Marcus specifically points to the ways in which theory-to-date has shaped our field of vision so that the varied and complex relationships she investigates have been outside of our purview. She points to the gap in theorists from Freud to Butler who block a full consideration of female subjectivity by way of their insistence on constructing masculine and feminine, heterosexual and homosexual, as mutually constitutive and simultaneously rigidly opposite binaries whose terms inexorably interpolate the others. Having internalized this structure, of significance here that “contemporary definitions of femininity presume that heterosexuality and lesbianism are opposed and mutually exclusive positions,” (18) Marcus notes, she had “assumed that all relationships between women had to refer to lesbianism and be external to male-female desire. As a result, I sought to define relationships between women solely in relation to sexual desire, the glue that binds masculine to feminine in the heterosexual matrix.” (19) This is the frame that kept her from being able to address the terms, and the significances, of the varieties of female subjectivities that are present in the Victorian. But once she sees her way around that, oh the places she’ll go.

I think that the model of paying very close attention to our frames is an important one, and timely, given where many of us are in our graduate careers. If we can train ourselves to think critically about how we think, given the range of approaches that we have available to us to approach objects, then we can be more sensitive to the methodologies that both our questions but also our objects demand. And we can also think through the way in which they keep us from seeing other answers, even though we might not be able to think through what those answers might be, or might not help us make any kind of logical sense of them. Though I also appreciate Marcus’ call that maybe we shouldn’t always try and come up with tidy answers.

It seems to me like the example of scholarship she provides (outside of an exhausting attention to a huge archive!) is one of careful attention to open reading, what she calls ‘just’ reading. Whether by just she means only or justice, or both, I’m not entirely sure. I’m leaning to both, though certainly only is funnier, given our discussion on Thursday about paranoid reading and recuperative reading. She says, “Rather than focus on what texts do not or cannot say, I use a method I call “just reading,” which attends to what texts make manifest on their surface.” (3) This just reading seems to have been enabled by her interrogation of her frame – she is able to see certain things manifest on the surface of the text because she approaches them differently, without the assumption of femininity as non-masculine and heterosexual.

I wonder if just reading can also be thought of as reading without analyzing. Because by reading without analyzing I think we can be more open to the text, and we can approach it on its terms and see what it has to point out rather than make it fit into our model. That seemed to be a complaint against Sedgwick last week, that she plopped triangles down everywhere, even in the sonnets where she herself points out the 4 participants in the narrative. The other thing that Marcus does not do that Sedgwick does, though, is define a structure, per se. There is no triangle for Marcus, though she maintains Sedgwick’s commitment to enabling non-normative subjectivity within normative spaces. Marcus would argue that this precisely is blocked by an insistence upon subversion and the subcultural within queer theory. She explains, “Queer theory often accentuates the subversive dimensions of lesbian, gay, and transgender acts and identities. The focus on secrecy, shame, oppression, and transgression in queer studies has led theorists, historians, and literary critics alike to downplay or refuse the equally powerful ways that same-sex bonds have been acknowledged by the bourgeois liberal public sphere.” (13)

I wonder what to make of this given the path of outsider exemplarity that we have traced in cultural criticism since Carlyle. While I am still not entirely sure I understand the ethics and aesthetics debate that keeps recurring in class, I think that I might understand how to apply it here, with the ethics of Marcus’ object choice. She makes the point that she is not saying that all Victorian women were lesbians, but rather that the homoerotic was a significant part of the construction of normative femininity in the Victorian era. What is the significance of this? She talks about the acceptance of female marriage, the erotic tone of female friendship, and the circles of female desire surrounding fashion, which was contemporary with a complete rejection of French Sapphic literature. Her point with this is that the female same sex-sexuality was not the issue, but rather the rejection of the bourgeois ideal of the family. She locates the primary site of ideology, the method of its policing, and its significance, which is one of the main aims of cultural criticism as I understand it. Her particular contribution seems to lie in the fact that her locating is distinct from others’, who rely on the construction of femininity as the object, rather than the subject, of erotic desire. (12)

Within her text feminine subjectivities are multiple and at times quite acceptably masculine. This matters to people who might not care exactly about Great Expectations or cross-generational dominance and submission narratives (who’s that?) because it posits a way to theorize identity that is “not reducible to sex, power, or difference.” (14) What this enables us to do is to theorize away from binaries. Which is hard to do, and I’m not entirely sure Marcus is successful at it throughout her book, but is a model that is important because of the way in which it enables us to think about the interstices, rather than the absolute oppositions, of the social that structure our movements through our environments and our interactions with others. The ethics here are that she proposes and models a way to think about subjectivities while also thinking about ourselves as scholars and the ways in which how we conceive of subjectivity itself limits the possibilities of the field of identity. Through her object choice Marcus is able to both make a historically specific point and also demonstrate a sensitivity to circumstance that could be helpful in our contemporary moment that is trying to find a way to build community in a context that is trying its damnedest to enforce post-identity. She allows for fluidity and ambiguity while still engaging positive scholarship. I look forward to discussing this book in class. I quite enjoyed this second engagement with it, and would recommend if nothing else a quick gander at the booby and crotch grabbing fashion plates, for those that didn’t read the second section.

VA

#1: Justine Bateman from Family Ties – sadly, this is not my autographed picture, nor do I own one.

#2: Jem from Jem and the Holograms – I wasn’t allowed to watch Jem, which made her all the more intriguing.

#3: Carrie from Mrs. Steinhook’s second grade class.

Looking back on my childhood, I wonder if my parents picked up on the fact that I wasn’t liking boys “the way I was supposed to” and were consciously trying to steer me toward them. My dad used to weirdly tease me about liking the men on the TV shows we watched. He would screech in a high-pitched voice, “Jillian’s in love with MacGyver,” or when watching Family Ties, “Jillian wants to have sex with Michael J. Fox” (emphasis mine). I was seven years old and didn’t really understand what sex was, but I knew enough to be embarrassed. Eventually my dad grabbed me by the shoulders and told me that if ever turned out to be gay, he’d murder me. That he didn’t say “kill,” and used the word “murder” felt more real to my child’s brain. The fact that he physically abused me and my brother only added to the weight of his words. I felt like it could happen.

Then I read Adrienne Rich’s “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” last semester for the first time and felt exhilarated. The notion of compulsory heterosexuality was alive and well in my head, but I never had the words to articulate it. There’s always been something missing. I was never quite homosexual, never quite heterosexual, but my social relationship lifestyle is, by heteronormative standards, ordinary. So the idea of a lesbian continuum, which could include me (a woman who ended up marrying a guy), and all women, was wonderful to contemplate in a Utopian sense. Nonetheless, even though the phrase “compulsory heterosexuality” gave me words with which to describe the sinewy underpinnings of my childhood, I still felt like there was something missing. An idea like quicksilver–rolling around in beads, poisonous to the mind, so never fully explored: How am I supposed to identify? Who am I?

I feel like Sharon Marcus inspired an idea that could put words to that slipperiness. Marcus admits that she, too, was so ensconced in Rich’s theoreom at first that it was hard for her to break free of that framework. “As Adrienne Rich influentially argued, women’s friendships and lesbian sexual bonds both defy “compulsory heterosexuality.” The move to valorize women’s friendships as a subset of lesbianism and as a subversion of gender norms continues to dominant the paradigm” (29). Instead, where most scholars/critics of the Victorian era see repression, and perhaps accuse women of complying with that repression, Marcus sees freedom in the ordinary: in friendships and in lifewriting. “The Victorian gender system, however strict its constraints, provided women latitude through female friendships, giving them room to roam without radically changing the normative rules governing gender difference” (27). I find it a little disheartening that today, in this world that I inhabit, this kind of lateral movement feels impossible, and I started to wonder why.

I started to think about blogs and lifewriting, and the similarities shared between the two. Sharon Marcus defines lifewriting as “the heterogeneous array of published, privately printed, and unpublished diaries, correspondence, biographies, autobiographies, memoirs, reminiscences, and recollections that Victorians and their descendants had a prodigious appetite for reading and writing” (33). She goes on to say that,”Some diarists even explicitly wrote for others, sharing their journals with readers in the present and addressing them to private and public audiences in the future” (35). Funny that. It sounds like a definition for blogs. So I started to wonder about the proliferation of blogging and how did this come to be possible? Sure, with the formation of diary hosting sites like WordPress, LiveJournal and Xanga, the availability of blogs became accessible to the common user not fluent in languages of HTML or CSS. But I am looking for a more social/cultural answer.

Granted, I don’t know as much about the kind of technologies available during the Victorian period–most of my knowledge comes from a small amount of research I did for a Dracula paper I wrote as an undergrad, so my knowledge is dusty and limited at best. But I do know they didn’t have computers (ha!). And with computers came binary and thinking in binary oppositions. 011001. I realize the differentiation of masculine and feminine spheres throws a kink in my grand scheme for theoretical world domination, but without computers, could we have Hélène Cixous’s Newly Born Woman or Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto? Judith Butler says that heterosexuality (0) is predicated on the notion that there is a homosexuality (1), but without binary or different spheres would there be differences between homosexual and heterosexual?

So yes, the Victorians lived before the Digital Age, but they had different spheres, however I think spheres is a more forgiving (read: elastic) theory than binary.

So I wonder if there was no binary, would sexuality be more lateral?

–0100101001101001011011000110110001111001

Fun With Binary Here

I realize that I run the risk of academic piggy-backing, but Jennifer’s mention of “intertextuality” gave me a more… grad school-y means of talking about the ideas that have been rumbling in my head in regard to the ways in which material culture comes to signify identity in various ways. The ways in which, for example, reading Leaves of Grass or Dorian Gray (I’ll expand on Dorian Gray, and Sedgwick’s mention of it, in a moment) might lead to particular queer identifications; the ways in which the mohawk, the leather jacket, the army boots might lead people to identify the wearers of such styles as punks; or how listening to say… Tori Amos and Ani DiFranco might lead to stereotypical identifications of the listeners as gay or lesbian, etc…  To a certain extent, I’m interested in the ways in which particular types of music are said to signify queerness, not only based upon elements such as style (specifically in regard to fashion… think 70s glam… or as Ian Svenonious has suggested [perhaps rightly so, perhaps not], the links between punk and gay leather culture) but also in regard to musical form and voice.

I’ll slip into an anecdote briefly here: about five or six years ago, I had a conversation with my younger brother after picking him up from his high school. He mentioned that his attempts to introduce some of his male friends to Jeff Buckley (introducing his female friends was significantly less difficult) had resulted in particularly homophobic responses: “Are you gay?” The emphasis placed on “gay” was not meant to mark their curiosity so much as their own attempts to insult him and his particular musical tastes. 

I’d never really thought of Buckley’s music as “gay” before then, though the notion that he would be heard as “queer” wasn’t necessarily a shock. His five/seven (critics and biographers seem to go back and forth on this point) octave voice, the falsetto, his movement away from the sonic dissonance and angst of 90s grunge (although I am aware that queer examinations of music have identified sonic dissonance itself as “queer”), a certain gender and sexual ambiguity in both his lyrics and voice, his vocal homage to singers such as Edith Piaf, Billie Holiday, and Nina Simone, might be cause for people to identify listeners/fans as somehow queer (his vocal and lyrical “femininity” mistakenly translated as gay). Which brings me to Sedgwick’s chapter on “Terrorism and Homosexual Panic” wherein she notes the ways in which intertextuality and gay identification by an/the o/Other becomes part of a system of control that results in “a structural residue of terrorist potential, of blackmailability, of Western maleness through the leverage of homophobia” (89). Because “Not only must homosexual men be unable to ascertain whether they are to be the objects of ‘random’ homophobic violence, but no man must be able to ascertain that he is not (that his bonds are not) homosexual” (88-89). These “bonds,” as Sedgwick’s “intertextuality” suggests, are not only between men, but between men and cultural material: books, music, film, art, etc… that can and have resulted in various forms of homophobic response and violence. To what extent does the threat of homophobia prevent some individuals from particular forms of cultural consumption (I realize that the ability to consume is not available to all subjects, too)?

Sedgwick mentions a particular case involving Beverley Nichols and a copy of Dorian Gray, where upon discovering his son reading a copy of Gray: “The father nearly choked. He hurled the book at his son. He spat on it over and over, frothing at the mouth. Finally he began ripping the book to shreds—with his teeth” (95).

To what extent does this bring to our attention not only the ways in which cultural material comes to signify racial, class, gender, and sexual identity, and in what ways does the notion of intertextuality raise questions regarding the ambiguity of the signifier and the ways in which signification itself becomes yet another form of control rather than a shibboleth (which I’ve always taken as a form of inclusive identification)?

Sorry if the paragraphs seem a bit odd… WordPress doesn’t seem to want to let me make breaks where I want them (insert awkward emoticon here).

This pivotal “exchange” between mentor and student seems related to the tradition of “intertextuality” that Sedgwick refers to in her chapter on Shakespeare’s Sonnets (28). There, she describes how the Sonnets, along with Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, figured prominently in the construction of a bourgeois Victorian homosexual subculture. “Visiting Whitman, liking Whitman, giving gifts of ‘Whitman,’” Sedgwick suggests, offered ways to identify oneself as homosexual and to express desire for and/or affiliation with other fellow travelers (28).

In my first few months of college, I “came out” to my professor as a certain kind of reader—one who took pleasure in finding the secret that was hidden in plain sight. Her gift of Sedgwick’s book revealed that there were others in on the secret. While my relationship to the “clique” of queer studies has grown more complicated since then, re-reading Between Men for this seminar has felt like an intellectual homecoming of sorts.

This time around I appreciated the opportunity (er, requirement) to actually read the “boring parts”—i.e., the literary analysis chapters—which I confess I’ve previously skipped in both Between Men and Epistemology of the Closet.

One thing I notice is that Sedgwick distances her analysis from the intertextual practices of reading mentioned above. Intertextuality is a key theme both in queer subcultures and queer theory, but Sedgwick argues that it can lead to a sort of misreading of texts, “plucked from history and, indeed, from factual grounding” (29). While I am not ready to abandon intertextual misreading altogether, Sedgwick does persuasively show that it can distract us from noticing the connection between earlier forms of homosocial and homoerotic desire and gender, class, and racial hierarchies. She offers a different model of analysis, somewhat more historicized, that treats literary texts as sources of theoretical insights (or “tentative generalizations” as she calls them [47]) about the underlying structures of homosociality and homoeroticism in dominant Western culture. These structures presumably persist into our own period.

I find this method of analysis—deriving theory in part from cultural texts rather than applying theory to them—inspiring but also challenging, since it raises questions about the selection of one’s archive, among other concerns.

~Jennifer B.

My life as an academic — as a lover and luster of books and writing about books, a girl with a curious and peculiar craving to tease out and gaze upon the maze of Culture and its practices — seems to me to have always (already) been shadowed by the knowledge / memory / affect of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, her “legacy” (what a weird word) and her theories. Despite her omnipresence in my critical mind, there is one essay that stands out to me, that I can name as generating my first moment of Sedgwick lust, as well as the first time (and one of the only times) I could ever say about an academic, “I want to be like her when I grow up.”

In “A Poem Is Being Written,” collected in Tendencies, there is the quintessential Sedgwickian argument: one of provocation, passion, and her movement between sharp brilliance and vulnerable personal. Using excerpts from poems she wrote as a child, Sedgwick, in exploring the syntax of desire in poetry, creates a link between spanking and enjambment. I laugh with shock and pleasure every time I remember the bridge she makes in this essay.

For me, reading Sedgwick has never required that I “believe” her. Her arguments are, for me, not about the truth or solidity of her claims, but in fact about their fallibilities, their failures, about her process — and that she goes there, takes risks, makes leaps in her thinking and her feeling that bring the unexpected together. And that to me is a good thing.

Of late, Sedgwick and other “founding” queer theorists, have come under fire for a variety of reasons — too elite, too white, too literary, and so on. I think the structure of Sedgwick’s theories are also considered problematic. I remember sitting in the office of a star scholar (all five minutes I was given, apologies for the bitterness) and being told that “originality is overrated.” Being told, essentially, that all my desires to make provocative arguments, a la Sedgwick, are overrated. I can understand this. Provocation only for the sake of provocation sometimes results in simplistic or rote arguments. And Sedgwick has made such a shift in the way we do literary studies that the structure of her argumentation is, by now, perhaps too often second nature. Articles such as “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl” forever changed what we as literary critics were allowed to theorize within these “pure” canonical texts. When we write about literature we are expected to come up with something original to say, and the more provocative the better. We are expected, in other words, to perform originality.

I’m not entirely sure why this is a bad thing. To move beyond initial and preliminary arguments (thanks WRIT 140) and into new territory . . . isn’t that what we’re here to do? What else are we supposed to be doing if not that?

Perhaps (to get back on my favorite soapbox) instead of dismissing theorists for what they lack or for the structure, form, and/or content of their thinking, we should think — why not? — more positively. One lesson we could learn from Sedgwick is how NOT to dig a niche of originality. We make the provocative, original arguments, we take the big risks, in order to get the big job. We reach the stability of tenure through the combustibility of the provocative. And too often we stay there, in the same provocation, in the same original spot. Sounds kinda counter-intuitive to me. If we are to perform the original, if we are to provoke, we should KEEP provoking. Every where. Always. And not just in our specialized little fields.

And for that very reason I admire Sedgwick. She has provoked in so many different fields: queer theory, literary studies, autobiography, performance studies, affect theory, memoir, cultural studies. I guess what I am gesturing toward — and suggesting for discussion online or in class — is the figure Star Theorists cut, and the debts that we owe to the entire figure and her history (in its complexity and relativity [loosely quoting Wilde 723]), not only her critical writing. Here I am also gesturing to the larger figure of Wilde, one that exceeds and intersects with the boundaries of textual production. Here I am saying that the personal is critical. How does such a statement inflect our discussions on ethics and ethicality, of the complications and background of these theoretical texts?

I still want to be like Sedgwick when I grow up.

SEDGWICK FOREVER!

– Mary Contrary

“That there was something (in this sense) irrepressibly provincial about the young author of this book is manifest. But will it make sense if I describe that provinciality not as a measure of her distance from the scenes of gay male creativity, whose utopian invocation tacitly motivates the book, but also a ground of her passionate, queer, and fairly uncanny identification with it? The more than Balzacian founding narrative of a certain modern identity for Euro-American gay men, after all, vibrates along a chord that stretches from provincial origins to metropolitan destinies. As each individual story begins in the isolation of queer childhood, we must compulsorily and excruciatingly misrecognize ourselves in the available mirror of the atomized, procreative, so-called heterosexual pre-or-ex-urban nuclear family of origin, whose brusingly inappropriate interpellations may wound us–those of us lucky enough to survive them–into life, life of a different kind. The site of that second and belated life, those newly constituted and denaturalized ‘families,’ those tardy, wondering chances at transformed and transforming self-and other-recognition, is the metropolis. But a metropolis continually recruited and reconstituted by having folded into it the incredulous energies of the provincial. Or–I might better say–the provincial energies of incredulity itself” (ix).

After all our talk of “debts” in the world of letters today, I thought I should own up to mine.
KT

I got the following quote from the Wikipedia Oscar Wilde page: “[Wilde] wrote, in The Picture of Dorian Gray, ‘All art is quite useless’, a statement meant to be read literally, as it was in keeping with the doctrine of ‘Art for art’s sake’…” (By the way, I promise I do not normally throw info from Wikipedia around so cavalierly. But I am hoping it’s OK in an informal blog like this one). Wilde was evidently committed to the “uselessness” of art and the value of the non-utilitarian. However, his letter to Lord Douglas quite obviously “works” or “labors” at a variety of tasks, from justifying Wilde’s motives and actions to providing Douglas and the reading public with morality lessons on what makes a good (Wilde) or bad (Douglas) friend/subject/artist/son/etc. Due to the utilitarian purposes of the letter, it seems unlikely to me that Wilde would consider this specimen of his writing “art.” And yet… doesn’t it seem to be written with particular care and attention, even a grace and beauty similar to his other literary endeavors? (Maybe I haven’t read enough Wilde to justify that comparison, but even the editorial note at the beginning of our photocopy that describes the evident editing and copying Wilde did of his own manuscript seems to indicate that there was as much thought going into the style and form as the content of the letter.)

Both Wilde’s interest in “useless” art and his frequent descriptions of Douglas’s faults and his own superior virtues brought to mind Cardinal Newman’s description of the “gentleman” (from our BlackBoard link). I’ve copied it below, and I’ve put in bold the phrases that I thought most aligned with Wilde’s description of himself and his conduct toward Douglas:

It is almost a definition of a gentleman to say he is one who never inflicts pain. This description is both refined and, as far as it goes, accurate. He is mainly occupied in merely removing the obstacles which hinder the free and unembarrassed action of those about him; and he concurs with their movements rather than takes the initiative himself. His benefits may be considered as parallel to what are called comforts or conveniences in arrangements of a personal nature: like an easy chair or a good fire, which do their part in dispelling cold and fatigue, though nature provides both means of rest and animal heat without them. The true gentleman in like manner carefully avoids whatever may cause a jar or a jolt in the minds of those with whom he is cast; — all clashing of opinion, or collision of feeling, all restraint, or suspicion, or gloom, or resentment; his great concern being to make every one at their ease and at home. He has his eyes on all his company; he is tender towards the bashful, gentle towards the distant, and merciful towards the absurd; he can recollect to whom he is speaking; he guards against unseasonable allusions, or topics which may irritate; he is seldom prominent in conversation, and never wearisome. He makes light of favours while he does them, and seems to be receiving when he is conferring. He never speaks of himself except when compelled, never defends himself by a mere retort, he has no ears for slander or gossip, is scrupulous in imputing motives to those who interfere with him, and interprets every thing for the best. He is never mean or little in his disputes, never takes unfair advantage, never mistakes personalities or sharp sayings for arguments, or insinuates evil which he dare not say out. From a long-sighted prudence, he observes the maxim of the ancient sage, that we should ever conduct ourselves towards our enemy as if he were one day to be our friend. He has too much good sense to be affronted at insults, he is too well employed to remember injuries, and too indolent to bear malice. He is patient, forbearing, and resigned, on philosophical principles; he submits to pain, because it is inevitable, to bereavement, because it is irreparable, and to death, because it is his destiny. If he engages in controversy of any kind, his disciplined intellect preserves him from the blunder. [From The Idea of a University, 1852]

Wilde’s descriptions of himself – as generous to a fault with both his money and time, gracious to Douglas despite the latter’s frequent outbursts, willing to let Douglas dictate their plans and activities, and unwilling to chastise him too strongly or hurt him too deeply, no matter how much he may deserve it – seem to align quite neatly with many of Newman’s ideas about what makes a gentleman a gentleman. And Wilde’s many complaints about Douglas’s selfishness, thoughtlessness, and bad temper seem predicated on the very incompatibility with gentlemanly virtues such faults indicate. However, with De Profundis, Wilde seems to be abandoning the gentlemanly virtues on which he has previously prided himself, even as he uses stories about the presence and lack of those same virtues to indict Douglas. In the letter, Wilde is clearly abdicating his position as “one who never inflicts pain;” he is finally refusing to “make light of [the] favours” he has bestowed upon Douglas, and he is most definitely refusing to be “merciful towards the absurd” any longer (quotes from Newman, above).

It seems to me that the gentleman, as described by Newman, is a somewhat useless, almost purely aesthetic figure with little to no practical value. So what does it mean that Wilde describes himself in his letter to Douglas as this kind of man, yet in order to write this letter at all, Wilde must no longer be this kind of gentleman (because Newman’s “gentleman” would be incapable of writing such a letter)? And how could this question tie in with the question I previously posed about the letter itself and how its use-value seems to preclude its eligibility as “art,” at least by Wilde’s former “art for art’s sake” standards?

My eyes are beginning to cross. I hope some of this made at least a little sense, and if it didn’t I’d be happy to try to clarify what I mean in tomorrow’s class.

Trisha

I have been thinking about the connections between the grotesque and the comical. Wilde writes that, “the dreadful thing about modernity was that it put Tragedy into the raiment of Comedy, so that the great realities seemed commonplace or grotesque or lacking style. It is quite true about modernity. It has probably always been true about actual life. It is said that all martyrdoms seemed mean to the looker-on…Everything about my tragedy has been hideous, mean, repellent, lacking in style. Our very dress makes us grotesque.” (756). Wilde mentions the word grotesque no less than 11 times throughout the text, sometimes to describe his unraveling relationship with Bosie, other times to point out the gross circumstances he found himself in or, most fitting of all, to highlight the behavior of either Bosie or Bosie’s father. Often, Wilde conflates father and son to levy what is likely the deepest criticism of Bosie, and thus hit him where it hurts the most, and to convey to the reader that the unimaginative, freeloader son and the deeply vindictive, coarse father are one in the same. Caught in the middle of old grievances, Wilde is forced to play the role of the comical fool, the third leg in the courtside entertainment in this drama and in the end, he is left in a cage, dressed in miserable costume, and discarded like some useless jack-in-the-box.

It is interesting to note that Wilde’s life is constantly entangled in a triangulation of sorts, and his retelling of events makes it clear that a third party or entity is always present in his battles. First, we have Wilde, Bosie and either ego dominating the dynamics of the relationship. Then Wilde, Bosie and Bosie’s father enter into their fatal interactions that lead to his trial. Then we witness the showdown between Wilde, Bosie’s father and the law, followed by the drama between Wilde, Bosie’s father and the audience that he seems to be writing for in De Profundis. I’d like to argue that for Wilde, the voyeuristic, and often deeply sadistic and judgmental public is firmly implicated in the spectacle of his sensational trial and imprisonment, and in the resulting prison letter. He reveals a public eager for salacious gossip and scandal, and, in perhaps one of the most moving passages of the text, suggests that those who crave and feast off of sensation are bereft of the most decent elements of humanity. He recalls how people laughed at him as he stood in his prison garb and faced the crowds assembled outside the train platforms. Here, once again, the grotesque and the comical converge to reveal an image of a clown entertaining the crowd. Yet his writing uncovers a deeply sentimental reproach for those unable to feel compassion. He writes, “Of all possible objects I was the most grotesque…Well, now I am really beginning to feel more regret for the people who laughed than for myself. Of course when they saw me I was not on my pedestal. I was in the pillory. But it is a very unimaginative nature that only cares for people on their pedestals. A pedestal may be a very unreal thing. A pillory is a terrific reality…to mock at a soul in pain is a dreadful thing. Unbeautiful are their lives who do it. In the strangely simple economy of the world people only get what they give, and to those who have not enough imagination to penetrate the mere outward of things and feel pity, what pity can be given save that of scorn?” (757).

In many ways, De Profundis is as much a response to the people’s transient interest and passing curiosity in the trial and case of Wilde as a public castigation of Bosie. Wilde is keenly aware of the collective project of shame being engineered and dumped upon him by a public eager for spectacle and sensation. This allows him to speak openly for the first time under the guise of writing a “letter.” Given Bosie’s penchant for selling Wilde’s personal letters, and Wilde’s knowledge of this (and in fact, he reserves some of his most cutting words for Bosie as a result of his plan to publish them) this letter was never meant to be a private transmission between old “friends.” Wilde must have known others would surely get their hands on it, and so decided to tell his side of the story and catalogue all the intimate details of their relationship. The concept of the “letter” then, experiences a curious transformation from mechanism of private messenger to a ledger where debts are calculated and transactions lodged. Wilde goes to great lengths to itemize and categorize the ruined inventory of their life together, and yet, perhaps most strikingly, most grotesquely of all, he does it from a space of such detached coolness, such tempered reasonableness, that Wilde’s narrative reads more like a calculated meditation on the consequences produced by trafficking in an economy of triviality for triviality’s sake, of allowing a base mentality with a lack of imagination to infiltrate the space of an artist, than the bitter reproach of an angry man seeking to get even.

Wilde’s turn to Christ in the latter part of his letter signals another instance of triangulation as he conjures the image of the trinity. Though previous permutations of three had been injurious to him, here he finds a guiding light in the morass of modernity. God, Son and Holy Spirit are the pure three, and if, as Wilde points out, “[t]he supreme vice is shallowness” (775) then its logical antithetical is a life devoted to something of substance—to love, sympathy and imagination, the three elements he sees most missing in Bosie, his father and the world surrounding them.

In the end De Profundis can be read not only as an accounting of both time and money spent, but also of the costs the artist must bear for the hard lessons learned. Here, Wilde offers a portrait of modernity that ultimately reveals an economy of commodity exchange preoccupied by modalities of prescribed time and transaction value—How much time did I waste and how much did it cost me? How much time is left and what do I [still] owe? If the letter had stopped at this, the text would have been implicated in its own accusations of pettiness and sensationalism since it takes on the curious role of both an unpaid bill—with all the attendant language of commerce—and a public notice that resembles a press release calling for the “truth” on behalf of a celebrity. But Wilde’s greater goal is not just to inventory past hurts and damages incurred, but ultimately to advocate against the shallowness of the modern world and the elements of the grotesque he has so far endured.

Similar to Nietzsche, Schiller, and Baudelaire, Oscar Wilde’s aesthetic views were connected to an unsystematic politics. He avowed the ethics of socialism (as the state in Plato’s ‘Republic’ was intended to help improve ‘the individual’), yet concurrently recognized its limitations in advancing the cause of aesthetics. Thus, Wilde was preoccupied with an aestheticism that espoused neither naïve idealism nor simply focused on the autonomy and disinterestedness of art. Wilde’s statement of views were influenced by a tradition of Irish literary wit, and despite the fact that he often spoke against ‘morality,’ which referred to conservative philistine mores of the period that we’re familiar with in Foucault’s “We Victorians,” he maintained that aesthetics ought to be linked to moral and spiritual life. He emphasized the primacy of aesthetics only to the extent that the former has power to transform the ethical. Wilde did not argue for a didactic theory of art, nor did he wish to support the status quo, but he thought art could help fashion individual virtues—that is, it could engender ‘humanitarian sympathy’ as well as help us realize our transnational literary and philosophical precursors.

Wilde aimed at forging a connection between aesthetics and ethics. For example, he would have opposed a separation of the ethical ‘mechanism’ from an aesthetic ‘dynamic’ in Carlyle, and the separation between Hellenism and Hebraism in Arnold. He would have noted contradictions in ‘C&A’ between nationalism and disinterestedness. In forging the aforementioned connection, he was much influenced by Kant, Schiller, Pater, and Ruskin. (Wilde was exposed to Kant at Trinity College and read widely in his work). He maintained the humanistic function of ‘truth in art,’ emphasizing ‘the problem of life.’ Despite this, we have reason to inquire into his approach to the problem of evil and social harms that are inherent in daily life. We have reason to interrogate Wilde’s depiction of ‘bad things happen to good people.’ Did he view such things ironically? Or did he maintain a classical conception of evil (i.e., that evil is error…a kind of proto-Derridean detour)? How is ‘culture’ set against the fallible individual? Is De Profundis a theologically soaked reprimand against his accusers? Is it ‘liberation theology’? Or is it rather a ‘didactic’ missive in the vein of Plato’s The Crito, which is aimed at a specific audience?

There seems to be a tone of artificiality in De Profundis. Does Wilde self-consciously advance the “lie” of art (as Fellini does)—a lie that aims at a ‘greater good’ of ethical instruction? Perhaps his point is closer to Plato’s in the ‘Allegory of the Cave’: what observers believe is the truth—that ‘seeing is believing’—is a massive delusion. Wilde seems to focus on truth as a logical possibility; he refrains from a dogmatism of ‘truth’ in order to posit logically possible worlds that contain amplified versions of it. In this way, Wilde’s art is not an ‘escape’ from life (in a Romantic sense), but a sufficient condition that provides access to analyzing life. We have reason to interrogate Wilde’s use of certain words, such as ‘art’ and ‘life.’

Does ‘art’ imply the artifact and object or the ethical and spiritual potential in each of us? Does ‘life’ imply the existential situation or the subtle ‘Grecian Urn’ stillness in art? How does ‘art’ and ‘life’ become linked to serve as a template for linking aesthetics and ethics? How does Wilde accomplish this, if he does, in contrast to the dualisms of Carlyle, Arnold, and Ruskin? In these latter folks, the aesthetic is set apart from human activity and lived experience.

Does Wilde’s own life, as it is represented in De Profundis, become an ‘ideal’ in moral terms (as it is perhaps similar to Socrates’s life in his last days)? Or is it a tragic captivity narrative of a ‘fallen’ Anglo-Irish aristocrat? Or is it a kind of self-promoting ‘reality TV’ advertisement? Is it a document that demonstrates his life to be an evolving work of art? Is it a statement of subjective tragedy or a ‘work of art’ that is a fated/necessary consequence of historical and material forces? How does ‘deviance’ or ‘decadence’ inform his sense of personal tragedy or moral insight? Does the artistic significance of his life fashion an identity between moral and aesthetic value? In what way is De Profundis Wilde’s version of Schiller’s ‘aesthetic education’?

Perhaps I shouldn’t pose these questions or so many of them…

But I guess the main question that harangues me has to do with fashioning one’s life into art, and it seems that ‘the ethical’ and ‘the aesthetic’ are two categories not obviously linked, or aren’t linked to sufficiently allow ‘life’ to have the significance of ‘art.’ De Profundis seems to be an ‘ethical’ statement on the aesthetics of lived experience (the relationship between Wilde-Douglas), as is thus implied: “We think in Eternity, but we move slowly through time.” Aesthetics and ethical actions are tenuously linked: “To be entirely free, and at the same time entirely dominated by law, is the eternal paradox of human life that we realize every moment.” It is also an antinomy that Kant brings forth in the Critique of Pure Reason. How do we negotiate the intuition that human beings act in accordance with free will while also acknowledging that moral agents occupy a world governed by natural (physical) laws? In his work on ethics, Kant returns to the question, which becomes re-fashioned: How are agents morally responsible if many of their actions are involuntary? How are natural laws or categorical imperatives self-legislated rather than expressions of external material conditions? Nonetheless, what does Wilde imply in the above statement as he uses the word ‘realize’? Does it mean that we cannot neglect the connection between the ‘aesthetic’ and the ‘ethical’ since both are enmeshed in a co-terminus notion of spatiotemporality? (How does that work?) As I previously metioned, Wilde argues for the following: the ‘ethical’ life is inevitably linked to the ‘aesthetic’ life, and vice versa. This is a big topic worth exploring…

I have more to say…later…Daddy needs more coffee…and protein… and per previous conversation on book cover panties…I can’t seem to locate mine either…

Although De Profundis is formally a letter to a particular person (albeit the length of a treatise), we could examine it as a document that addresses several issues. For example, we could look at it as a response to nationalism—the type of racialism or imperialism espoused in Arnold’s ‘C&A.’ I am more or less interested in the issue of logical coherence in Wilde’s ethical aesthetics, which seems to float on ‘paradoxical truths.’ But we might want to define the word ‘paradox.’ There are two kinds: (i) epistemic paradoxes are riddles that involve the concept of knowledge. Typically, answers attempt to demonstrate that the initial question is a pseudo-question. (There are such things as bad or fallacious questions). (ii) The riddle immediately informs us of an inconsistency; it guides us into correcting at least one deep error – about concepts such as justification, evidence, or rational belief. I want to discover whether Wilde’s ‘paradoxical truths’ are genuine questions or pseudo-questions. Because, it would seem, ‘truth’ ought to be clear and not paradoxical. ‘Truth’ is a property of sentences–a given sentence is true in all possible worlds. A ‘paradoxical truth’ seems to imply epistemic confusion, illusion, or logical inconsistency (a type of non-sequitur whereby two or more statements contradict). Is it a sentence with a truth-value that depends on contextual utterance or conditions? Thus, what is the problem that Wilde addresses? Why is the result a ‘paradoxical truth’? Why would this result be satisfactory?

How do we formulate a clear statement of the main problem? One might begin by treading water a bit…

How would Wilde agree or disagree with Arnold? Although in ‘C&A’ aesthetics seems to be linked to ethics, it isn’t. Arnold is advocating a kind of cultural imperialism—cultural indoctrination or coercion—that hinges on an English idea of the state. ‘Culture’ gives us the idea of the state, which is in opposition to ‘anarchy.’ ‘Culture’ is that which is ‘sweet and light,’ the best that has been thought and said—it lacks ‘strength and fire.’ The latter is basically Hebraistic, referring to (Protestant?) religious mores and restrictions. The idea of culture is to increase intellectual curiosity and ‘disinterestedness.’ Guardians of culture are permitted to combat anarchy with ‘fire and strength.’

Wilde seems to view culture organically as Arnold did. Accordingly, such an integrated or ‘social whole’ must be evaluated from an outside perspective (not from the point of view of those on the inside). A paradox arises as a matter of perspective (in a similar way to the Barber’s paradox…how does a barber shave himself if everyone in town goes to the barber to get shaved?) Thus, how is it possible to stand outside the conditions of one’s linguistic community?

Wilde may have appreciated Arnold’s ‘sweetness’ (a love for the intrinsic value of beauty) but perhaps had no use for his ‘light.’ Wilde, in a way, is a proto-Marxist: he saw contradictions everywhere in society. But one wonders how contradictions become manifested as ‘truths.’ He didn’t think art could convey a ‘universal truth.’ Since Wilde was versed in Kant as well as Hegel, dialectic could form the basis of ‘truthful’ masks. In this way, it seems Wilde links ‘sweetness’ to the fire of inspiration and personal freedom.

I’ll come back to this later…

On June 17, 2007 at 9:24 am MDaddy Said: |Edit This
“Racial and religious distinctions are used by Arnold to explain the kind of racial and religious discrimination practiced by the British in Ireland. His plea is the Burkean one for ‘healing measures,’ for the abolition of this kind of injustice. Yet the ground of his argument concedes the principle that in Ireland there is a collision between two racial types and two religions. Celt and Teuton, Catholic and Protestant, confront one another. Arnold’s attack on the hard and dull English civilization is extended to include the Protestants of Ulster whom he sees as representatives of the English middle class…the romanticizing of the Celt becomes, in effect, the romanticizing of the Irish Catholic. Burke’s attack on the Protestant Ascendancy is incorporated into Arnold’s attack on the English middle classes and the Protestant garrison in Ireland….It is possible…to trace a line of filiation from Burke’s early Tracts to Arnold’s essays of 1878-81…he [Arnold] gave fresh emphasis to the sectarian features which were part of the Irish political situation by providing them with a cultural myth….our idea of the Celtic tradition…The ideas of continuity and of betrayal…become associated with the experience of sectarian division in such a way that continuity has become the preserve of the Catholic Celts and betrayal the role of the Protestant garrison. For this we have to thank one of the greatest of English literary critics writing under the influence of the greatest of Irish political thinkers.” (Seamus Deane, “Arnold, Burke, and the Celts” in ‘Celtic Revivals’)

On June 17, 2007 at 1:08 pm MDaddy Said: |Edit This
“Out of the depths I call to you, Lord; Lord, hear my cry! May your ears be attentive to my cry for mercy. If you, Lord, mark our sins, Lord, who can stand? But with you is forgiveness and so you are revered.” (Psalm 130)

“I used to live entirely for pleasure. I shunned suffering and sorrow of every kind. I hated both. I resolved to ignore them as far as possible…My mother, who knew life as a whole, used often to quote to me Goethe’s lines – written by Carlyle in a book he had given her years ago, and translated by him, I fancy, also:-

‘Who never ate his bread in sorrow, Who never spent the midnight hours Weeping and waiting for the morrow, – He knows you not, ye heavenly powers.’

…they were the lines my mother often quoted in the troubles of her later life. I absolutely declined to accept or admit the enormous truth hidden in them. I could not understand it. I remember quite well how I used to tell her that I did not want to eat my bread in sorrow, or to pass any night weeping and watching for a more bitter dawn.” (Wilde, DP)
—-
Out of the depths of suffering and pain, committed to redemption and obtaining mercy, Wilde often refers to motherhood, the maternal, and mothers in citing the unfortunate facts of historical drama and striving for individual perfection. (He also mentions the person of Christ in the Gospels, and Virgil’s guidance to Dante in hell). This reminds me of previous questions I raised on the connection between art and life, and aesthetics and ethics. De Profundis seems to be many things: a personal rant and an expression of outrage, a ‘reprimand,’ an attempt to acquire the moral high ground, a document of guilt, shame and hatred, a repentance, a condemnation of philistinism, an expose of the secret hypocrite in each of us…it’s perhaps the ‘paradoxical’ blog entry par excellence!

While reading it, I kept thinking about ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol,’ Brendan Behan’s ‘Borstal Boy’ (a narrative of an Irish revolutionary in prison), and Terry Eagleton’s play ‘Saint Oscar.’ In the latter, we have a unique characterization of Wilde undergoing trial. Eagleton depicts Wilde on the stand in the courtroom:

“I object to this trial on the grounds that no Irishman can receive a fair hearing in an English court because the Irish are figments of the English imagination. I am not really here; I am just one of your racial fantasies. You cannot manacle a fantasy. I do not believe in your morality and I do not believe in your truth. I have my own truth and morality which I call art. I am not on trial here because I am a pervert but because I am an artist, which in your book comes to much the same thing. You hold that a man is a man and a woman is a woman. I hold that nothing is ever purely itself, and that the point where it becomes so is known as death. I therefore demand to be defended by metaphysicians rather than by lawyers, and that my jury should be composed of my peers—namely, poets, perverts, vagrants and geniuses.”

Although Wilde did not utter this statement (it is made by a fictional Oscar Wilde), it echoes statements that he actually did make. Also, in a Field Day pamphlet (1984), Declan Kiberd remarks: “Wilde saw that the image of the stage Irishman tells us more about English fears than Irish realities, just as the still vibrant Irish joke tells us far less about the Irishman’s foolishness than about the Englishman’s persistent and poignant desire to say something funny…Wilde was able to invert, and ultimately to challenge, all the time-honored myths about Ireland.”

Wilde challenges myths, hence the reason I quoted Seamus Deane, Terry Eagleton, and Declan Kiberd, in that De Profundis belongs to a tradition of long disaffected Irish prison journals, which includes the political defiance of John Mitchel’s diaries and extends to writings of IRA members (e.g., Brendan Behan) and leaders of Sinn Fein (e.g., Gerry Adams). This writing often aims at exposing political contradictions and injustice just as Wilde’s paradoxes aimed at signifying iconoclastic truths.

Much of the literary style in De Profundis that details personal tragedy is underscored by memories of his mother who was a nationalist poet. Thereby, much of his rhetorical style is ‘romantic,’ seemingly anticipating W.B. Yeats’s poetic lines: “Never give too much of the heart,” “Man can embody truth but he cannot know it,” “Out of Ireland have we come, great hatred, little room, maimed us at the start. I carry from my mother’s womb a fanatic heart,” “We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry,” and “Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart. O when may it suffice?”

Perhaps statements such as these, Wilde’s ‘truthful paradoxes,’ his description of suffering prison conditions, and his Augustinian ‘confession’ of righting wrongs, were a means to pattern a path of human solidarity. In confronting absurdity and contradiction, we attempt to assuage suffering with empathy and understanding, perhaps adopting Virgil’s guidance to Dante— in passing suffering souls we listen in silence to their cries of woe.

Lady Wilde was an important figure because of her sympathy with famine victims and the cause of independence. This influenced her son. In a lecture in San Francisco, Wilde mentioned his respect for those involved in the 1848 rebellion against British rule:

“I look on their work with peculiar reverence and love, for I was indeed trained by my mother to love and reverence them, as a catholic child is the saints of the calendar. The earliest hero of my childhood was Smith O’Brien, whom I remember well…who fought for a noble idea and the sadness of one who had failed…John Mitchel, too,…[and] Charles Gavan Duffy…men who made of lives noble poems… ‘By sheer power of Irish intelligence, by sheer strength of Irish genius, made a national poetry and a national literature which no other nation can equal.’”

Then he referred to one of his mother’s songs, “The Ballad of the Brothers Sheares,” quoting these lines:
They [the brothers] are pale, but it is not fear that whitens
On each proud, high brow,
For the triumph of the martyr’s glory brightens
Around them even now…

Before them, shrinking, cowering, scarcely human,
The base informer bends,
Who, Judas-like, could sell the blood of true men
While he clasped their hand as friends.

In citing lines from his mother’s song, Wilde refers to a narrative of betrayal, a court trial, and a character of piteous endurance that may have informed his own later prison experience. Perhaps this demonstrates only a coincidence of behavior and style between mother and son, but it, too, may reveal something about our approach to De Profundis, a text rarely examined at length in our studies. As Wilde the aesthete converts into the image of a convict, we have reason to wonder whether he also transforms into a Lazarus. In routing his shadow through life, hell, and purgatory, perhaps his main contribution to an ‘ethical aesthetics’ comes in the form of a rant—a condemnation of the penal system, the ills of punishment, moral arrogance and the hypocrisy of imposed rehabilitation—and a revelation of common guilt we carry with us.

If Wilde’s prison writing signifies a return from the dead, it employs modes of confession, contrition, and self-indulgence that are required for art to triumph over life at last. In this return, rising above and writing from the perspective of inhuman conditions, he rebels against a society that dared to imprison any spirit, engendering in us as readers an appreciation of the ‘sweet and light,’ as well as the ‘fire’ of bold commitment and resistance. In this he makes a last plea in favor of culture, a defense against fated trials, the dominant ‘willful’ personalities that neglect the ideals of art and ignore the ideas of geniuses. De Profundis is a realization of human potential and individualism, an apologia of empathy, tolerance, and freedom. Perhaps ironically, the voice of an Irish convict in an English jail cell also sheds light on British imperialism and its penal system. As the voice of a man who spoke for many, Wilde’s suffering evokes the sympathy of human solidarity. It would be a voice heard again, echoing in the memories of those who in 1916 failed to establish Irish independence, and with the shade of Roger Casement, who endured a similar trial as Wilde did, while finally his body hung limp from the gallows.

When I read our unexpurgated copy of De Profundis, I felt that heart-crushed seventeen year-old artist rise from her ancient burial ground to tremble in sympathy with poor Mr. Wilde. I am not referring to Wilde’s romantic betrayal by his immature, unworthy boyfriend, although my seventeen year-old self certainly could relate to that unfortunate situation too; I am referring to the unique misery of having one’s work destroyed by an inferior artist. Wilde writes, “I thought life was going to be a brilliant comedy…I found it to be a revolting and repellent tragedy” (705). He also describes, in painful detail, how Bosie’s hand was all over this change in genre. He admits that he was completely dominated by his young lover, that he could not work when Bosie was around, and that his beautiful artist’s life – a work of art in itself – deteriorated into a dull collage of expensive, yet mindless and repetitive amusements at the other’s command. Thus one of Wilde’s objectives in using his tiny allotment of prison paper to write De Profundis, it seems to me, is to give authorial credit where credit is due: to put the pen in Bosie’s hand. His other objective is to write the drama of his own reclamation of the authorial role through the writing of the letter.

When I began to regard Wilde’s letter as a play, many details that had first confused me, gained clarity. Wilde actually explains his modus operandi half way through his project: “In modern art atmosphere counts for so much. Modern life is complex and relative. Those are its two distinguishing notes. To render the first we require atmosphere with its subtlety of nuances, of suggestion, of strange perspectives: as for the second we require background” (723). When I had taken Wilde’s writing at face value (ie. as a private letter to Bosie), I had wondered why Wilde would feel the need to rehash his whole relationship in detail. After all, Bosie had been there too. However, when I regarded the letter as an epistle-format dramatic monologue, I realized that all of this information was required to give the drama the appropriate background. And what could be a better “strange perspective” than that of a convicted “sodomite”?

In addition to noting the evidence of his articulated approach to the project, I also recognized many attributes of a typical “well-made play” in this letter. Wilde’s story begins with a simple meeting and proceeds with relentless logic towards its inevitable conclusion. Although Wilde is no slave to Aristotle, he uses the “fatal flaw” as his primary plotting device. He tells Bosie, “Your terrible lack of imagination, the one really fatal defect of your character, was entirely the result of the Hate that lived in you” (707). And indeed, Wilde’s drama unfolds like a flower from this perfect little bud: Bosie hates his father. Pure Sophocles!

Wilde also incorporates theme and variation, including doubling. At first, all of the doubling is antithetical: that is, Bosie represents Wilde’s evil twin. In a rare moment of sympathy, Wilde writes, “As far as our friendship is concerned Nemesis has crushed us both like flies” (723), and much of Wilde’s monologue elaborates on this idea. For every set of circumstances in which Wilde demonstrates his faithful and generous spirit, Bosie, given the same set of circumstances, exposes his selfish, niggardly soul. The particular aching beauty of Wilde’s doubling scenarios comes in large part from the fact that every replay of events at Wilde’s expense comes as a direct result of his relationship with Bosie. Wilde takes ill because he has nursed a sick Bosie. Wilde’s mother, the writer forcefully suggests, dies because her son is moldering in prison, again thanks to Bosie. As a reader, one sees elegance in this aspect of Wilde’s narrative – like a good nineteenth century melodrama, no piece is out of place.

When he turns to the figure of Christ, Wilde shifts from nineteenth century dramatic forms to those of the sixteenth century. Indeed, I don’t think that it is a coincidence that he begins this passage with a prayer for Christ’s heart and Shakespeare’s brain. I see the Christ passages of the letter as a kind of meta-narrative in the style of Shakespeare, Kyd, Marlowe, and the other genius playwrights of the Elizabethan era. In discussing Christ’s life, Wilde creates a play-within-a play about the possibility of making one’s life an art object, exactly the project that the letter itself enacts. He asserts, “[T]here was nothing that either Plato or Christ had said that could not be transferred immediately into the sphere of Art, and there find its complete fulfillment” (741). Christ becomes, with this alchemy, a performance artist, the “true precursor of the romantic movement in life” (741). Thus as an admiring fellow artist, Wilde can praise Christ’s poetics: “[H]is entire life also is the most wonderful of poems. For ‘pity and terror’ there is nothing in the entire cycle of Greek Tragedy to touch it.” (741). Although Wilde returns to the subject of Bosie’s fatal flaw at the end of his letter-play, Christ and Shakespeare remain on stage for the third act as Wilde’s personal eudaemonoi, helping him to find his final words.

I know that it is difficult to reconcile Wilde’s petty laundry lists of expenses with my suggestion that this letter represents anything other than a personal vendetta (and maybe I have been overly influenced by seeing V For Vendetta this weekend), but I think that Professor Tongson’s own work on the subject may provide a helpful clue to unraveling this supposed inconsistency. For those of you who haven’t read the chapter in question yet, she discusses Wilde’s disgust for Bosie’s lack of tact and how it forms the basis of his larger ethical argument against his lover – again, we return to the ethics of formal choices.* With this idea in mind, I propose that Wilde shifts to the embarrassing and mundane minutiae of his financial relationship with Bosie precisely to indict the younger man for his own materialism. A good playwright knows that each of his characters must speak in his or her own unique voice. To this end, Wilde gives his late mother the language of poetry and gives his former lover, likewise, the language of the ledger.

Considering the care with which Wilde has composed this missive – again, I can’t help seeing him like the caged lesbian in Vendetta, writing his desperate message in a crabbed hand on tear-soaked toilet paper – I share Natasha’s outrage at his publisher’s decision to edit the great man’s work without his permission. When Wilde’s curtain finally rose again, the least he deserved was to have his story told to the tune he chose.

* I apologize if my brief summary of Professor Tongson’s point is off the mark and, as always, am ready to be told I don’t know shit.

- Erika

The mythology/story the editors outline for us in the first footnote to the letter reminded me all the more of the material nature of the letter and the fact that it was altered, edited, “improved” upon, and reprinted without Wilde’s permission (a practice which Wilde denounces in the letter itself when he refers to Douglas reprinting his letters for profit or prestige). While I can see the merits of reading the letter, the fact that I can read an annotated edition of Wilde’s manuscript while the man to whom the letter was originally intended never received all of Wilde’s words, let alone that he could not experience the text on the blue ruled prison paper, infuriates me. Further, the fact that the British Library reprinted the original manuscript in “facsimile” form and heightened its value by only making 495 copies sickens me all the more. I refer to the British Library “facsimile” in quotes because even though it supposedly allows for the letter to be experienced in Wilde’s own hand, its binding in blue leather and cloth, not to mention its cohesive nature in book form, allow for the legitimization, not to mention the heightened culture capital, of reading words intended for another. Additionally, let’s not forget that out of the limited run of 495, 95 copies were signed by Merlin Holland, Wilde’s only grandson, and thus, the man who can justify the selling of Wilde’s letter for profit. (See the listing for the edition: http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=66286638&searchurl=sortby%3D1%26y%3D0%26kn%3Dfacsimile%2Boscar%2Bwilde%2Bde%2Bprofundis%26x%3D0 )

My main question revolves around the role we, as scholars, play in the legitimization of such practices. Do we support the reprinting of Wilde’s manuscript? Do we place more value on editions with Wilde’s grandson’s stamp of approval? Do we assume that it is ethically correct to read other people’s mail as long as all the players are long dead? Does the facsimile edition become more acceptable if it has an unlimited run? Perhaps I am being too extreme here because frankly, I’m all for the archive and the reading of diaries and letters, but in the spirit of this class, I would like to wonder at the “afterlife” of private correspondence and the necessity to which permission must be obtained before one edits, reprints or alters another’s work. The editor’s note on Robbie Ross’s misreadings of Wilde’s word choice, improvements on his syntax and the shifting or removing of whole lines or paragraphs, combined with the editors’ own admission that the letter is reprinted in its entirety except for the fact that they made it easier to read by adding more paragraph breaks, makes me question the difference between these two seemingly divergent practices. Are we intended to feel more at ease as scholars to read an edition such as this one? Does referring to this edition over the Dover paperback edition make our work more intellectually rigorous? What is the value in reading one version over another?

I know I would not have begun to question these issues if it were not for Wilde’s attention to money and labor in the letter itself, not to mention his constant reference to Douglas’s vanity and spendthrift “nature.” I originally set out to write this post in regards to history and (mis)remembrance in regards to the editorial notes and what we as contemporary readers can or cannot believe in either the editorial comments or Wilde’s one-sided letter, but I hope that the questions I have raised were not the wrong ones. Perhaps it’s because it’s the summer and  my life is then, by default, less crazy, but I cannot help but wonder at our own labors and what we value in terms of the archive. Where do we draw the line in terms of privacy/permission? Does the line even need to be drawn? Perhaps not. Maybe in setting something down on paper, one is consciously aware of the fact that it may one day be published, edited, or altered. Are we as critics as “bad” as Douglas is for presuming to dedicate a volume to Wilde without his permission? What responsibility do we have to our subjects, our readers and our peers in regards to these situations?

–NSAH

You can be impulsive . . .

What perhaps frustrated me most was the shortage of alternatives. At the end of the book, Kipnis extols the possibilities of love, “a zone to experiment with wishes and possibilities and even utopian fantasies about gratification and plenitude” (199).

But rather than elaborate on those “utopian fantasies,” she quickly returns to the theme that runs throughout the book, that “love can be harnessed to social utility . . . an efficient way of organizing acquiescence” (199). I kept wanting more: OK, enough about marriage and adultery, what about other forms of love and intimacy?

Indeed, Kipnis seems unable to think beyond the “system” of monogamy and its opposite. While I wouldn’t describe her as a structuralist—she at least acknowledges possibilities for utopia—her inability or unwillingness to articulate those possibilities does make me wonder whether her underlying theoretical influences somehow constrain her vision of alternatives. While she acknowledges Freud and Foucault and de Certeau as inspirations, her argument also seems influenced by Lacan and Althusser, theorists for whom there is no outside to the system. Despite her insistence on “intellectual promiscuity” (49) and “intellectual flirtation” (200), her actual argument did not seem as “flirtatious” as I would have hoped.

This leads me to a larger question of whether the totalizing tendencies of structuralist accounts of power and subjectivity share common ground with the tendency of polemics to “overstate the case,” as Kipnis describes (4). Just a thought . . .

You can stay out past midnight . . .

Kipnis’s actual stance toward adultery seems ambiguous and ambivalent. In the beginning of the book, she suggests that it is the “nearest thing to a popular uprising against the regimes of contemporary coupledom” (28). Later, she clarifies that this form of resistance is perhaps not consciously motivated; it is “more of a critical practice than a critical theory,” a “spontaneous” form of “acting out” against the system (28, 139). But even as she claims that adultery offers utopian “visions of change” (165), she also suggests that adultery actually serves as a “release valve” for the pressures of the companionate partnership, indicating that it is an integral part of the system of monogamous love (121-122).

Perhaps, depending on the circumstances, adultery can be any of the above. But considering her tone (which bordered on sneering contempt in the “Art of Love” chapter), I wondered whether even she believed her claims about the radical potential of adultery.

Your best friend can call after ten . . .

Friendship is one of the alternatives I wished Kipnis had explored more.

It is not an inherently radical form of relation; like adultery, friendship can serve as a “pressure release valve” for the companionate couple. For example, friends often perform a kind of emotional labor to initiate and sustain the companionate couple—setting up friends on dates, listening to tales of relationship woes, etc. Many friends don’t seem to mind playing a subordinate role, especially if they too are engaged in their own companionate-couple dramas.

But I’d also like to consider friendship as an alternative to the companionate couple. Jen A. and I have talked a number of times about our shared frustration that close friends are frequently regarded (by society, family members, even the friends themselves) as a lesser priority than romantic partners, even though many friendships long outlast romantic/sexual liaisons. The perennial question to singles, “Have you met anyone special?” implies that the people already in our lives aren’t special. In my experience, I’ve found this relative ranking of relationships doesn’t do justice to the complexity and intimacy of “friendly” love.

~Jennifer B.

On the style question: if you haven’t already found it, I recommend the dialogue Kipnis had with Daphne Merkin in Slate.com about The Female Thing, her most recent book.  (The dialogue starts here: http://www.slate.com/id/2154848/entry/2154988/; note that “id” appears in the URL, which would no doubt make Kipnis happy)  Merkin’s opening post begins with her attack on Kipnis’ style, which echoes some of the things others have been saying:

“I…devoutly wish that you would lose some of your more strenuously (not to mention irritatingly) breezy locutions in your next book. But I, unlike Jacobs, am willing to overlook your populist twang—which I attribute variously to you and your publisher’s hopes for landing you an Oprah slot and to your being an academic specializing in media studies (which can’t possibly be as flimsy a specialty as I conjecture it to be) rather than, say, gender studies (which would bring on a whole other unbearable vocabulary of ‘queering’ and ‘privileging’ and spotting ‘tropes’ right and left)—to the unpopulist mind that lurks beneath.”

It’s interesting that Merkin herself enacts the “academy vs. the middle-brow” binary right off the bat in an attempt to make sense of Kipnis’ style, as if there’s something about Kipnis’ prose which evokes some form of tension between these two cultural imaginaries.  (Not only that, she creates a “media studies” vs. “gender studies” distinction that I find more than a little odd.)  Anyway, here’s Kipnis’ response, by way of an opening “confession”:

“The confession concerns my employment situation in the dreaded world of academia, which you contrast to the populist twang of the writing. Although I do indeed receive a paycheck from a university, I’m actually a former filmmaker who went to art school and mostly teach on the production side of the curriculum. What I write about actually has little to do with what I teach, so I’m not really what you’d call a traditional academic. It’s a little complicated to explain all this in a bio line, though I would have tried if I’d known that it would turn out to be a filter through which to read the book (not only here, but in the Times).”

As a response to Merkin’s assumptions, I find this last line really fascinating, as Kipnis hints at the ways in which the spectre of the academy is used to pillory Kipnis’ text, as if it is some kind of unacceptable Frankenstinian monstrosity.  It seems to me at least some people are dismayed by the hybridity of the text, that it inappropriately mashes together two different discourses, when it’s this hybridity which I personally find so fascinating, even if I didn’t find it altogether successful (Trisha can tell you that I’m in love with failure).  Kipnis, however, goes on to pretty much affirm that dichotomy herself:

“How does this relate to the question of prose style? Having an art education, and having been steeped in an experimental tradition at an impressionable age, I find myself interested, as a writer, in playing around with style and address, and in the larger question of how to creatively revamp social theory writing—the critical-diagnostic tradition of books like Christopher Lasch’s Culture of Narcissism, in which the writing itself is often unbearably dry and authoritarian. How would you write social criticism in which the writing itself performs the critique, as opposed to relying on argumentation or didacticism; books in which the writing engages the reader at the aesthetic level, not a cognitive one alone?

“In Against Love, given the subject (adultery), I tried riffing on the mode of the love letter: The writing was over-the-top and flirtatious, there were a lot of run-on sentences and excessive metaphors, a lot of playing around—you know, like adultery. I was trying to write to the cultural id, and I think people mostly understood that. In The Female Thing, I really thought it would be clear that I was parodying the style of women’s magazines and girl culture—not because the publishers were hoping to land me on Oprah (though I’m sure they wouldn’t have minded), but as an experiment in appropriation: refunctioning (in the Brecht sense) girly language and turning it on its head, into critique. OK, maybe it was a failed experiment, if that didn’t come across. But it wasn’t unserious….”

I’m not sure I’m entirely with Kipnis on this one, but it is interesting to me to hear what she thinks she’s doing, and I’d be curious to see what others thought.  Is it possible to make the case, as she does, that the subject matter necessitates a certain style, and that the excesses of the prose that others are finding so odious is itself a rhetorical strategy?  Is it possible that one would more easily discern the parodic quality of her style if it didn’t evoke this juxtaposition of academic source material and “breezy” style, that such a juxtaposition immediately makes her prose a litmus test for the “academic vs. mainstream” debate, obscuring other nuances in her writing?  Merkin’s highly problematic response to Kipnis on a subsequent post is that you can make relevant cultural points or you can be parodic, but you can’t do both simultaneously; I cringed when I first read this, but perhaps she has something like a point; one can’t be parodic while simultaneously referencing Marcuse, de Certeau, and Jameson, because this invokes an entirely different culture war (academia vs. the hoi-polloi, rather than hetero-normatives vs. adulterers and weirdos).  (PS: the whole dialogue is a laugh riot, as the two women start out cordial and proclaiming their “mutual bond,” only to degenerate into outright hostility and name-calling.)

In this context, I found myself intrigued by the “inciters” listed in “A Note on Sources” in the bibliography; Kipnis highlights the various major theoretical texts with which she sees herself in dialogue, and I found her selections fairly interesting, as well as the different ways she used these various writers.  Chapter 1, for example, seems like a straight re-packaging of Marcuse, whereas Chapter 2 seems like an attempt to further Foucault, since, as she notes, Foucault himself never got around to marriages.  Chapter 3 & 4 seemed to me to be more interesting and fruitful applications of de Certeau and Jameson, respectively.

In other words, I think a careful reading of Against Love might suggest that she’s doing more than just name-dropping theorists, and that furthermore, she’s using them in different ways and to different ends.  What others have found repetitive and redundant seems to me to be bringing these different writers’ projects into dialogue with one another, and that if the individual chapters are paired more rigorously to their respective theorists, there’s a far more nuanced and evolving relationship to the overall subject matter.

I’d be interested to see what people made of this theoretical lineage; do others think that Kipnis’ use of these writers is acceptable? (I’m guessing not.)  Does the transformation of the rigorous and scholarly into a mass-market polemic seem justified, or does it betoken a dumbing-down and/or misappropriation of their arguments?  Is she making notoriously obtuse writers like Jameson (big ol’ scare quotes a-comin’) “palatable to the masses”?

All this being said, what I could not figure out for the life of me was how to locate Peter Burger in all of this.  He’s listed alongside de Certeau as the inciter for Chapter 3, but aside from a chatty bit of gossip about the loves of Max Ernst, I’m hard pressed to find a connection between her writing and Theory of the Avant-Garde.  Do others see connections I don’t? 

In trying to make sense of this, I’ve been going back through Burger’s text, looking for parallels.  The main thrust of Burger’s narrative, so far as I’ve always read it, is the gradual marginalization of art in the wake of the historical avant-garde, which attempted to effect social change via shock, and was greeted with apathy instead, so that the bourgeois re-trenched itself and foreclosed the possibility of anything like art’s capacity to enact change in the populace at large.  I should say I’ve always hated this book, which constructs a really problematic narrative around post-avant-garde production (which, for Burger, is an a priori failed enterprise that is perpetually doomed to meaninglessness).

If Kipnis’ goal is to “shock the bourgeoisie,” then Burger would be the first to say that she’s too late.  So is the relationship between her and Burger far more contentious than her other “intellectual dads”?  Is it even possible, let alone responsible, to read Kipnis into a history of the avant-garde?  Or, could one say that Kipnis is agreeing with Burger, that the avant-garde is no longer in a position to shock the bourgeoisie, and so necessarily such a shock must come from a different venue, e.g., the mass-market, Oprah-hopeful polemic, rather than anything to be found at the Venice Biennial? 

  Colin

A short list of couples (all real) who clearly have lost “any power to rebel” (37):

Tarquin the Proud and Tulia (fell in love, killed most of their respective families, took over the throne, and lived “happily ever after”).

Antony and Cleopatra (after Antony’s divorce, A & C married, had babies, and lead a civil war against the Roman Republic, the most powerful civilization in existence at the time).

John Reed and Louise Bryant (while enjoying their open marriage, they attempted to spread pacificism and communism to the U.S., defying multiple charges of sedition).

Prince Edward and Wallis Simpson (although more symbolic than political, Edward renounced his claim to the English throne to marry the American divorcee).

Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera (the “Dove” and the “Elephant” worked together to promote communism in Mexico and to make some kick-ass art).

Bonnie and Clyde (true loves and leaders of a notorious gang of bank robbers).

Yoko Ono and John Lennon (Lennon defied his bandmates to marry his love; together they promoted feminism, workers’ rights, and the anti-war movement despite ongoing pressure to cease and desist from the Nixon administration. Ono continues their work today).

Bob and Rita Marley (the long term sweethearts married and toured together, promoting Rastafarianism and related social causes. Many people believe that the assassination attempt made on Marley was ordered by the American government which saw the Marleys as a serious political threat).

Every Gay and Lesbian Couple in recent history (Kipnis’ treatment of gay and lesbian lovebirds is particularly shabby. She treats the push for gay marriage as a betrayal of “gay and lesbian values” and not as a legitimate rebellion, again reducing a heterogeneous group into a single entity).

Every Interracial American Couple (Kipnis has a lot of nerve to create an analogy between interracial love and gettin’ some on the side).

Big Kisses,
Erika

Only if we assume that there is one single possible way to be against love, and that way is from directly within it, from the position of the adulterer. If some choose not to choose “love,” if some choose something else (imagine this in the petulantly confrontational Scots of Renton’s opening monologue in Trainspotting)––whether by subscribing to different familial models than the white American bourgeois one that is Kipnis’s only reference point, or by trying against the odds to make up their own––well, they’re still subject to love’s propaganda, so they just don’t matter.

Early on, Kipnis promises “commitment-phobes” and proponents of “prolonged adolescent rebellion” that “there are a million stories in love’s majestic empire, and yours is in here too” (15). Well, I’ll spare you the personal narrative (ask me after class), but let me just say that mine wasn’t. And though I started off enjoying Kipnis’s rollicking polemic in spite of that niggling annoyance (she reminds me of Barbara Ellen, a columnist in the UK Guardian newspaper who always drives me mad and yet compells me to read), by the end my objections had grown too much to ignore.

Yes, I understand that she’s not writing for me. She’s writing for that nebulous monolith, “the mainstream.” But one of my reasons for wanting to theorize from and around geeky subcultures is my conviction that the mainstream has far more margins than most of those who speak to and for it would like to admit, and that what goes on in those margins is significant. For me, reading Kipnis was a profound validation of the importance of subcultural knowledge, of thinking from and through exceptions as well as rules. Because in refusing to even consider the possibilities of consciously nonnormative intimacy and desire, her arguments from the utopian prospects of adulterous love (which, by the way, I did find quite compelling) lost much of their force for me. By the time I got to the chapter on “politics,” with its narrow focus on “our” elected representatives and denial of any present political activity located on different ground, I was ready to throw the book across the room.

Like Jen, I was struck by the resonances of Kipnis’s discussions of labor and temporality with Halberstam’s work on “queer time” in Queer Time and Place. But, whatever problematics may exist around Halberstam’s privileging of particular subordinated life narratives, she is writing about things that happen here and now. The only alternatives to compulsory monogamy and adulterous resistance Kipnis is willing to entertain are located safely in the past: in nineteenth-century debates on the “naturalness” of monogamy, in the apparently long-defeated sexual liberationism of the 1960s (179-181). She declares adultery to be a utopian project, implicitly political in its resistance to publicly hegemonic modes of intimacy; but she refuses to recognize that there are any explicitly political, purposefully utopian models of intimacy and relation that exist in the here and now.

Nobody but Kipnis ever understood that personal lives have political implications, apparently. Never mind the feminist critiques of gendered power in domesticity on which her argument relies, and which she disavows in favor of her multiple declarations that gender doesn’t matter any more because men are unsatisfied in marriage too (16); any possibility that all queer people are not happily campaigning for marital equality as the only political end worth achieving is quickly shoved aside in her one footnoted reference to Michael Warner (152).

This is my counterpolemic to Kipnis (and I hope I haven’t stepped on the toes of anyone whose actual turn it was to respond this week). I suspect that I actually have more time for her arguments than some of the other counterpolemicists, and I will probably find myself defending her in class. (As in the matter of dead baby theory, I’m with Alex on the value of this work.) I think my problem with Against Love may fundamentally rest on my wanting it to be a different book than it is, a book which would highlight multiple lived alternative models of intimacy and kinship even as it rails against the normative one, which would recognize its radical feminist and queer forebears, the significance of class and racial difference to its arguments. But if that book exists outside of my head, it certainly wouldn’t have made the “Best book of the year” lists that Kipnis’s did; and perhaps that’s the core of my dissatisfaction with her arguments, after all.

Alexis

Now that that’s out of the way, I can try to work through the specific and numerous criticisms I have about Against Love. Initially, I believed that my concerns had to do just with the content of Kipnis’s claims, and this is something I will eventually return to. But as I continued to read what seemed like an extra 150 pages or so of unnecessary repetition, I realized that there are elements of Kipnis’s style that irk me more than her actual argument does. And recalling our discussions about style in Arnold (whose ideas I also find problematic but whose writing style I find so enjoyable to read) and Hebdige, I thought this could be a productive place to start.

Let me begin with Kipnis’s repeated and frustrating use of metaphors and similes to describe love, adultery, and other admittedly nebulous ideas. The first page of the “Reader Advisory” presents love as a car ride or roller coaster, as “conscription,” “vital plasma,” and an “exclusive club.” On subsequent pages, one’s libido is described as a “freedom fighter,” “Janis Joplin,”and “Barry Manilow” (pg. 5). Kipnis discusses the “examining table of your relationship” on pg. 76 (your relationship, not hers). Or how about this one: “All of us risk drowning in those swirling tidal waves of emotion and lust… having thought ourselves shrewd and agile enough to surf the crest despite the posted danger signs” (48). Is she kidding? She proceeds to describe the exposure of a lie as an “emotional auto wreck” (130) and she actually compares “restless adulterers” to “moldering POWs” (133). Marriage is a “gulag,” a “barren landscape” (121), an adulterer is a “dust-bowl farmer whose dry scrubby fields have been transformed into lush verdant plains by a miracle rainfall” (109), and love is like “scurvy” (OK, I made that last one up, but you believed me for a second, didn’t you?) I realize that this is largely a question of aesthetics, and I do appreciate a finely-wrought metaphor when used carefully and judiciously , but Kipnis’s seemingly endless circumvention of what she is actually talking about frustrates me to no end. Does she think her audience is so simple-minded that we need her to explain the intricacies of her theory in this manner? (I think Erika brought this up as well). Does this accumulation of stand-ins reveal her own inability or unwillingness to commit to a single definition (even though she seems to be doing so in the opening pages of the book?) Of course, most linguistic exchanges depend on metaphor of some sort, but I kept wishing that Kipnis would just get to the point and do so without the bad metaphors.

I’m also bothered by the contradictions that pop up in Kipnis’s argument. I would draw your attention to one of the passages Erika highlighted in her post: “Race, class, gender, age, or sexual orientation will cause minor or ultimately insignificant variations in response” (83). Here Kipnis clearly seeks to diminish these boundaries by rendering them as unimportant to her claim, yet she invokes the issue of miscegenation in the final pages of the novel (an issue in which race is of ultimate importance) as support for her assertion that we should in fact be concerned that the “state’s vision of love and [ours] are [not] in happy coincidence” (170). She also makes the statement that “political consent is itself rather fictive” (185). But wouldn’t that render her own theories about the political consent inherent in coupled relationships fictive as well? Kipnis just seems a bit too willing to reside in these spaces of contradiction without addressing them in any meaningful way.

And for good measure, let me throw in this logical gem: “As we see, it’s also impossible to say exactly why polygamy is illegal. . . . The reason is that’s against the law” (172). I don’t think I’ve seen a finer example of circular reasoning in a long time.

In terms of the actual content of Kipnis’s claims, of what she says as opposed to how she says it, I do find some of her ideas rather compelling.  The whole concept of collectivism vs. individualism raises some similar, interesting questions to those in Arnold, and Kipnis’s discussion about the “wronged” spouse inhabiting a physical space within both participants in an adulterous relationship is, I think, an important insight.  Unfortunately for me, however, I simply cannot divorce what she says from how she says it (I’m not really sure why this is).

Finally, I feel compelled to at least mention the generalities present in Kipnis’s text that others have already commented on in ways I can’t hope to improve upon. But this is where my real problem with her content arises, so I have to say something here. When did it become acceptable practice to ignore the experiential distinctions between those of different genders, races, ages, or religions? From a purely practical standpoint, I think Kipnis’s willingness to construct a monolithic marital experience reveals a rather sloppy and ineffective approach to cultural observation (a point that Erika also makes). Who actually still believes that there is a single human experience (at least in the context of culture?)

I think I will end here. I hope I’ve been able to articulate more than a simple rant against Against Love, and I hope that people continue to post the reasons they like this work. See you all on Thursday!

-Jessica

Like Alex, I am a Kipnis fan. I am“dead inside” about anything nearing the romantic lovey-dovey (just the sort of sister you’d like at your wedding), and at the same time hopellesly utopic and idealistic. Often, my criticism verges on the solipsistic and “uncritical” because I don’t get as much distance from the theoretical approaches (or people) that have influenced and touched me.

So I appreciate Kipnis’s lack of “intellectual rigour” and her willingness to demonstrate the problems with thinking exclusively along the lines of rigour and scholarly convention.

Kipnis writes:

“The best polemic against love would be to mimic the prose the erratic and overheated behavior of its hapless practitioners: the rushes and excesses, the inconsistent behavior and incohate longings, the moment-by-moment vascillations between self-doubt (what am I doing?) And utter uncertainty ( “You’re the one”), all in a quest of something transformative and unknowing…. We polemiscists too are propelled to (intellectual) promiscuity, rashness and blind risks and becoming the neighborhood pariah (or joke) just for thinking there could be reasons to expiriment without re-imagining things” (50).

In my mind, the critique that Kipnis is making (despite my objections to how she reaches some of her conclusions, which I’ll get to in a moment) works as a polemic, not just to appeal to a mainstream audience, but to reflect the kind of anxiety, anger, and alienation (as well as passion, devotion, and lovey-doveyness) that is produced for some people around romantic love, coupledom, and marriage. Kipnis makes the point well that knowledge formation happens in excessive, emotional, “unintellectual” ways of thinking and being in the world. Without a doubt, my first queer critique emerged not as a carefully thought out and planned intellectual argument, but probably as a polemical rant that included a few tears. To harp on a question we seem to always return to around issues of form: “Might we entertain the possibility that posing philosophical questions isn’t restricted to university campuses and learned tomes, that maybe its something everyone does in the course of everyday life– if not always in an entirely known fashion?… Acting out is what happens is what happens when knowledge or consciousness about something is foreclosed” (28)

And so Kipnis “acts-out” for us, and I kind of appreciate it, especially since I have attend my brother’s wedding this weekend, where bitter silence will be all the acting-out I do.

Where Kipnis misses her mark for me is around the question of couple economies, working, and what she calls “labor-intensive intimacy.” While I agree that “couple-economies too are governed – like our economic system itself– by scarcity, threat, and internalized prohibitions, held in place by those inecessant assurances that there are ‘no viable alternatives’,” I think that even as prohibitions are produced, so are desires and imaginative possibilities.

If we think beyond labor as necessarily goal oriented, wage-earning, and reproductive, what kinds of (alternative, criminal, queer, intellectual, etc. ) labors can we imagine as moving us toward some alternative? Since Kipnis’s understanding of labor rests on the assumption of normative time, can we imagine a queer labor that might exist in relationship to queer time? Kipnis is particularly interested in the greater potentiality of play, but isn’t there some work in play or play at work? Kipnis herself seem to suggest as much, even as she writes: “fuck work.” Or maybe I’m just a workaholic, but I don’t think so.

This is a point that Halberstam develops in A Queer Time and Place in relationship to queer subcultures: “…all kinds of people, especially in postmodernity, will and do opt to live outside of reproductive and familial time as well as on the edges of logics of labor and production. By doing so, they also often live outside the logic of capital accumulation: here we could consider ravers, club kids, HIV-positive barebackers, rent boys, sex workers, homeless people, drug dealers, and the unemployed” (10).

Despite some issues with this passage, but I always come back to it is because it seems to be pushing us to think about the work “queer” does and the conditions that make that work possible, and that’s the question I’m kind of posing here: How does queer work in a way that critiques normative paradigms of labor that are invested in couple-economies, reproduction, wage-earning, and goal-reaching?

For instance, I’ve been interested in criminality, care-taking, interpretation, and fantasy as sites of “productivity” without necessarily thinking about a product.

“We’re scavengers and improvisers, constructing odd assemblages out of detritus and leftovers: a few scraps of time and some dormant emotions are stuck together to create something unforseen, to have new experiences. ” (117).

I don’t know… sounds like work to me. And maybe we can thinking about how such work, if not a way entirely out of the marriage-tomb, the 9-5, the reproductive and goal-oriented logics that seem to structure our lives, at least provides a way of acknowledging other intimacies and investments that often take a good deal of work and creativity to maintain in the face of the ideological pressures to “commit,” “settle down,” “find the one,” etc.

Ok, I’m out. Have a nice class!

Jen

However, I’ve got to say that, despite all her annoying writing tics, her questionable ethical decisions, and her logically flawed arguments, I find a lot of what Kipnis has got to say compelling. Really. If the point of a polemic is to “dispute or refute a topic that is widely viewed to be beyond reproach” (thanks, Wikipedia! Just don’t tell my WRIT 140 students I used you…), then Kipnis’s does the job, at least as far as this reader is concerned. What I’d like to do is examine one or two parts of her argument that I find illuminating or potentially useful (at least as a jumping off point) without feeling like I need to believe in her entire project. Judith Halberstam introduced her 630 class to the idea of “pirate theory” last semester and I’ve got to say, I’m a fan. So here goes:

The idea that marriage is not an ideal – or natural – institution is not new to me. I’ve certainly studied the changing social meanings and purposes of marriage, its troubling history (esp. in relation to the positions women occupy in such domestic arrangements, their status as exchangeable commodities, etc.), and its still-troubling present. However, I’ve never personally made the connections between our work- and self improvement-obsessed culture and the master-narrative that “a good marriage takes lots of hard work and sacrifice” the way Kipnis does. Maybe this is a commentary on my own naiveté rather than Kipnis’s insight or skill, but I’ve also never made a lot of the connections she does between our society’s version of marriage and its version of government. I tend to attribute a lot of the moralizing that promotes marriage and “the nuclear family” (and decries gay unions, single parents, etc.) to uptight Moral Majority types, interested in the issue mostly because God tells them they must be. But Kipnis points out that larger things are at stake here; she explains the incredible cultural defensiveness about the value of traditional marriage and the social shame leveled at those who transgress its boundaries through adultery or divorce by asking, “If contracts and commitments can be overturned merely on grounds of dissatisfaction, or not getting what you think you should, then what of governments? […] If marriages can’t be dissolved, how can the illusion of consensual democracy be maintained? As Nancy Cott points out, that would be sovereignty, not democracy. But if they are dissolvable, everything they symbolize is up for grabs, too” (175). I understand that the marriage/government metaphor isn’t Kipnis’s invention, but I still found what she said about it eye-opening. Her statement that, based on our national (Christian) conception of marriage, adultery is “not only an infidelity to your spouse but also to your country” helped me better understand the attitudes and investments of heterosexual-marriage-defending politicians (169).

Wow. I’m already tired and trying to defend Kipnis is making me even more so. Because I feel totally unable to continue any kind of sustained discussion of why Kipnis might not be totally crap, I will instead leave you with what I considered to be a few or her more convincing – or at least thought-provoking – statements:

“The erotic life of a nation of workaholics: if sex seems like work, clearly you’re not working hard enough at it” (66). Come on! This has to have resonated with someone besides me!

“Pre-modern common law may have established the right of the husband to control his wife, but modern gender relations rests on a system of mutual control, commands, and interdictions. […] If premodern wives were considered their husband’s property – ‘coverture’ was the term – in modern love, we spouses belong to each other” (83).

“Bourgeois exactitude is the temporality of our deepest self. Which means that even small protests against time-management are worth some attention, because screw around with time and, in fact, you’re adulterating the very glue of orderly society” (112).

Feel free to continue hating her; I have a feeling that someone who writes like Kipnis doesn’t mind being hated — like Glen Close in Fatal Attraction (and wasn’t that a popular little tale of the dangers of adultery?), she just doesn’t want to be ignored.

Trisha

Now that I have spent several hours with this writer, I wonder how she could have chosen such a topic. The only evidence I see of Kipnis’ experience with love is her tremendous love affair with her “bracing,” “invigorating,” “audacious” self.* “So this is what can happen when you surround yourself with sycophantic grad students for too long,” I thought. “You devise little intellectual games to show off your erudition and covertly bitch about people who don’t subscribe to your fan club.”

Meeoow!

So…what connections do I see between Kipnis and the Victorian writers we’ve been discussing? Well, there are a number of 19th century contributors to the intellectual hit parade she substitutes for her own analysis, but maybe I should start with our readings. Putting aside Meredith for the moment, I must return to Arnold’s complaint that his fellow Englishman’s highest good seems to be the right to do as he or she pleases, clearly a virtue that Kipnis feels our self-abnegating society still underrates. We have engaged in an interesting debate about Arnold’s use of sarcasm on the subject, and I must admit now – after reading Kipnis – that I now see how this rhetorical strategy could work a person’s nerves. For example, she likes to put genuine criticisms against her argument in sassy quotations – eg. charges of “selfishness,” “immaturity,” etc. – instead of actually responding to them. Her choice of format – the polemic – also works to safeguard her sophomoric position against any real scrutiny (I think that I am beginning to see Professor Tongson’s point about the ethics behind certain formal choices). Having conceded the similarity in their rhetorical devices, I must now, however, extricate poor Arnold from Kipnis’ snot-nosed company. I know that a number of us were troubled by Arnold’s assumption of a monolithic ideal culture (rightly so), but at least he thought out this utopia enough to question whether the individual’s freedom should be the ultimate end of all of our collective endeavors. Kipnis, on the other hand, seems to feel that she can sidestep such ethical questions with a plethora of dodgy logical fallacies (hasty generalizations, false dichotomies, non sequiturs, post hoc, poisoning that damned well, etc.) as long as they are in service of playtime! Sorry Matthew, when this kind of rant ranks as counter-culturist, it looks like the Philistines have won.

Kipnis’ use of Marx seems particularly manipulative in this regard. Alexis was right about Arnold: he did seem to be echoing Marx when defending the rights of the powerless. Maybe we would like to criticize him for not admitting his intellectual debt; personally, I’d like to criticize Kipnis for name-dropping so shamelessly. Witness this little nugget of self-love: “if love is the latest form of alienated labor, would rereading Capital as a marriage manual be the most appropriate response?” (21). [Cue the appreciative chuckles]. Oh, and love is also the opiate of the masses. Actually, you can just substitute “love” for any of Marx’s bugbears – you’re just that clever. God knows, your audience hasn’t read any Marx, so you can just make it up as you go along if you want. For example, you can pretend that Marx thinks that “work” is a bad word, and forget that pesky “alienated” stipulation. If that doesn’t work, spice your argument liberally with Freud, of course ignoring any of the specificity of his work too (eg. whatever you do, don’t attempt to define “repression”). In fact, if you follow Kipnis’ model, everyone will have lost track your topic after a few pages (Love? Desire? Marriage?), and you will be able to quote the New Yorker and poach other scholars’ work to your heart’s delight.

Indeed, generalization is Kipnis’ best friend. Unlike Arnold, who takes some time out of his criticism to situate himself as a specific person with specific experiences; and unlike Meredith who anchors his Modern Love with a straightforwardly biased first-person narrative; Kipnis eschews personalizing her polemic (in an interview, she actually made fun of other writers who did so). I understand that we are living in a post-author world, but I still think that it is intellectually dishonest to presume to speak for everybody, especially on such a personal topic. Natasha set a good example for us in class today when she prefaced her comment with a frank admission of her potential for personal bias. Fortunately, I think she is in good company in our class; unfortunately, Kipnis wasn’t there to hear it. For someone who is so suspicious of cultural authority, Kipnis wields universalism with aplomb. She is so sure that her jaundiced view of love is the only honest response to the issue, she blithely asserts, “Race, class, gender, age, or sexual orientation will cause minor but ultimately insignificant variations in response” (83). That’s right, we are all bored, narcissistic intellectuals – don’t bother denying it. Your sweet satisfaction with your mate (or mates) is false consciousness. What you really want is DRAMA! I mean, “Isn’t this ‘maturity’ business a bit of an anti-aphrodisiac in itself?” (58). I don’t know about you, but I love writers who assume that I’m an idiot. I especially like this treatment from a woman who sincerely asks why the American public’s interest in political sex scandals waned at the turn of this century – adultery is not the only way to feel alive, Laura. Not being blown up works too.

I just realized that, after criticizing Kipnis for her use of sarcasm, I have been dipping in and out of that colorful inkpot myself throughout this post. I am sorry for it…not sorry enough to erase it…but sorry enough to feel a little silly. I also reserve a special apology for Jessica for my use of a crappy metaphor a couple of sentences ago. I suppose the most painful part of reading Kipnis is the lurking feeling that, in the hands of another author, Against Love could have been an interesting book instead of an object of ridicule. Cultural constructions of love, desire, and commitment (whether historical, current, or utopian) deserve our attention, and I hope that we may be able to shed more light on these subjects than she does.

*This line represents my attempt to follow Arnold’s idea of listening to one’s “best self.” My original explanation of Kipnis’ ignorance was much, much ruder.

- Erika

Just a bit of trivia:
George Meredith posed as Thomas Chatterton (the forger poet, 1752-1770) for Henry Wallis’s infamous painting, “The Death of Chatterton” (1856). Wallis ended up being the other man who wooed Meredith’s wife, Mary Ellen Peacock Nicolls (daughter of the poet Thomas Love Peacock). Wallis and Nicolls eloped in 1858.

For those pop fiends in the house who don’t know their Wallis from their Peacock, this image re-entered the popular imaginary about 10 years ago in a charming little film about intergenerational fan obsession, titled Love and Death on Long Island. John Hurt stars as a crusty, cantankerous, luddite scholar named Giles De’Ath. De’Ath is reborn after an accidental encounter with a horndog teen film called “Hotpants College II” starring the heartthrob “Ronnie Bostock” (played with puppy dog earnestness by Jason Priestley). Priestley strikes a pose at the end of the film within the film that evokes, for De’ath, Wallis’s “Death of Chatterton.”

Do with this what you will.
KT