t h e t r u t h o f m a s k s
∞∫Ω
much.’’≤∞ It therefore hardly seems surprising that Lionel Johnson would have lent his copy of the novel to one of his young cousins, who read it passionately—fourteen times, he claimed—and seized upon the first occasion that presented itself to accompany Johnson on a visit to Wilde. The cousin’s name was Alfred Douglas.
7
The Greeks against the Psychiatrists
Michel Foucault’s assertion that homosexual literature came into being as a reaction to psychiatric discourse and to the invention by nineteenth-century medical science of the personage of the homosexual is not an assertion that we can accept. In support of his thesis, Foucault provides the examples of Oscar Wilde and André Gide. He suggests such a historical chain of events in an interview that appeared shortly after the publication of La Volonté de savoir: In the 1870s psychiatrists began to make it into a medical analysis. . . .
They began either to incarcerate homosexuals in asylums or attempted
to cure them. They were formerly perceived as libertines and some-
times as delinquents. . . . In the future we’ll all see them in a global kinship with the insane, su√ering from sickness of the sexual instinct.
But taking such discourses literally, and thereby even turning them
around, we see responses appearing in the form of defiance: ‘‘All right, we are what you say we are, whether by nature or sickness or perversion, as you wish. And so if we are, let it be, and if you want to know what we are, we can tell you better than you can.’’ An entire literature of homosexuality, very di√erent from libertine narratives, appeared at the end of the 19th century: think of Oscar Wilde and Gide. It is the strategic return of a ‘‘same’’ will to truth.∞
This particular version of history seems cavalier, to say the least. Foucault seems unaware that Wilde’s writings were not conceived as a reaction to psychiatric theories. Nor were those of Pater or of Symonds. One might in fact wonder if precisely the opposite is not the case. Perhaps the invention of a culture by homosexuals themselves was prior to any attention that psychiatry was beginning to pay to them. It is, in any case, probably impossible to establish any clear and direct causality in one direction or the other. The two
t h e g r e e k s a g a i n s t t h e p s y c h i at r i s t s
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discourses are probably best thought of as developing separately and simultaneously. Thereafter, a kind of disciplinary battle arises, in which the domains of literature and philosophy struggle with medicine, psychology, and psychiatry over who has the right to speak, and who is saying what on the subject. Homosexuals themselves spoke from the literary and philosophical domains and found themselves in opposition to psychiatrists—for the most part heterosexual—who set out to give a medical and scientific account of homosexuality. To a≈rm that homosexual literature was nothing but some kind of reaction produced by psychiatry makes little sense; it is surprising to find Foucault o√ering such inaccurate approximations. It is certainly undeniable that the literary discourses were ‘‘reverse’’ discourses: they fought against a prohibition on speech, responded to homophobic discourse, and, in order to do so they often integrated that discourse into their own. But the discourses in question were in no way shaped by psychiatry, which came on the scene only later. Rather than the categories of medical discourse, it was the moral and religious order of Victorian England that was being called into question. Indeed medical discourse was almost entirely unknown to these writers when they elaborated their projects in their Oxford colleges. Their adversary was Christian morality, the idea of the ‘‘vice which cannot be named among Christians,’’ of the ‘‘sin against nature.’’ In opposition to this, they o√ered the pagan freedom of the Greeks, the Greek cult of beauty, and the greatness of Greek artistic accomplishments: ‘‘A nation of artists,’’
Symonds would say of the Greeks.
If we consider the case of Symonds, we can see that the first literary texts (poems) in which he struggled to express his homosexuality date from much earlier than his acquaintance with the medical literature. Those poems are from the 1860s and one finds nothing that has to do with psychiatry in his attempt there to justify and legitimate his homosexuality. Symonds rebels against stifling traditional values and invokes the glorious Greek past in order to do so. When he did begin to take an interest in psychiatric discourse, it would not be in order to appropriate its categories while reversing their significance, but to oppose the discourse by referring once again to that mythic Greece whose greatness he had first lauded twenty years earlier.
A whole set of medical works dealing with ‘‘sexual inversion’’ and what would later be called ‘‘homosexuality’’ would appear in the years between 1870 and 1890, notably in France and Germany. For Symonds the psychiatric writings were just as contestable as were the religious or moral discourses that this science imagined it was going to replace. This is why, in the 1890s,
∞Ω≤
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 Symonds undertakes to confront the psychiatrists directly. ‘‘The theory of morbidity,’’ he writes, ‘‘is more humane, but it is not less false, than that of sin or vice.’’≤ In A Problem in Modern Ethics, published in 1891 in a privately distributed edition of fifty copies, he specifically attacks a number of the most prominent psychopathologists of the time: Tardieu, Carlier, Moreau, Kra√t-Ebing, and so on. In the chapter he devotes to Dr. Paul Moreau, the author of an 1877 treatise entitled Des aberrations du sens génésique (On aberrations in the reproductive faculty), Symonds takes some pleasure in pointing out the astonishing contradiction between, on the one hand, the description of sexual inversion as a state with hereditary causes that lies halfway between sanity and madness, and, on the other, the assertion that such is the case only for modern Europe—not for the lands that accepted pederasty in the ancient world. ‘‘In other words, an Englishman or a Frenchman who loves the male sex must be diagnosed as tainted with disease; while Sophocles, Pindar, Pheidias, Epaminondas, Plato are credited with yielding to an instinct which was healthy in their times because society accepted it.’’ Symonds concludes his argument by stating:
The bare fact that ancient Greece tolerated, and that modern Europe
refuses to tolerate sexual inversion, can have nothing to do with the etiology, the pathology, the psychological definition of the phenomenon in its essence. What has to be faced is that a certain type of passion flourished under the light of day and bore good fruits for society in Hellas; that the same type of passion flourishes in the shade and is the source of misery and shame in Europe. The passion has not altered; but the way of regarding it morally and legally is changed. A scientific
investigator ought not to take changes of public opinion into account when he is analysing a psychological peculiarity.≥
In passing, Symonds reveals his astonishment that doctors forget in their analyses ‘‘savage races’’ and ‘‘classical antiquity.’’ Such doctors, he says,
‘‘strive to isolate [the phenomenon] as an abnormal and specifically morbid exception in our civilisation. But facts tend to show that it is a recurring impulse of humanity, natural to some people, adopted by others, and in the majority of cases compatible with an otherwise normal and healthy temperament’’ (52).
Here one sees how Greece and historical references are used to support an argument against the position of contemporary psychopathology. One also sees how, by recalling certain famous Greek figures, Symonds is able to
t h e g r e e k s a g a i n s t t h e p s y c h i at r i s t s
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speak of a ‘‘psychological particularity’’ and thus not to limit his analysis simply to behaviors or practices that would not be tied to the psychology of the individuals involved. Symonds almost seems to be writing about an invariant sexual identity that traverses the centuries—to such an extent that he seems to forget all he had wri
tten earlier about the distinction between a
‘‘pure’’ love and a ‘‘vulgar’’ vice. Everything now fits under the rubric of
‘‘sexual inversion’’ (this certainly shows the influence of psychiatric discourse on his own ways of thinking), and it makes no sense to describe inversion in modern societies as pathological precisely because we know it to have been associated with health during antiquity. It is a question of tolerance or intolerance, and has nothing to do with the phenomenon itself.
Now one might point out that, contrary to Symonds’s assertion, ‘‘sexual inversion’’ was never favored in Greek antiquity, in which the ‘‘passive’’ role and ‘‘e√eminacy’’ were roundly condemned.∂ But what Symonds refers to as
‘‘sexual inversion’’ or as the ‘‘inverted sexual instinct’’ is simply the attraction of one man for another and thus includes the institutionalized ‘‘pederasty’’ about which he had written twenty years earlier within a much larger set of practices and feelings. This makes it di≈cult to agree with John Lauritsen when he writes, in his preface to an edition of some of Symonds’s writings, that in the transition from the 1873 A Problem in Greek Ethics to the 1891 A Problem in Modern Ethics we see—whatever the author’s intentions may have been—a shift from a historical approach to a medical approach, and from a study of ‘‘a form of behavior, love between males, to a condition, ‘inverted sexuality.’ ’’∑ Lauritsen’s analysis is clearly heavily indebted to Foucault and to the distinction Foucault makes in La Volonté de savior between homosexual
‘‘acts’’ and homosexual ‘‘personages.’’ In order to keep the Foucauldian dogma intact, it seems necessary to assert that the idea of a homosexual
‘‘identity’’ could only have appeared along with or in reaction to psychiatric discourse. Yet it is impossible to interpret the evolution of Symonds’s texts in this way. If some reference to Foucault must absolutely be made, it would probably be a better idea to refer to the Foucault who teaches us to think in terms of ‘‘strategies’’ and to consider, when trying to explain Symonds’s evolution, the ways in which the discursive configuration in which he was writing in 1891 was no longer the same as the one in which he had been writing in 1873.
Yet Symonds’s thought also reveals profound continuities. For one, he never ceases to invoke history in opposition to medicine. Even when he uses the term ‘‘sexual inversion’’ it is always, with the support of historical evi-
∞Ω∂
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 dence, to give a positive value to the term in the face of negative and derogatory psychiatric approaches. Further, and above all, it is extremely unlikely that he was not already thinking of the psychology of men who love the masculine sex in terms of identity at the time he was writing A Problem in Greek Ethics. Indeed, if he is able to move so easily from one way of conceiving things to another, it is surely because this is all the same cause for him, the cause of men who live in the shadows because of their di√erence from other men, whereas in ancient Greece they could live in the light of day. If, in 1891, he feels the need to emphasize not the purity and the nobility on which he focused in 1873, but health and normalcy, it is because his adversaries have changed. Clearly his 1873 apologia for Greece was also a way of justifying himself to himself. He assimilated himself to that Greek culture, claimed to be its heir, and imagined himself along the same lines as the men he was describing ( just as would Pater with his remembered dream and his philosopher lover). His poems from the 1860s provide further evidence of this, as does his autobiography and his frequent references to the poems of Walt Whitman as ways of justifying his own views. Symonds unquestionably held to the idea of a sexual ‘‘identity’’ long before he entered into his polemics with the psychiatrists. It is not possible that he got the idea from the psychiatrists against whom he was arguing.
Quite the contrary: he would build his contestation of the notion of
identity being constructed by the psychiatrists on his own idea of homosexual identity, developed in his study of ancient Greece. He insists on this in his letters to Havelock Ellis and Edward Carpenter and others in the 1890s: ‘‘The historical study of Greece is absolutely essential to the psychological treatment of the subject now.’’∏ The psychiatrists are making a colossal error, he writes to Ellis in 1892, ‘‘by diagnosing as necessarily morbid what was the leading emotion of the best and noblest men in Hellas.’’ He goes even further in his denunciation of the ignorance of the psychiatrists: ‘‘The ignorance of men like Casper-Liman, Tardieu, Carlier, Taxil, Moreau, Tarnowsky, Kra√t-Ebing, Richard Burton is incalculable, and is only equalled to their presumption. They not only do not know Ancient Greece, but they do not know their own cousins and club-mates’’ (3:693–94). In short, some of their cousins and fellow club members are the direct heirs of a psychological character that flourished openly in Greek antiquity yet in the contemporary world is forced to hide itself.
As Symonds takes on the psychiatrists, shifting from the register of the noble purity of homosexual desire to that of the healthy normality of the
t h e g r e e k s a g a i n s t t h e p s y c h i at r i s t s
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homosexual person, there is one theme that remains constant: the question of masculinity. In the chapter he devotes to Kra√t-Ebing, Symonds emphasizes that in the case studies Kra√t-Ebing presents one finds many ‘‘Urn-ings,’’ men whose only distinguishing feature from other men is the direction of their sexual leanings. ‘‘The class includes powerfully developed masculine beings, who are unsexed in no particular except that they possess an inordinate appetite for males, and will not look at females.’’π
In 1892, Symonds entered into a collaboration with the doctor and sexologist Havelock Ellis. The collaboration was intended to produce a collectively authored work titled Sexual Inversion, although Symonds’s death would necessitate changes in the form of the project. He explains his conception of this work in a letter to Edward Carpenter:
I am so glad that H. Ellis has told you about our project. I never saw him. But I like his way of corresponding on this subject. And I need
somebody of medical importance to collaborate with. Alone, I could
make but little e√ect—the e√ect of an eccentric.
We are agreed enough upon fundamental points. The only di√er-
ence is that he is too much inclined to stick to the neuropathical theory of explanation. But I am whittling that away to a minimum. . . . I mean to introduce a new feature into the discussion, by giving a complete
account of homosexual love in ancient Greece. I wrote this some time
ago, & had 10 copies of it privately printed. If you like to see it, I will lend you one of my two remaining copies. . . .
All the foreign investigators from Moreau & Caspar to Moll, are
totally ignorant of Greek Customs. Yet it is here that the phenomenon has to be studied from a di√erent point of view from that of psychopathology. Here we are forced to recognize that one of the foremost
races in civilization not only tolerated passionate comradeship, but
also utilized it for high social and military purposes.∫
Symonds specifies in this letter that his ‘‘hope’’ is, and has always been, to see the emergence of ‘‘a new chivalry, i.e., a second elevated form of human love,’’ that would take its place alongside the earlier form dating from the Middle Ages, that is, the chivalry based on heterosexual love. Love in this new order of chivalry, Symonds adds, will be ‘‘complementary, by no means prejudicial to the elder & more commonly acceptable’’ form.
Symonds then goes on to speak of ‘‘a di√erent type of individual’’ who would be able to put energy into new forms of activity, in which ‘‘aims answering to
∞Ω∏
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 those of monastic labour in common or of military self-devotion to duty
[take]
the place of domestic cares & procreative utility.’’ Within this implicit suggestion that the partisans of love between men will be more devoted to the collective than heterosexuals involved in family life are able to be, we can see once again Symonds’s old argument that this ‘‘new chivalry’’ would be able to o√er a di√erent kind of contribution, perhaps one more noble than heterosexuals are able to contribute, to the regeneration of the nation. In any case, this argument suggests, no harm will be done to heterosexual relations. Yet Symonds remains acutely aware of the fantastical character of his remarks, and even exclaims: ‘‘How far away the dream seems! And yet I see in human nature stu√ neglected, ever-present—pariah and outcast now—
from which I am as certain as that I live, such a chivalry could arise.’’ He refers once again to Whitman, whose work ‘‘will remain infinitely helpful’’
even if Whitman may repudiate ‘‘the deductions which have logically to be drawn from Calamus.’’Ω
8
The Democracy of Comrades
In Wilde, too, one finds a rejection of the categories of thought of psychiatric medicine. In 1897, for example, Wilde writes, ‘‘The fact that I am also a pathological problem in the eyes of German scientists is only interesting to German scientists.’’∞ Wilde is here alluding to Max Nordau’s book, Degeneration, published in 1893, in which several pages are devoted to him: ‘‘Oscar Wilde apparently admires immorality, sin, and crime,’’ writes the German psychiatrist.≤ The two volumes of this work are devoted to a description of the artistic and literary currents of a ‘‘fin de siècle’’ in which society is heading toward ‘‘ruin.’’ Nordau takes aim at symbolists, mystics, and Pre-Raphaelites, at Wagnerism, at Aestheticism, at the Decadents, and so on. He attacks Huysmans, of course, but also Zola. All these ‘‘pathological’’ geniuses are ‘‘enemies to society of the direst kind,’’ and society should ‘‘un-conditionally defend itself against them.’’ We are, he writes, ‘‘in the midst of a severe mental epidemic; of a sort of black death of degeneration and hysteria, and it is natural that we should ask anxiously on all sides: ‘What is to come next?’ ’’ He encourages all those who would protect civilization—
Insult and the Making of the Gay Self Page 28