Want from Love?
My astonishing victory over Menti did not give me a pleasure one-hundredth part as intense as the pain she gave me when she left me for M. de Rospiec.
Stendahl, The Life of Henri Brulard
On the surface of it, the lover wants the beloved. This, of course, is not really the case. If we look carefully at a lover in the midst of desire, for example Sappho in her fragment 31, we see how severe an experience for her is confrontation with the beloved even at a distance. Union would be annihilating. What the lover in this poem needs is to be able to face the beloved and yet not be destroyed, that is, she needs to attain the condition of “the man who listens closely.” His ideal impassivity constitutes for her a glimpse of a new possible self. Could she realize that self, she too would be “equal to gods” amidst desire; to the degree that she fails to realize it, she may be destroyed by desire. Both possibilities are projected on a screen of what is actual and present by means of the poet’s tactic of triangulation. That godlike self, never known before, now comes into focus and vanishes again in one quick shift of view. As the planes of vision jump, the actual self and the ideal self and the difference between them connect in one triangle momentarily. The connection is eros. To feel its current pass through her is what the lover wants.
The essential features that define this eros have already emerged in the course of our exploration of bittersweetness. Simultaneous pleasure and pain are its symptom. Lack is its animating, fundamental constituent. As syntax, it impressed us as something of a subterfuge: properly a noun, eros acts everywhere like a verb. Its action is to reach, and the reach of desire involves every lover in an activity of the imagination.
It is no new idea that the imagination has a powerful role to play in human desire. Homer’s description of Helen in the Iliad is perhaps the archetypal demonstration of it. The description is withheld. Homer merely tells us that the old men on the wall of Troy watched her pass and let out a whisper:
οὐ νέμεσις Τρῶας καὶ ἐϋκνήμιδας Ἀχαιοὺς
τοιῇδ’ ἀμφὶ γυναικὶ πολὺν χρόνον ἄλγεα πάσχειν·
It is no discredit for Trojans and well-greaved
Achaeans
to suffer long anguish for a woman like that.
(Il. 3.156-57)
Helen remains universally desired, universally imaginable, perfect.
Erotic theorists spend considerable time discovering and rediscovering the lover’s imagination from different angles. Aristotle defines the dynamic and imaginative delight of desire in his Rhetoric. “Desire is a reaching out [orexis] for the sweet,” he says, and the man who is reaching for some delight, whether in the future as hope or in the past as memory, does so by means of an act of imagination (phantasia: Rh. 1.1370a6). Andreas Capellanus analyzes the pain of amorous longing in the same light in his twelfth-century treatise De Amore, insisting that this passio is a thoroughly mental event: “The suffering of love does not arise out of any action … but only from the cogitation of the mind upon what it sees does that suffering issue.” (XIV). Stendhal, in his celebrated essay on love, uncovers in the lover a fantasizing process that he names “crystallization” after a phenomenon witnessed in the mines of Salzburg:
Leave a lover with his thoughts for twenty-four hours and this is what will happen: At the salt mines of Salzburg, they throw a leafless wintry bough into one of the abandoned workings. Two or three months later they pull it out covered with a shining deposit of crystals. The smallest twig, no bigger than a tom-tit’s claw, is studded with a galaxy of scintillating diamonds. The original branch is no longer recognizable. What I have called crystallization is a mental process which draws from everything that happens new proofs of the perfection of the loved one. (1957, 45)
Kierkegaard also devotes some thought to this “sensuously idealizing power … [that] beautifies and develops the one desired so that he flushes in enhanced beauty by its reflection.” The force by which Don Juan seduces may be found in this “energy of sensuous desire,” Kierkegaard concludes, with a trace of relief (1944, 86-102). Freudian theory, too, takes note of this projective faculty of the human erotic instinct, ascribing to it the scheduled mischief known as ‘transference’ in psychoanalytic situations. Transference arises in almost every psychoanalytic relationship when the patient insists on falling in love with the doctor, despite the latter’s determined aloofness, warnings and discouragement. An important lesson in erotic mistrust is available to the analysand who observes himself concocting in this way a love object out of thin air.
Such concoctions fascinate the modern novelist. Anna Karenina’s passion for Vronsky depends on a mental act:
She put her hands on his shoulders and looked at him for a long time with a profound, passionate and at the same time searching look. She was studying his face to make up for the time she hadn’t seen him. She was doing what she always did when she saw him—comparing the image of him in her imagination (incomparably superior, and impossible in reality) with him as he was. (pt. 4, chap. 2)
Emma Bovary’s love letters to Rodolphe enact the same process: “But as she wrote she saw in her mind’s eye another man, a phantom composed of her most passionate memories, her most enjoyable books, and her strongest desires; at last he became so real and so tangible that she was thrilled and amazed, yet he was so hidden under the abundance of his virtues that she was unable to imagine him clearly” (quoted in Girard 1965, 63-64). The heroine of Italo Calvino’s novel The Nonexistent Knight is a splendid voluptuary who finds she can only feel genuine desire for the knight of the title, an empty suit of armour; all others are either known or knowable and cannot arouse her. Here we arrive at the nub of the matter, not for the first time. That which is known, attained, possessed, cannot be an object of desire. “In love possession is nothing, only delight matters,” says Stendhal (1957, 112). Eros is lack, says Sokrates. This dilemma is given a still more subtle image by Yasunari Kawabata. His novel Beauty and Sadness (1975) recounts the early days of the marriage of Oki and Fumiko. Oki is a novelist and Fumiko a typist in a news agency. She types all his manuscripts and this connection is the substance of Oki’s newlywed fascination with his bride:
It was something of a lover’s game, the sweet togetherness of newlyweds, but there was more to it than that. When his work first appeared in a magazine he was astonished at the difference in effect between a penwritten manuscript and the tiny characters in print. (34)
As Oki becomes habituated to this “gap between manuscript and published work” his passion for Fumiko fades and he takes a mistress.
It is in the difference between cursive and typeface, between the real Vronsky and the imaginary one, between Sappho and “the man who listens closely,” between an actual knight and an empty suit of armour, that desire is felt. Across this space a spark of eros moves in the lover’s mind to activate delight. Delight is a movement (kinēsis) of the soul, in Aristotle’s definition (Rh. 1.1369b19). No difference: no movement. No Eros.
A mood of knowledge is emitted by the spark that leaps in the lover’s soul. He feels on the verge of grasping something not grasped before. In the Greek poets it is a knowledge of self that begins to come into focus, a self not known before and now disclosed by the lack of it—by pain, by a hole, bitterly. Not all lovers respond to erotic knowledge so negatively. We were struck by the equanimity with which Virginia Woolf’s character, Neville, records “Something now leaves me” (1931, 83) and we saw what a gust of elation accompanies the change of self for Nietzsche (1967, 426). But then, Nietzsche calls the modern world an ass that says yes to everyhing. The Greek poets do not say yes. They allow that erotic experience is sweet to begin with: gluku. They acknowledge ideal possibilities opened out for selfhood by erotic experience; they do so, in general, by divinizing it in the person of the god Eros. Sappho, as we have seen, projects the ideal in the particular person of “the man who listens closely” in fragment 31. A more narcissistic lover, namely Alkibiades in Plato’s Symposium, subsumes the ideal to himself, blandly announcing his motive for pursuing Sokrates:
ἐμοὶ μὲν γὰρ οὐδέν ἐστι πρεσβύτερον τοῦ ὡς ὅτι
βέλτιστον ἐμὲ γενέσθαι
For me nothing has a higher priority than to perfect
myself. (Symp. 218d)
But a sense of exultation at the thought of incorporating the self’s possibilities within the self’s identity is missing. In these ancient representations, bittersweet Eros prints consistently as a negative image. Presumably, a positive picture could be made if the lover were ever to reincorporate his lack into a new and better self. Or could it? Is that positive picture what the lover wants from love?
An ancient answer presents itself. Aristophanes puts this very question to a pair of imaginary lovers in Plato’s Symposium. He pictures the lovers locked in an embrace and dismisses as absurd the notion that this “mere amorous union” (sunousia tōn aphrodisiōn, 192c) is all they want:
ἀλλ᾽ ἄλλο τι βουλομένη ἐκατέρου ἡ ψυχὴ δήλη ἐστίν, ὃ οὐ δύναται εἰπεῖν. ἀλλὰ μαντεύεται ὃ βούλεται, καὶ αἰνίττεται.
No, obviously the soul of each is longing for something else which it cannot put into normal words but keeps trying to express in oracles and riddles.
(192c-d)
What is this “something else”? Aristophanes continues:
καὶ εἰ αὐτοῖς ἐν τῷ αὐτῷ κατακειμένοις ἐπιστὰς ὁ Ἥφαιστος, ἔχων τὰ ὄργανα, ἔροιτο· “Τί ἔσθ᾽ ὃ βούλεσθε, ὦ ἄνθρωποι, ὑμῖν παρ᾽ ἀλλήλων γενέσθαι;” καὶ εἰ ἀπορούντας αὐτούς πάλιν ἔροιτο· “Ἆρά γε τοῦδε ἐπιθυμεῖτε, ἐν τῷ αὐτῷ γενέσθαι ὅτι μάλιστα ἀλλήλοις, ὥστε καὶ νύκτα καὶ ἡμέραν μὴ ἀπολείπεσθαι ἀλλήλων; εἰ γὰρ τούτου ἐπιθυμεῖτε, θέλω ὑμᾶς συντῆξαι καὶ σνμφνσῆσαι εἰς τὸ αὐτό, ὥστε δύ᾽ ὄντας ἕνα γεγονέναι καὶ ἕως τ᾽ ἂν ζῆτε, ὡς ἕνα ὄντα, κοινῇ ἀμφοτέρονς ζῆν, καὶ ἐπειδὰν ἀποθάνητε, ἐκεῖ αὖ ἐν Ἅιδου ἀντὶ δυοῖν ἕνα εἶναι κοινῇ τεθνεῶτε· ἀλλ᾽ ὁρᾶτε εἰ τούτου ἐρᾶτε καὶ ἐξαρκεῖ ὑμῖν ἂν τούτου τύχητε·”
Suppose that, as the lovers lay together, Hephaistos should come and stand over them, tools in hand, and ask: “O human beings, what is it you want of one another?” And suppose they were nonplussed, so he put the question again: “Well, is this what you crave, to be joined in the closest possible union with one another, so as not to leave one another by night or day? If that is your craving, I am ready to melt you together and fuse you into a single unit, so that two become one and as long as you live you may both, as one, live a common life, and when you die you may also, down there in Hades, one instead of two, die a common death. Consider whether this is what you desire, whether it would satisfy you to obtain this.” (192d-e)
Eternal oneness is Hephaistos’ offer. The lovers’ response is not heard. Instead, Aristophanes himself intervenes to pronounce: “No lover could want anything else” (192e). Now, how credible a witness is Aristophanes, or his spokesman Hephaistos, in the question of what a lover really wants? Two reservations strike us: Hephaistos, impotent cuckold of the Olympian pantheon, can be viewed as at best a qualified authority on matters erotic; and Aristophanes’ judgment (“no lover could want anything else”) is belied by the anthropology of his own myth. Was it the case that the round beings of his fantasy remained perfectly content rolling about the world in prelapsarian oneness? No. They got big ideas and started rolling toward Olympus to make an attempt on the gods (190b-c). They began reaching for something else. So much for oneness.
It is not the number ‘one,’ as we have seen in example after example, to which the lover’s mind inclines when he is given a chance to express his desire. Maneuvers of triangulation disclose him. For his delight is in reaching; to reach for something perfect would be perfect delight. The sweet apple still dangling in Sappho’s fragment 105a represents this wrenching, delightful fact. We have looked at some of the tactics of incompleteness by which Sappho sustains desire and desirability in the poem. We have looked at similar tactics penetrating lovers’ logic and contracting upon a solitude unknown before. They are tactics of imagination, which sometimes turn upon enhancing the beloved, sometimes upon reconceiving the lover, but which are all aimed at defining one certain edge or difference: an edge between two images that cannot merge in a single focus because they do not derive from the same level of reality—one is actual, one is possible. To know both, keeping the difference visible, is the subterfuge called eros.