Dwelling in Desire: Standing on the pont Mirabeau

In Apollinaire’s poem ‘Le pont Mirabeau’ (1912), love flows on while the remembering lover stays behind on a Paris bridge, dwelling on what is lost. This essay compares a range of literary and biographical examples of dwelling in/on love, showing how this seems to allow the lover a kind of ‘perpetualness’ while the object of love changes or is replaced. In the first section, three sets of texts from the 1910s are analysed. In the life and writing of J. M. Barrie, young men die or are culled, leaving Peter Pan ageless and Barrie himself shrunken but surviving. Thomas Mann’s Aschenbach dies destroyed but his love persists while the beloved boy poses at the horizon. André Gide claims to absorb the youth of his ever-new love objects through ‘sympathy’, yet there is a vampirism here which drains both parties. In the second section, three texts by Freud examine why it may be that some people are constant or ‘adhesive’ in love while others find replacement after replacement: he concludes with the paradox that even an unending onward movement is caused by a fixity of desire for the lost mother.