Eros, the Beautiful, Sex, Without Love
- Autores: Lidija D. Delić
- Localización: Knjizevna istorija = Literary History, ISSN 0350-6428, Nº. 159, 2016, págs. 37-58
- Idioma: inglés
- Enlaces
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Resumen
The Classical cults already linked Eros and the beautiful. However, Plato was the first to give Eros a cognitive dimension and link it with the beautiful within a broader philosophic concept, turning it into a mediator between the sensual-concrete sphere of human experience and the ideal transcendence (world of ideas), while Thomas Mann directly appropriated and literary transposed these postulates in Death in Venice. Similar aesthetic positions, although without a citational dialogue with Plato’s texts, are visible in Ivo Andrić’s opus where physical beauty is also viewed as an imperfect reflection of transcendent beauty, except that in Andrić’s case the inclination towards the aesthetic pole is sometimes more radical than in Thomas Mann (Jelena, žena koje nema [Jelena, the Woman Who Is Not]). Authors who position the source of the erotic/attraction outside the sphere of erotism are in a direct or indirect polemic with the concept of Eros as “love for beauty” (Plato) and the literary texts based on it: Percy Adlon who, in his film Bagdad Café, erotizes human warmth (kindness) instead of beauty in an obvious dialogue with Death in Venice, and Vladan Matijević, who almost entirely positions the erotic in the sphere of the body/sexuality (Časovi radosti [Hours of Joy]). In all discussed cases, love has the most instable/marginal position.
This study is based on a few examples from the extensive opuses of Thomas Mann, Ivo Andrić and Vladan Matijević, as well as the film narrative of Percy Adlon, which is why it should not be regarded as an attempt to discover the poetic dominants of the authors in question. Their opuses are far more varied regarding the questions of Eros, carnality, sex and love than we could conclude from this text. The examples were selected with the intention to isolate several characteristic types of Eros in narrative discourse (literary and film), established according by the presence or absence of two sufficiently distinctive parameters – the beautiful and sex (carnality) – and the superposed/subordinated relations between the sphere of transcendence or the sphere of the immanent, upon which the effects of Eros are projected. In Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, Plato’s dialogues Phaedrus and Phaedo (which served as the immediate ideological and plot background for Mann) and Ivo Andrić’s prose, the transcendent is indisputably dominant. By regarding the human body as a space for the projection of ideal mathematic proportions and transcendent essence, Plato and Thomas Mann essentially disqualified the sensuality of the body and positioned the aesthetic ideal in the very epicenter of erotism. Ivo Andrić went even further in the process of disqualifying carnality in favor of the Beautiful, narrating the powerful attraction of a woman without a body and thereby completely excluding the dimension of sexuality from the field of the erotic. The remaining two authors whose works are the focus of this analysis incline towards the other pole – where the Eros is manifested exclusively in the sphere of the immanent. Without introducing any aspects of sexuality, but disqualifying Beauty as the source of Eros, Percy Adlon places the Good, i.e. harmony, in the epicenter of erotism in his film Bagdad Café, an obvious counter-story for Death in Venice. Matijević’s concept of Eros disqualifies both the beautiful (aesthetic) and the good (emotional, reflexive) by establishing the absolute supremacy of the carnal/sexual experience. Those texts whose concept of Eros does not exclude carnality, but leaves it unfulfilled, remaining “merely” on the level of a “game of desire” remain in some sort of “grey zone” – however, artistically very productive and impressive (Žena na kamenu [Woman on the Rock], Bajron u Sintri [Byron in Sintra]).
