Insult and the Making of the Gay Self

by Didier Eribon

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  i n s u lt a n d t h e m a k i n g o f t h e g ay s e l f realise the influence of neo-Platonism on the Renaissance that we can understand the true meaning of the amatory phrases and words with which friends were wont, at this time, to address each other,’’ writes Wilde. ‘‘There was a kind of mystic transference of the expressions of the physical world to a sphere that was spiritual, that was removed from gross bodily appetite.’’

  Wilde then mentions the sonnets that Michelangelo addressed to the young Tommaso Cavallieri and emphasizes ‘‘with what intense and religious fer-vour Michael Angelo addressed himself to the worship of intellectual beauty, and how, to borrow a fine phrase from Mr. Symonds, he pierced through the veil of flesh and sought the divine idea it imprisoned.’’ He also recalls another of Michelangelo’s sonnets, written for Luigi del Riccio upon the death of his young friend Cecchino Bracchi, and adds that there too one can find, ‘‘as Mr. Symonds points out, the Platonic conception of love as nothing if not spiritual, and of beauty as a form that finds its immortality within the lover’s soul.’’∞≠

  Wilde had begun reading Symonds at university. In 1876 he drafted an

  article that was never published in the second volume of The Greek Poets. In that article he commented that one could find in Symonds the same pictur-esque qualities, the same beauty that is so admired in the writings of ‘‘Ruskin and Pater.’’∞∞ The aesthetic idea developed by Symonds was one Wilde found striking. Symonds wrote, after all, that even if Greek morality ‘‘was aesthetic and not theocratic, it is none the less on that account humane and real.’’ And, finally, Symonds concluded that ‘‘the Greeks were essentially a nation of artists. . . . Guided by no supernatural revelation, with no Mosaic law for conduct, they trusted their aesthesis, delicately trained and preserved in a condition of the utmost purity.’’∞≤ This is, of course, a clear allusion to the noble purity of ‘‘pederasty.’’

  Wilde liked Symonds’s book so much that he entered into a correspon-

  dence with him, one which has unfortunately been almost entirely lost. Yet Wilde clearly kept an enthusiastic eye on Symonds’s later publications, especially those devoted to the Renaissance.

  From all these apologetic e√orts, what must first and foremost be kept in mind is the need these authors experienced to justify themselves to themselves.

  Symonds, like Pater, Wilde and so many others, was struggling, as Neil Bartlett puts it, ‘‘to find an identity through reworking the biographies of the past.’’ He continues: ‘‘They could not believe that theirs was a unique experi-

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  ence. Instead they subscribed to the opposite theory: the idea that one man’s experience may be a repetition of another’s. They found their peers not in other men, but in other texts.’’∞≥ These nineteenth-century intellectuals, he adds, were looking for ‘‘proofs of their own existence, ransacking their libraries with a scholarly enthusiasm for Classical or Renaissance culture’’

  (226–27). It is no surprise, then, that it was Wilde who would write, in Dorian Gray, that ‘‘one had ancestors in literature, as well as in one’s own race, nearer perhaps in type and temperament, many of them, and certainly with an influence of which one was more absolutely conscious.’’ To make Wilde’s point perfectly clear, and to make inescapable the link to the portraits Symonds traced in his studies of the Renaissance, it su≈ces to add the following:

  ‘‘Dorian Gray . . . felt that he had known them all, those strange terrible figures that had passed across the stage of the world and made sin so marvellous, and evil so full of subtlety.’’∞∂

  4

  Philosopher and Lover

  In not all positive evocations of pederasty was it felt necessary to rea≈rm the virile character of this kind of relationship. Some authors proved able to resist the social pressure in that direction. But their evocations of pederasty often then became so coded that only the initiated were able to understand them. Already in 1864, the twenty-five-year-old Walter Pater had read his essay ‘‘Diaphaneitè’’ to the Old Morality club (an all-male, politically liberal group that met to hear texts read out, and to which John Addington Symonds also belonged). In that essay, Pater describes the kind of human character that would be able to induce the ‘‘regeneration’’ of society. The figure of the diaphane, ‘‘this clear crystal nature,’’ is a person so perfect that his simple presence would do more for the world than others manage to do through their actions. Pater insists on the physical beauty of this figure, a physical beauty that is matched by a correspondingly great inner beauty. Pater anoints this man—more exactly, this young man—with a great ‘‘pride of life.’’∞

  The presentation Pater made to this all-male club (and in the presence of the young man in question) contained a good many references to Platonic philosophy. Indeed, what we find in Pater’s text is more than a literary or philosophical evocation of the Symposium; the scene of the reading of this text is a recreation of the practice of meetings that were a combination of all-male sociability and philosophical discussion. Pater here enacts one part of the distinction made by K. O. Müller between ‘‘he who teaches’’ and ‘‘he who listens.’’ What in fact comes to life again here is the Platonic theory of

  ‘‘ philosophesas poté met’ erotos,’’ an expression Pater would translate as ‘‘lover and philosopher at once.’’ The homage he pays to the person to whom his discourse is addressed is, as Linda Dowling puts it, ‘‘an almost classical paean to beautiful youth by an older admirer.’’≤ Oxford, it would seem, o√ered at this point in time a nearly perfect location for the expression of

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  this kind of love—which was, in theory, totally desexualized: the professor

  ‘‘loves’’ the student and nourishes him intellectually, but has no intention of touching him. (All the texts insist on this ‘‘purity.’’) Of course, touching doubtless happened, as is attested to by the repeated scandals that cropped up in Oxford, at least one of which shows that Pater himself was not always as distant from physical passion as his ‘‘Platonism’’ might have required.≥

  Pater’s essay would only be published after his death, by the person to whom it was addressed, but Pater would return in ever more noticeable ways to the question of masculine loves, notably in 1873, in the volume of essays called Studies in the History of the Renaissance (a volume dedicated to the same young man). The volume of course contains chapters on Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci. Yet it is in the final chapter of the volume—one devoted to the eighteenth-century German art historian, Winckelmann, already made famous by Hegel and Goethe—that Pater most explicitly invokes homosexuality. For in Pater’s eyes, the spirit of the Renaissance lived on in Winckelmann’s work and in his passion for Hellenism. In this text from 1867, Pater establishes a direct relation between Winckelmann’s sexual tastes and his deep understanding of Greek art, notably of sculpture. He writes: ‘‘That his a≈nity with Hellenism was not merely intellectual, that the subtler threads of temperament were inwoven in it, is proved by his romantic, fervent friendships with young men. . . . These friendships, bringing him into contact with the pride of human form, and staining the thoughts with its bloom, perfected his reconciliation to the spirit of Greek sculpture.’’∂ Pater gives a long citation from a letter written by Winckelmann to one of his young friends, a letter in which the historian praises the tendency to be attracted to young men, claiming it as a guarantee of an authentic taste for art, an authentic aesthetic sensibility:

  I have noticed that those who are observant of beauty only in women,

  and are moved little or not at all by the beauty of men, seldom have an impartial, vital, inborn instinct for beauty in art. To such persons the beauty of Greek art will ever seem wanting, because its supreme beauty is rather male than female. But the beauty of art demands a higher

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bsp; sensibility than the beauty of nature, because the beauty of art, like tears shed at a play, gives no pain, is without life, and must be awakened and repaired by culture. Now, as the spirit of culture is much more ardent in youth than in manhood, the instinct of which I am speaking must be

  exercised and directed to what is beautiful, before that age is reached,

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  i n s u lt a n d t h e m a k i n g o f t h e g ay s e l f at which one would be afraid to confess that one had no taste for it.

  (123–24)

  Thus heterosexuality is on the side of nature, homosexuality on the side of culture. Moreover, ‘‘the spirit of culture’’ is closely allied to youth, and this belief is what makes possible Pater’s claim that Winckelmann’s personal letters shed important light on his writings about art.

  It is Winckelmann’s lively, tactile relation to beauty that inspires his deep and instinctive understanding of the Greek spirit. ‘‘He is in touch with it,’’

  says Pater, ‘‘it penetrates him, and becomes part of his temperament. . . . He catches the thread of a whole sequence of laws in some hollowing of the hand, or dividing of the hair.’’ Then, taking up his translation of his favorite expression from Plato, Pater writes that Winckelmann ‘‘seems to realise that fancy of the reminiscence of a forgotten knowledge hidden for a time in the mind itself, as if the mind of one, lover and philosopher at once in some phase of pre-existence . . . fallen into a new cycle, were beginning its intellectual career over again, yet with a certain power of anticipating its results’’ (125).

  To put things bluntly, for Pater it is the spirit of pederastic love that is reborn in Winckelmann. When Pater cites Goethe’s judgment, in which

  Goethe enthusiastically describes Winckelmann’s work as ‘‘a living thing, designed for those who are alive,’’ it is easy enough to understand what this Oxford scholar is choosing to mean by ‘‘alive’’ (125). Pater follows in Winckelmann’s footsteps. As he pursues his line of reasoning to the end, recalling the religious origins of gymnastics, by means of which the devotee of the gods strives to be worthy of them by striving to be beautiful, Pater writes that Greek art had a direct link to physical beauty. So ‘‘the beauty of the palaestra, and the beauty of the artist’s workshop, reacted on one another,’’ for ‘‘the youth tried to rival his gods; and his increased beauty passed back into them’’ (134).

  In Pater’s text we see how important the ardent descriptions Winckel-

  mann gave of Greek sculpture were to those men seeking to legitimate their own desire. After all, the statues were of young men—indeed, of extremely handsome young men.∑ It is not here a question of virility in the military sense, but of the youthful virility of the gymnasium, the palaestra; we are dealing with idealized representations. At this point, Pater sets down a radical argument regarding those who are resistant to the notion of the greatness of Greek art. For him, as for Winckelmann, there is a simple explanation for their reticence. Greek art seems imperfect to them because

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  they are heterosexual. We can also see that Pater is implicitly calling for the creation of a specifically homosexual culture whose goal would be to revivify the ideals of ancient Greece and of the Renaissance. This helps to explain the considerable extent of his influence, for the link that he, following Winckelmann, established between artistic creation, masculine beauty, and love between men would open the way for new discourses and for a new feeling of self-esteem for many young men.

  Pater’s book gained quite a following for itself. To understand why, it helps to understand its context: the Victorian atmosphere and the su√ocating e√ect of religious and moral traditions on Oxford colleges. In Pater’s apologia for ancient Greece and the Renaissance, people found a breath of fresh air, a taste of freedom. Students found its paganism, its celebration of the body, of beauty, and of nature seductive. But there was another theme in the book that would also be influential—the idea, expressed in the book’s conclusion, that one had to seize passions in the moment. ‘‘Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end,’’ he writes. One must strive ‘‘to burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy.’’ That constitutes ‘‘success in life.’’ Pater therefore exhorts us to reject all philosophical systems:

  With this sense of the splendour of our experience and of its awful

  brevity, gathering all we are into one desperate e√ort to see and touch, we shall hardly have time to make theories about the things we see and touch. What we have to do is to be for ever curiously testing new

  opinions and courting new impressions, never acquiescing in a facile

  orthodoxy. . . . Philosophical theories or ideas, as points of view, instru-ments of criticism, may help us to gather up what might otherwise pass unregarded by us. . . . The theory or idea or system which requires of us the sacrifice of any part of this experience, in consideration of some interest into which we cannot enter, or some abstract theory we have

  not identified with ourselves, or of what is only conventional, has no real claim upon us.∏

  The sense of the brevity of life leads to an exalted aesthetic sensitivity. ‘‘ Nous sommes tous condamnés,’’ he says in French, citing Victor Hugo. ‘‘We are all under a death sentence.’’ We are only granted a brief ‘‘interval,’’ and our one chance lies in somehow dilating it, in ‘‘expanding that interval . . . getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time.’’ Such wisdom, he tells us, is best found in, ‘‘the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for

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  i n s u lt a n d t h e m a k i n g o f t h e g ay s e l f its own sake. . . . For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake’’ (153).

  It is worth adding that other currents were helping create the sense that the Renaissance belonged at the front and center of the cultural scene.

  Artists from the Pre-Raphaelite movement, such as the poets Swinburne and Dante Gabriel Rossetti or the painter Simeon Solomon, were active in this project. The idea was beginning to spread that the periods of greatest artistic attainment were also those in which love between men had been the most developed, the most visible, and the least repressed. Yet the aestheticism and dandyism that could be found in certain apologists for the thought of Plato or for the Renaissance seemed often to coincide with ways of being that could only be perceived as ‘‘e√eminate’’ by other contemporaries. This placed such figures at the antipodes of the dominant theme of masculinity that one finds in this cultural universe. Certainly the great theme of ‘‘androgyny’’ cohabited with discourses on masculinity toward the end of the nineteenth century. One has only to glance at Solomon’s paintings from the 1860s and 1870s to understand that sexual ambiguity was one of the most forthright and marked ways of destabilizing normative representations of virility. (It is worth noting that this topic of androgyny was an obsession of late-nineteenth-century French culture as well.) While certain people (such as Symonds) were working to reappropriate discourses of virility, others were working to find ways around them or to reject them outright.π Wilde owned paintings by Solomon. When, after his trial, he was declared bank-rupt, the paintings would be sold at auction to cover legal expenses. Wilde was clearly an heir to the Solomon tradition as well as to the tradition of Symonds and Pater.

  In fact, it is often hard to hold the two traditions of this moment—the a≈rmation of conventional masculinity and the play with sexual ambiguity—

  in clear distinction the one from the other. Those who spoke ecstatically of the beauty of gymnasts did not always exhibit behavior in keeping with their discourse. On May 5, 1878, Mark Pattison, dean of Lincoln College, makes a journal entry after a tea at Walter Pater’s:

  To Pater’s to tea, where Oscar Browning who [was] more like Socrates

  than ever. He c
onversed in one corner with 4 feminine looking youths

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  ‘part dawdling’ there in our presence, while the Miss Paters and I sat looking on in another corner. Presently Walter Pater, who, I had been told was ‘‘upstairs’’ appeared, attended by 2 more youths of similar

  appearance. . . .’’∫

  Richard Ellmann, who cites this passage, adds that the description might tend to create a false impression. One might be led to think that members of this circle displayed their homosexuality fearlessly. But in fact, as Ellmann points out, Pater was extremely prudent and became even more so after the publication in 1873 of his Studies in the History of the Renaissance. As Oscar Wilde would say to Charles Ricketts, ‘‘Poor dear Pater has lived to disprove everything he has written.’’ Or to Robert Ross, ‘‘Dear Pater was always frightened of my propaganda.’’Ω Whatever can be said about his personal comportment, trapped between audacity and prudence, between the defiance of instituted norms and fearful compliance in the face of established power, it can certainly be said of Pater that he contributed to the creation of a visibility for this love, a visibility which, even if coded in many ways, nonetheless seemed able to catch the attention of certain uninitiated people—

  both Pater’s enemies and his young adepts. Pater’s prudence doubtless grew out of the fact that he had been the object of some attacks of considerable violence. The conclusion to his Studies did not go unnoticed. He was denounced in 1877 in a pamphlet entitled The New Republic, authored by W. H.

  Mallock. In that satire, Pater was portrayed under the name of Mr. Rose, a ridiculous and e√eminate esthete, pale, with a high voice, who hides his sexual tastes behind a screen of classical references. Mallock wanted to demonstrate that Pater’s Hellenism, far from belonging to the tradition of

  ‘‘spiritual regeneration’’ that John Stuart Mill had called for, could only lead to ‘‘dissolution,’’ to the collapse of a culture and a society. But, because of the way he insisted on the links between Hellenism, aestheticism, and homosexuality, Mallock in the end achieved the paradoxical result of giving greater visibility to this movement of self-a≈rmation, in a certain way providing it with avant-garde credentials, calling it to the attention of young men with literary and intellectual ambitions. Mallock publicly exposed the subtext of Victorian Hellenism and thereby helped it move from being the abstruse province of an Oxford elite to becoming something with much wider visibility. Once again we notice that homophobic discourse is always productive in this paradoxical way. It helps to crystallize previously disparate aspects of a gay consciousness. Without a doubt, Oscar Wilde was heavily marked by