The Epic Versus The Lyrical Lover: Or Towards An Erotic Theory of Everything

Ok, now that I’ve done the appropriate mindless, Cosmopolitan/Internet/Facebook Test of lover types, I can more fully examine the conflict between the epic and the lyrical lover.

Milan Kundera categorized two types of lovers in his book, The Art of the Novel -- the lyrical and the epic:

• Lyrical seeks their personal ideal in each woman.
• Epic seeks the infinite variety of the feminine universe.
• Lyric is the expression of a self-revealing subjectivity,
• Epic arises from the urge to seize hold of the objectivity of the world.
• Lyrical is the love of romantic youth.
• Epic is the search for the vast variety of life.

In the hands of a writer like Kundera, definitions can be compelling.  He appeals to two great literary traditions in poetry, the epic and the lyrical.  He captures the human emotions of romance and lustful abandon.  He counters the subjective with the objective.  He finishes us off with youth and inexperience versus wisdom and age.  But his categories limit us.  We are either epic or lyrical lovers.

But definitions create artificial boundaries on human experience. The conflict between safety, serenity and security of a steady spouse versus the danger and erotic charge of the unknown has been the fodder for countless novels, stories, songs and movies.  Like the left and the right in politics, the faithful versus the philandering pepper our erotic discourse.  The battle is between the lyrical and the epic, the subjective and the objective, love versus lust.

The conflict is genuine, much like the conflict in physics between quantum mechanics and general relativity.   And as in physics, there is a great need for an underlying Theory of Everything Erotic, but no one can agree.   The evidence mounts up and conflicts.  Erotic safety and depth come from intimate relationships.  True.  Erotic charge comes from variety and seduction.  Also true.  The evidence piles up on both sides, so you can just pick the pile that appeals most to your sensibility, but the very act of choosing requires that valid erotic evidence be ignored.

Can romantic, intimate love be reconciled with wild, fuck-it-all eroticism?