its own variants and disputes, which needs much more care and information to be described accurately. In this sense, even the claims about the Greeks are too broad. They resemble, too, current simplistic constructions of identity and culture in the form of identity politics in which group trumps all. No wonder such facile constructions flourish in the humanities departments of universities: their inhabitants have never practiced any other type of thinking. It is deeply unfortunate that thinkers such as these have the care of the intellectual development of our young.
Oh, and let us not forget argument from authority, the appeal to performances past. What Freud says may be interesting, and indeed it may even be true, but if true, it is not so because he was the one who said it. This book has flashed me back to a career in a set of disciplines that would accept virtually any theory, provided that it was discredited in its original and proper disciplinary home. Something is terribly wrong with a community who will accept as valid the formulation, "well, Freud said".
I love literary study, and feel it should be taken seriously. And yet I find that those who dismiss it as pseudo-scientific, metaphysical woo-woo with no real value in any kind of rational or scientific community need not look far for examples of what they mean. What I would not give for better allies.
---------------
Special moments in the ridiculousness hall of fame:
The Iliad Book 3: she mischaracterizes the nature of Aphrodite's threat. Either this is deliberate, in an effort to force a piece of evidence that does not fit into her schema, or she has actually come to see it this way because of her presuppositions. Either way, the evidence comes after the conclusion, and the author is not to be trusted.
The Uncertainty Principle: at a BASIC level, she does not understand that this principle describes the reality of quantum systems, and not an epistemological problem or the inside of the human mind. Being an expert on one thing does not make you an expert on everything.
October 9, 2023
What am i supposed to do now
March 15, 2020
Would Anne Carson’s PhD thesis have made it today? It is exceptionally wide-ranging and ambitious. While being intimately grounded in the etymology, grammar and semantics of classical languages and well-versed with ancient Greek philosophy to boot, her ability to synthesise this learning and apply it to certain key questions which were circulating in American continental philosophy departments at the time is frankly overwhelming. As far as I can tell, her essay results from the convergence of trying to answer three broad philosophical questions. 1. What can we learn from ancient poetic and philosophic formulations of love triangles which might explain its inexorable ‘bittersweet’ quality? 2. To what extent is this theory of erotic triangulation analogous with the process of reading? 3. What is the impact of the deferral and stabilisation of meaning through the advent of writing on past and present literature and love? While these guiding questions can, with some effort, be elicited from Carson’s essay, to my knowledge, her answers largely retreat into what others have said before and leave it at that.
That is, if they are answered at all. At a 2015 talk in Buenos Aries, an interviewer clearly struggling with the logistics of a simultaneous live translation, wanted to know more about Carson’s ‘theory of love’ which she professed to admire. Carson was bemused. She explained how the work was drawn from a PhD and is pretentious, both in terms of its expression and its content. To try and come up with a theory of love is ‘a very teenage thing to do’, she quipped, and joked about how her husband hasn’t read it but keeps a copy in the car in case he ever gets trapped in a snowstorm. By way of apology, Carson emphasised how the essay was written over thirty years ago, and that she had very little idea of what it meant, and invited the interviewer to clarify it for her. There was an awkward pause before the next question.
I find it interesting that Carson considers her own work pretentious. While clearly this essay wears its erudition on its sleeve, in her later works she takes pains to write with her sleeves rolled up, so to speak, while here, her whole hand is swallowed up in the wizard's sleeve of a formal gown. But what does it mean to classify a work as pretentious when it is a product of unquestionably serious scholarship and learning? Normally, to be pretentious means to allude to knowledge you do not know. I detect two main strands of it in this work. Firstly, there is her ebullient over-interpretations. A textbook example appears on page twenty six, where Carson reads Sappho fragment 105a as if the extant condition of the verse was in every linguistic detail deliberate and meaningful. What’s wrong with such a thorough close reading you ask? What else should we do but give our classical poets the benefit of the doubt and assume that every minute morphologic inflection carried meaning? Well, firstly there’s a sense in which such violent deconstructions seem more like a demonstration of the critic’s fluency with the quasi-scientific terminology of linguistics than an attempt to understand what the source might have meant, and then secondly, good intentions not being everything, there’s a kind of hubris in offering such microscopic analysis: you imply that Sappho needs your linguistic abilities to be fully understood, and that, indeed, Sappho wouldn’t fully understand herself until you came along and articulated what she really meant. Lastly, Carson’s speculative comparisons between variances in prosody and movements of the heart were once a staple of my own excited undergraduate essays and, in my view, that’s where they should happily remain. Any time you feel tempted to compare metric deviations to the rhythm of something more intimate, compare it to a brisk walk instead. It's usually just as good.
To state this is not to opt for conservative readings of the classics. The second pretention in this essay is its failure to live up to the questions it poses. On the one hand, it tantalises us with the prospect of uncovering a theory of love which is based on triangulation, but in practice it retreats into academic arguments about the perspectival position of the lover in relation to the beloved in a way that, for this reader at least, is unsatisfying, and annoyingly coy. In a work tastefully kitted-out with references to brand-name French poststructuralists, namely, Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida, there’s not much by way of radical theories of the subject. In Carson, love is a three-way only insofar as we might occasionally imagine feeling pleasantly uncomfortable when someone eyes up our would-be partner, and if things do get difficult, there’s always the semantics of ‘eros’ to ponder over and bide time. Anyone hoping to find a Pierre Klossowski style ‘theory of hospitality’ replete with pretty illustrations from classical literature will be disappointed, and not bittersweetly. And Carson’s reticence, to me, misses out on a chance to explore what might have been a far more radically alternative notion of love in the ancient Greek world.
Having said all this, Carson’s essay is commendable in its near total lack of moral censure for any human expressions of love. Nor does it court academics who would prefer to believe their research matters in proportion to the amount of political indignation they can legitimately muster, in the what might be termed the ‘now you've done your close reading, you can have your complaint’ school of tepid politicised journalism masking itself as literary analysis. If politics does still seep into Carson’s essay, then perhaps it comes from her inimitable voice, which implies a certain relation to the world which values sensitivity, wide-learning, honesty, and a certain sanguinity of temperament which makes studying the classics seem like a heroic, intrinsically worthwhile endeavour. And if, after the thorough breakdown of Plato’s ‘Phaedrus’ in the book's concluding chapters, Carson doesn’t quite live up to the Herculean task of drawing together the love of wooing with the love of knowledge, one never gets the impression she’s been wasting your time.
That is, if they are answered at all. At a 2015 talk in Buenos Aries, an interviewer clearly struggling with the logistics of a simultaneous live translation, wanted to know more about Carson’s ‘theory of love’ which she professed to admire. Carson was bemused. She explained how the work was drawn from a PhD and is pretentious, both in terms of its expression and its content. To try and come up with a theory of love is ‘a very teenage thing to do’, she quipped, and joked about how her husband hasn’t read it but keeps a copy in the car in case he ever gets trapped in a snowstorm. By way of apology, Carson emphasised how the essay was written over thirty years ago, and that she had very little idea of what it meant, and invited the interviewer to clarify it for her. There was an awkward pause before the next question.
I find it interesting that Carson considers her own work pretentious. While clearly this essay wears its erudition on its sleeve, in her later works she takes pains to write with her sleeves rolled up, so to speak, while here, her whole hand is swallowed up in the wizard's sleeve of a formal gown. But what does it mean to classify a work as pretentious when it is a product of unquestionably serious scholarship and learning? Normally, to be pretentious means to allude to knowledge you do not know. I detect two main strands of it in this work. Firstly, there is her ebullient over-interpretations. A textbook example appears on page twenty six, where Carson reads Sappho fragment 105a as if the extant condition of the verse was in every linguistic detail deliberate and meaningful. What’s wrong with such a thorough close reading you ask? What else should we do but give our classical poets the benefit of the doubt and assume that every minute morphologic inflection carried meaning? Well, firstly there’s a sense in which such violent deconstructions seem more like a demonstration of the critic’s fluency with the quasi-scientific terminology of linguistics than an attempt to understand what the source might have meant, and then secondly, good intentions not being everything, there’s a kind of hubris in offering such microscopic analysis: you imply that Sappho needs your linguistic abilities to be fully understood, and that, indeed, Sappho wouldn’t fully understand herself until you came along and articulated what she really meant. Lastly, Carson’s speculative comparisons between variances in prosody and movements of the heart were once a staple of my own excited undergraduate essays and, in my view, that’s where they should happily remain. Any time you feel tempted to compare metric deviations to the rhythm of something more intimate, compare it to a brisk walk instead. It's usually just as good.
To state this is not to opt for conservative readings of the classics. The second pretention in this essay is its failure to live up to the questions it poses. On the one hand, it tantalises us with the prospect of uncovering a theory of love which is based on triangulation, but in practice it retreats into academic arguments about the perspectival position of the lover in relation to the beloved in a way that, for this reader at least, is unsatisfying, and annoyingly coy. In a work tastefully kitted-out with references to brand-name French poststructuralists, namely, Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida, there’s not much by way of radical theories of the subject. In Carson, love is a three-way only insofar as we might occasionally imagine feeling pleasantly uncomfortable when someone eyes up our would-be partner, and if things do get difficult, there’s always the semantics of ‘eros’ to ponder over and bide time. Anyone hoping to find a Pierre Klossowski style ‘theory of hospitality’ replete with pretty illustrations from classical literature will be disappointed, and not bittersweetly. And Carson’s reticence, to me, misses out on a chance to explore what might have been a far more radically alternative notion of love in the ancient Greek world.
Having said all this, Carson’s essay is commendable in its near total lack of moral censure for any human expressions of love. Nor does it court academics who would prefer to believe their research matters in proportion to the amount of political indignation they can legitimately muster, in the what might be termed the ‘now you've done your close reading, you can have your complaint’ school of tepid politicised journalism masking itself as literary analysis. If politics does still seep into Carson’s essay, then perhaps it comes from her inimitable voice, which implies a certain relation to the world which values sensitivity, wide-learning, honesty, and a certain sanguinity of temperament which makes studying the classics seem like a heroic, intrinsically worthwhile endeavour. And if, after the thorough breakdown of Plato’s ‘Phaedrus’ in the book's concluding chapters, Carson doesn’t quite live up to the Herculean task of drawing together the love of wooing with the love of knowledge, one never gets the impression she’s been wasting your time.
August 21, 2007
Do you know how what we call "love," came to be? Anne Carson does. She examines the nuances of love, through the lens of Greek fragments and culture. Her chapter titles: "Ruse," "Tactics," "The Reach," pars out the subtleties of desire with all its paradoxical underpinnings. If you've ever wondered if your lover was playing a "game," read this book to understand the impossibility and awesome responsibility for wanting what you want, denying it so you can eventually enjoy it, and where honesty truly lies. (Pun intended.)
May 11, 2023
Over dit essay over verliefdheid en verlangen heb ik een stevige twee maanden gedaan, enerzijds omdat de betekenisdichtheid per zin zó hoog was, dat ik veel moest pauzeren om Carsons woorden goed te overdenken. Anderzijds omdat ik eigenlijk niet wilde dat het voorbij was. Zulke wijsheid, zulke heerlijke citaten uit de Griekse Poëzie (inclusief het origineel in het Grieks!).
Ach, ik kan oneindig citeren uit dit boekje:
'Eros ervaren is onderzoek doen naar de dubbelzinnigheid van de tijd. Verliefden zijn altijd aan het wachten. Ze haten wachten; ze houden van wachten ... Voor een verliefde lijkt het alsof verlangen in één oogwenk, zodra het plaatsvindt, de tijd sloopt, en alle andere moment in zichzelf verzamelt en daarmee onbeduidend maakt'
Ach, ik kan oneindig citeren uit dit boekje:
'Eros ervaren is onderzoek doen naar de dubbelzinnigheid van de tijd. Verliefden zijn altijd aan het wachten. Ze haten wachten; ze houden van wachten ... Voor een verliefde lijkt het alsof verlangen in één oogwenk, zodra het plaatsvindt, de tijd sloopt, en alle andere moment in zichzelf verzamelt en daarmee onbeduidend maakt'
February 12, 2020
"La necesidad de expresar el deseo amoroso, el placer y el dolor simultáneo que provoca, todavía es, hoy en día, uno de los lugares comunes de la literatura. El amor erótico, aquel que desea lo que no tiene, que existe tan solo como estado transitorio entre querer y tener, parece único para quien lo está experimentando, sea o no la primera vez, y es universal para quien está libre de él. El carácter individualizador y paradójico de Eros ha influido en que sea uno de los temas más importantes en la historia, tanto artística como filosófica, de la cultura occidental. Actualmente, el término se define simplemente como «amor» o «impulso sexual», pero ¿cuándo apareció por primera vez? ¿Qué significaba en sus inicios? ¿Cómo se ha ido transformando el concepto a lo largo del tiempo?
En este ensayo de 1986, originalmente titulado Eros el agridulce, Anne Carson hace un análisis exhaustivo de la figura de Eros partiendo de los textos clásicos griegos. El estudio de la poeta abarca temas como la escritura, la imaginación y la metáfora, sin desvincularse nunca del concepto de deseo. Carson es capaz de establecer lazos firmes entre lo concreto y lo abstracto y consigue unir a autores separados por siglos: de Safo y Arquíloco a Woolf y Welty. El ensayo es una muestra de su profundo conocimiento de la cultura clásica, su rigor filosófico, y su talento para la palabra escrita. La autora logra hacer un trabajo académico cuidadoso sin dejar de lado su estilo como poeta. El resultado es un texto analítico pero accesible e incluso, por momentos, intimista. Tratándose del tema del que se trata y escribiéndolo quien lo escribe, la combinación es lógica y bienvenida. Carson hace resurgir a Eros en toda su complejidad volviendo a sus inicios, y nos recuerda que todo tópico fue, tiempo atrás, original". Ada Bruguera
En este ensayo de 1986, originalmente titulado Eros el agridulce, Anne Carson hace un análisis exhaustivo de la figura de Eros partiendo de los textos clásicos griegos. El estudio de la poeta abarca temas como la escritura, la imaginación y la metáfora, sin desvincularse nunca del concepto de deseo. Carson es capaz de establecer lazos firmes entre lo concreto y lo abstracto y consigue unir a autores separados por siglos: de Safo y Arquíloco a Woolf y Welty. El ensayo es una muestra de su profundo conocimiento de la cultura clásica, su rigor filosófico, y su talento para la palabra escrita. La autora logra hacer un trabajo académico cuidadoso sin dejar de lado su estilo como poeta. El resultado es un texto analítico pero accesible e incluso, por momentos, intimista. Tratándose del tema del que se trata y escribiéndolo quien lo escribe, la combinación es lógica y bienvenida. Carson hace resurgir a Eros en toda su complejidad volviendo a sus inicios, y nos recuerda que todo tópico fue, tiempo atrás, original". Ada Bruguera
September 20, 2023
IT ONLY TOOK ME A MILLION YEARS TO READ THIS but just breathtaking and so so intelligent. Her work on yearning, obsession, and desire is just so precise and beautiful. I loved what she wrote about the paradox of desire and getting what is desired thus erasing that desire, the attention she pays to Greek poetry in order to make that point is amazing.
May 29, 2024
“Eros is always a story in which lover, beloved and the difference between them interact. The interaction is a fiction arranged by the mind of the lover. It carries an emotional charge both hateful and delicious and emits a light like knowledge.”
This book is a literal work of art. I found out about this book through ContraPoints’ video on Twilight, which in my opinion is another work of art. The quotes used in the video enticed me enough to read the whole book and I am so glad that I did. Eros the Bittersweet attempts to understand the Greek term and the God Eros through the analysis of classical and contemporary renditions of love and desire.
“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 no longer wanting.”
“Only a god’s word has no beginning or end. Only a god’s desire can reach without lack. Only the paradoxical god of desire, exception to all these rules, is neverendingly filled with lack itself.”
I won’t say that I am familiar with all the references given by the author, especially when it came to classic Greek literature, but most names I had heard of or read in passing. It is an enriching and elaborate study on the topic and manages to understand the nature of this paradoxical term and why is it called “Bittersweet” by Sappho. Very rightly termed because it is an emotion both delicious and painful, and we revel in lt.
We read a myriad of books, watch hours of movies on all kinds of love and feel it in real life. They are all thrilling experiences. But do we take enough time to truly understand the concept of these emotions and what makes it so intoxicating? An apt analysis can be found in this book as it deals with the emergence of literature itself and connects it with Eros and how that is depicted in these works.
“Imagination is the core of desire. It acts as the core of metaphor. It is essential to the activity of reading and writing…Writing about desire, the archaic poets made triangles with their words. Or, to put it less sharply, they represent situations that ought to involve two factors (lover, beloved) in terms of three (lover, beloved and the space between them, however realized).”
“In any act of thinking, the mind must reach across between known and unknown, linking one to the other but also keeping visible their difference. It is an erotic space.”
“A city without desire is, in sum, a city of no imagination.”
Every chapter beautifully explains the many steps of desire and what makes it so coveted. Its beginning, fruition and conclusion has at its core small details that can be seen in any good work of literature that follows these steps in the right format. Sure, some things will be here and there while crafting a story, but in general, isn’t every story about someone wanting something, be it material or not? Thus, every story has to touch these strategic beats to keep the narrative of want going. Once the want is achieved, there has to be a new one or there is no quest.
The adventure lies in the searching.
While reading, I was reminded of this quote from the movie Before Sunrise:
“You know, I believe if there’s any kind of God, it wouldn't be in any of us. Not you, or me…but just this little space in between. If there’s any kind of magic in this world, it must be in the attempt of understanding someone, sharing something. I know ,it‘s almost impossible to succeed, but…who cares, really? The answer must be in the attempt.”
It’s one of my favorite films of all time and I guess they got the concept of this dialogue from this book?
“…for desire is a movement that carries yearning hearts from over here to over there, launching the mind on a story.”
It seems like an impossible task for me to review this book because I do not feel knowledgeable or creative enough to manage such a thing. That’s why it’s filled more with quotes rather than my own words. I can only say that anyone who is interested in philosophy, literature or in reading a deep analysis of the concept of Eros or desire should read this book. Even if one can’t grasp all of it, even pieces of it are like specs of gold.
This book is a literal work of art. I found out about this book through ContraPoints’ video on Twilight, which in my opinion is another work of art. The quotes used in the video enticed me enough to read the whole book and I am so glad that I did. Eros the Bittersweet attempts to understand the Greek term and the God Eros through the analysis of classical and contemporary renditions of love and desire.
“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 no longer wanting.”
“Only a god’s word has no beginning or end. Only a god’s desire can reach without lack. Only the paradoxical god of desire, exception to all these rules, is neverendingly filled with lack itself.”
I won’t say that I am familiar with all the references given by the author, especially when it came to classic Greek literature, but most names I had heard of or read in passing. It is an enriching and elaborate study on the topic and manages to understand the nature of this paradoxical term and why is it called “Bittersweet” by Sappho. Very rightly termed because it is an emotion both delicious and painful, and we revel in lt.
We read a myriad of books, watch hours of movies on all kinds of love and feel it in real life. They are all thrilling experiences. But do we take enough time to truly understand the concept of these emotions and what makes it so intoxicating? An apt analysis can be found in this book as it deals with the emergence of literature itself and connects it with Eros and how that is depicted in these works.
“Imagination is the core of desire. It acts as the core of metaphor. It is essential to the activity of reading and writing…Writing about desire, the archaic poets made triangles with their words. Or, to put it less sharply, they represent situations that ought to involve two factors (lover, beloved) in terms of three (lover, beloved and the space between them, however realized).”
“In any act of thinking, the mind must reach across between known and unknown, linking one to the other but also keeping visible their difference. It is an erotic space.”
“A city without desire is, in sum, a city of no imagination.”
Every chapter beautifully explains the many steps of desire and what makes it so coveted. Its beginning, fruition and conclusion has at its core small details that can be seen in any good work of literature that follows these steps in the right format. Sure, some things will be here and there while crafting a story, but in general, isn’t every story about someone wanting something, be it material or not? Thus, every story has to touch these strategic beats to keep the narrative of want going. Once the want is achieved, there has to be a new one or there is no quest.
The adventure lies in the searching.
While reading, I was reminded of this quote from the movie Before Sunrise:
“You know, I believe if there’s any kind of God, it wouldn't be in any of us. Not you, or me…but just this little space in between. If there’s any kind of magic in this world, it must be in the attempt of understanding someone, sharing something. I know ,it‘s almost impossible to succeed, but…who cares, really? The answer must be in the attempt.”
It’s one of my favorite films of all time and I guess they got the concept of this dialogue from this book?
“…for desire is a movement that carries yearning hearts from over here to over there, launching the mind on a story.”
It seems like an impossible task for me to review this book because I do not feel knowledgeable or creative enough to manage such a thing. That’s why it’s filled more with quotes rather than my own words. I can only say that anyone who is interested in philosophy, literature or in reading a deep analysis of the concept of Eros or desire should read this book. Even if one can’t grasp all of it, even pieces of it are like specs of gold.
September 27, 2013
I was in pain when I read this. Wanted a guide to the mysteries of love and lovepain and Carson had just cracked me open with
The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos
. (What was Kafka's thing about a great book cracking open the ice berg of the soul? Wait... let me look for it: "A book must be an ice-axe to break the seas frozen inside our soul.") So I wanted more. More insight. More guides to the mysteries. But this book wasn't that. This book, instead of being a guide, instead of being Beatrice, is Humbert Humbert mansplaining about obsessions only tangentially about love; mainly about obsessions from the classical world and riffs and plays on antecedent books about love and pain. In particular, Carson wants to write an update to Barthes'
A Lover's Discourse: Fragments
, but this is not that.
What does she argue? It's been a month since I read the book, so I don't really remember everything that well, but she claims that love is bittersweet, or "sweetbitter" in Sappho's version. Love is about the object of love that exists outside of the lovers, which might be true. It might be the case that what is loved is not really The Other, but an idealized form. Ok, I can live with that. It's roughly Proust's stance and it has some ring of truth. But for me, my love was the friction between what I expected the beloved to say or do and what she actually did. It wasn't an obsession with an ideal, but with a cozy place between her constant surprises and constant familiarity. It wasn't how I remembered her, but how she existed in the world both not what I knew and what I knew.
But Carson also ties everything to writing, as a writer is apt to do. Ties it to reading and language and the alphabet and the mysteries thereof. Really? Because to me the mysteries of reading (and "falling in love with reading") is pretty distinct from falling in love with a person. I mean, as a reader I get what she is getting at. There are occasions when I seem to breath and eat a particular book and that obsession comes slightly near what I feel when I love a person, but still, it's a writer's kick to see everything in terms of writing. To a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
Ok.
I'm in Paris. On vacation, I guess. The so-called "city of love." I'm alone and discombobulated so I'll have to write about this later. But walking in the City of Light / The City of Love and seeing couples happily walking entwined while you walk alone wishing you were with who you loved gets more into the sweetbitter of love than reading a treatise on metaphors in Sappho, Catullus, and Roman rom-coms.
What does she argue? It's been a month since I read the book, so I don't really remember everything that well, but she claims that love is bittersweet, or "sweetbitter" in Sappho's version. Love is about the object of love that exists outside of the lovers, which might be true. It might be the case that what is loved is not really The Other, but an idealized form. Ok, I can live with that. It's roughly Proust's stance and it has some ring of truth. But for me, my love was the friction between what I expected the beloved to say or do and what she actually did. It wasn't an obsession with an ideal, but with a cozy place between her constant surprises and constant familiarity. It wasn't how I remembered her, but how she existed in the world both not what I knew and what I knew.
But Carson also ties everything to writing, as a writer is apt to do. Ties it to reading and language and the alphabet and the mysteries thereof. Really? Because to me the mysteries of reading (and "falling in love with reading") is pretty distinct from falling in love with a person. I mean, as a reader I get what she is getting at. There are occasions when I seem to breath and eat a particular book and that obsession comes slightly near what I feel when I love a person, but still, it's a writer's kick to see everything in terms of writing. To a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
Ok.
I'm in Paris. On vacation, I guess. The so-called "city of love." I'm alone and discombobulated so I'll have to write about this later. But walking in the City of Light / The City of Love and seeing couples happily walking entwined while you walk alone wishing you were with who you loved gets more into the sweetbitter of love than reading a treatise on metaphors in Sappho, Catullus, and Roman rom-coms.
Read
January 8, 2024task 4 the real carsonheads: compare structure this w/ economy of the unlost
oi oi a quality piece ! Very much running alongside Barthes' Lover's Discourse - one of my favourites for years , which anne saves as such for a hot minute. then inject some lacan and so forth, get freaky w/ it. but delicious. I'm having. alovely time thank u kate
oi oi a quality piece ! Very much running alongside Barthes' Lover's Discourse - one of my favourites for years , which anne saves as such for a hot minute. then inject some lacan and so forth, get freaky w/ it. but delicious. I'm having. alovely time thank u kate
June 2, 2019
Το βιβλίο με συγκλόνισε, με ανατρίχιασε, με σκίρτησε. Περιγράφει με τρόπο εξαιρετικά τρυφερό την αμφιρρέπεια του Έρωτα και την επώδυνα γλυκιά του απαρχή, την Επιθυμία.
"Η εξήγηση εντοπίζει τρεις γωνίες: τον ερωτευμένο, τον ερώμενο και τον ερωτευμένο που επαναπροσδιορίζεται ως λειψός δίχως τον ερώμενο."
Πάντα και παντού αυτή η τριγωνική κατάσταση: το γνωστό μέρος, το δυνητικό μέρος-άρα και άγνωστο ακόμα και η πρόθεση σύζευξης αυτών των δύο στην αιωνιότητα, αφού συνειδητοποιείται πρώτα η διαφορά τους. Εκεί, στην τελευταία, ορίζεται και εγκαθιδρύεται και ο Έρωτας ως η απαράμιλλη προσπάθεια σύνδεσής τους.
"Η εξήγηση εντοπίζει τρεις γωνίες: τον ερωτευμένο, τον ερώμενο και τον ερωτευμένο που επαναπροσδιορίζεται ως λειψός δίχως τον ερώμενο."
Πάντα και παντού αυτή η τριγωνική κατάσταση: το γνωστό μέρος, το δυνητικό μέρος-άρα και άγνωστο ακόμα και η πρόθεση σύζευξης αυτών των δύο στην αιωνιότητα, αφού συνειδητοποιείται πρώτα η διαφορά τους. Εκεί, στην τελευταία, ορίζεται και εγκαθιδρύεται και ο Έρωτας ως η απαράμιλλη προσπάθεια σύνδεσής τους.
May 15, 2022
if i could write like anne carson all my problems would be fixed
July 25, 2024
Safo, me gusta. El Fedro de Platón, me gusta también. Las novelas griegas tipo Dafnis y Cloe, muy bien sí, no las conozco pero seguimos. Con estos mimbres Anne Carson imparte una lección magistral sobre el Eros griego, que llega volando de tiempos lejanos y que es amor, es placer, es dolor y es algo más. Y lo que viene a contarnos Carson es un poco como: eh, esto nos importa, este Eros es el nuestro también; ella lo cuenta mucho mejor, nos dice: cuando viene el Eros prepárate porque no hay escapatoria. El tópico podría ser tan tópico que en manos de otro se volvería invisible, pero Carson es listísima, culta y escribe como la inmensa poeta y ensayista que es. Hay tantas ideas originales que solo queda desear que Sócrates en el Fedro no llevara razón en eso de que la sabiduría pueda fijarse simplemente leyendo libros. Y aunque realmente no es así, creo haber salido del libro un poquito más sabio.
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