No one contradicts me now and the salt has gone out of my life.
Queen Victoria, after Albert’s death
Eros loves strife and delights in paradoxical outcomes.
Chariton, Chaereas and Callirrhoe 1.1
It is nothing new to say that all utterance is erotic in some sense, that all language shows the structure of desire at some level. Already in Homer’s usage, the same verb (mnaomai) has the meaning ‘to give heed, to make mention’ and also the meaning ‘to court, woo, be a suitor.’ Already in ancient Greek myth, the same goddess (Peithō) has charge of rhetorical persuasion and the arts of seduction. Already in earliest metaphor, it is ‘wings’ or ‘breath’ that move words from speaker to listener as they move eros from lover to beloved. But words that are written or read place in sharp, sudden focus the edges of the units of language and the edges of those units called ‘reader’ and ‘writer.’ Back and forth across the edges moves a symbolic intercourse. As the vowels and consonants of an alphabet interact symbolically to make a certain written word, so writer and reader bring together two halves of one meaning, so lover and beloved are matched together like two sides of one knucklebone. An intimate collusion occurs. The meaning composed is private and true and makes permanent, perfect sense. Ideally speaking, at least, that is the case.
In fact, neither reader nor writer nor lover achieves such consummation. The words we read and the words we write never say exactly what we mean. The people we love are never just as we desire them. The two symbola never perfectly match. Eros is in between.
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 surfaces 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.
Desire for knowledge is the mark of the beast: Aristotle says “All men reach out to know” (Metaph. A. 1.980a21). As you perceive the edge of yourself at the moment of desire, as you perceive the edges of words from moment to moment in reading (or writing), you are stirred to reach beyond perceptible edges—toward something else, something not yet grasped. The unplucked apple, the beloved just out of touch, the meaning not quite attained, are desirable objects of knowledge. It is the enterprise of eros to keep them so. The unknown must remain unknown or the novel ends. As all paradoxes are, in some way, paradoxes about paradox, so all eros is, to some degree, desire for desire.
Hence, ruses. What is erotic about reading (or writing) is the play of imagination called forth in the space between you and your object of knowledge. Poets and novelists, like lovers, touch that space to life with their metaphors and subterfuges. The edges of the space are the edges of the things you love, whose inconcinnities make your mind move. And there is Eros, nervous realist in this sentimental domain, who acts out of a love of paradox, that is as he folds the beloved object out of sight into a mystery, into a blind point where it can float known and unknown, actual and possible, near and far, desired and drawing you on.