The Other Orpheus

A Poetics of Modern Homosexuality

Merrill Cole

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN: 9780415967051
• eBook ISBN: 9781135886561
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Poetry
• Index: Literature

First published in 2003.  This volume aims to re-establish an interest in poetry by integrating questions of prosody and aesthetics with political literary inquiry. The broader theoretical goal is nothing less than a rehabilitation of the concepts of affect and imagination, though the study also argues against anti-formalist approaches to literature.

CHAPTER ONE
The Anatomy of Decision
Modernist Bodies and the Meaning of “No”

THE SUFFERING THING

In his definitive framing of the modernist period around the heroic figure of Ezra Pound, Hugh Kenner moves carefully to disqualify the other contender to canonical centrality, the one already consecrated by “great man” historiography, T.S.Eliot. Heeding Pound's call for hard-edged precision, as well as, implicitly, masculine vigor, Kenner contrasts the barbed-wire aesthetic to Eliot's effete “poetic of eschewals and refrainings” (16). Eliot would circumvent the true challenge. Because The Pound Era demands that poetry speak publicly and firmly about the modern condition, Eliot's “response to impalpabilities,” with its “tones and airs, surfaces and absences,” can register as no more, in all its eloquence, than “a poetic of the mute” (16). Briefly reconsidering “The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock,” and virtually collapsing Eliot into his titular persona, Kenner disparages the poet's “suspensions and resolutions of things only half-named” as a grandiloquent abdication of responsibility, a sort of magisterial impotence (17). Yet more than a threat to Poundian prowess, Eliot's deferral of settled boundaries subtly casts doubt on the imperative to order that Kenner inherits from his embattled Odysseus.¹ Against the consolidation of the self, its hierarchical social relations, and the self-present clarity of its expression, Eliot registers a protest, if only by default. By negative exemplification and oblique questioning, “The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock” suggests modes of relation wholly foreign not only to the authorized grand projects of High Modernism, but also to many of the critical dictates and later poetic statements of Eliot himself. With the borders of personality, the boundaries of modernism begin to vacillate in Prufrockian indecision.

Kenner reads Pound's own “drive toward fragmentation” not as an assault on the fictions of the masculine self, but as a purgative to the “static constructs” glutting the active mind (32). Aligning Pound's novel approaches to language with “[t]he Romantic quest for purity” (109), he echoes the poet's critical dicta. Pound's literary guidebook, The A B C of Reading, in spite of its emphatic rejection of Romanticism, asserts in proper Wordsworthian fashion that “[g]ood writing is coterminous with the writer's thought, it has the form of the thought, the form of the way the man feels his thought” (113).² Furthermore, “[IJiterature is language charged with meaning” (28). “Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear” (32). The manifest failure to sustain phallic order in the Cantos, in which Kenner discerns a certain pathos, hardly brings Pound's practice closer to the one articulated in Prufrock and Other Observations.³ The coherence-haunted poetics in the end finding error “all in the diffidence that faltered” (Cantos LXXXI l. 174) necessarily disdains the imprecise phantasms of Eliot's “Preludes” speaker:

I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing. (IV. 11. 10–13)

An elegant syntax skirts its undesignated object, in the delicate caress of infolding abstractions. Perhaps rhyme is the only masculine feature of the quatrain. Poignancy depends upon the absence of an objective correlative.⁴ Here, diffidence matters.

Perhaps psychoanalytic theory offers an aesthetics that can appreciate and begin to explain, rather than simply dismiss, such ephemeral erotic grief. In The Freudian Body (FB), Leo Bersani advances the startling thesis that “sexuality…could be thought of as a tautology for masochism” (39). It would be “that which is intolerable to the structured self,” for “the pleasurable unpleasurable tension of sexual excitement occurs when the body's ‘normal’ range of sensation is exceeded, and when the organization of the self is momentarily disturbed by sensations or affective processes somehow ‘beyond' those compatible with psychic organization” (38). For Bersani, “[t]he mystery of sexuality is that we seek not only to get rid of this shattering tension but also to repeat, even to increase it” (38).⁵ Reading Prufrock's sexual foibles as instances of the self-unmaking prerequisite to erotic feeling opens interpretive possibilities unrecognizable in Kenner's terms. Bersani valorizes literary works which would enact, rather than rigidify or repress, the disordering impetus of desire. The Freudian Body asks, “how might the esthetic be conceived as a perpetuation and replicative elaboration of masochistic sexual tensions?” (43). How then could we understand the aesthetic erotically, and what would such an understanding offer? Bersani, more or less reversing Kenner's evaluative priorities in The Culture of Redemption (CR), opposes a repressive art asserting “the authority to master the presumed raw material of experience in a manner that uniquely gives value to, perhaps even redeems, that material” (1), to another art that in reconciliating “culture and bodily intensities” (34), relinquishes command.⁶ As Prufrock facetiously suggests, the time for “works” (l. 29) and “visions” (l. 33), to “murder and create” (l. 28), may not be too far from “the taking of a toast and tea” (1. 34).

The forms of art that Bersani contrasts share a constitutive element of sacrifice. The redemptive model “is inherently sacrificial,” because its action incorporates violence and, concomitantly, death. In redemptive tragedy, a “catastrophic error or defect is somehow made up for by the hero's (the victim's, the sinner's) consciousness of his defect.” That “[1]ife is redeemed by the act of cognition” depends upon a purifying death (CR 97). Whatever its generic specificities, redemptive literature seeks to correct, and to compensate for, the inadequacies of ordinary human existence. Instead of critiquing the coercive structural operations of dominant society, its masterful aesthetic renarrates and legitimizes the “processes of repression, symptomatic violence, and ascetic sublimation” that “unleash sexuality in human history as murderous aggression” (FB 115). To recognize, rather than repudiate, the masochism of desire, Bersani claims, can avert this threat, by reconfiguring the act of sacrifice. Eroticized art rewrites the fatal imperative as the seductive call to self-undoing, and thereby “erases the sacrosanct value of selfhood, a value that may account for human beings' extraordinary willingness to kill in order to protect the seriousness of their statements. The self is a practical convenience; promoted to the status of an ethical ideal, it is a sanction for violence” (CR 4). In Horaos, Bersani endorses “a nonsuicidal disappearance of the subject” (99).

Bersani is recognized as a critic primarily of French literature and Sigmund Freud, as well as a major figure in contemporary queer theory, even though “queer” would seem not to be his preferred term.⁷ His theoretical assault on the self aims primarily at the masculine ego, alternatives to the stiffness of which he finds in male homoerotic novels and French modernist poetry. For the reader familiar with Bersani's superb analyses of such writers as Marcel Proust and Stéphane Mallarmé, it may seem unfair to apply his theory to the Anglo-American poet commonly conceived as the last word in literary and social conservatism. The unlikely Eliot, however, serves to test the limits of Bersani's reworking of sacrifice. It is also important to separate the young poet of concern in this study from the forbidding figure who came to keep literary study in the United Kingdom and the United States under his firm control.⁸ In “Avant-Garde Eliot,” the first chapter of Twenty-First-Century Modernism: The “New” Poetics, Marjorie Perloff considers “the still-vexed case of T.S.Eliot, the American avant-gardist of 1910–11, who had, by the late 1920s, transformed himself into the self-proclaimed ‘classical,’ Anglo-Catholic, Royalist poet and conservative critic and editor” (10–11). If he still troubles experimental poetic practice, as Perloff demonstrates, and if, as I will argue in chapter five, he perturbs Hart Crane, Eliot himself, even in his earliest published works, was already “vexed.” This vexedness, as chapter four will explore, very much extends to the issue of male homosexuality in The Waste Land. It is a topic for queer theoretical investigation.

Whiie Eliot's work indeed revolutionized poetic discourse in English and elsewhere, he never cut, nor intended to cut, a revolutionary figure like that of Rimbaud, whose blanket condemnation of the entire literary past will be a subject of chapter three.⁹ Eliot announces, in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” an essay published in 1919, between Prufrock and Other Observations and The Waste Land, the necessity that the new poet “conform” to the entirety of Western literary tradition, a conformity that would be more than slavish imitiation (38). In Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation, John Guillory argues that Eliot's critical rhetoric operates as a vehicle of self-promotion, for the model of literary value advanced in his essays implicitly favors his own poetic production and that of his associates. At the same time, Eliot articulates a decidedly conciliatory view of the role of the poet in the modern world: the new poet who “ever so slightly” modifies “the existing order” (38) of European literature cannot pose as an agent of radical social change. However significant the overall alteration that the new poet effects, Eliot's emphasis falls on cultural continuity: the canon never fragments. This is an implicit endorsement of the stable social circumstances that the canon sanctions.

Confrontation with recalcitrant literary and psychoanalytic texts renders the full import of Bersani's theory of self-undoing, as well as the difficult complications and political problems it introduces, more readily apparent.¹⁰ “The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock,” albeit charged with sexual indecision, reads its persona's disappearing act in resolutely negative terms. Prufrock signifies not a workable alternative to normative or heroic masculinity, but a defeat dependent upon contrast to the desired ideal.¹¹ If that ideal does not sail off unscathed or unmoved by “the mermaid's singing” (1. 124), its escape from the feminine is still meant to seem more attractive than Prufrock's attentive anxiety. The defense mechanism Prufrock deploys throughout his song receives careful consideration in Sigmund Freud's short essay, “Negation.” I read Freud against Prufrock not to psychoanalyze the troubled literary figure in a reductive manner, but to examine the strange interaction of eroticism and negativity that both works manifest. Indeed, the authoritative analyst bears an obscure resemblance to Eliot's careworn persona; to compare the two, more than raising interesting questions, submits the very activity of interrogation to uncertainty.

THE MERMAN

The “overwhelming question” (1.10) that Prufrock defers resonates throughout Western literary history, predicates psychoanalysis, and appears as the chorus line of season after season of popular songs, always with a new urgency, always with a slightly different inflection: What is love? Prufrock protests his inadequacy to poetry's ultimate concern, the question of how to articulate love. “The Lovesong of J.Alfred Prufrock” begins in the realm of the damned, where Dante's Guido mistakenly assumes he can give a self-compromising response to the Italian poet's question, because it will never reach the light of day. Although this epigraph from the Inferno frames the purported song of love as a dialogue with the dead, the poem turns quickly elsewhere, to frustrate epic and elegiac expectations, as well as the romantic expectations elicited by its title:

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table (11. 1–3).

The astonishment provoked by the vivid juxtaposition of these opening lines, which has become a benchmark of modernist criticism, evidences what Richard Poirier, in “Modernism and Its Difficulties,” terms “an unprecedented break in cultural continuity,” confronting the reader with demanding “stylistic and structural evidences of dislocation” (97). Unsavory and anything but anesthetizing, Prufrock's invitation projects his interior condition onto the surrounding environment, a gesture Bersani associates with the realist novel's claustrophobic structures of containment.¹² Perloff notes that the sound structure emphasizes the speaker's “frozen state”: the first line consists of monosyllables, “each one demanding some stress,” with a caesura after “then”; the second line has eleven syllables and six stresses; and third line, even longer, ends with “the awkward shift from falling to rising and back to falling rhythm in ‘etherised upon a table’” (20). Such metric immobility would be mirrored in the reader's moment of shock. In urging forward motion—“[1]et us go”— at the same time that he induces stasis, Prufrock sets the pattern for the poem, in which he will repeatedly imagine taking action, only to refrain.

In contradistinction to solipsistic realism, Prufrock's projection, his more-than-rhyming tie of “I” and “sky,” enables him to engage in subtle self-critique. The verse paragraph continues,

Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent,
To lead you to an overwhelming question…
Oh, do not ask, ‘What is it?’
Let us go and make our visit. (11. 4-12, ellipsis Eliot's)

The “half-deserted streets” mimetically suggest what appear to be the poem's half-completed lines, and the “muttering retreats” characterize Prufrock's hesitant discourse. The following phrases, however, obliquely censure conventional male sexual propositioning, the pick-up lines soliciting “one-night” stands in “cheap hotels.”¹³ Eliot's curious metonymic displacements complain against the manipulations of romantic rhetoric, at the same time disrupting persuasion's presumptive itinerary, its “tedious argument/Of insidious intent.” A drill of hard “d,” “s,” and “t” consonants, as well as an assonal insistence of the long “e,” accentuates the unpleasantness. “By initiating a designifying mobility” within his poetry, Eliot accords with Bersani's claim that literature can undo “that security of statement by which we can so easily be seduced, and possessed” (FB 67).

The context of paragraph's posed but postponed final question works to trivialize it, even as its negated offering provides the first hint of an overwhelming significance. The poem obsessively returns to this question; and, in each instance, a heterosexual encounter, anticipated in terror, leads Prufrock to imagine delivering it in terms radically unsuited to the trite circumstances he descri...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INTRODUCTION: The Intellectual Life of the Feelings
• CHAPTER ONE: The Anatomy of Decision: Modernist Bodies and the Meaning of “No”
• CHAPTER Two: The Rack of Enchantments: “New Love” in Rimbaud's Illuminations
• CHAPTER THREE: Jouissance of the Commodities: Rimbaud against Erotic Reification
• CHAPTER FOUR: Empire of the Closet: Erotic Colonization in The Waste Land
• CHAPTER FIVE: Perversion's Permanent Target: Hart Crane and the Uses of Memory
• AFTERWORD: A Lovely End
• EPILOGUE: Wine
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX