Joy of the Worm

Suicide and Pleasure in Early Modern English Literature

Drew Daniel

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780226816500, 9780226816494
• eBook ISBN: 9780226816517
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Consulting an extensive archive of early modern literature, Joy of the Worm asserts that voluntary death in literature is not always a matter of tragedy.
 
In this study, Drew Daniel identifies a surprisingly common aesthetic attitude that he calls "joy of the worm," after Cleopatra's embrace of the deadly asp in Shakespeare's play—a pattern where voluntary death is imagined as an occasion for humor, mirth, ecstatic pleasure, even joy and celebration. 

Daniel draws both a historical and a conceptual distinction between "self-killing" and "suicide." Standard intellectual histories of suicide in the early modern period have understandably emphasized attitudes of abhorrence, scorn, and severity toward voluntary death. Daniel reads an archive of literary scenes and passages, dating from 1534 to 1713, that complicate this picture. In their own distinct responses to the surrounding attitude of censure, writers including Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, and Addison imagine death not as sin or sickness, but instead as a heroic gift, sexual release, elemental return, amorous fusion, or political self-rescue. "Joy of the worm" emerges here as an aesthetic mode that shades into schadenfreude, sadistic cruelty, and deliberate "trolling," but can also underwrite powerful feelings of belonging, devotion, and love.

[ Chapter One ]

Failed Seriousness in the Old Arcadia and Gallathea

Sacrifice enters cultural play . . . as a trick, as a hoax.

Arthur Little Jr., “Altars of Alterity”

Time after Time

A friend tells me a story: She was playing in a cover band in a bar and they had just finished a popular ballad when a drunk and distraught woman in the audience loudly demanded that they play it again. Heckling back and forth—the woman demanding, the band refusing—escalated until the woman produced a knife, which she held against her wrist, saying that she would kill herself right there if the band did not play the song again. Showing that she meant it, she made small cuts into the skin that began to bleed, and as other audience members nearby tried to reason with her, the band dutifully proceeded to play the same three-minute pop song, over and over and over. Eventually, people in the bar talked the woman out of her crisis, and, upon the tenth iteration, she finally put the knife away. The song in question was Cyndi Lauper’s “Time after Time.”

Though suicide isn’t funny, this story almost is. In part there’s the joke-like structure of a long windup followed by the punchline reveal that the song at the kernel of this emotional crisis of mandatory repetition is, itself, a song about repetition. Specifically, the song’s lyrical promise—“If you’re lost, you can look and you will find me / Time after time”—repetitiously offers unconditional love, a stable and therapeutic “holding environment,” a seemingly boundless willingness to assume on-demand care work.1 The banality of the pop song and pop singer as parent/partner substitute overwrites an odd identificatory parallel between wailing Cyndi and knife-wielding customer (each, whether donor or recipient of care, stuck in an emotional loop). The passage from violent surprise to peaceful resolution makes this story, though it is true, seem artful.

Endings matter, and the survival of the woman lets this be more of a joke than it is, because it models the urge to die and the threat to kill the self as an everyday feeling rising to a decisive crisis that can be worked through, collectively, to a comic resolution. In this story, art saves a life, repetition becomes difference, and the knife is put away.2 There’s something deflationary about it, but only in the wake of the fatal threat at its core, and yet it can circulate as funny—the friend who was present relayed it as such to me, and we laughed as she told the story—precisely because no one dies. Harm has been limited, and threats have been lifted, and so it feels, somewhat, permissible to laugh at the comedic reveal of the song title, which is, in its own way, deflationary too. That song? Really? Part of why laughter at this story doesn’t feel entirely nasty is that we as readers are invited to reflect on our own emotional investment in pop songs, our own moments of playing a piece of music over and over and over. Whether we like pop music or opera or harsh noise, we have all been the child in Freud’s “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (1920), demanding the repetition of the same bedtime story, over and over, to the letter, with no deviation.3

Why tell this story at the start of a chapter about the representation of the urge to die in Sir Philip Sidney and John Lyly? This is a story about genre, and about the way that genre modulates our relation to self-destructive urges, letting us gain purchase upon what is serious by refusing, entirely, to take something serious seriously. We are permitted to adopt other stances toward what is serious when a generic frame primes us to regard it as less than serious, less than life-threatening. How does art bring self-destruction toward the comedic threshold, and why might it do so?

There are obvious reasons why one might align Sidney’s pastoral prose romance The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (i.e., the Old Arcadia) (1578–80) and Lyly’s pastoral tragicomedy Gallathea (1588): both works exemplify a certain high-summer cultural moment in the history and evolution of Elizabethan literary style.4 Both works helped define their authors as tastemakers and men of influence, however variably closer and farther away these men were from the sun of favor at Elizabeth’s court. Both works draw upon and revise the pastoral traditions of classical literature, both works place a pair of protagonists in cross-gendered disguise and explore the queer romantic possibilities that result, and they both have quasi-miraculous deus ex machina conclusions that liberate their protagonists from tightly plotted, seemingly inescapable constraints with a lightning speed that feels both invigorating and abrupt.

So far, so familiar. Overfamiliar, even. But in this chapter, though I respond to and build upon the surrounding web of connections and correlations between Sidney’s prose romance and Lyly’s drama, I intend to concentrate, admittedly in a myopic manner, upon two specific scenes in which characters express a curiously subsidiary affect within the broad range of scenarios of self-killing with which this book deals: the desire to be sacrificed for others. Specifically, both Pyrocles in book 4 of Sidney’s romance and Hebe in the middle of Lyly’s play seem to arrest the forward motion of their respective texts in order to dwell, at extraordinary length, upon the valedictory process of leaving the world. Both, albeit in entirely separate contexts, are brought to a pitch of emotional intensity in which they come to welcome their own deaths.

They do not do so because of despair. That is, neither Pyrocles nor Hebe is in the grip of a depressive mood disorder as contemporary diagnostic protocols understand it. Rather, they long to die so that others may live and survive beyond them. Outlined broadly like that, each case is locatable within the Durkheimian explanatory matrix of “suicidal altruism.”5 That said, their sacrificial frame permits an ethical relation to voluntary death that also echoes key components of Christian faith and acts of martyrdom that express devotion to that faith, even as the pastoral and quasi-pagan settings of both works also place these characters at a protective remove from any overly strong resemblance to confessional specifics. Their imagined sacrifices are meant to be received as deliberate public acts of personal valor rather than as private spasms of sinful despair. To reiterate the distinction made in my introduction, they are cases of self-killing rather than suicide.

In an early modern variant of what Elizabeth Freeman has termed “temporal drag,” this shared framing of an earlier historical moment permits citational play, at once drawing energy from the precursor it sublates and ironizing its codes.6 But instead of modeling a generational delay or developmental lag (as in Freeman’s case, which focuses upon the performance of outmoded styles of lesbian self-presentation), in these works a temporally and culturally “otherwise” frame of culturally prior pseudoantiquity allows a textually localized but intensive exploration of a feeling arguably central to the theological present in which these works were written: sacrificial longing. However modulated by Reformation differences between confessions, the urge to admire Christ’s sacrifice and to emotionally invest in and inhabit that state of willing submission to suffering through meditative practices of imitatio Christi—practices that Ross Lerner has memorably termed “interminable consideration”—rendered the affective repertoire of sacrifice both omnipresent and arguable across a broad spectrum of available forms of early modern Christianity.7 Burlesquing the urge to die while giving it voice, book 4 of Sidney’s Old Arcadia and Hebe’s scene in Lyly’s Gallathea seem to solicit admiration for the ethical premise of self-sacrifice precisely in order to overturn and cancel its expression. In response to these vocal longings for death, both Sidney’s Pyrocles and Lyly’s Hebe run aground upon narrative outcomes that are more humiliating than heroic.

Pyrocles longs to die to demonstrate his remorse and to protect someone else from the shameful and potentially fatal consequences of his own actions. Screwing himself up into a pitch of heroic determination, he attempts suicide but picks the wrong object (literally—his chosen implement is too blunt) and a long argument ensues, in which he is persuaded to trade in his fantasy of self-destruction for survival. Hebe is offered as a sacrifice to a sea monster on behalf of her community and, in the midst of reconciling herself to her fate, comes to long for the monster to devour her so that she can die nobly on behalf of that community. Her offer is rejected when the monster does not deign to appear. These two figures stand in strong opposition to each other: one longs for death and tries to achieve it; the other is more or less forced into a position of being exposed to death and bemoans that fact until, in what she thinks are her final moments, she comes to embrace it.

What unites the scenes of Pyrocles and Hebe despite their manifest differences, and their central distinction with respect to the will to die? Rather than functioning as dramatic climaxes of violent release, they are both scenes of failure and frustration, in which the longing to die is stifled. The knife, having been brandished, must be put away. If the pathos of Pyrocles’s vexation and Hebe’s lonely exposure to monstrosity solicits our pity, that counterforce of comedic possibility encourages us to take pleasure in the very disparity between each figure’s subjective investment in being sacrificed and the surrounding work’s own apparent stance toward that investment.

In other words, Pyrocles’s blunted suicide attempt and Hebe’s fatal aria of sacrifice anticipate that phenomenon of passionate excruciation, stylistic excess, and “failed seriousness” that twentieth-century aesthetics once knew as “camp.”

Wither Camp

Does anyone really care about the allegedly critical power of “camp,” let alone need a definition of this now drearily ubiquitous critical term, at this late historical moment in its putrefaction? As filmmaker Bruce LaBruce notes in his hybrid lecture/performance “Notes on Camp/Anti-Camp” (2012), the term, once redolent of insider subcultural knowledge circa its midcentury articulations by Isherwood and Sontag, has been transformed into “the ideological white noise of the new millennium” as it has fractured outward into an array of forms that LaBruce gleefully taxonomizes as Classic Gay Camp (Bette Davis), Bad Gay Camp (Liberace), Good Straight Camp (Robert Altman), Bad Straight Camp (Damien Hirst), High Camp (Oscar Wilde), Low Camp (burlesque), Reactionary Camp (heavy metal), Liberal Camp (Dr. Ruth), Conservative Camp (Donald Trump), and so on.8 In the wake of the disastrous banality of the 2019 Met Gala, whose “Camp: Notes on Fashion” theme prompted inert gestures from the usual cast of billionaires and celebrities, camp now seems ice-cold, ready for permanent storage.9

Like “duende” or “rococo,” the term “camp” connotes a charged aesthetic cluster of objects and qualities, a restricted repertoire of affects and effects, without yielding to precise articulation. Camp’s glittery peaks conceal deep epistemological crevasses, but it has always had a curiously constitutive relationship to early modernity. One of its first forays into print, in Christopher Isherwood’s The World in the Evening (1953), featured a mini-disquisition that found the sensibility afoot centuries before its christening: “High Camp is the whole emotional basis for ballet, for example, and of course of baroque art. . . . High Camp always has an underlying seriousness. You can’t camp about something you don’t take seriously. You’re not making fun of it, you’re making fun out of it. You’re expressing what’s basically serious to you in terms of fun and artifice and elegance. Baroque art is basically camp about religion.”10 “Basically” is doing a lot of work here. One may well snicker at the tacitly Protestant bias that produces such judgments, but devotees of Crashaw and Bernini might also be willing to grant the larger point. Though Sontag would dismiss Isherwood’s framing as flimsy and jejune, Sontag too features some early modern precursors in “Notes on ‘Camp.’”

Snugly tucked into a parenthetical aside, Lyly makes a curiously apt early modern stowaway within Sontag’s foundational, if not definitive, account of the books, films, furniture, clothes, buildings, attitudes, and human beings that constellate that “unmistakably modern” sensibility.11 Having alleged that camp takes root in the eighteenth century, amid the folly gardens and artificial ruins of the Gothic, Sontag hedges her bets with a casual backward glance toward the early modern period, and it is there, in a torrent of name-dropping, that we discover this lonely representative of the English literary Renaissance: “A pocket history might, of course, begin farther back—with the mannerist artists like Pontormo, Rosso, and Caravaggio, or the extraordinarily theatrical painting of Georges de La Tour, or euphuism (Lyly, etc.) in literature.”12 How are we to assess Sontag’s judgment that Lyly’s writings might constitute a crucial early modern contribution to camp sensibility? To force a pocket history to empty its pockets, when exactly did that happen? Is camp something we find in the past or do to the past?

Here one might wish to distinguish between “weak” and “strong” versions of such a claim. The “weak” version would go like this: Lyly’s art, or, for that matter, Sir Philip Sidney’s art, is camp for us in the present, because of the pleasurable strain involved in measuring the distance between our own aesthetic moment and the elaborate rhetorical effects of artificiality we find when we read Euphues or the Old Arcadia. However seriously Lyly or Sidney may have taken themselves, we cannot quite take them so seriously, and so we can only read across this barrier, when we read them at all. Sontag flags a threshold of surplus intensity as the defining criterion: “Camp is art that proposes itself seriously, but cannot be taken altogether seriously because it is ‘too much.’”13 Caught in the glare of that “too much-ness,” camp is what we do to highly stylized authors from the past, the price of their survival into the present.

The “strong” version would claim that Lyly and Sidney were, in their own historical moment, consciously attempting to produce camp effects. This, of course, only begs the question of what early modern camp could be in the first place. Skittish at spoiling the fun with a serious, hence noncamp, precision, Sontag glancingly defines camp as “the sensibility of failed seriousness, of the theatricalization of experience. . . . a consistently aesthetic experience of the world. It incarnates a victory of ‘style’ over ‘content,’ ‘aesthetics’ over ‘morality,’ [and] irony over tragedy.”14 Given the strong flavor of nineteenth-century aestheticism attendant upon most if not all of these imagined victories of X over Y, the alleged discovery of such an agenda in an early modern author or artwork prompts justifiable fears of a passé sort of presentism, the victory of one more recent past over another, older past. Indeed, it is hard to imagine any early modern artist consciously taking themselves to be attacking “morality” itself, Sidney least of all, and if that is truly definitive of camp, then the strong claim looks doomed from the start.

But if we regard the theatricalization of experience (note 36), the affirmation of irony over tragedy (note 38), and an aroma of “seriousness that fails” (note 23) as keynotes for the strong claim about camp, then in this chapter I would like to consider, and, yes, consider seriously, the possibility that Sidney’s prose romance Old Arcadia and Lyly’s play Gallathea (1585/1592) constitute examples of just such a sensibility, and prove its circulation in early modern English literature. I hope to reconsider these works to flag the ethical problems generated by the forms of solidarity at work in camp’s pleasurable response to sacrificial “excruciation.” Specifically, I’m interested in how Old Arcadia and Gallathea draw camp pleasure from a seemingly inhospitable and recalcitrant emotion: the longing to sacrifice oneself for the sake of others.

An Idle Toy

For a work of pastoral romance that Sidney passes off as an id...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction · Renaissance Self-Finishing
• Chapter 1 · Failed Seriousness in the Old Arcadia and Gallathea
• Chapter 2 · Slapstick and Synapothanumenon in Antony and Cleopatra
• Chapter 3 · Trolling Decorum in Hamlet and Timon of Athens
• Chapter 4 · The Open Window in Biathanatos
• Interlude · Inventing Suicide in Religio Medici
• Chapter 5 · A Cartoon about Suicide Prevention in Paradise Lost
• Chapter 6 · Smiling at Daggers in Cato, a Tragedy
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index