Attraction and Aesthetics
I saw Andre Aciman give a fascinating reading some years back at the Harvard Bookstore. This was probably 2017, and I believe he was promoting Enigma Variations, which seemed great, but I still haven’t read despite loving Aciman’s work.
During the Q & A period someone asked the classic question of how he was able to write so insightfully about LGBTQ+ characters when he identified as straight. As I recall, the responses were much of what you’d imagine: empathy, artistic imagination, the variability of sexual desire. Good answers, all of them.
Aciman has given similar answers to that question elsewhere, particularly regarding the fluidity of sexual desire. Of course he’s on to something. One likes to think that it would be common sense by now that crude categories such as “straight” or “gay” barely scratch the surface for many if not most people, but that optimism would be sociologically inept. Really, even to say sexuality is “flexible” doesn’t speak to the half of it. Humans have all manner of desires of different durations, types, levels of conscious awareness, etc. We’re complex.
Deepening the point, it occurs to me that there are types of attraction just as much as types of people to be attracted to. It’s easy to slip into thinking of attraction itself as uniform, as though we have X units of the substance “attraction” that we then assign to greater or lesser degrees. But that’s too simplified. Attraction itself isn’t just one thing. There are different species or forms of attraction. It might even be that each experience of attraction is radically singular and particular (while perhaps reflecting more generalizable underlying patterns).
What is “attraction”? What does it mean for something to be “attractive”? Working out a definition would take some elbow grease, but it would have something to do with having a pleasing quality (or qualities) that draw(s) one toward it. In that sense, in the Passions of the Soul, Descartes describes attraction as a combination of love and desire fed by our impulse to move toward beneficial things. Even just within the terms of Descartes’s typically stark, mechanistic definition, it’s easy to think of how different configurations or allotments of love and desire might lead to different iterations of attraction (spooky chemistry, indeed).
On a different register, love might provide a helpful metaphor. There are many forms of love: eros (romantic love), agape (generalized non-romantic love), philia (brotherly love), etc., which have underlying similarities but are felt differently and have unique characteristics.
Attraction is similarly diverse. In addition to the classic romantic and sexual forms, we have other types that variously overlap with and diverge from those two. For example, to make the (arguably) dubious gesture of deferring to the anecdotal, it can be easy to think of a distinctive form of asexual attraction that isn’t romantic per se but has a vividness or vitality distinct from other types of friendship.
This line of thinking might provide an additional answer to the ones given during the Aciman Q & A mentioned above. More specifically, another explanation for why his work can so powerfully capture relationships with which he’s had no personal experience might be because he’s documenting types of attraction that are as varied as are our desires. Attraction pulls on us in all manner of ways, and the ability to capture those can give art unique resonance regardless of the author’s lifestyle.